Home alone

 

A year.

I’ve had time enough to collect my thoughts in order that I might compose this entry, but I find that my keyboard has lost its cunning. Possibly the best I will ever do to provide a full account of her illness and death is to be found in the online (PDF) version of To the Undiscovered Country, so here I’ll do little more than to observe that Lina Foltz died a year ago this evening, following an abrupt and appallingly steep weeklong decline. She had outlived her original prognosis by almost two years, and contrived for almost the whole period to to wring a measure of happiness from each day granted to her.

She had grown frailer during the last three months of her life, but we were neither of us prepared for the violence and celerity with which the disease consumed her in those last days as she visibly dwindled physically and, in a way, psychologically: not that she was cognitively diminished so much as focused on the serious business of dying, from which those of us around her (family, friends—their visits and calls exhausted her) seemed to appear by way of distractions, wraiths, snow flurries on her laborious ascent through thin air to that icy summit. The effect, though, was akin to watching her personality seeming to be planed away with each day that passed.

Lina died on Sunday night at 6:30 (to paraphrase the W.C. Fields epitaph quip, she’d rather have been watching weekend football) as peacefully as the circumstances permitted. To this end she opted to take advantage of a legally-sanctioned elixir compounded of four ounces of apple juice with a powder of morphine, Valium, phenobarbital, digitalis and amitriptyline dissolved within. I have read—on authority for which I cannot vouch but certainly hope—that the preponderant morphine component would have had the effect of ramping her endorphin receptors up to eleven, so that the soundtrack for the last minute or so of consciousness vouchsafed her after downing the cocktail would have involved choirs of angels singing the “Ode to Joy.” Gods grant, if gods there be, that this was so.

For so long, we had each other’s backs.

It was, and remains, as though she took the soul of The Crumbling Manse™ with her when she left. The first time we looked at the place in 1999 it struck us both that, as Lina said, “People have been happy here,” and I will assert that we added to that vibe for the next quarter-century. I hope not to erode it too far in the years remaining to me, but during the interval since my wife’s absence it has been a bleak and cheerless house indeed. —“For life, as it were.”

Gobsmacked, 5 July

I’m not going to whine about this again, but geez—fifty years!

The years of living cancerously

Just one entry since the last day of 2022? There must have been issues.

Well, yeah. The present entry will go on at considerable length as we make up for the deficit.

This weekend marks two years since the spousette received a startling email from CæsarCare, the HMO into the coffers of which I have poured treasure these (counts on fingers) forty-seven years past. C-Care used to be a bargain, but early in the present century they appear to have filled their board of directors with Enron alumni, and after that for a long time their premiums skyrocketed from year to year, generally eating up most of my modest salary increases.

Lina had been feeling a little unwell for a period of months, and C-Care was putting her off: “It’s probably a urinary tract infection.” She wanted a scan, and started pestering them that spring. Their response: “A scan? Sure thing. We’ve got an opening in August. August work for you?” Fortunately her “primary care physician” was able to intervene, and got her slotted in at the end of June.

We were prepared for “Nothing to see here,” or for “Something wrong; here’s what we need to do to fix it.” Instead the terse, impersonal email said “advanced metastatic peritoneal carcinomatosis,” which turned out to be as dire as it sounds. Also, words like “palliative” and “hospice” figured in the message.

You could have, as they say, knocked us over with a feather.

Hard upon this diagnosis, the disease, which had hitherto merely been tuning up, announced itself with a fanfare, full orchestra and a lightshow, the symptoms coming in backed by a vigorous horn section and kettledrums. She spent most of the next ten days in C-Care’s emergency wing a mile away as liters of “ascites” were drained from her abdomen.

Myself, I had no issues with C-Care when they reamed out my cardiac plumbing in 2016: they identified the problem and addressed it briskly; the treatment has ameliorated the issue to date—although lately I have the sense that the relevant arteries might be silting up anew—and according to the rather censorious surgeon who reproached me post-op for my tardiness in consulting the competent authorities, that June’s could have been the last installment of Son of Urschleim, so I suppose that, the greedos on the C-Care board notwithstanding, I owe the outfit a life.

Still.

Lina was not pleased with them, particularly following her first consultation, once the initial crisis had passed, with the oncologist assigned to her. “There are no good outcomes here,” quoth the oncologist, which was and probably remains true, but the doctor’s affect suggested that she was keen to get this patient off her caseload and into some kind of palliative care that wouldn’t require regular supervision. And indeed, the literature we’d consulted at that point suggested that my wife would be well advised to finish up her estate planning before the end of the year.

An element of obduracy figures in Lina’s character, and she has never been one readily to accept “no” for an answer, and so she set about “doing her own research,” which fortunately was confined to reputable precincts: no quack cures, no crystal healing or suchlike. Her investigations suggested that nearby Stanford (Palo Alto) or distant Cedars-Sinai (West Hollywood) were her best bets for entities serious about treating patients rather than slotting them into hospice care. She was particularly intrigued at the prospect of a hyperthermic treatment, “HIPEC,” which has only lately been brought to bear on her condition, and which has yielded promising outcomes in a quarter of the patients so treated. C-Care was dismissive: we took the impression from their Doctor H that it was looked upon there as fringe medicine, even though Cedars and the Mayo Clinic appeared to regard it as a legitimate approach to treatment. Accordingly, we betook ourselves to West Hollywood for an initial consultation with young Doctor P, who looks just about old enough to shave but is possessed of a frank and appealing bedside manner. Doc P did not mince words, and advised us that L’s odds for getting through this were not great. He was lukewarm on HIPEC. “It goes in and out of favor. Lately it’s out.”

But wait! Also on the case is older Dr. M (I say “older” with Doc P as my baseline. Pretty much everyone we have encountered in the medical line has been noticeably younger than we are), the surgeon, who is a champion of HIPEC, and he persuades Dr. P that it’s worth a shot. And so, somewhat to my chagrin at the time, because I still entertained some faith, silly me, in my HMO, we committed to spending most of the next six months in the San Fernando Valley, as longtime readers of this blog—that would be me—will have been aware.

So, long stretches in a borrowed Northridge condo as Lina endures—fairly well, it must be said—chemotherapy, followed in November by surgery, Dr. M and a colleague attending, to scoop out her ladyparts, scrape the cancer from her peritoneum, and bathe her innards with a solution formulated to kill any rogue cells that might have eluded the scalpel. It was a daylong procedure, but toward the close Doc M excused himself from the operating theatre and visited me in the waiting room: “It went great. We could see where the tumors were, but no trace of where they still are.”

Well, yay. Lina was feeling pretty rugged in the immediate aftermath, but her characteristic cheer returned over the coming days. Dr. P was still not prepared to declare the patient cured, but allowed that we might look forward to a year of remission. Her “cancer numbers”—the blood antigen proteins present in her system, around 2500 at the onset of symptoms, were down about 95%. Yay, team! Yay HIPEC!

Except…early in 2023 the numbers began to climb anew. The magic bullet missed the target. Even Dr. P was surprised: he thought that the disease might lie doggo and demoralized for considerably longer before venturing again from its lair. Instead, barely a season elapsed before it came roaring back.

Lina wasn’t about to take this lying down. Doc P mentioned “Lenvima,” a pharmaceutical concoction, as a possible course of treatment. “It might be costly, though.” “How costly?” “I don’t know. Maybe a couple of thousand dollars a month.” Dr. P, bless him, clearly spends more time poring over medical journals than studying the annual reports of Big Pharma, because a thirty-day course of Lenvima retails for a cool $25K. We contemplated this figure glumly, reflecting how we’d have to cut down on our wild nights on the town, flinging C-notes to menials in our wake, to say nothing of our weekends flying out to the Côte d’Azur. But Lina always looks for an angle, and discovered that the manufacturer maintains a foundation for hard luck cases. After very little negotiation, it was established that the drug would be shipped here each month for…zip. Nada. Gratis. And there was much rejoicing.

Lenvima worked for a few months, until it didn’t. The efficacy waned; the side effects mounted. By November Lina was down to 89 pounds—forty down from her former weight—and frail, with little energy. “I was circling the drain,” she recalls today. At that point the supervising physicians switched her to a regimen based on a drug called “ENHERTU,” and this yielded dramatic advances: by January those cancer antigen numbers were down to 12 and then 9 (anything under 35 is considered to be within the “normal” range). She recovered not merely her strength but also half the lost poundage. Rejoicing was renewed.

“ENHERTU” worked until, yeah, until it didn’t (we thought “We’ve seen this movie before”). At the end of April the levels of CA-125, the dreaded “cancer antigen,” began to climb anew, and CæsarCare’s Dr. H, who has always seemed to us keen to drop Lina from her caseload, rather peremptorily discontinued it, as L didn’t learn until she appeared on the hospital premises for her scheduled infusion—C-Care ain’t great in points of communication. We’d remained in contact with Cedars, and the prospect of a “clinical trial” was held forth. We’d auditioned for one late in 2023, but were disqualified following a somewhat uncomfortable biopsy. This time we qualified and, again resuming our hegiras to Cedars-Sinai—four or five trips south since April—endured tests, scans, infusions, a daily regimen of pharmaceuticals following which, earlier in June, the Big Pharma “sponsor” advised the supervising physicians that we had washed out: the CA-125 numbers had skyrocketed to levels unseen in two years, which was not the result the shareholders were looking for (I am probably being unfair here: some useful data points were likely harvested).

We have since consulted with Doctor B, another C-Care oncologist, whose advice also does not conduce to optimism (“What is the outcome you’re looking for?” “Well, a cure, obviously.” “Not going to happen, I’m afraid.” “Yeah, but it was worth a try”), but who has advised us to return to the “ENHERTU” regimen. Given that the disease has been romping unimpeded for two months, he feels that it will have, so to say, let down its guard, and that a renewed course of E will yield another interval of respite. During this consultation the possibility was mentioned, incidentally, that the discontinued course of treatment may not have merely failed to retard the progress of the cancer, but might actually have spurred it on: apparently this has been known to happen. L and I looked at one another with the same thought—and this has not been mentioned hitherto why?—and then shrugged: “Forget it, Jake—it’s Cancertown.”

And here we are, two years in. Lina is dealing, alas, with what has proved a Houdini among maladies, an already rare cancer this particular variant of which possesses the uncanny knack of wriggling out from any restraints—straitjacket, locked steamer trunk bound by chains in twenty fathoms of shark-infested water—with which medical science may attempt to bind it. It appears that this will not end well.

Still, at the moment she soldiers on, not quite unbowed, but like the late Ravi (to be discussed anon), still enjoying life more than not. Dr. M (although we and Cedars-Sinai have likely finished up) reminds us that researchers are staying up late attempting to devise more magic bullets. The horse could learn to sing. For the rest, I am put in mind of the personal credo I have borrowed from John Updike: “We do, after all, survive every moment, except the last.” And while I am mindful that grief is poised to roar down the mountainside like an avalanche, well, we must live day to day, and all of us, as Samuel Beckett once put it, “die one day like any other day, only shorter.”

Point of origin

 

Medical issues have compelled the household’s attendance to Southern California—specifically the San Fernando Valley, more specifically Northridge, a postal designation therein—since early summer. We have spent two or three weeks out of each five in the Southland as the spousette receives treatment for a life-threatening disease (Cedars-Sinai proposes to cure this; our local HMO was prepared to slot the patient straight into hospice care).

I quit the Valley for the first time—I was raised but not, as I tell friends, cultivated there—in 1970; found myself couchsurfing at various addresses within its boundaries in summers 1971, 1972 and 1975 before I finally shook its grit from my desert boots. Until this year I had seldom thereafter passed more than a few consecutive nights in the Valley.

A kind friend vouchsafed us her vacant, somewhat spartan condominium in Northridge (how is it that some people end up with multiple homes and others with none at all? It’s a conundrum as well as a condo). Here we sheltered in place over the therapeutic regime, cowering under the brutal SoCal heat, which hovered within a few degrees of 100°F all summer and a few weeks into autumn. Not until November did the weather abate.

The entire summer was oppressive. Come the autumn, though, I was distantly tickled by the cooler weather, the clear days, the brisk air between them summoning up my formative years: not to the degree that, visiting the region decades past, a sense of my salad days would occasionally descend upon me there with almost shattering immediacy, but sufficient to put me in mind of Mole from The Wind in the Willows when he catches a whiff of his old burrow, not hitherto missed, and the scent summons his attention, poignantly, to the memory of that abandoned past.

I’ve never wanted to live in the San Fernando Valley again, not the sprawling whitebread suburb I quit the first time in 1970, nor the polyglot slum, the wilderness of strip malls, into which it has devolved today, but I am obliged to acknowledge the tidal tug that even now, weather permitting, causes the hindbrain to twitch in response.

Above: Sunset from near the borrowed condo. More strip malls’n you could shake a stick at.

Fifty years(!)

 

I can scarcely believe that five decades have elapsed since that evening. It doesn’t seem possible meaningfully to enlarge upon this account of 28 September 1972, posted two years ago, so I will merely link to it anew. But half a century, geez…

Scaling the mountain anew

I grew up reading, as they say, “voraciously,” but my diet consisted largely of trash. OK, science fiction, which was as a rule trashy in those days, and very little else. Looking back, I think the first “serious” novel I ever read outside of school assignments was All the King’s Men, which I took in when I was around fifteen or sixteen. Before I was out of high school I went on a Joseph Conrad tear and, at the instigation of my future ex-wife, began reading Hermann Hesse, few of whose books really stood up to subsequent visits. Another high school friend, learning of this, sniffed “Well, the German novelist you should be reading is Thomas Mann.” I later learned that she personally, with adolescent audacity, had not actually read any Mann, but she was the child of a family far better-read than my own, and had picked up the name and reputation by, so to speak, osmosis (a couple of years later I was talking up Mann to my friend’s mother who, amused, asked me if I’d read Proust. This was, I think, the first time that name had been spoken in my presence. “Whost?” I asked, weakly).

Still, I took my friend’s recommendation seriously and, beginning with The Magic Mountain, commenced early in 1971 to chew through the author’s entire œuvre over the course of the next eighteen months. I have come back to Der Zauberberg at approximately seven-year intervals since that time, and earlier this month completed my ninth go-around, just four years since my last.

I can’t really pin down what it is that delights me so about this book, what has kept me coming back to it since the first time I read it at eighteen. Many readers have been bored: one, in an online discussion thread I look in on, recently called it a “snoozefest.” Not for me. The novel has been a different experience each time I have taken it up. This time out was the third or fourth go-around I’ve taken with translator John E. Woods as my cicerone. My first several sessions were with the 1927 H.T. Lowe-Porter translation, to which I had become so accustomed that the first time I looked over the Woods version I was put off: I missed some of Lowe-Porter’s stately cadences. There came a point, though, early in the century, at which, having taken up her rendition anew, I found it somehow heavy sledding. At this point I purchased the Woods translation and have never looked back.

It has been said of Lowe-Porter that she contrived the unlikely feat of translating Thomas Mann into German. He was always puzzled that his English-language audiences saw him as “ponderous,” because his German readership regarded him as a deft prose stylist. He was content, however, to retain Lowe-Porter as his authorized translator, and kept cashing the checks from Alfred Knopf.

Anyway, I have loved the book anew. The set pieces are glorious, of course, but even the passages that have put some readers off—the debates between Settembrini and Naphta, for example—are so much catnip to me. I took it in at about seventy-five pages to a hundred each day, and enjoyed every session. Oddly, I don’t think I have ever persuaded my high school friend to read it, but I remain grateful to her for putting the novel in my way.

Looking back, December 1971: homeless, stranded and cold

Very, very cold.

Half a century ago I was a few months into one of the greatest adventures of my young life, a Homeric struggle in terms of personal mythology, although at the time it appeared to me more in the light of a hole into which I’d fallen, or dug myself, and from which my extrication was by no means assured.

I had, two years earlier, applied for admission in 1970 to the University of California’s Santa Cruz campus. I learned later that I’d made every cut except the last, which meant that by the time I was turned away all my alternative choices—in those days one’s single application to UC permitted secondary and tertiary campus options—had all filled up, and I was remanded, to my horror, to the University’s Riverside campus, in those days the Siberia of the UC system, supplanted these latter years by its Merced campus.

I was not ready for prime time. I might have not done much better at Santa Cruz, but I flamed out in spectacular fashion at UC Riverside by my second quarter, following the conclusion of which one professor told me that he regretted giving me a failing grade—“Unfortunately the University doesn’t allow me to assign anything lower.”

Following this I was, I suppose, poised to go feral for the second time in five years, and still might have absent a couple of lucky breaks fore and aft, but in December 1971 I had been reduced—had reduced myself—to a state of discreet homelessness. Determined upon another assault of the citadel (really, went my thinking, what had I to lose at that point?) I had parked myself at UCSC, dwelling, in a fashion that would be impossible today, in the interstices of the campus residence halls, most nights in a narrow storage closet, not quite long enough to accommodate me at full length, which I shared with a couple of upright bedframes. This arrangement kept the rain off, for which I was grateful.

I had found weekend employment with the campus food service, a contractor called “Saga,” and took part of my wages in meals, which meant that I generally had no solid fare between Sunday evenings and Saturday mornings. This grew old fast, to judge from the written accounts I left, but one becomes accustomed to these things. Mind, this was not some whimsical regimen of asceticism: I needed my weeks free to hitch back to UC Riverside now and then in order to negotiate freeing my transcript from its grip. That’s a story for another time, perhaps, but I was ultimately to prevail in this unlikely enterprise, so yay, me. In the interim, though, I was near-starving.

So, in early-mid December the campus closed down between academic quarters, meaning no dishwashing for Rand and no four squares on weekends. I imagine that I could have survived three weeks without grub, but it was not an attractive proposition, and I reasoned that between the two components of my bifurcated nuclear family I could probably cadge some room and board, especially board, without wearing out my welcome at either venue. And so I prepared to depart.

I don’t know, or can’t remember, why I delayed my departure from Santa Cruz until afternoon, but I parked myself on Highway 1 with a mind to arriving in Southern California by evening.

It didn’t work out in the event. For one thing, the first ride or two slotted me onto California Highway 1, the “Pacific Coast Highway,” rather than onto the inland and more heavily-traveled Route 101. A couple of subsequent rides left me at dusk in the middle of Big Sur, with little traffic southbound.

I might mention that the previous month I had lost my cheap sleeping bag in a rainstorm on this same stretch of highway: it had become utterly soaked overnight, my attempted shelter having proved inadequate, and I was obliged to leave the sodden thing draped over a nearby barbed wire fence come the morning.

So: no sleeping bag, no rides in prospect, impending night and falling temperatures. I had a shirt, a sweater and a light jacket, nothing like enough for the bitter cold that was in prospect. I trudged down the highway, and presently caught up with, or was caught up by, a trio of teenagers similarly ill-equipped for the conditions. They presented themselves to me as “runaways,” although I imagine they were merely highschoolers on a lark. In any event, we proceeded along Highway 1, few cars passing and none prepared to pick up four passengers. Presently we arrived at a tiny settlement proclaimed by a highway sign as “Pacific Valley.”

Pacific Valley appeared to consist of a gas station and a coffee shop, neither of which were open for business. It included as well, however, an open shed enclosing a working generator, and this the teenagers and I huddled around for the rest of the night: warm air was emitted from the front end, and hot exhaust, almost certainly with a major carbon monoxide component, from a hose or pipe at some distance from the machine. One of the teens parked himself beside this, and passed out at intervals: the rest of us would drag him away until he came to, whereupon he’d reposition himself against the spew.

Dawn broke. Out came a bearded character in an army jacket with an embroidered stars & bars on the shoulder. He looked at us: “Out,” he grunted. We cleared out. We’d survived the night.

I can’t recall how I eluded my companions—perhaps they reconsidered and headed north again?—but I secured a ride by myself with an eccentric character who, as I dimly recall, hated the Hearst family. And I remember seeing whales breaching off the coast.

The scary month of May; hinges of fate

Although nearly half a lifetime has elapsed since the last disaster I associate with this month, I still incline to tiptoe during the interval each year between April and June, because the darkest and direst episodes in my life have occurred in May. One such occurred half a century ago.

1971 was…eh, not the best year in a life less than abundantly provided with such years by that point. By mid-January my sweetheart had presented me my walking papers; by March the University of California had begun to get pissy about the considerable arrears that I’d accumulated fee-wise, and the professors of all three classes that winter quarter had flunked me out, at which point UC and I severed all relations save that of creditor-debtor, and the University notified the good people at Selective Service of my availability for the struggle against international communism then being conducted in Indochina. By the end of the year I found myself discreetly homeless, although I flatter myself that an onlooker would not have so identified me, and also near-starvation, eating just four meals a week.

So no, for these and other reasons, things weren’t going well for me by the first of May 1971, and that evening I stumbled into a personal contretemps I don’t propose to relate here, but which involved me in a spirited beat-down administered by uniformed public employees and the subsequent withdrawal of my freedom of movement for the better part of a day. That I somehow contrived to talk my way out of this fix while leaving only the faintest of audit trails—more, and I would certainly never have enjoyed my alleged career; less and I would likely not have completed college—seems remarkable at this remove.

Actually, I used to retail the anecdote rather casually, because it certainly had its droll and entertaining elements. I was twenty-one, about thirty months later, when I lightheartedly related it to a new girlfriend who startled me by appearing appalled by the tale, at which point it struck me for the first time that I might not really want the incident following me around forever after.

Still, I recognized at the time, in the aftermath of 2 May 1971, that I probably needed to order the course of my life in such a way as to minimize the likelihood of ever again landing in such a plight, and in this I’ve largely succeeded.

As to the “audit trail,” those ghostly glimmers of my indiscretion were sufficient to persuade some University of California bureaucrats (and I learned that year that a Department Secretary can be mightier than a Dean) to consent to allowing me a second bite at the apple, and that has made all the difference in my life. Another such hinge from that summer: I sat brooding at loose ends on a median of a then sparsely-traversed street in Southern California when a passing carload of high school acquaintances spotted me, stopped, and invited me to accompany them to the graduating class’s “one-year reunion.” There I fell into conversation with a classmate whose chance remark set me on a course that ultimately brought me back into UC’s good graces.

And had even one of my professors—I’m thinking in particular of the one who told me afterward that I was taking up space at UC that ought properly to be given over to “someone serious about receiving an education,” and who regretted assigning me a failing grade (“I’m only sorry that the University doesn’t let us give a grade lower than F”)—had only one of them given me a “D,” I could not have made it back in. Thanks, Dr. H!

The following decade, in my mid-thirties, weekends late in May occasioned, in the first instance, consternation and grief as a decisive blow was landed upon my domestic arrangements, and a year later a descent over the course of a day into chasms of wretchedness—the abrupt emotional implosion following a year of insupportable stress—such as I hope never to experience again.

I’ll allude to one other hinge of fate: in 1966 a customer at a Southern California coffee shop spilled a drink. I wasn’t there, and although the immediate consequences were unhappy, reverberations from this trivial incident changed the course of my life profoundly for the better. At fourteen I was going rapidly feral: I would likely not have completed high school on that trajectory; I would certainly not have made it to college. The entire course of my adult life has followed upon that deflection, of a few ounces of beverage making for a slippery floor. Funny old world.

But May 1971: fifty fucking years! Geez.

First flight, and afterward

 

Over forty years have elapsed since I first saw a personal computer in operation, in a private residence in Marin County, a tony California precinct. It was an Apple II (or “Apple ][,” according to a curious typographical convention of the day, which I will not bother repeating), owned by a friend’s father, a fiftyish chemical engineer, and it was running, on a green phosphor monitor, and loaded from a cassette drive, a program called “Flight Simulator,” the distant but direct ancestor of the product marketed by Microsoft unto the present day.

A little background: in the initial years of my romantic history I was successively involved with three women who subsequently made their livings in the computer field—even before the (Mis)Information Age had wrapped its tendrils anything like so thoroughly around and through the populace and the polity today—and a fourth who, early in 1974, endeavored in vain to interest me in the computer terminals available for undergraduate use at various points on the UC Santa Cruz campus. “Faugh!” quoth I. “I am a humanities major. What have I to do with these machines?”

A fair amount, it was to turn out, but that proved true one way or another of many of us of a Certain Age.

Anyway, a few years later my then-spouse began to agitate for the acquisition of one of these gadgets, and because what we’d seen was a Cupertino product, we went shopping for an “Apple II+,” the current model as of October 1982, and landed at an outfit—was it in Berkeley or San Francisco?—called, I think, “Quest Computers,” at which a slick salesman (for some reason I still remember his name: Phil Sotter) unloaded on us a computer with 48K—that’s kilobytes—of RAM, a green phosphor monitor, a “floppy” drive and a dot-matrix printer. Woo! I think that the tariff, which we financed by means of a particularly avaricious consumer lender, was initially around $3500, which was probably close to half my net annual salary in those days.

As initially configured, the thing could only display upper-case characters, although it could output lower-case to the printer. Fortunately…er, not quite…fortunately the machine accommodated plug-in cards, and we acquired, for a couple of hundred dollars, an “eighty-column” card that permitted the monitor to display both cases. Did I mention that the software could also do italic and boldface provided the appropriate <tags>were entered</tags> in the word processing environment? But also, the eighty-column jobbie was a little slow: it could not keep up with my keyboard input, and then, as now, I am a fucking two-fingered typist.

Within half a year of taking delivery, although I purchased and played “Flight Simulator” (on a 5.25” floppy—how cool is that?) I could scarcely look at the goddamn machine without hating it, and myself for my folly in consenting to indenture myself to its purchase. The spouse, however, used it to “typeset” several pages worth of content in one issue of Tim Yohannan’s “Maximumrocknroll” magazine—this one. I met Tim Y, dead these many years now, once or twice during that period: he struck me as an exceptionally charmless character.

In late summer 1984 my wife again suggested a computer purchase, this time of an Apple Macintosh, which had first reached the consumer market earlier that year, and which had already struck me as the homeliest piece of consumer electronics I’d ever set eyes on. “Absolutely not,” I growled. “I will never consent to having another product from that loathsome company in my home again.” Perhaps I should mention here that for the nine years we cohabited following our move to Oakland in 1977, I was for various reasons the principal breadwinner as she worked lower-paying, temporary, part-time, voluntary or not-at-all gigs, and that I regarded my views on big-ticket expenditures as accordingly carrying a correspondingly greater weight.

Cannily, she said nothing to this. A couple of weeks later, working late—she was then employed at a software firm on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley—she called to ask if I could fetch her from the workplace. When I arrived, she apologized, told me that the staff meeting was running overtime, led me to an otherwise empty room with an original Macintosh, the 128K model, booted up and running, I think, MacPaint.

I’d never seen anything like this. When she returned after three-quarters of an hour, I sighed: “Where do I sign?”

Two years later, she’d moved out, and on, to gigs in the IT/tech writing field that paid far more than she—or I—had ever made when we had common premises. But a year after that I began to make my living on the Mac (a story for another time, perhaps), and did so until my retirement in 2017, so yay. I probably could have brought home the same or greater income from the same employer during those latter three decades, but I would not have enjoyed myself as much, and would likely never have attained anything like the sundry technical and artistic proficiencies I can claim today. Thanks you, K. No, really.

I owe this also, I suppose, in minor part to that horrible Apple II+ back in the day. I salute the machine, halfheartedly, in whatever metal-retrieval landfill might have claimed it, you otherwise unmourned old thing.

Just for the record

 

So lately I’ve been having a series of dreams in which I run into V on, I don’t know, something like a rolling meadow-themed bardo at twilight, and she says, affectionately (approximate sense), “Welcome.”

Well, my belief system doesn’t allow for a metaphysical cosmos in which V (1954-2008) is ethereally competent in 2020 to pluck the strings of my mind’s lyre as I sleep, although I’m prepared to entertain the possibility that time is a lot weirder than we understand. What strikes me as likelier is that my unconscious is gently tugging at my sleeve to convey that I really ought to submit the cardiac plumbing, which has lately given signs of silting up again, to medical evaluation.

A memory: 28 September 1972

An evening class at Cowell College, UC Santa Cruz, just a couple of days into Fall Quarter. I am, two years later, a freshman again, having been granted a second bite at the apple. A dozen or twenty fellow freshmen gathered around a circular table in a smallish room. At some point before the class came to order a noxious bug, something like a fly, but blacker, slower, softer, was buzzing about my head. I swatted at it, and on its second or third pass contrived to propel it across the room and into the face of the young woman directly opposite me across the table. Fate, it appears, will sometimes hinge upon an insect. At close of class, as we all dispersed outdoors, I caught up with the girl and apologized. We walked together across the Cowell upper quad. As we passed a first floor room (the same room which my younger brother was briefly to occupy thirteen years later) she noticed a political poster on the wall, visible through the window. “That’s Russian!” she exclaimed. It happened that I’d just that summer commenced my infatuation with all things Slavic. “Oh? You know Russian?” At which point Veronica—for it was the legendary, now departed Veronica—clammed up (a speaker of Russian since infancy, she’d just had demonstrated to her earlier in the day her deficiencies in the written language, and was smarting in consequence) with a charming and ambiguous disclaimer. I saw her to the ground floor of her dorm, and set off to College V, half a mile distant. “Here comes a girlfriend,” I thought, correctly, and would have whistled, had I ever learned how. Actually, that’s never stopped me. I strode across campus, in the dark through the trees, emitting low, hoarse, lighthearted hoots through my pursed lips, forming clouds before me in the cool, slightly damp autumnal air.

Bright college days

 

Half a century ago today I arrived, most unwillingly, at the Riverside campus of the University of California. That’s a long story, to be related another time, if ever. Still, the following months before my ignoble exit (conveyed in the event by the University to the good people at Selective Service) yielded up some piquant memories. Hearts full of youth! Hearts full of truth! Six parts gin to one part vermouth!

—Although my set really didn’t drink much. Back in those days we regarded it as a little counterrevolutionary.

“The Happiest I’ve Been”*

 

20 September 1970

I was summoned to the telephone at my parents’ home that Sunday morning. A group of high school friends were organizing a trip out to Zuma Beach in Malibu—was I interested? Of course I was.

This was just about a week before my graduating class was to scatter to the four winds, those of us who were going the “higher education” route, to our sundry and far-flung colleges and universities. I, to my disappointment, was bound just ninety miles away, to an institution that would spit me out half a year later; my classmates went on to various fates, some known, some not: that day was the last time I was to see most of them.

Among the teenagers present was my beloved, with whom interludes in the course of the preceding summer and the following autumn are among the tenderest of my youthful memories. That romance did not endure past the turning of the year (more on this anon), but this Sunday at the beach was the capstone of the year. At one point, as we waded in the shallows, a wave knocked my sweetheart down, and her spectacles into the churning surf: groping at my feet, I found and retrieved these before they were swept out to sea, for beaucoup points.

I do not think that, up until this day, I had ever experienced such an episode, so many seamless hours, of sustained joy.

By January the beloved, four hundred miles north of me, had developed other interests. I was unhappy, and peppered her with letters (in that distant era, meine Kinder, one had to convey text messages on paper and via the post) for the next few years until I finally wore her down and rekindled the romance in 1974. Two years later we wed; ten years after that she had reconsidered and, on this day in 1986, took a step, my weeks of anguished entreaties being dismissed, that pretty much put paid to the entire matrimony thing, so that’s another 20 September, a grim one, to bookend the first.

Someone asked me, twenty years ago, “Don’t you think it’s turned out for the best?” I imagine that the ex would agree—from the scant online evidence, she has long regarded our entire common history as an ill-considered detour from her own life’s journey. For my part, the question makes no sense: had I never been divorced, I’d be a different man today. To desire that counterfactual, to make it magically come about, would necessarily involve an act of self-cancellation of the man who might make that wish. So no, I do not rub the lamp. It is what it has been, and I am who I have become. And today is, fifty years on, the twentieth of September.

*The post title is taken from John Updike’s 1959 short story.

Another birthday

Born this day ninety-four years ago; seen here about a decade prior to my own debut. She stinted routine maintenance, I’m afraid, and pegged out suddenly not quite four months after she reached the Biblical span. An erratic personality with, er, issues that went back to her childhood—my father, marrying her in 1946 in Mexico City after what may be described, with some understatement, as a whirlwind courtship, took her up in the “manic pixie dreamgirl” phase, and could not, at twenty-five, have understood what he was signing onto. Well, water under the bridge; beer over the damn dam, and if the two youngsters had been less hot-bloodedly impulsive I would not be here to condescend to their memories. She was very far from being a model parent, but she loved her children well, if not wisely, and I wish I’d been home to take her phone call forty-eight hours before her death instead of rolling my eyes as I listened to her tipsy recorded message late that night on my answering machine. Here’s to you, Mom, wherever you’ve lodged in the space-time continuum.

A birthday

Deborah Clark meant little to me when last we passed one another between classes on 30 January 1968—we were only acquaintances—but that night she arbitrarily secured a place in my memory when she became the first of my contemporaries I knew to have died: a little over a mile from my home, of blunt-force trauma in an automobile accident. She’d be sixty-eight today. I retrieved this artifact from the accident site a few days later, and have morbidly retained it for over half a century.

The pleasure of giving respect

I’ve been thinking recently, four years after he died suddenly at eighty, about my old boss Spindle. He was “Gerald Spindle,” “Jerry” to some, “Mr. Spindle” to others, “Chief” when I addressed him directly, and “Spindle” when I alluded to him. This was in no wise a token of disrespect. On the contrary, when I delivered a spoken tribute an audience of ≈150 at a retirement luncheon held in his honor a quarter-century ago, I observed that the honorific was supererogatory: “Does one say Mister Thor? Mister Zeus? No. These are forces of nature, personified, and titles do not obtain or apply.” Spindle was Vulcan, God of Steel, Smithy to the Olympians—the metaphor was more apt than you strangers might imagine.

In his magnificent short story “A Bullet in the Brain” (a PDF transcription can be found here), Tobias Wolff’s doomed, unpleasant protagonist briefly recalls—doesn’t, actually—“the pleasure of giving respect.” But I do. I worked for Spindle for five years (most of us were rotated from one office to another after a year, but the fierce head of the steel products branch was so dreaded that, when I volunteered each year to re-enlist, management was relieved to avoid the bitching and complaining that might otherwise have ensued) from 1982 until 1987 when, greatly to his ire and disappointment, I took another gig in order to get out from under his boss, who had taken a considerable and consequential dislike to me. What was contemplated at the outset to be a temporary assignment ended in consuming the remaining thirty years of my alleged career, and while in consequence this depressed the bottom line, it was better for my mental health. I grieved that Spindle regarded my defection at the outset as a betrayal, but following an interval of reproach I worked myself back into his good graces, beginning with a flattering and well-deserved article about him published in the house organ.

Following his retirement in 1995, Spindle and I remained in regular contact, mainly by phone, several conversations each month, and secondarily by email; occasionally by post. He was a bottomless fount of knowledge on military history—WW II informed the childhood of a precocious youngster, nine by VE Day—and of films: to the extent I am conversant today with cinema as an art form, I owe this almost entirely to Spindle’s tutelage.

He died suddenly in 2016. In the preceding weeks he had spoken—turning eighty, as he had that February, tends to focus the mind on these things—of putting his affairs in order. A flinty midwesterner (he once copped to a tendency to “squeeze the nickel until the buffalo shits”), he wanted to arrange his estate without the costly participation of an attorney. I told him that I’d see what I could find online. Alas, a cerebral episode took him out before I’d even begun my researches, and his estate ultimately fell into the hands of a court-appointed trustee. I do not doubt that a generous slice of administrative expenses were extracted.

Still: “the pleasure of giving respect.” I’ve enjoyed this a few times during my adult life, but at this point, probably not again. Have I ever been, will I ever be, the object of this? Dunno. I’m inclined to doubt it.

Above: Master and journeyman, circa 1985

I have inexplicably grown old

An anniversary

A court order dissolved my marriage, which had been barely on life support for rather over twenty-four months at that point, on this day in 1988. I should not imagine that the co-respondent has retained the date in memory.

Legacy Not

Visiting the former workplace last week, I was struck at how what I once regarded as my potential “legacy” has been utterly erased: both the design sense I attempted to inculcate for the last three decades of my alleged career, and the consciousness of institutional history I labored to leave behind.

I might as well never have walked into the place forty years ago. I thought at one time that I was building something, but it turns out that all the while I was piling sand.

What Dreams May Come

Seventeen months? Well, there were issues. Also, the election cycle became increasingly alarming and dispiriting, although I won’t claim not to have been gobsmacked by the triumph of the short-fingered vulgarian. What I expected was that Clinton would prevail, and preside over a critically injured polity. The actual outcome was, of course, incomparably worse, but this is properly the subject of another post.)

A century ago, and certainly by the time I was born, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was considered canonical in many circles, although since that time, like Freud himself—these latter decades the object of some spirited iconoclasty—his take on these things has fallen out of favor. Even the “Viennese quack,” as Nabokov styled him, reportedly acknowledged that too much could be read into a cigar.

The modern thinking, I believe, is that our dreams consist largely of random imagery, albeit with a bias toward recent input and experience, and that to the extent we may draw conclusions from these regarding the psyche of the dreamer, it is properly from the narrative that the sleeping mind attempts to impose upon the farrago of pictures and situations it has spontaneously spewed forth. I regard this approach as generally plausible.

Most evenings my own dreams are as random, I suppose, as the next fellow’s, but certain scenarios, all of these in some measure of a stressful character, recur rather regularly, and I suspect that taken together they limn in broad outline a picture of my personal anxieties. In no particular order:

The Week of Reckoning

This one I apparently share with millions of others going back decades: I’m back in college. It’s finals week. I have barely attended class all quarter; have never cracked a textbook; have certainly not studied for the test. I’ve a day, if that, to make up all the neglected work, write the papers, master the subjects, pass the exams. I am not filled with optimism.

Oddly enough, I lived that dream back in 1971. It was notably less stressful in real life. Of course, I did flunk out of school (one professor told me shortly afterward that he regretted that the University of California did not provide for a grade lower than “F”).

Icarus Descending (not):

I prefer those dreams of flight in which I soar effortlessly, without even the occasional exertions of birds. Usually, though, my airborne course is a chore, like doing the breast stroke through a viscous, unforgiving medium. When finally I attain some ledge analogue, generally a narrow and unwelcoming perch, I linger to catch my breath and then find myself assailed by crippling doubts as to whether, once I leap back into the vast spaces above the unforgiving pavement, my aerial powers are to be entirely relied upon.

Drive, He Said

At—or near—the wheel of a motor vehicle, usually in highly inclement weather, usually at night, usually at high speed; in every scenario imperfectly in control of the said motor vehicle, sometimes even attempting to steer in from the passenger or even the back seat.

Smoke Signals

I quit smoking—well, a long time ago. I dream that I have taken it up again, and wake up with a sense of crushing disappointment in myself.

Funny Money

I retrieve my wallet in a retail environment and am appalled to realize that my last retail transaction returned to me several bills so nakedly counterfeit that they will not possibly pass muster here. The faux currency is always on coarse green newsprint, and resembles crudely printed retail coupons. Semi-related: I drop something of great value; am unable to locate it in the fog at my feet.

Room for More

I’ve lived here at The Crumbling Manse™ for eighteen years, longer than the second-place finisher among my residences (see below), and although I’m devoted to the place, it could frankly use a bit more space (or we could use a bit less in the way of inessential chattel, an issue I’m hoping to address in the coming months). The space I have in mind has nothing to do with this recurring dream, in which I am startled to discover two or three hitherto undiscovered, neglected and vaguely sinister rooms on one side of the house.

Home Again, Home Again

From 1977 until early 1993 I dwelt in a handsome craftsman bungalow, rather similar to this one, in Oakland’s then-affordable—though not at that time by me—Rockridge neighborhood. It was sold out from under me after 186 months, and I quit the premises with bitter regret in March 1993. I’ve never been back thereafter except in my dreams, but in my dreams I am a regular, panicked visitor: Shit! What the hell am I doing here? I need to get the fuck out before the real owners get back home!

Spouse Again, Spouse Again

I was married from 1976 to 1986—technically to 1988, but the domestic arrangements had fallen to flinders by this time in ’86—to a woman who’d first caught my eye in 1968, and whom I’d actively begun courting by the end of the following year. The endgame was dreadful, and the anguish considerable, and the wounds, on this end at least, still raw the last time I saw her over a quarter of a century ago. I like to think that I’ve moved on, but she certainly has maintained a claim in Freudland, appearing there at intervals overnight—sometimes cordially, oftener not. The recurring dream, though, is invariably framed as a memory: it is the early 1990s, and she has returned from Europe and announced that we are to be reconciled, and I, as I might very well have at that nadir of my spirits, readily consent. And then, in the dream-alternate, things go south very quickly. I wake from these, and they have the force and immediacy of a “recovered memory,” and I groggily think, “Wait, did we actually—” before I reassemble my world. I’m grateful that these visitations, formerly more frequent, are down to a couple of times a year.

Let There Be Light, Or Not

This actually does not relate to a specific series of dreams, but I find that electric lighting does not work in my dreams: when I attempt to engage one of these things it either does not work at all, or emits a flickering, useless glow. For many years I took this to be a peculiarity of my individual interior landscape until I happened upon an allusion to it in the film Waking Life. This remains a reliable indicator that one is dreaming; but its remains as well an indicator I reliably though not invariably fail to take into account on these occasions.

Piss Me Off

From time to time my dreams will steer me toward a public or private convenience in an irregular (sometimes gruesomely so) state of maintenance, but occasionally these facilities will present themselves as plausibly unobjectionable. I’ve trained myself to test these for reality in sleep, but as with the lights, above, it’s not infallible. Fortunately a number of factors, including a clogged prostate with hundreds of thousands of miles upon it, have thus far spared the bedsheets.

These then, are my anxiety dreams. And yours?