Author Archives → ProperToad

Hop aboard the struggle bus our rates are reasonable and our seats are clean hey what do you mean you don’t have exact change f*ck

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe that I’d be better at handling loss than I am. Maybe to believe the mid-west adage that there’s nothing more curative than WORK WORK WORK to take your mind off things.

Whatever the case, I have been struggling. I feel like I’m doing a terrible job at school and that just messes with my head. I can’t stand being somebody who isn’t doing their best, and there is no doubt that my classes are being affected by what I’m going through.

I’ve missed more days of work these last few months than I have at any job ever, which means I’ve had substitute teachers, which means that all of my classes are behind in their coursework. It’s nothing insurmountable, and I don’t mean to say a single bad word against substitute teachers — they are vital and God bless every one of them — but the fact is that not as much work gets done when the class has a sub.

Lots of students, even the most studious students, tend to slack off. I don’t get upset at students for it — what am I going to do? Get mad at someone for not wanting to read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?”

Plus, I often feel like a significant portion of my brain has melted. I am just … dumber than I used to be. My memory is bad. I have trouble focusing. Little things that I’d normally remember slip through the cracks. (Cue a panicked student yelling, “Did you grade my paper yet!?”)

Between this paragraph and the last paragraph I typed, I just spent about 10 minutes trying to get the cat to sit on the heated pad we got her. Unsuccessfully.

Sigh.

The solution here is obvious: Time.

Of course that’s the answer. I have to be gracious with myself and give myself time. All I do by beating myself up like this is giving myself a proverbial black eye. All I have to do is wait. Breathe. Exist. “This, too, shall pass.”

I hate it, though. Until it does pass, I hate every last minute of it.

It wasn’t a funeral technically we didn’t have a funeral it was an inurnment which I learned is different than an interment

Here are some words I did say at my father’s funeral:

…everything good that I am is thanks to you. I am living and pursuing happiness in a foreign land, a thing that I have always dreamed of doing and a thing in which I find exceptional value and strength. If I wouldn’t have had you, if I wouldn’t have had Mom, none of this would have been possible. If we are to count our blessings then this is the first and perhaps greatest of mine.

Yeah, it was a little sappy.

Neither of my brothers were particularly jazzed about the idea of saying something at Dad’s gravesite, so I had a little speech typed out and in my coat pocket. I won’t put all of it here on the blog, but the whole thing was about how ineffective words are at explaining loss.

The speech ended with me yelling, “Kakaw!” at all the nice folks at our small grave-side gathering. Sarah’s part was to reply by hollering, “Aye-aye-aye!” like a member of a mariachi band. (It made sense in context.)

Dad would’ve liked that.

Three dollars times five days a week times four weeks a month is sixty dollars times twelve months a year is seven hundred and twenty which it turns out is too much

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be “Put Together.” (As in, “Let me put myself together,” or, “That’s a guy who really has it all together.“) It’s a feeling that I like and I assume everyone else likes it, too. Otherwise, why would we all have dress shoes?

Anywho. When I think of being “Put Together,” I always think of Haruki Murakami.

Author of books like 1Q84, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami has become a bit of a literary staple. I had a furious love affair with Haruki Murakami’s books in the 2010s, when I was in Korea and shopping at What the Book, which carried all his Vintage International Editions with covers by John Gall. (I read them all, collected all the different editions. I even had a few written in Japanese, which I couldn’t read but admired.)

I’m a Murakami nut.

Murakami has a few tropes that appear in his works, and one of them is the (usually male) character who loses his current life for one reason or another and is forced to rebuild his life from the ground up in a whole new setting.

Like, a guy has an existential crisis, gets dumped by his wife, leaves his house and job, and then moves out to the countryside where he works at a small-town library. Once placed in his new surroundings, Murakami describes how the character wakes up, how he cooks breakfast, how he gets to work, etc., etc. Murakami might describe the steps involved his getting dressed, how he unwinds after a long day, the restaurant he goes to for dinner, or the turn-by-turn route he takes in going home from work in the evening. All of it is so meticulous and minute and it just scratches some kind of itch that I have. I can’t get enough of it.

I think that itch I feel is the desire to be “Put Together.”

A few years ago, when I first started teaching at my current school, I was trying to set up a routine that would work for me. Sarah and I had just moved into the house we rent and things were … tough. We’d been overseas for so long, we didn’t have any furniture, knew hardly anybody in town, the pandemic had just happened, and both of us weren’t making very much money.

Things were decidedly not “Put Together.“

Back then, I thought I’d stop in the mornings at a gas station for a quick cup of coffee like I did back when I was student teaching, which was the last time I’d been a teacher in a U.S. classroom. It was a silly thing, but I liked stopping at a little place before the sun came up for a quick cuppa. I liked the silly little interactions I had with the gas station attendant. I liked walking into the school building with a warm paper cup in one hand and my entry badge in the other. I liked to take a little sip, smack my lips real loud, and go, “Aaahhh!” so it echoed down the hallways. Frivolous? Sure, but you’ve got to take pleasure in tiny, pointless, everyday activities. Otherwise what’s the point?

After a few days, though, I did the math, and I realized that I wasn’t making enough money to buy gas station coffee before work. With rent, utilities, gasoline, insurance, groceries … I just couldn’t afford to stop at a f*cking Casey’s for a bullshit cup of coffee every morning. And while having a gas station coffee isn’t necessarily a big part of being “Put Together,” it felt like I was trying to build for myself one of those minuscule Murakami habits only to be told, “Sorry, the coffee from our gas station is for better people than you.”

I’m still bitter about it. Dark and bitter. And aromatic!

They always had chicken tenders and they weren’t great but they were hot and ready when a lot of other things weren’t

When someone you love is slowly dying, one thing no one really tells you about is just how much goddamned sitting around you have to do. Something like 75% of the whole shebang is time spent just sitting in a chair in a little room with the people you care about waiting for something bad to happen.

The other 25% of it is, based on my experience, forgetting to eat and then running down to the hostpital cafeteria before it closes to see if there are any chicken tenders left.

Anywho, there were a bunch of times in that room when I’d look up as if suddenly coming awake and see that, of the six or seven people squeezed in to be at Dad’s bedside, all of us were looking at our phones. Everyone except Dad, of course, who was busy with other matters.

It was surreal and … kind of horrifying. A definite, “My God, what have we become?” sort of moment.

I’m not pointing fingers at anyone or blaming anybody or any of that jazz. It’s just that I’m a teacher and I spend a lot of my day fighting to keep people off their phones so they can get some work done. These days, I have a sort-of conditioned response to seeing a room full of lowered heads and a bunch of tiny, glowing rectangles. I see how f*ing insidious our cellular masters are. I get angry about it.

In that room with Dad, I’d purposefully put my phone away and just sit. Not the whole time, but every now and again, when the urge hit me. It wasn’t meditation, but something akin to it, when I’d pick a sound or something and try to focus on it and just … exist in that room. Sometimes I counted seconds, sometimes I counted breaths, sometimes I counted the number of times the IV Dad was hooked up to made its little pumping noise. (It had to pump 4,000 times to go through one bag of IV fluid.)

Was it worth doing? Trying to “be in the moment” rather than scrolling? F*ck, I don’t know. It was hard not to be nihilistic or fatalistic when Dad was dying right there, to say to myself, “What is the point of anything?” and then mindlessly swipe through TikTok or Reddit. Take comfort where you can find it, right?

There have definitely been times when I’ve thought that the sort of distractions phones can give was a comfort. A blessing, even.

But we all know better.

Dear john we had a lot of good times didn’t we oh boy those were good times anywho I’m seeing someone else

I’m going to take a little break from Dungeon Crawler Carl. I have nothing against it, to be honest. It’s been a great series–it’s just had the unfortunate distinction of being the series I was reading while Dad was getting sicker.

I listen to audiobooks when falling asleep, and for the last several weeks, the soothing sounds of Carl shouting “Goddamnit, Donut!” have been the soundtrack to my snoozes. This has created a bit of an unfair association, and I (well … Sarah and I, actually) realized we should probably listen to something a little more innocuous.

… This reads like a break-up letter to a book series.

Honestly, I just want a change of pace, vibe, scenery, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it. I need to get my head straight, so I’m just going to start with something new.

In essence: “It’s not you; it’s me.”

I’ll probably come back to Carl later. Maybe as a destination-read or something that will help remove the negative association. Hard to be mad at any book you read on a beach, that’s what my ol’ Nana used to say.

(I don’t believe my Nana ever so much as set foot on a beach. At least not without complaining about it.)

Anywho.

For the last few days, Sarah and I have just been listening to The Lord of the Rings as we fall asleep. It’s a book we’ve both read several times, so we can really just start at any point in the story and not miss a beat. It’s safe. It’s also an audiobook I don’t feel the need to finish, and an audiobook I (probably) won’t associate with my dad dying.

Sarah and I also went to Barnes & Noble today and I looked for books off of my list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, which is more challenging than it ought to be. (I know there are a lot of great books out there and shelf space is limited, but we can all agree that bookstores should have at least one copy of The Power & the Glory, right? Right, fellas…?)

I found a slight little thing called The All of It by Jeannette Haien, which I know next-to-nothing about. (The only thing I DO know for certain about the book is that it has a rowboat on the cover.) I’m glad it’ll be my next read because, even if I don’t like it, it’s only around 145 pages.

… and now I’m justifying my rebound novel. I actually called it a “slight little thing!”

Ha! What a world.

The New Normal and words that I probably won’t say at my father’s funeral

My dad died early in the morning on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026.

What had started out as a trip to the E.R. for abdominal pain spiraled into more and more problems until, eventually, the cancer was just too much for his system.

It feels too personal to go into details, but my memory hasn’t been … working the way it should for the past few days. All of us were by Dad’s side right up until the end and everything has turned into this blur of nurses and doctors and hospice reps and phone calls and late-night drives and texts and chicken fingers from the hospital cafeteria and, at some point, my brain said, “You know what? I need a break. We’re going to shut down some non-essential functions.”

And so, my writing about all this is a way of helping my poor brain keep track of events.

(I can’t believe I’m still doing doodles for a post like this)

My brother has told me a couple times in the last few days that he doesn’t think it’s really “hit” him yet.

I’ve responded both times by asking, “How do you think it’ll ‘hit’ you? Like, what do you anticipate will happen when it does?” Because that’s what a therapist would ask — it’s a leading question to help you understand that you’re not tied to any tracks; there’s no steam train about to run you down. You’re having a trauma response that makes you feel like there’s an immanent threat, but really there isn’t.

(Today’s armchair psychologist’s report is brought to you by: Years and Years of Teaching Seminars!)

My brother says he doesn’t know what it’ll feel like when it hits. I think the whole “hitting” thing is a myth.

Or, I should say, I’m not as worried about getting hit as I am worried about “The New Normal.”

What I think happens when you go through a traumatic event like this is your brain slowly starts incorporating new, bad habits that result from the trauma and/or getting rid of good habits you may have once had. If you’re not careful, those temporary habits become actual full-time habits when maybe you don’t want them to and all those good habits you once had are gone forever.

Like, right now, there’s no way I’d be able to go out and do fun stuff. I absolutely don’t feel like it. If a friend called and asked, “Hey, do you want to play board games or go to a concert or see a movie?” I’d probably respond (internally) with, “No way! I’m too sad to do that. I want to stay home and watch A Relaxing Walk Across Skyrim and take a nap for the fourth time today.”

That’s a big, obvious example and I’m sure you think, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense, I can see that.” But how many tiny and seemingly-innocuous habits are there that I’m losing or gaining?

For example, at one point in the last week (although the specific day escapes me), I realized that I hadn’t brushed my teeth in two days. I had similar realizations at other times along the lines of, I haven’t had any food since breakfast yesterday. And When was the last time I showered? Christ. I don’t remember.

And mental habits! I don’t even know how many times I’ve told myself, “I am not going to think about that right now. I’m just not even going to consider that particular problem right f*cking now.” It could be a bill or an email I have to send or the question of what to with my father’s collection of erotic sculptures from across 6 continents. I will just shove it aside like a passenger on a Japanese train, without so much as a care, and continue on about the business of being miserable.

That’s what I think happens to you when someone you love dies; They leave a hole, and a big part of that hole are the habits — physical and mental — that keep you happy and healthy. Your sadness becomes a part of “The New Normal” and you’re left just being … worse.

Sigh. This is not at all what I intended to blog about when I started.

Whatever. I’m still here. Still typing.

My world’s on fire how about yours

This is going to fall under the category of “Posts People Probably Don’t Want to Read on Account of Their Being Overly Morose,” but here we are.

My dad’s cancer is getting worse and worse.

Yesterday, he was unable to make it to his radiation treatment because he was having some intense pain in his lower back. The cancer is in his liver and bones and he has low calcium (which apparently causes pain along with brain fog), so we don’t know exactly what is causing the discomfort. He was admitted to the hospital and is currently being monitored. My brothers and I are on our way to see him and be with him and…shit, I don’t even know. What does one do?

There have been dozens of times when I’ve thought to myself, “I don’t think I could feel any worse than I do,” only to find out that there is no bottom to this mess. As Trent Reznor once said, “I now know the depths I reach are limitless.” Of course he was talking about sex and/or drug addiction, but misery is misery at a certain point. We’re all brothers and sisters in pain.

I have no idea what to do and feel like I’m panicking all the time. I randomly start crying and am desperately overwhelmed by everything that I have to do. (Life goes on despite the mess — I’ve got papers to grade and meetings to attend and dishes to do and all the while I feel like my brain is a puddle of goo.) From what I understand, so many people are going through this.

Every time I mention to a coworker what’s going on, the invariable response is, “Oh, that has happened or currently is happening to my family also!” Sometimes it’s a father, sometimes a mother, sometimes a sibling, sometimes a child.

It’s…disheartening. Like peeking behind the veil only to see a hospital waiting room.

So, to everyone out there who has been touched by this bullshit, I wish you all a hearty fuck cancer.

She awakens in her aqueous lair and rises through seas lakes and rivers and into the municipal water system where I wait patiently with my pants down

Sarah got me a bidet for my birthday. It’s a little attachment that goes under the back of your toilet normal seat. Not a separate appliance, but just a little one that you add on to your regular toilet. It plugs into the water line like a Super Nintendo only instead of turning to channel 3 the bidet shoots a little stream of water at your B-hole. It feels like a mermaid violently licking your undercarriage and it is a game changer.

Bidets are things that have never really “landed” in America. While the word “bidet” is French (the word means “pony” — it’s a little joke), I’ve always thought of them as an Asian thing. Mostly because that’s where I first encountered and absolutely fell in love with them, but also because of the electric Japanese toilet seat trend that started decades ago and into which bidets were folded.

Sarah and I fell in love with them when we lived in Bali, where our main bathroom had what we called a “butt gun” (not technically a bidet, but the same effect) that sprayed water hard enough to bruise your balls if you didn’t aim it right. It was risky, but I swear my butt crack has never felt fresher.

The bidet we just installed isn’t quite as intense, but it’s still refreshingly firm. Like Poseidon’s handshake!

A lot of Americans will roll their eyes at this, but it goes to show how much people are willing to stick to an old habit even when there’s something better out there. Every person I know who has regularly used a bidet has said they loved it. Several of them have joined the cult of bidet enthusiasts (I’m a proud member!) who go around advocating them strangers both in person and in the blog-o-sphere. I am convinced that not only are they wayyyy more sanitary, but that the majority of Americans would love them if they tried them.

It’s just that once you’ve experienced the feeling of having the shit blown out of your ass by a high-pressure stream of water, you realize that there’s no going back. Conventional toilet paper — even that bougie 4-ply stuff — just doesn’t cut it. All you heathens sticking to your Charmin are missing out.

Time for a reader question!

Humor, definitely. While there are a lot of horrific scenes in the first two books — hello Krasue! — they all work in service to something else. Usually something funny. A lot of times, it’s the descriptions of the mobs that Carl and Donut (his partner/Persian cat) fight, which are “written” by the game-controlling AI in a snarky tone. Think Bill Burr writing the cut scene texts for Skyrim.

Besides, there’s a wealth of horror out there that relies on comedic elements. Most of it, I would argue. Carl definitely has a shared element with the Human Centipede franchise and the whole “gore porn” sub-genre of horror. There’s a perverse humor in asking, “How far can I push this? Just how GROSS can this scene get?” It’s all tongue-in-cheek. A sideshow. A circus.

The whole point of it is to laugh at the bloody, floating prostitute heads with glistening innards dangling down from their neck holes. What else are you supposed to do with characters like that?

Don’t message me that it’s not the title of the 3rd book I know it’s not the title of the 3rd book it’s just a dumb joke take it easy

Man, yesterday’s post was dark. Sorry about that.

I wrote the whole thing in my head as I was driving down to be with dad at his radiation treatment.

(Is that bragging? The whole bit about “writing in my head?” It sounds like bragging. I don’t mean to say, “Oh, wow, hey, check me out, I can compose personal essays in my head, ain’t I talented?!” I just don’t know if other people, other writers, do this sort of stuff. They must. Right? I don’t f***ing know. Whatever. Nobody reads this.)

I live about an hour away from the cancer center, and I wanted to keep my mind occupied while I drove, so I thought I’d see if I could write (and, more importantly, remember) a whole blog post as I was driving.

Most of the time, I have a vague idea of what I want to talk about when I start blogging and I just go with it. It’s not like I want to spend hours upon hours pouring over every word and phrase of a post, rewriting and second-guessing all my choices. I do do that sometimes, but not always, and the way I write has a natural flow to it, so I’m usually fine with what happens “off-the-cuff.”

This time, though, I planned everything out ahead of time. How many paragraphs would there be, what would the images look like, where would those images go, which parts of the text would I highlight, all that fun stuff.

As the wheels rumbled and thumped and the strange miles of God’s greenish-brown country blurred by, I barely noticed. I was in my head, making little blocks of text and pictures. Was I driving safely? Maybe. Maybe not. Who’s to say?

I moved sentences around deleted some things and kept others and decided to end the whole thing by trying to capture a particular visual that I’d been dwelling on: My dad’s hand. When I got to the cancer center, I sat down and typed it all out while I was waiting for Dad to get there. (I was able to do this because I am one of those idiots who shows up to doctor’s appointments 45 minutes early.)

Anywho. I think writing with everything all planned out like that is what caused the post to be as dark as it was. It lost…spontaneity, I guess. A humor that sometimes pops out when I’m going off-the-cuff.

Some may say it’s overrated–that you ought to know precisely what you wish convey and that every word ought to carry you to that purpose with brevity and wit. But there’s something to be said for not knowing what’s next, for “going off-the-cuff.” Because “going off-the-cuff “is what allows me to share with you things like a drawing I did of the world’s longest penis.

Anywho.

I finished the 2nd book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series last night. I’d been listening to it while lying in bed, mostly, but I’d also had a lot of time to read the physical book while at Dad’s appointments. Usually, though, I’d was listening. And things were getting fragmented.

Each night, while the audiobook was going, I’d fall asleep and wake up at odd intervals. Each time, I’d back up the book to the last thing I remembered hearing. As a result, I heard some parts once or twice. Some parts I heard three or more times. I’m sure there are parts I totally skipped over, just as I’m sure all this must have really annoyed Sarah.

Mostly, though, I think I got everything. It was oddly satisfying. The style is really growing on me, even though it’s starting to read like a DM turning a D&D campaign into one big novel. That may actually be the case, but the characters are funny, there’s graphic violence, lots of quirks, and it’s fast-paced enough to enjoy listening to in little chunks 4-5 times because you keep falling asleep.

Plus, the ending is clever and absolutely left me wanting to hear more of it right now.

So, I’m starting the 3rd book without delay. “Carl’s Anarchic Cookery Set.” Something like that.

I’m just saying that even if I donated the money don’t put my name on it bad stuff happens in there so just call it something else please

The city of Lincoln waits for you like a big red splotch, as if a great glob of glued-together Republicans fell from the sky and splattered over dozens of square miles of pasture at the heart of the Great Plains. They spread out, repopulated, all started building. First, ranch-style homes. Next, steak houses.

The fact that the University of Nebraska (arguably the most liberal spot in the state) is in Lincoln is only redeemed in the eyes of the citizenry by the Cornhuskers, the perennial disappointment of a football team with an inexplicably avid fan base.

In the far south of Lincoln is where you’ll find the April Sampson Cancer Center, which I can only describe as a cathedral to the gods of malignant tumors. It is massive and modern and all made of glass and marble. The foyer is tall. It looks like it was pulled out of a mega church, or maybe a bank, because right off to the side there are a bunch of partitioned desks where the administrative sides of things are handled. (That’s where they tell you your insurance doesn’t cover it. That’s where they tell you you’re bankrupt.)

There are a fleet of wheelchairs just inside the entrance and whole building is dedicated to cancer and, boy, do I hate it. I mean, I’m glad it’s here and I appreciate all the doctors and nurses and support staff. Everyone is so nice. They bake cookies every day and go around passing them out. There are player pianos and a cafe where the worker is quick to tell you about the free refills. There’s a whole path out back where you can walk around when the weather is nice. It has a water feature. It’s as pleasant of a “cancer building” as one could ask for. But I hate the fact that this building even exists.

I’m not a conspiracy theory sort of person, but there are a couple of things that I think are true:

  1. American car companies and the oil industry conspire and bribe the government to disincentivize small, cheap electric vehicles.
  2. There are people in the medical and insurance industries who would happily inject every American with poison if it meant they could squeeze another dollar out of one needy schmuck.  

I get the feeling that whoever built the April Sampson Cancer Center, whoever is profiting from it, considers the whole outside world to be one big waiting room and all of us peons are just cancer patients in the making. Waiting in the wings for our chance in the radioactive spotlight.

It’s pessimistic. Probably not the thing to focus on. Today, however, I am filled with dark images that occupy my mind like belligerent apartment tenants who refuse to vacate.

(When the pain got really bad, Dad’s hand seemed to rise up of its own accord. It hovered a few inches in the air. I recognized the motion. His fingers felt and fumbled with the hem of his shirt and then with the thin layer of tissue paper that covered the exam table. It was a restrained, delicate touch, but his hand didn’t find whatever it was looking for. Maybe a pocket, maybe a person, but nothing. Then his hand paused for a moment against his stomach and fell back down to the exam table, suddenly and quietly deflated.)