grandma bob

I'm not entirely sure how to approach this blog entry. The thing is, my grandma Wickman had a stroke last week and is in hospice now, resting with her family around her. Grandma Bob (as my brother and I dubbed her in order to differentiate between her and grandma Toby) was and continues to be one of the smartest people I've ever known and fiercely independent. We will miss her dearly, but I feel confident she is at peace with her life and I feel incredibly lucky to get to spend this time with her.
While this obviously been the encompassing aspect of my week, I'm not entirely sure how to approach it in this venue. I do want to give some sort of an update about my life, and this is my life right now. But so often this blog is (to put it mildly) irreverent.
One of the things I discovered this week is that more of my family reads the blog than I imagined. Aunts and uncles and whatnot. And I do tend to drop some f-bombs and douche-bombs. Even though I write this in the knowledge that my mom reads it, it's a bit disconcerting when other random people who I don't necessarily want to know the sordid details of my existence casually reference the blog. Like my aunt cracking a joke about my face kersplat.
That has been the most rewarding (if that's the right word) aspect of this entire experience. I can't remember the last time the entire family was together like this. A little background: this is my mom's mother, not my dad's (who I'm staying with). While my dad's mom has two children (my dad and my developmentally disabled aunt) and two grandchildren (me and Glenn), my mom's mom has 17 direct line descendents and most of them have been around for some period of time this past week. When I was young, we were all together a lot of the time. And the relative ages of everyone leads to a lot of interesting interactions. For example: my brother is as close in age to our youngest uncle as he is to me, and he is much older than any of the other grandkids.
Rather than lapse into the countless memories I've been rehashing this week, I just want to focus on what's been happening recently. Although the stroke was massive, grandma has retained her personality and ability to communicate. It's impossible to overstate how reassuring this has been. She was able to decide for herself that she wanted her feeding tube removed, and that she wanted to go to hospice instead of staying the hospital. She has been responsive when people visit, and retained her wry wit and whip smarts. She's mostly sleeping, of course, but just being able to tell her we love her and have her reply in kind is wonderful.
I'd also like to give a warm and sincere thank you to the Evergreen Hospital Hospice Center. It's a beautiful and peaceful place, with lots of wonderful and supportive people. I can't describe how much of a privilege it's been to be there with everyone.
I am doing alright, in general. Emotionally exhausted of course, and the days are running together. But I feel great peace between me and grandma, and am secure we've said what we need to say to each other. She is and will always be an inspiration.

busy

Been trying to find the time to get a quick word out here, but I've just been crazy busy. Very content with the shape of the path, but it's a full schedule.
The biggest story is truly surreal: last Tuesday I went to a trivia night at a bar on Capitol Hill with a couple new friends; they set up this group that plans to visit and review every bar and club on Capitol Hill by the end of the summer. So this particular evening we're sitting there, rocking the trivia casbah, when Alex (instigator and blogger of the group) gets a phone call. Long story short; a friend of theirs works at Canlis (the fanciest restaurant in Seattle) and can get us into an impromptu, free jazz show... featuring Wynton Marsalis.
No really.
So we all jet to our respective homes, put on some nice threads, and meet back at Canlis at 11:30. At midnight Wynton Marsalis walks in with a good sized crew and they proceed to jam until 2:30am.
I had never been inside Canlis before. It looked like Hugh Hefner's study. Well, I've never been in Hugh Hefner's study before, either. But Canlis definitely had the 1960's pleasure lounge feel.
I would say more, but I mean... what else needs to be said? Definitely among the most surreal experiences of my life. Wynton was absolutely and predictably amazing. Perhaps oddest about the entire night: I can find no mention of this show anywhere on the Interwebs. Just that Wyn (we're on a monosyllabic basis now) canceled his show at Benaroya earlier in the night.
So that was Tuesday; here's what the rest of last week's schedule has looked like:
Monday: 2.5 hour yoga/meditation class. Meet a buddy in town for the night for a few drinks. In bed around 2am.
Tuesday: Hit the gym, hang out with some friends in Belltown, walk up Capitol Hill, trivia for a few hours, sprint around town in time to get to Canlis to see Wynton Freaking Marsalis. In bed around 3am.
Wednesday: Somatic movement class. Check out a bi-monthly ecstatic dance night in Interbay (more on this in a moment). In bed by midnight.
Thursday: Meet a buddy in town for the weekend and another good old friend. Go lawn bowling at Greenlake (they have an immaculately manicured lawn, really a treat). Have a late dinner (sunset at 10pm) before taking a bus up Capitol Hill to check out a dancehall reggae night at the War Room club. Cab home, go by the 24 hour doughnut shop, play board games and eat doughnuts until falling asleep on the couch around 4am watching 6 String Samurai. Still haven't seen that frickin' movie to the end.
Friday: Independence Day. More lawn bowling. Toss the Frisbee around. End up at a rooftop party in Belltown from which you can both the Forth of Julivar's and the Lake Union fireworks. As always, Lake Union show blows Forth of Juliver's out of the water. I kept expecting a full scale replica of Mount Rushmore to appear in red, white, and blue in the sky. Very impressive. Finish the night dancing to 80's music at a bar around the corner. End up retiring with a few people afterwards and, before you know it, in bed (again) at around 4am.
So there you have it. I am the type of person who is usually in bed by midnight. This has been an insane week. And yes, I did go to work this week, too. I think that's a valid excuse for the belated blog entry.
Just to return to the Wednesday night ecstatic dance event for a moment; I've been keeping my eyes out for a good ecstatic dance night since I returned to Seattle. I tried a few, but they involved people putting on CD compilations and charging you $10 to dance in the space. Totally fine, but really not what I'm looking for. The big thing, for me, is to have a live DJ laying down tracks. Someone who can interact with the energy in the room and change the flow of the music according to what kind of feedback they're getting. It's just not the same the have a pre-defined list of tracks.
(Quick note: the things that generally set apart what is called "ecstatic dance" from a normal club night are an earlier start and finish and a lack of a bar. The idea is to use the dance to achieve a sort of inebriation, to reach a different level of consciousness.)
So this night is exactly what I've been looking for. Decent DJs, and only $5.
Guess I'll just leave it at that for now. Hopefully things will settle down enough that I can get in another entry before too much time passes, but I wouldn't hold my breath. So until next time... Pope out!

Bits and baubles

I found myself in the awkward position of getting annoyed at other drivers on the freeway yesterday while I was having a conversation using my Douchetooth headset. That's always been one of my rules: if you're driving while talking on the cellphone, you absolutely forfeit all your rights of indignation with other drivers. I don't care if someone crosses the center line and swerves back and forth across all the lanes of oncoming traffic waving a bottle of Jack Daniels out the window while doing rails of cocaine off a hooker's breasts. If you're on the phone, you can't complain.

The thing about the Douchetooth is that it's actually more dangerous to use while driving than just having the cell phone up to your ear. Studies have shown (and I've read them; I actually did a presentation in a class a few years back about how it should be illegal to talk on the phone while driving) that the dangerous thing about it isn't that your hand is engaged and blocking the view; it's that your mind is engaged and you don't do things like moving your eyes or turning your head. They call it the tunnel-vision effect. And the Douchetooth doesn't alleviate that effect; it just gives you a false sense of security. It's like driving an SUV; you think you're safer when you're really not, so you end up driving even less safely than you would have otherwise.

So yeah, that was me. Having a conversation on the phone and getting angry at the guy who cut to the front of the line for the exit lane that was backed up. Big day for Jerod.

The face is almost completely healed. The government did foreclose on the lease to my moustache farm, but it's all for the best. A word to the wise; don't ever try to do anything ironic using your face as the medium. If you really believe in the moustache (or decide to give yourself a mullet for Halloween like my buddy Billy a few years back), you gotta just own it. It can't be this snarky, post-modern statement or something. To paraphrase Raising Arizona, they gotta name for people like that: asshat. Not a pretty name, is it, Hi?

In any case. I didn't own the 'stache, I didn't really believe in it, so I was that asshat. And when I strapped on the headset I was the douchebag asshat. Not a comfortable hat, lemme tell ya.

Here's a haiku I wrote while jogging around the park today.

I'm done trying to
Run while sucking in my gut
It's just not much fun

More Pope Culture

I had totally forgotten how good a movie The Bourne Supremacy is. I watched it again the other night and was totally blown away. The scene where Marie (aka Lola) dies, and he is giving her mouth to mouth underwater, and then has to let her float away, and she slowly fades into the water... and then when he kicks that guy's ass with a rolled up magazine??? Seriously, wtf? That was awesome! And getting Brian Cox to replace Chris Cooper's insane CIA guy? Brilliant. Solid and entertaining all the way through.
A brief word on the NBA finals: bleh. Lakers-Celtics? Really? I'm having nightmares from my youth. They all involve too-tight shorts and bad haircuts. Of course, with the influx of European players in today's NBA, I predict the resurrection of the famous blonde afro-mullet. It's inevitable.










I wasn't sure who I was going to root for before I started watching the first game, but once I gave it even a little thought it became obvious. To break it down:
Ex-Sonic factor: Ray Allen, one of my top-5 all time Supes... or Vlad Radmonovich, the asshat who is such a prima donna he got kicked off the Serbian Olympic basketball team even though he's by far their best player, because he couldn't get along with anybody.
Superstar factor: Generally likeable team player Kevin Garnett... or brooding rapist Kobe Bryant. Also: Kobe is so unliked that he doesn't even have a nickname and had to make one up for himself. He calls himself "Black Mamba."* No really.
I also just realized that "Paul Pierce" totally sounds like a porn star name. Add in Sam Cassell's "I have giant testicles" dance** and it's really no contest. I think the Lakers will win in six, but I'll be rooting for the Celts.
By the way, what world did I wake up in when suddenly the Celtics have zero white players on their roster??? This was always the big joke, right? They regularly threw up a complete and totally competitive whitewash*** in the '80s. Boston is infamous for being one of the most racist sports cities in the country. And now not only do they not have any white players, but the coach is black, too? I'm not complaining, mind you. It just kind of blows my mind.
Face update: now that the swelling has gone almost completely down on my upper lip, I'm realizing how totally skeevy the chipped incisor looks. I smile and it's hellllo Bubba. Open this beer bottle with your teeth, would ya? So I'm gonna have to get that fixed.
*Chalk one more up in the "professional athlete's nicknames that are actually what they call their own penises" column. Your top five, in reverse order: 5. The Splendid Splinter. 4. Big Smooth. 3. The Big Unit. 2. The Chicoutimi Cucumber. 1. Magic Johnson.
**

















***A "whitewash" is when a team plays white guys at all five positions. The '88 NBA champion Celtics regularly had a lineup of Bird, McHale, Walton, Ainge, and the guy who always died on the alien planet in Star Trek.

Big day

I mailed off the last few items for my application for grad school! Whoop whoop! I'm gonna celebrate by not crashing a bike on my face. As my buddy Eric put it, "it's good to set achievable goals."
In other face news, I've decided to become a moustache farmer. The visible wounds are right in the Hitler zone, so I figured I needed to make some facial hair decisions until I am able to shave my whole face again. For whatever reason I decided to celebrate my inner 70's porn star and grow the 'stache. I'm also letting the soul patch grow back; for whatever reason, it's significantly wider than it was the many years I had one. I've been shaving it for about three years now, but before that it was probably over a decade that I'd had at least the patch and sideburns. I'm sure the regular shaving is why the patch has spread.
Last bit of face-related ephemera: I regained the ability to whistle a few days ago. Momentous.
Finally, just a (much belated) thought on the whole Myanmar thing: does anyone else find it downright hilarious (in an incredibly offensive way) that the Bush administration has come down so hard on the government of Myanmar for their mishandling of the official response to a natural disaster? And their unwillingness to allow foreign aid workers into the country to help? I mean... whaaaaaaa??? It doesn't matter that you're right! New Orleans is STILL fucked up, and you're giving some other country shit about how they responded to a catastrophic disaster?!? Go eat a bowl of dicks. Seriously.
Speaking of New Orleans, there's a new ride they have there called "The Katrina." You drink a hurricane and get blown behind a dumpster.
Whaaaaaaaat? Still too soon?
And now I will distract you from that terribleness with a bit of Get Your War On:








What's really funny about this is that my gram doesn't trust answering machines. She's down with the digital clocks though.

My face! My valuable face!*

Is there some kind of protocol for what you write when you haven't made a blog entry in months and months? Is it better to acknowledge the fact, give some lame excuse, and then launch in? Or just start writing and pretend like you haven't been AWOL for so long that only the two people who have you on their RSS feed have any idea you've made a new entry?
As should be obvious, I've chosen the middle path, whereby you discuss the potential discussion. So what's the lame excuse, you may ask? Well I'll tell ya; I haven't had internet at my gram's place since I've been back in the northwest. I can hear it now; "Pope, why not just go hang out in a coffeehouse, or a bar? Have a cuppa or a fermented beverage and get your write on?" The answer, of course, is that I'm not a douchebag.
But here's the thing; I've finally found the sweet spot from which I can poach the neighbor's unsecured wireless. So now I can actually post stuff from home. Sure, I have to climb the tree in the corner of the backyard, hang upside down from a very specific branch, and hold the computer at arm's length to get it to work. But as they say, beggars can't be... is it "choosers" or "choosy"? I've always said, "choosers," but I know I've heard it both ways. Hold on, I'll go check... just a quick run to the magic tree should do it...
Seems like the interwebs are undeclared. There are just as many choosers and choosy-ers. Not to mention some "begers." I even found a yahoo! answers page that asked this exact question. Jeez, my faith in the world is severely shaken; I mean, if you can't trust something you read on the interwebs, what can you trust?
I guess now is the time to actually discuss something of consequence in my life, eh? There are two things I will mention at this point, one from the beginning of last week, and one from the end. The one from the beginning I can gloss over for now: I took the GREs on Monday. By far the biggest step in my application for graduate school. I'm applying to the UW's Master of Science in Technical Communication for this coming fall. And, after months and months of alternating between psyching myself up and out, I finally took the test. And I did fine, definitely well enough for my purposes. I still haven't gotten back my writing scores (the only non-automated section of the test), but I was most confident in that section for the split second before I got my verbal and math scores back.
The second thing makes for a better story. And, additionally, I can't really remember much of what happened before this event. Hence the glossing over of the GREs. It's not that I don't want to talk about it; it's just that, for reasons that will become apparent, the details have become, shall we say, a bit hazy.
So it's Saturday. The first day of Memorial Day weekend. Absolutely gorgeous in Seattle. Sunny and warm, upper 70's. I spent the morning and afternoon getting stuff done around the house: some cleaning, a bit of writing, yoga, meditation, reading. I watched a movie. (Primer, excellent, $7,000 budget, highly recommended.) Then, early afternoon, I set out to my buddy Rob's house to play some music and barbeque.
I get there around 2:30 and start to set up my drum kit. And—and this is key—I cracked a beer. A Lagunita's IPA. If you're a hophead like me, there is no better beer. If you're not, well, you probably think it tastes like a skunk's ass. But whatever. The important part to remember is that it's not yet three in the afternoon and I'm cracking my first beer.
So I set up the drums, and we play for several hours, taking breaks to go hang out in the sun. A few buddies are coming over later to bbq, so we're just kind of snacking (also an important point). Literally two tons of fun.
Can you see where this is going? Perhaps not. But this is the moment of truth, the grand foreshadowing, like that shot of the cook in Hunt for Red October. But in this movie it's instead a shot of Jerod hopping on Robbie's spare bicycle so we can ride over to his neighborhood bar for an hour or two before the boys show up.
Now you can see where this is going, right? We're not quite there yet though. I made it to the bar just fine. And what a bar it was; they had good beer on tap (IPA, natch), a big rack of records behind the bar (Stones, Cash, Social D... just good solid rock n' roll. I'm a big fan of all kinds of music. I love reggae, hip hop, jazz, various kinds of pop, you name it. But when I'm drinking in a bar on a Saturday night? Sheeet, man, throw some muthafuckin rock n' ROLL on that beyatch, right?), and a huge deck out back with a ping pong table. So we drink beers and play pong for a couple hours, the boys meet us there, and we (finally) decide to head back to Rob's to have some dinner.
By now it's 8pm. So that's five and half hours of fairly solid drinking, and fairly solid not-eating. And yes, there is that voice way, way, waaaay in the back of my head. What do you want to call it? Conscious? Common sense? Ego? Whatever it is, it's screaming so loud that even under all that beer I can still hear it. But here's the thing (and I'm not telling you anything you don't know): beer does funny things to a man. My new name for it is "Id juice." Because it just unleashed that silly, stupid beast from under all the eons of socialization that go into creating a 21st century human being and makes you say to yourself, "hey, there's no freaking way I would drive a car right now... but you know, what if we just took away half the wheels and all the years of German and/or Japanese engineering that go in to maintaining a healthy barrier between you and the concrete? Is that something you'd be interested in rolling down the street?" And beerbeast he nod.
So I mashed my face into the sidewalk. Literally, I mean... I have really no other injuries to the rest of my body besides my mouth. Actually, that's not entirely true; I have just enough other injuries** to kind of recreate what happened. I thought I had it figured out; a few raspberries on my left hand and a fairly significant bruise on my left shoulder made me think I'd fallen off the left side of the bike, landed on my lips, and then a split second later my shoulder and hand glanced off the ground. But here's the thing; my right fricking knee is hurting me now, too! WTF??? I can't for the life of me figure out how my left shoulder and right knee both got hurt.
Okay, I think I just figured it out. I think I just rag-dolled it over the handle bars and landed face-shoulder-hand-knee. Because hey, you know... free dummy. Or maybe it was one of those occasions when you're drunk and just decide to take a nap in "that place." You know that place. It's wherever you happen to be at that moment everything just shuts down. I know a couple guys who took a dirt nap along side of the Burke Gilman Trail for about three hours once. And another buddy who fell asleep with his big toe on the throwing line of a dart board when he passed out mid-throw. So it's entirely possible I just got partway into my flight and decided, "hey, you know... this is pretty comfy. I think I'll just catch a bit of shuteye..."
The first thing I remember when my alarm went off—the part of the alarm is being played by a large piece of rock—was a couple wide-eyed kids running towards me. "Hey man, are you alright?" one of them asks. I actually laughed at that point. Took off my shirt, pressed it to my face. Said, "I dunno kid, you tell me. Am I?" He shook his head.
Lucky for me my buddy Joe was driving past right at that moment (he'd shown up the bar late and only had one beer) and drove me back to Rob's. When I got out of the car, there were a couple more kids riding bikes in the street. I took the shirt away from my face and said, "this is what happens when you don't wear a helmet!" (I neglected to mention the beers.) It totally worked, too; they were like, "that happened because you weren't wearing a helmet???" "Yeah man, totally. You should always wear a helmet. Like, even when you're eating breakfast or pooping. You just can't be too careful."
At this point I'm seriously worried I'm going to vomit. And as the famous showtune goes, if you have gaping mouth wounds, you should really, really try to avoid getting vomit in them. But you have to remember that all I've consumed at this point is a couple handfuls of cheetos, half a dozen beers, and a tall boy of my own face blood. (I felt like an alchy vampire. As my buddy Ryan put it: "Ahh'll haaaave ah blaaaah-dy Maaaah-ry." (That's "I'll have a bloody mary" in a dracula voice.))
I managed to chew it back. I passed out for several hours in Rob's spare bedroom (we checked for concussions first) and then got a ride home from Joe. And, truly, I'm incredibly lucky; one small chip from a tooth, the aforementioned huge gash, and a bunch of road rash. No full on broken teeth, no shattered cheek bones. Everything seems to be healing okay. And I have the kind of lips that middle-aged women pay considerable amounts of money for. So I got that going for me...
Which is nice.
*We also would have accepted "New Look for Luke."
**Minor so far, but these things have a way of popping up more and more the farther you get from a crash of this sort. You know how it is; you're so focused on the major injuries—the cracked ribs, or the broken clavicle, or the huge gaping split on the inside of your upper lip with all the fat hanging out—that you barely notice the other seemingly minor aches and pains. And then a few days or a week later you start to notice some weird pain in your back or shoulder or knee... and that's the injury that's still giving you shit a year later.

over the river and through the woods

You know, I had a sneaking suspicion that even this year, after all that's happened in the recent past, the democrats would still find some way to fuck it up. You think, "there's no way they could screw this up! Republicans' cache is at an all-time low! They're beset with controversies of every stripe! Even being as useless and spineless as the dems are, they still took over both houses in 2006!" And yet... they appear to be finding a way to fuck it all up. This battle for the nomination is going to destroy this party and, while I have no problem with destruction of the democratic party in general, if it means we get John "neck skin" McCain instead of Barack Obama in the White House, well...
But whatever. I think it's amazing that the best the Republican party can muster for potential nominees is one of the Bobs from Office Space (Mitt got his start as an "efficiency consultant"); a right wing nut job Southern Baptist minister who knows nothing about the world outside of Arkansas; and my grandpa. And I love my grandpa... but he thinks my name is Susan.
But that's a topic for another day. For now, I'll focus on personal events. As most of you probably know, I have recently moved back to Seattle. The immediate impetus was some family stuff I wanted to be around to help deal with; ergo, I'm living with my grandma and aunt in Mountlake Terrace for the time being. I am sleeping in the room my dad grew up in. All I can say is, I'm glad they changed the sheets.
What else. When I first got here, there were literally dozens of antique hand cranks lining all the walls of the room. My grandpa collected them. My dad has been talking about getting rid of them for 12 years. I put half of them in a big box and stuck it in the garage. I only moved the ones that were precariously stuck to a crappy old bookshelf that is suspended DIRECTLY ABOVE THE BED by a couple L-joints.
Let's review: a couple L-joints; six inch wide, one inch thick, eight foot long piece of pine (by now totally bowed because of all the antique hand cranks that were stuck on it); DIRECTLY ABOVE THE BED. Not to go all Dennis Miller on y'all, but it was like the frickin' hand cranks of Damocles up in here.
So it's real interesting living here, as I'm sure you can imagine. I'm still trying to figure out my role, exactly. So far it's been a lot of "fixing stuff that's not broken." My grandmother is one of those people whose first instinct is to throw something away if it doesn't work as she expects it to. She was all set to throw away an alarm clock because it didn't go off two mornings in a row... until I explained that someone had set the alarm to go off in the evening instead of the morning. And then there was the travel mug that had the wrong lid on it. I like to think that I'm doing my part to minimize land fill waste.
And I'm living with cable again, for the first time in about a year and a half... I'm one of those people who doesn't miss cable when I don't have it (except Independent Film Channel, but nobody gets that anyway) but watches it when I do. So it's a curse. The problem here is that the television is always on, so it's hard to avoid if I'm home. But I won't lie; I often hang out in the other room and watch the second television. But that's not the point; the point is that my grandma and aunt watch a lot of tv, and Food Network is the only channel we even remotely overlap on (they usually watch Hallmark). So earlier tonight there was this show about a competition where the chefs had to create a sculpture out of sugar; all different kinds of sugar. For the purposes of this story, the important thing to know is that one form of sugar they had to work in was blown sugar. I'm not entirely sure what that means because I didn't stick around to find out. I assume it's a similar process to blown glass or something. Regardless. This one guy has an idea to make zoo animals out of blown sugar, and I swear on everything that is holy to me he said the following line: "I've never blown a giraffe before. I'm interested in its head and long neck."
I have absolutely nothing to add.