The Fireworks are Over

Weather: too hot, too dry, and now there are just way too many tomatoes.

Stressor #1:
The Trucker is out of work on family-medical-leave act. His back has been causing him serious discomfort for about a month now. About a week ago, though, he told me that his left leg was numb, he couldn't feel where he was putting his left foot and was having trouble keeping his balance. Being the CF that I am, I told him that he couldn't go to work, and went with him to the doctor to find out what the prognosis was. The Internist said he hadn't gotten what he expected from the neurologist the Trucker saw the week before-- only the results of some nerve conduction test, which were clearly abnormal. So we went to the neurologist's office to see where the rest of the report was, only to find out that was it. The person who made the appointment decided that all that was needed was nerve conduction tests. So we went back to the Internist (they're on the same floor) and told him what the neurologist's office had said. He then pulled out what he had written on the referral, ie, "neurological consultation to determine source & prognosis of low back pain". So we went back to the neurologist's office to say that nerve tests were not what the Internist ordered and to schedule an appointment for a neurological exam. The earliest appointment she could find was two weeks away. This was a major frustration, since The T was in constant pain when he stood for more than a minute or two, and not knowing what the problem was did not help the stress level, particularly since the neurologist and the internist had both said that his nerve function wasn't normal, but hadn't said why it wasn't normal or what he should do about it, to say nothing of not being able to work, since as soon as he told them that he had numbness in his leg and couldn't keep his balance, they told him that he was out on 'personal injury' because if he worked and anything went wrong, he would be personally liable. The idea of him driving 70,000 pounds around and clambering up on that rig and not being able to depend on his left leg was a fairly frightening prospect. Of course, having him home where he has access to chainsaws and axes is almost as scary, but I figured that if he was in pain, he'd probably just read or watch TV and leave his other toys in the shed. [The last time he decided to take down a tree, when it fell, it hit the edge of an eight-foot-long 2 x 4, studded with nails, laying across the corner of the chain-link dog fence which did a complete 360 in the air before one end of it came down and whacked him in the head. A blow that would have undoubtedly shattered my flimsy skull only made him a little dizzy. If I hadn't seen it happen, I doubt that he would have even been able to figure out what hit him. ]

On the following Monday, though, the neurologist's receptionist called me at work and said that they had an opening on Wednesday afternoon and wanted to know if he would want to come. [I refrained from saying what I was thinking which was something like, "No, you damnned itiott, of course he wants to lay around in pain for two MORE weeks wondering what the hell is wrong with him!?!", and said instead that would be great & we'd see him then. This time, the neurologist did all the "Can you feel this?" "And this?" "And this?" tests, but when he told The T to walk on his heels, he could only walk on one, and he would have absolutely failed a field sobriety test if the cops had stopped him and asked him to walk heel-to-toe in a straight line-- he just couldn't do it. After the N got done, he said that there was unquestionable neuropathy, but the cause was not clear, except that it was more generalized than just his left leg. So he ordered an MRI, 11 different blood tests, to check for Lyme's disease and everything else including a 24-hour urine collection test to detect the presence of heavy metals, all toward the end of determining if The T had any kind of neuropathy that could be treated, along with physical therapy to see if some stretching might help ease the low back pain.

After the MRI, it may be that he will have to go in for back surgery to fix whatever is interfering with the nerves in his left leg; but the generalized neuropathy is more worrisome. His short-term memory is also pretty clearly impacted, too, which I see, but he doesn't. At all. This morning he calmly filed away the lab test orders he needs to take tomorrow morning to the lab. when I asked him why he was filing that --he clearly didn't have a clue as to what he'd done wrong or what was special about that piece of paper, since he was putting it in the right insurance folder in the file cabinet, even though we'd talked about it no less than three or four different times in the last two days and put it on the kitchen table so that he would have it to take on Monday. Of course, he may have just not actually looked closely at it, just recognized that it was something with his name on it that belonged in the insurance file, but even after he looked at it, it didn't seem to register.

Stressor#2:
S-F-B has apparently applied for and taken a job with some scum-sucking lowlife outfit that is operating the old 'ship-office-supplies-never-ordered-and-bill-for-'em' scam.

It used to be copier toner 'samples', and other things that the scam operators would try to slip in and get paid for before someone in an organization would say What the hell did you think you were doing ordering that much toner or printer catridges or whatever. The scammers always try to get someone's actual name so that when the bill shows up, it will show that the un-ordered stuff was ordered by 'Jerry in the sales' or Susan, who answers the phone. If it's a big organization, (but not too big), Jerry does have some vague recollection of telling someone he wasn't interested in buying something a while ago, but the payables people, who know he's a little flakey, feel guilty about having the product and think that they are somehow obligated to pay for it, even though it doesn't seem right, try to either figure out how to make the shipper pay to ship it back (which only gets them more crap shipped from the scammer), or pay to ship it back, (which inevitably boomerangs, since the return address is always bogus), or, worst of all, go ahead and pay for it (which really gets them more worthless junk and a re-curring basis for the scammer, who also sells the mark's contact information to all the other scammers around) depending on whether or not there is anyone around who knows what the actual legal obligation to pay for anything that arrives, uninvited and unordered, on one's doorstep-- which is to say, knows, [as if it were carved in stone on those proverbial tablets] :

THOU ART NOT OBLIGATED TO PAY FOR, OR TO RETURN, OR TO PAY TO RETURN ANYTHING THAT THE SENDER CANNOT PROVEST THOU HAST ORDEREST, BY PROVIDING THOU WITH A BONAFIDE COPY OF THOU VERY OWN SIGNATURE ON THOU VERY OWN PURCHASE ORDER;

SHOULD IT BE THAT SENDER HAST GOOFEST, AND SHIPPEST TO WRONG CUSTOMER, SENDER HAST VERILY MADEST A GIFT TO WHICHEVER THOU, WHO DIDST HAPPENEN TO RECEIVEST IT, AND IS IN NO WAY RELIEVEST OF OBLIGATION TO SENDEST SAME TO WHOMSOEVER DIDST REALLY ORDER IT AND DIDST PAY FOR IT, OR ONLY DIDST AGREE TO PAY FOR IT.

Nevertheless, associating with scammers, aiding, abetting, participating and benefiting in a in material way (getting paid) is something that any other person of reasonable mental fortitude would be expected to recognize immediately as the wrong thing to do. One senses that S-F-B is indeed troubled, and ascribes her moral discomfort to being distainful of those who are not of her "class. " As if being repulsed by those who perpetrate financial fraud on the unwary is somehow a moral failing on her part!!!???!!!

This is a major stressor because it reveals that S-F-B does not understand how she-who-cannot-be-scammed is likey about to get scammed, to wit, the scum sucking lowlife WWF boss is only using this telemarketing job as a magnet to attract his real prey, the young and unwary, who are then (and unbeknownst-to-them) interviewed for their next, purportedly better and so much higher-paying job, which will be something ever more morally repugnant, if not clearly criminal. And the reward, if S-F-B falls for the 'better job'? She has managed to get herself trapped, although she may not realize it until she decides it is really not ok, and tries to bail-- ah, too bad, so sad-- SSLLWWF has a handy videotape, excellent quality and perfect sound reproduction, and it's not the sort of thing that will be much of a recommendation for a legitimate job, or worse.

One would hope that if S-F-B wants to be a telemarketer, she might contemplate getting a job with whoever's raising money for her local PBS station, Zoo, etc.. Try and see if she could maybe stay away from the offal-sucking scumbags of the world, so that she would have some chance of having a life.

How one earns one's board and bread does matter. If one does it at the expense of the gullible and sees the rest of the world as chumps and marks, to be used and then blamed for their mis-placed trust, one's future happiness and one's very soul are in the gravest of danger.

Stressor #3

The Old folks. Pure, unadulterated unremitting guilt. Not because of what they say, but because I know that they really need to have one or the other of us there with them all the time. Every day is a little harder for them, a little less easy to get through. And they are there, and I am here, with spouse and house and little green growy things that wilt and die when it doesn't rain and dogs and cats and birds.

Stressor #4

I used to have another child, but she turned 18 and has joined some psychiatric cult with her narcississtic no-longer-heterosexual drama queen father this summer, and, save for a brief electronic note, has remained incommunicado since the beginning of June. Her brief note expressed her love and justified her actions by expressing concern that I would get into a fight with her NNLHDQ father and try to rescue her. I think not.

Neither her father, who certainly knows, because I told him, nor the members of her psychiatric cult, who could have easily explained the relevant law to her, bothered to tell her that having a fight over her at the House of Fruits and Nuts with the Drama Queen or trying to forcibly remove her, were, without a doubt, two of the very last things I would ever contemplate doing.

In her little note, she also told me not to call her father's house because he didn't want to talk to me. No surprise there. But it did leave unanswered the obvious, and What about you? But I don't know whether she is there with him or someplace else. I have respected her request. Knowing that receiving no word from her is by her choice and no one else's, and, considering that she is an adult, I merely mourn, as any mother would. Like that father in the Old Testament who had a son who took his inheritance and left home to waste it in a faraway town, there remains the hope that someday she will come to her senses and return. I'm sure he had that hope and mourned, too.

Mourning, though, is much less stressful than worrying and wondering if something horrible has happened. People do what they want to do. They may make excuses and claim they were forced or coerced, but, in the end, eveyone does exactly what they want to do. When they don't like the results of their decisions, they often try to find someone else to take the fall, but that's bullshit.

And on the other side:

Non-stressor #1:

Went up to LWS with one of the Biker Chics from Hel, and spent a quiet afternoon talking and drawing and walking around the lake, cleaning up the remains of an illegal campfire and associated trash. It was one of those bittersweet sort of days, because the place has always been where we went. And, of course, there are all sorts of memories:

One camping trip, the Wayward E stepped on her still-hot marshmallow-roasting fork and branded her foot. The only relief available was a muddy leaf puddle, which probably had as much tannic acid in it as any over-the-counter burn remedy, as well as being cool and there, instead of a long, painful car ride away. The rest of the time, The Wayward E was in one of the creeks, flipping rocks, hunting the elusive mountain salamanders. She was Athena incarnate, when it came to those amphibians. I could only catch the littlest ones, mostly by accident, because they can't move very fast. She could spend hours, systematically driving the biggest, fastest, slipperiest ones into someplace where they didn't have any coverage, and snatching them.

When she was really little, she used to catch frogs. At one point, there was an aquarium with about 20 in it. She most likely had a name for every one of them, too. I was feeding them with live crickets from the vegetable stand/bait/ bluegrass-on-the-radio shop run by a former Vietnam Vet in town. Eventually, I think the frogs all got repatriated alive.

At home, there were hermit crabs, who inevitably escaped and found they could climb 10-feet up the screens on the porch, which seemed and still seems weird. And spice finches, who sang a a staccato 5-note tune, which also escaped from their cage from time to time and were both ultimately killed by Oskar, when we weren't able to catch them with a pillowcase before he grabbed them with his clawless paws and choked their tiny lives out of them.

And hamsters and pregnant gerbils who gave birth to little gerbils who could get through the bars of the cage and liked to congregate under the refrigerator because it was warm, there, and dogs and cats. And even a couple of bats-- one that was waterlogged at a lake she found and another that crawled out from under the stove one day.

And a gold fish, that lived and grew from one inch to four, until the Other child decided to feed it an entire piece of whole wheat toast, which floated invisible under the light, but within 24 hours had choked the filter entirely and caused the demise of the fish as well. The Wayward E held a full-dress formal tea for its funeral, and laid it out on one of her tea set china plates. she served red kool aid and cookies, and said a few words over its departed soul (having, I think, recently accepted Jesus as her Lord and Savior at the Baptist Church that her father had gone to for most of his childhood), afterwhich we put him in a white letter envelope and buried him across the street. A week or two later, she wanted to exhume its remains to see what his skeleton looked like. The child was always a little on the macabre side. When one of the Old Folks' gold fishes died, she and her best buddy of the time, did a careful and complete textbook dissection of it on the work bench in the garage. It was disconcerting to see each and everyone of its internal organs teased out from its proper location. They clearly knew what they were doing. This was, after all, the child who insisted that I come to school when they disected a pregnant shark. Not a good smell.

And a large and very soft Chinchilla, which died while she was away on vacation, and which I put in a cardboard box and took home with me to bury in the back yard, along side old Codger. And a ferret named Ziegfried or Siegfried, who lived to be very, very old, although he lost the better part of his tail along the way. Siegfried liked chocolate, and was a thief. The floor under her bed was littered with the peanut butter innards of Reese's peanut butter cups, which he liked to peel open and lick the chocolate off of. When the free dogs were puppies, we'd let Ziegfried and Virgil and Tahllulah play together. Ziegfried liked to play the big, brave Ferret of the wild and arch his back and bounce around, like a prize-fighter, daring the dogs to try anything. They would clumsily slide on the floor and chase him behind the entertainment center. He would show off by coming back at them from out the other side and bouncing around until they ran to him and chased him back behind it again. It only took Tahlullah about three times to send Virgil to the other side while she waited for him to come out her side; he obliged and she grabbed him with her teeth, and he squeaked and we rescued him. After that, he only got to visit with the dogs from the protection of his cage. For some reason, I don't think Oskar ever tried to kill him. Aside from smelling fairly bad, Ferrets don't actually cuddle. Extremely cute, real comedians, but not cuddly.