Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: October 2009
Another shout-out for Huston
Just finished Charlie Huston’s Caught Stealing, and wow, what a read. The plot is pure MacGuffin — Hank Thompson, a Californian transplanted to New York City, does a favor for the guy across the hall. He looks after his neighbor’s cat while the guy is away seeing to an ailing father. But there’s something in the cat’s carrying case that some very bad men want, and before long, Hank’s world is breaking into pieces. For starters, he gets the shit kicked out of him and loses a kidney.
Pure Maltese Falcon, only a hell of a lot more violent.
Hank’s such a likable guy that when he starts doing bad things, I didn’t feel alienated from him; no, I said to myself, “Yeah, I would have bashed that guy’s head in with a baseball bat, too.” He cares a lot about people (his sort-of-girlfriend, his parents, his neighbor’s cat) and that made me care about him. I wanted very much to see him come out of this mess in one piece, preferably with all the loot, and if he had to step of a few toes or blow away a leg or a neck, well, so be it.
Huston has a blog, too. He updates infrequently but his posts are interesting — like this one on the agony of having to write thousands of beats.
And now I get to start his just-released My Dead Body, his latest Joe Pitt novel (a series I blogged about here).
So, um, gotta go . . .
D.
That’ll exercise you
Here’s a screenshot of a discussion thread that is tres meta and delightfully absurd. Enjoy.
Meanwhile, we’re trying to figure out the insanity of California PE requirements. I really need to get Karen to blog about this, since she did the research today. But as best we can tell, one parting gift from the Bush Administration is a physical fitness test designed to train millions of boot camp-ready teens.
Gotta go. Upset stomach.
D.
Watching a grown man cry
Overall this has been a real once in a lifetime experience. It was hard, really hard and unforgettable. Sometimes the hardest things are the most memorable and that’s certainly true of this. I remember the journey between Dogpack and Tincup most vividly. I had difficult times and great times. I had one of the most beautiful places on the planet all to myself, I could swim naked in the lake, get up in the middle of the night and howl at the moon and I came pretty close to some of the big icons of the wilderness. At my first camp got within 20 metres of a large moose and on the creek I almost bumped into a moose surrounded by white timber wolves. I came pretty close to a bear and filmed a caribou swimming across a lake, American eagles would come and check me out and for 50 days I lived off the wild. It makes me smile to think of it – a big smile.
Tonight,
I’m feeling tired and discouraged and down. I didn’t sleep well last night and there’s no obvious explanation why. I’m beginning to realize that my friend Mike is correct, and that I have no urge to write because I’m generally happy with everything, job, family, etc., except I miss the writing and I fear the complacency of comfort, but I dread upheavals and change, especially now that things are finally settling into a routine. I can’t possibly want to be miserable just to stimulate the muse, can I?
Mostly I’m feeling whiny.
Patients keep asking me what I do for fun. This makes me feel like a very boring individual because what do I do? I hang out with my family. I read, I surf the net. I work out (which isn’t exactly fun). I’m tempted to say that I raise spitting cobras, or I’m a mountain climber, or that I’m researching a book on Craig’s List prostitution. (I do read Craig’s List personals for the yucks — does that count?)
My patient who hates Bakersfield came back to see me today and wanted to know how was I settling in, how did I like Bako, what was I doing for fun. I think she wanted me to admit to being horribly miserable here. Truth is, now that the weather has cooled, my number one gripe has evaporated.
I’m not even coughing anymore. Took five weeks to get over that horrid bug, but Jake and I are finally back to full health.
I think I just need a good night’s sleep.
D.
The fourteen minute mile
That’s how long it takes Jake and I to run a mile. The school wants him to run it in under 10 minutes, to which I have only one comment.
Are they insane?
We’re not built to run a ten-minute (or less!) mile. We have short little hobbit legs that are meant to run down supermarket aisles, maybe, but not laps. And certainly not miles.
It’s a funny thing. I can put in an hour on the elliptical trainer at high resistance and I’m fine. Drenched in sweat but fine. Put me on the road and ask me to run, and I’m miserable every step of the way. Maybe it’s because I can’t watch TV while I’m doing it.
I feel for my son. I really do. I had forgotten how nice it was to graduate high school and know that I would never again be judged on my physical prowess. Now we’re back in the hell of doing X pushups and Y situps in 60 seconds, bringing up the rear in the mile-running competition, and don’t even bring up the horror of team sports.
I wrote his PE teacher tonight . . . tried to tell him that we’ll do what we can, but we’re constrained by the genetics of the situation. I wish there were more emphasis on individual fitness, less on being able to meet certain abstract milestones.
They issue grades in PE. Grades! Whatever happened to Pass/Fail?
D.
Sorting them out
I can’t part myself from Path Beyond the Stars or any of the other dozen hard-to-find vintage SFs which, while uniformly atrocious, give me some weird sense of comfort.
I could make an appreciable dent in these piles by giving away all of my Pratchett, but I keep thinking that one day, my son is bound to catch the Pratchett bug. I mean, the kid sucks down everything Christopher Moore writes; he’s bound to like Pratchett, right?
And I can’t give away our graphic novels, nor my classics (SOME day I’ll manage to read Paradise Lost), my nature books, my pet care books, or books written by my friends. I would like to give away 120 Days of Sodom but I figure no one else will want it on his shelf, either.
I can’t give away Le Carre’s Tinker Tailor series, since I hope to reread it one of these days, nor can I give up Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, which I find unreadable, but I still want to know why some folks still make a fuss about Pynchon. I won’t give away my Michio Kaku or Steven Weinberg or Kip Thorne — all scientists who have popularized their work for the lay reader — because my son might want to read them some day.
I’m having an easier time parting with a good number of writing books which never did me a damn bit of good, such as The Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, whose title implies that I am something lower than an idiot. Al Gore’s Assault on Reason isn’t going to take up shelf space, nor the work of Cory Doctorow, Scott Lynch, Joe Haldeman, Jon Scalzi, or China Mieville. I’ve enjoyed some of these authors but I have no desire to reread their work. Out they go.
I think I need to go back through the “keep piles” with a sterner eye. But how can I give up my volumes from the Norton Library, or my handsome two-volume collection of Sherlock Holmes stories which I’ll never read but which I’ll always mean to read? It’s hard to part with books you’ve read partially and meant to finish but never did. Like Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, which lies on my table eighteen inches away, and which has once again lost my interest. (Yeah, that one’s gotta go.)
And don’t even get me started about all of our textbooks.
D.
An invasion of sorts
No telling how a teenage girl’s diary ended up at the bottom of our trash can. When I tossed out the morning’s garbage I saw it there, opened to a blank page. At first, I thought it was one of my many writing notebooks (you know, you get an idea for a new story, you have to write it down, but you don’t want it to rub shoulders with all those older crappy ideas that never went anywhere; THIS idea will be different, THIS story is going to go somewhere, so it damn well deserves its own notebook!) so I fished it out and looked at it.
Nope. Not mine.
It belongs, belonged, to a girl who was a high school freshman in 2008. There are no entries later than October 28, 2008, which makes me wonder if she came to a bad end. Perhaps her mother or father, cleaning house, came across the diary and could not bear to have it around (but why throw it into someone else’s trash can?) I’ve already googled her name hoping not to find news reports of some grizzly murder or car accident. She’s clean on Google. So the question remains: why?
It’s a multipart diary with sections devoted to prayers, goals, “trials and triumphs,” etc. The cover design is of a rather Duggary-looking girl in a pink dress that’s up to her chin, looking sweet enough to put ten diabetics into ketoacidosis.
Do I have any responsibility to honor the privacy of a stranger whose diary ended up in my trash? My compromise: I decided to read it but not reveal anything too terribly embarrassing on the blog. Nor would I reveal any identifying information.
With those ground rules in place, here’s what I’ve learned of our diarist:
She’s a thoroughly indoctrinated Christian, praying that this kid or that family be saved. She prays for that sort of thing a lot. (I wonder how many people have prayed for my salvation? At least one that I can think of, back at the Crescent City hospital. *Shudder*)
She’s a young Republican. On the back page is the draft of a letter she wrote to “Mr.” McCain.
She’s trying very hard to be a better person. Seems like her heart is in the right place.
She writes the usual angsty adolescent song lyrics and poetry.
She doesn’t have very lofty goals — “Be the person you meant me to be,” which I presume is addressed to Jesus.
By far, the most detailed section of the diary is “Prayers.” It’s remarkable how pushy some folks can be in their prayers. Not only does our diarist wish for the salvation of others, but she wants one woman to “stop dating and be worthy of a good man,” and she wants all the children to be taken out of one home and for their parents to be saved. Presumably, the kids would be allowed back into their home at that point, but she forgot to pray for that.
She’s not the sort of person I would have talked to in high school (although, oddly enough, one very like her friended me on Facebook). But there’s such a desperate earnestness in her writing and such modesty in her own personal prayers that she strikes me as a genuinely good person, and I can’t help but hope she’s okay. It worries me, though, that the diary ended up in the bottom of my trash bin.
Why?
D.
I drank the Kool-Aid.
At our hospital in Antioch, a great big picture of Sidney Garfield decorates the lobby’s wall, side by side with photos of one of his first hospitals and quotations regarding his philosophy of medicine. The man was a visionary, recognizing in the latter days of the Great Depression the fundamental illogic of fee-for-service medicine and recognizing that a system providing incentive to keep patients well would ultimately benefit everyone.
At the retreat (my retreat, not Jake’s), they handed out a book to every one of us: Courage to Heal by Paul Bernstein, a fictionalized account of Garfield’s early days in medicine, his nearly disastrous attempt to found a hospital in the middle of the Mojave Desert to take care of aqueduct laborers, his introduction to Henry Kaiser, and the work they did together to change medicine. These guys came up with the idea of a health maintenance organization when those words still retained their meaning: a network of health care providers, facilities, and insurers whose business is most successful when they keep their patients healthy.
Nowadays, HMOs are often considered sharks that want to take premiums and administer as little care as possible. Speaking as someone inside the system, though, that’s not how Kaiser Permanente functions. They really do want their patients to stay healthy, and there’s an ass-ton of emphasis placed on preventive medicine.
Yes, I drank the Kool-Aid. I’m a believer.
When I learned that the Kaiser-Permanente model was conceived by a landsman, the son of a Russian Jew, who if not a socialist was at the very least considered a socialist by the medical establishment of his day, I got that warm and fuzzy all over feeling. I’m part of an organization that shares my attitudes about caring for people. I’m part of a pro-labor outfit, one that has been pro-labor from the start. I’m doing good. I’m part of the solution. And it doesn’t hurt the warm-and-fuzzies that they pay me well and give me great benefits for doing good and being part of the solution.
The book is mesmerizing — not because it’s well written (it’s not), but because the story itself is compelling. But the author is unapologetic about being inventive; this is a novel, and he comes right out and tells you in the acknowledgments, “I have tried to respect history wherever doing so served my purposes as a novelist, but wherever it did not I have, cheerfully, and without regret, ignored it.” So there’s no telling how much of this is BS. I figure the love story is probably all hooey, but the bones of the story are probably true.
Not to worry, though, because Tom Debley and Jon Stewart (not THE Jon Stewart. The OTHER Jon Stewart) have written a more factual account: The Story of Dr. Sidney R. Garfield: The Visionary Who Turned Sick Care into Health Care. Yes, I’m going to buy this puppy, even if it means I have to buy it from Amazon since Barnes and Noble doesn’t have a copy available. I figure it will be fun to learn the boundaries of Paul Bernstein’s creative license.
And besides, after a while, Kool-Aid’s addictive.
D.