Through a glass, darkly

I read that this is one of the most written about biblical phrases. In this world, this one with death and suffering, and love and hate, and war and peace, and sincerity and deceit, we are as ones looking at a glass, a mirror, which is somewhat dark, and we really cannot see what is true, what is real. What is ideal.

Our actions, my actions, are a mystery. The planned and the unplanned. At the very moment I am trying to be kind and caring, I am actually the opposite. I love and hate at the very same moment. How is that possible?

I am confused about what I shall do. And what I should do. And what I have done.

As I look into that mirror, the me I see is unknown to me, even as I profess knowledge.

I say "this and that is so", but in truth, I have no idea what is so, particularly in that everyone challenges my saying, more it seems to me than I challenge theirs, but after all, isn't that itself merely a perception or misperception?

Every step in in a sort of blind. And yet one must step.

Just some sad idle thoughts.

 

The Invisible Elderly Patient in Los Angeles

I would have extended the title of this entry to all of America, because my suspicion is that it is the same anywhere, except maybe in the now rare small town where one man or woman with a black bag and an actual heart still does everything. I won't bother with the tale that has gotten me most recently enraged with the money making assembly line that is modern medicine, but suffice it to be said that when I blurted out in tearful and utter frustration, to my very elderly father's arrogant twit of a doctor, that he, individually, and his other specialist colleague weren't treating the whole person, he actually laughed. I suppose it is a bit funny in a traumatically cynical sort of way.

Not only do they not listen. But heck, woe be to the person who actually challenges them, some spouse or daughter or son, who says, "He is talking to you" while they are obliviously doing some rote procedure without knowing any recent history and without a second's worth of compassion.

When I wait at the high tech urology office for my father to have his euphemistically called "treatments", administered only by techs, not a doctor, (each treatment or absence thereof, because say of an infection, is never preceded by any actual check of the man's body), I watch the largely years' crumpled characters, often with walkers, or canes, called in one of two doors, "Jones", "Smith", "Johnson", known to the staff only by their disembodied bladders. I mean that the people treating them, the people at the desks, those frozen faced automatons they call receptionists, ("Sir, you have to sign in!". Why is that so critical to the procedure I wonder?) see no person, no face, no life, no future, no past, nothing. Only the bladder and the insurance card. Ask 'em about a bill even, and they'll say, "This isn't ours." or "You have to call your insurance company." with a dismissive blankness. I have to qualify here, there was one young woman, who actually did resolve an insurance problem. I should have kissed her on the head.

I haven't been able to do much for my father against the seven headed hydras that call themselves care givers. I cannot imagine what a person alone, without even one support person, experiences. It is enough to make one want to die.

I have heard people say to me, in their perhaps appropriate defense, "They have to get hard; they see so much suffering". And I am reminded of my non-medical consumer job, and how hard it is to deal with the anger and the emotion of people who have been mistreated by a company or a profession. And, how often I have failed. "Yes, it must be hard for them," I think to myself. And then, frankly, here it is. I DON'T care what is their problem. This is my father, your father, your mother, your sister, your wife, your husband and they deserve better. Those old lives are still theirs to live. Remember your amusement at or patronizing response to their anger or their children's anger when you get to that societally useless stage. What goes around comes around inevitably since we all get old and die. You too. And sooner than you think given how quickly time passes. I'd like to be a fly on the wall when some 30 year old ignores your complaints and cries. Of course, someone will be ignoring mine so I probably won't ever get the chance.

One good thing may come out of this, and it won't likely be my father's recovery, alas, but maybe I have found my own retirement calling. Who knows. Someone must be out there advocating for these forgotten folks of a certain age; I will be looking to join them. I hope. I hope. I hope I don't forget the anger I feel and the need to redress the singularly sick system. And I don't think universal health care is the answer. I don't think Cuba or Europe does better. The answer is in the hearts of the profession. And maybe those hearts are just too hard. But what's the alternative?  

 

 

Tags: Elder health care, uncaring doctors, arrogant doctors, elder health advocacy

Joan Rivers Run Deep(er) Than you Think

Joan Rivers is in her decrepit dressing room waiting the 90 minutes to go onto the red carpet for a fictional cable TV network. Her daughter, Melissa, has the A dressing room. It's a not very good sign, along with the incredibly small cheese plate featuring "Laughing Cow", that her star is again on the wane. Again. She has had to come back from celebrity, financial, and personal oblivion before, and it looks like she just maybe will have to start over once more. She alternately rants to her ne'er do well underlings. She comedically rants to us, her loyal audience, about age, and gravity. And she stops for a moment or two in small spotlight to reflect with gravitas about people she has known and losses she has suffered. I wouldn't have thought it possible for the mix to work. But mostly, it did. 

The plastic surgery is overdone. Even she'd admit it. But that is the thing about a "Work in Progress by a Life In Progress", she keeps on tinkering, and you find yourself rooting for her, even with both tears of laughter and sadness. 

Surprisingly it's not the jokes I remember from the evening at the Geffen, it's the stories that she told with all seriousness after leaving us reeling with laughter at the ravages of aging in Hollywood, or aging anywhere for that matter. The one about cinemetographer Lucien Ballard. The one about the suicide of her husband Edgar Rosenberg, after he was banned, perhaps even with some reason, from the set at FOX when Joan had her ill-fated, short lived talk show. And the one about Johnny Carson, who, called by Joan to share the good news of her becoming a host on the then new network, hung up on her, never to talk to her again. Even after Edgar died. Even after his own son, Rick, died, and she sent a note of condolence. And yet, she still reveres him.

My friend, Len (Speaks), and I agreed that she could have carried off the evening without the supporting cast whose job it was to advance the story and be a kind of stage sounding board. She really did not need them. It's too bad she doesn't realize that. And as to the plastic surgery, some things you can't hold back. Age. Death. Loss. But you can hold back fear. And laughter does that! Depth and laughter, both in one evening. Who knew?

 

 

Tags: Joan Rivers

Bye Bye Sarah Marshall and Us

Sometimes the aural and the visual just become too much. I notice that more often these days. The rationalizations of certain presidential candidates (and I am not talking about Hillary, who these days I find myself rooting for) double speak me into a terrified rage and a need to look up the word demagogue and see if his picture is next to it. I have this image of the need to become a freedom fighter hiding from the think police only this isn't Paris in the 1940s but Anycity, United States, about a year after the inaugural of January 2009. I used to think my father was crazy when he talked about a race war. But now, I see honest people being manipulated into one as they project their fears onto the blank screen that has the audacity to hope. Just a little side bar, according to Webster's, "audacity" has the following meanings, 1. bold courage; daring 2. shameless or brazen boldness; insolence; impudence---hmmmmm? I may have to read the book because it sounds as if the one with the audacity feels that someone is preventing him or her from hoping, or is a whole country? Sounds like Mr. Wright and Mr. Audacity really ARE on the very same page. And while I cannot speak my mind, as I mentioned in a prior, angrier entry, because dissension from the (politically) correct thinking (Mr. Orwell, are you turning in your grave yet?) leads to disapprobation, a young man can walk in front of a child, oh, just your ordinary pedestrian, with the pithy phrase, something like "F---k you" emblazoned on his trendy tee. "Mommy, what does F--K mean?" "Well, it is a little early Johnny, but then you are in first grade and you aren't supposed to hear about these things until you get to second grade, but maybe it's time that mommy explained".

A long preamble to the relatively small visual assault that has convinced me that we are doomed. I have been long in accepting this. I hope I am wrong. But I am nearly irrevocably pessimistic. Why should this relatively young country survive the onslaught of human evil packaged in cutsey culture when longer lived countries died in their own psychological and emotional filth going down this very same road. (You know, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it). A second long preamble.

So I am driving to my home after a long day of listening to complaints and battling narcissism besides my own and I go into a left turn lane to a big boulevard. I look to my left where there are the ugly posters one on top of the other. I have seen other versions of this particular one, e.g. "I hate you Sarah Marshall" and I have assumed that it is the teaser for a movie. But this one. This one really touches my heart and I want to rip faces off, if only I knew who is responsible. "You Suck Sarah Marshall". Yes, indeed, it is an ad for a movie about a man who dated a TV star. He goes to Hawaii to forget her and whoa, what a great idea, she is there too! Hollywood is just so full of wisdom and wit, the guys or ladies (I am ashamed it could be a lady) must have really patted themselves on the back in between guffaws when they thought of that teaser! Little Johnnie is probably trying to figure out whether F--K and Suck are the same thing. Close enough Johnny.

I can pray otherwise, but I am guessing that "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" the name of this entertainment gem will be a weekend hit among the gen x-ers and whatever the heck is following them these days, Y, Z, AA, cause we're going to have to start the alphabet over again, kind of like license plates.

A moment of silence for the demise of yet another civilization.

 

What About Lazarus?

 Christ called, "Lazarus, Come out!" and a man dead four days appeared at the tomb's entrance, still wrapped in the material in which he had been prepared after death. A great miracle brought to our minds to this day, over 2,000 years after the salvific act by which we are restored to a relationship with Our God. But what about Lazarus. As my pastor noted today, and not the point of the story, Lazarus died, twice. He died and was buried for four days, raised by the Hand of God and then sometime later, and we do not know when, or how soon after this event, he died again, this time to await the Judgment of God.

Now there's another story--what changed in Lazarus on the second go round? He had, apparently, been a good man on the first go round, although the particulars of his goodness are not known to us. But having died and been raised by his Friend, in a demonstration, a pre-cursor, of what could be in store for all, if only we believe in Him, that had to have given him some impetus in his restored life. I wonder if it did. How could waking up in one's own grave covered from head to toe with burial oils and fabric not make a massive, actually mystical impression on anyone? In the beginning, he promised all sorts of changes, I am imagining, he'd be, for example, less impatient with his wife and sister. This second life, a gift, would be one of service. Is that the way it happened? Like to think so, but being human, good intention, even after a big wake up call (and this was the biggest, don't you think?) fades and the difficulties of the day to day erode the will to good, and next thing you know, you are back in that sinful rut.

If it were today, Lazarus would be in therapy, after acting out on the job, maybe, though I have no idea what his actual job was, and be diagnosed with adjustment disorder or Post-traumatic stress (that one really works given the thing that brought him there, coming back from the dead). He'd be telling his therapist what it felt like, and maybe he'd mention a light and some relatives he had seen, and he'd get a gig on John Edwards' to tell how it was, and he'd be making money, and telling his story over and over, and something, the essence, might get lost in translation. God. Jesus, the Way and the Life. Judgment. Reconciliation. Hope that is beyond this world. That he would have to die again, in body, and to self, to achieve something much better than the wonder of wagging tongues and a passing celebrity.

But no one knows what Lazarus did or did not do. Or what he felt or did not feel. But imagine yourself after the same experience. What would you become? What would I?

 

Speak Freely? Give me a break!

As I was driving home in the interminable traffic along Sunset Boulevard, I passed the LA Weekly's offices. The building has a kind of handdrawn marquee, reflecting its highminded goals. . .beginning with "Speak Freely". Normally I wouldn't notice it, really, but today, I have been reflecting, in a not so rare bit of more than irritation, at just what bullshit is the idea that we in this world, country, communities or friendship circles can ever speak freely. Pardon. I am endeavoring to speak, freely, with the use of a moderate expletive.

I did interviews today for a job in my office. One of the interviewee's resume piqued a memory from my days in New York. You see, the resume revealed that he had attended a high school at which I had often attended dances, it being a boy's school and mine being a girl's school, co-educational was a carefully orchestrated and chaperoned Friday or Saturday night get together of bad foot work and loud music amid teenage angst. He had attended back in the late sixties, just before my forays to the dances, courtesy of my friend Virginia's judge father, who drove us in cigar smoking silence each and every time. Here I was 3,000 miles and like 40 years from that time, and the man in front of me was here too. I just wanted to share my small joy at the one degree of separation with a complete stranger. He was slightly amused by the coincidence and the interview went on without incident. As we were concluding our day, one of my co-panelists who often paternalistically corrects me when I am either too ebullient or blunt (in her view) or otherwise not sufficiently circumspect, as she implicitly defines it, pointed out that in a management training she and another panelist had attended, my reference to the high school and the implication of "all those years ago" could be interpreted as some form of discrimination, ageism, I guess, because well 40 years ago he was in high school. My mere pointing out of a mutual experience, our respective experience of that high school, was, well, inappropriate, politically incorrect. Ask your questions, and shut the F up, Djinn. Nothing social. Nothing extraneous. A big goose egg of human interaction. By the way, if he is old, so am I, because I was there 40 years ago, too. Like it's a big secret.

Meanwhile, I have learned that I am not allowed, in my supervisorial role, to express disapproval to my staff for deficiencies, for that is, disrespectful. I wish that I had had the guts to tell that to the nuns I had in grammar school when they expressed their disapproval or, harshly, in my view, critiqued my poor handwriting or math skills. I am sure Mother Alphonsus Ligouri would have been touched at my showing her the light. It wasn't said, explicitly, that I am not allowed, of course, but since audiences are given to those who inevitably ask "Can she do this?" or "Can she say this?" , I am slowly becoming hip to the reality of things. Or as one of my own management trainers recently pointed out to me, that we supervisors only have the illusion of control. Actually, we don't have even that. But let me stick with the subject at hand. Speech.

Don't get me started though. These days I would call myself a conservative leaning independent, rather than the nominal Republican I have heretofore been. But to my liberal friends with whom I never bring up politics, but who forever feel the need to say something like "Your President" did this venomous thing or another (btw, does anybody understand that in fact the president doesn't make decisions unilaterally, that he is tempered, hampered by his many advisors, by press, lobbyists, his own party, the other party, the Senate, the House, the Court, those chains and shackles, oh, excuse me, checks and balances of governance?), I am a right winger. Say that I think maybe the War in Iraq and its genesis is maybe a bit more complicated than the sound bytes flung at us day after day, and I am a war monger. So, I don't discuss politics. And, as they say, I don't discuss religion, because so many of those I know are retired Catholics and they are the most lethal and unforgiving lot if you mention you might still believe in it all.

Friendship is tricky too. I have lots of examples, but let me give two. Of course I cannot know the truth of what really happened, but the since the person would not disclose the reason for our sudden lack of commonality, I speculate from the time frame in which it all changed, and the fact that our friendship went south after a nice dinner at Cafe Montana in Santa Monica in which I disputed her position that psychology, which I was studying at the time, was anti-religious. I said what I think, and then shortly thereafter, we drifted apart. When I tried to reconnect, she stopped calling me back. What to think? Because we had not had any major cataclysmic argument and we had shared some of the same religiously related charity work, I could only conclude that my defense of psychology, my faith in both it AND religion, my very thoughts, offend also some, at least one, of the religious. I am pro-life as it happens, as well, and another friend, told me that anyone who wasn't pro-choice, she did not know if she could be friends with. I apparently just can't get it right. Shut the F up, Djinn. All opinions, and all speech welcome, just not yours.

If a friend asks you what you think, or if you think you are close enough to someone to ask or to speak what is truly on your mind because you trust that closeness---cause you been down the road together, say nothing.  Don't risk it. Or else lie.

Tonight's cynical view of life.

 

 

 

 

Len's Moment with Valerie, Valerie, Bertinelli

For me, it's Pierce Brosnan. For Len, of Len Speaks, it's Valerie Bertinelli. In 1975, Valerie was the youngster who played the sweet sister on One Day at a Time. She was the girl next door. She was better than the girl next door.  She was probably what every mother hoped every son would bring home when she was legal age. I already knew Len for about one year in 1975. And I have known about his pine for Ms. Bertinelli since then. Oh, he's no more delusional about her than I am about Pierce Brosnan. Let's face it, Pierce and Valerie have been and are now again connected to significant others. They aren't options for us. But, there is a pleasure in the unlikely dream. Okay, the impossible dream. So, because of Len, I have a huge poster of Pierce on my wall from his James Bond days, and because of me happening across an announcement at the Grove's Barnes and Noble that Valerie would be doing a book signing on March 1, Len got his ever so brief moment with Valerie. He doesn't have the picture to prove it. But that's ok, cause I was there, ruining the picture to prove it, so I can prove it.

He's probably written about it already on his blog. I haven't read his blog because I don't want to usurp his take of things. Valerie still is the girl next door. You know how I know? Her parents were in from Phoenix to watch her do the signing, and her boyfriend was chatting us up on the waiting line. He isn't handsome in the traditional way, but I could see what she saw in him. He was the boy next door for the girl next door, and even better, now that she will be making money at this new career, a financial planner to boot. What luck! I mean, these people really like her. And although the book store organizers had forbidden staged pictures with the now svelte (she really looked good, and except for the reading glasses you'd never know she was 47), Valerie was posing with each one whose book she signed. When I messed up my effort to commemorate the event for my friend the first two times, the book folks were saying, a kind of "Ok, guys, move along, you're holding up the line".  But Valerie, that delight, said, "No, why? I'll sign the next person's book and they can get the camera ready!" I really wanted this and not in a narcissistic way. All altruism, some of the time. But mistakes were made.

But still Len has the signature. I have to ask if he got the little heart that I got, drawn into the frontispiece. I really liked that. I wondered if she'd still be doing that by the time she got to the last person on the line. I wouldn't be, but I am not the girl next door. I am more the girl from the next planet, truth be told.

I think still that Valerie and I could be friends. Not that she'll be looking me up. That's ok. I understand. But what about Len? Valerie, you're not married yet, how about dinner with my friend? How about CPK? No pressure. Let me know. I'll set it up.

 

 

Tags: Valerie Bertinelli