Post Category → Family

The only exception is you can maybe plan on going to a bookstore but that’s it

Yesterday was a travel day. Sarah and I have found that it’s better, when you’re traveling, to consider any day when you have a flight as a day when nothing else gets done. That day is just for travel. Don’t try to meet anybody, don’t go see any sights, don’t go eat at any particular restaurants. Just pack and get where you’re going. The temptation is to cram as much activity into a trip as you possibly can, but there is no more sure-fire way to fuck up your itinerary’s hard deadlines than to try to do something immediately before or after a flight.

Plus, we’re both worriers and find the simplicity of having only one-thing-to-do-that-day comforting. Besides, sometimes a relatively simple trip can take up a surprising amount of time.

We left Sarah’s mom’s place at about 10:30 a.m., heading for the airport in Bozeman. We stopped to have lunch and to visit a dry goods store called Murdoch’s (not my idea — this was supposed to be a travel day, but Sarah’s mom needed, swear to god, cat treats). We arrived at the airport at 1:00 p.m. for our 3:00 o’clock flight, made it through security, and then hung out at our terminal. I read The Butcher’s Masquerade and listened to Talking Head’s Fear of Music, which has 11 tracks and came out in 1979.

I don’t mind airports the way a lot of people do. They’re expensive and crowded and the chairs should really be more comfortable considering sitting down is like the only thing everyone DOES at airports, but I enjoy having a moment to relax on an otherwise hectic trip.

I paused while listening to Fear of Music to talk to Sarah about the Talking Heads.

”I’m not trying to be confrontational here or anything, but what do people see in this band? Is it the satire? The comedy? Because I’m listening to their third record and … I don’t like the singing, I don’t like the lyrics, I don’t like the drums, I don’t like the guitar, and the production value isn’t spectacular. The whole first song is nothing but a bunch of white guys doing a we-just-discovered-African-music. The bass is good on a lot of songs, but the bassist is a one-trick pony when it comes to tone.”

Sarah oftentimes thinks I’m looking for an argument when I talk about books or music or movies — it can seem like I’m challenging her to defend a band that she’s not particularly nuts about, when really I’m just trying to voice questions that I’m asking myself. “You don’t have to listen to them,” she said. For her, music isn’t supposed to be a struggle. It’s supposed to be something you enjoy. If you’re not having fun, then why bother? Stop listening to it.

I don’t really have an answer to that question, other than I think it’s important to try things you don’t like. Especially in the realm of art. Art is there to challenge us, after all, and some of my favorite musicians are acts that I didn’t like at first but only came to enjoy after repeated listenings. Maybe I’ll wind up liking the Talking Heads — who knows?

Our flight took off at 3:00 p.m. Our seats were surrounded by stinky, invasive children. We landed at SeaTac at 4:00, having gained an hour in the air. We quickly deplaned and made our way to the light rail system, which brought us north to Lynnwood, where Sarah’s dad picked us up. It was about a 90-minute subway ride. After a quick dinner at the marina, we loaded up the boat and made our way to the island my wife grew up on. A 30-minute boat ride through smoke and choppy waves.

I listened to the audio of The Butcher’s Masquerade as we traveled and made a lot of progress before we finally arrived at our destination at around 8:00 p.m. Just like that, our trip, which mostly consisted of a 2-hour flight, managed to take up nearly 10 hours.

You can see why it’s better not to cram in activities on a travel day.

It is beautiful out here. Dark at night, and very quiet. It’s easy to get lost in your own thoughts.

I dreamed of a purple pillow that screamed at me. It was a large, square throw pillow with a face, and it had been screaming for a while. I went up to it and said, “I’ve had enough of your goddamned screaming, purple pillow. Enjoy being face-down.” Then I put the pillow down on its face and left it there, knowing it didn’t have the ability to right itself.

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.

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?

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.)

The thing to remember is that all you can really do is anything at all

I’ve had these moments for the past several days where my body will suddenly stop whatever it’s doing, as if put on pause, and an incredible and inescapable sense of ennui will wash over me like a layer of quick-dry cement. I’ll be just walking down the hallway with a cup of tea on my way to 2nd block when, WHAM, it hits. In this moment of intense hopelessness, my thoughts will turn incredibly dark and I’ll feel this sense of, “What’s the use of any of this? Why am I — why are WE doing any of this nonsense?”

It lasts for a fraction of a second; anybody watching would probably think I’d just had to do a sneaky, stutter-step fart or something, and then I’m back to normal, just walking along like everything is fine.

I don’t know why, but I feel a little guilty about it. Is that dumb? I think it is. It’s a stupid thing to feel guilty about and I’m aware of that, but I imagine what Dad is going through and can’t help but think he’s the one who is in the thick of it. I should focus on how to be helpful rather than dwelling on how bad I feel.

I talked to my brother about it quite a bit yesterday and I said something to the effect of, “I’m really starting to think that the only thing I can do — the only thing any of us can do — is to find happiness in little moments. Stop thinking about the past, stop thinking about the future, take a cue from all of those eastern philosophers and just live in the now.”

Trite? Maybe. Cliche? One-hundred percent. But it’s one way that I’m able to find some sort of comfort. Plus, in a new-agey, hippy sort of way, I really do think that Taoism has the right idea with entering a “flow state.” Spending too much time dwelling on the future is missing the point entirely.

Anywho, I was telling my brother this in the context of sharing this perhaps-too-on-the-nose clip from the movie A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood:

(The part I’m talking about is at the end. “..to die is to be human, and anything human is mentionable. Anything mentionable is manageable. Anything mentionable is manageable.”)

I’ve also (surprise!) been thinking a lot about how uncomfortable most of us feel talking about death. I’ve been able to talk frankly about it with a few people in my life — Sarah, my brothers, a few friends — and it really does seem helpful.

Just keep moving, keep busy, keep talking. One foot in front of the other.