Posts (page 2)

Tell us about your first kiss.  Who was it with?  How old were you?

I was 18 and it was on New Year's Eve at the movie theater I worked at. Her name was Shannon and it was a nice polite, chaste kiss. I didn't have my first "real" kiss until I was 22.

I've made up for lost time... :-D

Mom fell victim to a secondary infection that shut down her lungs and heart. My sister was with her during Mom's last few moments, exactly a day before I was supposed to be there. Mom died exactly two weeks after lapsing into a coma. She was in-urned a week after that. I was fortunate enough to place her ashes into the vault next to my Father's.

The past is gone. Only shreds of it remain with my siblings. My fond memories and childhood have been ripped from this plane and now are black and white, archival records of time long ago that can never, ever be relished in again without melancholy.

For those of you with living parents: Call them today for no other reason than to hear them. Visit them if possible. Pour through old photos with them and have the descriptions of each written on the back. Treat them extra kindly as their mortal coil may be sloughed all too soon.

My Mom's was.

Now I'm an orphan. Annie made it seem all so much more glamorous.

What's the most memorable building you've lived in?
Submitted by Shelly.

It had to have been Brendenwood Apartments in Mishawaka, Indiana. I can say that so freely without repercussions because the "memories" there were so bad that the complex changed its name.

It was nearly 11pm on a warm summer night. I was playing video games with my girlfriend and my best buddy. We were having a grand time until we heard the bottles shattering against the door. The door shook as a body or many bodies slammed against it. The screaming was horrific, but from their tone and urban diction we discerned that it was a group of black young man beating the crap out of another black young man. 911 was called and the fight continued down the stairs and out the door into the parking lot. Once the police arrived, we opened the door to find a myriad of brown beer bottle shards and more blood than I had ever seen before. No one died, but you couldn't tell from the looks of it.

A week later we signed the lease on a new apartment.

First apartments are great lessons for life, and some lessons you never forget. That qualified as both.

(FYI, my Mom is in a stupified coma. She opens her eyes and tracks objects, but doesn't move. Not fun.)

My Mother died Friday. Not all at once, mind you, which is funny saying "mind." See, my Mother's heart stopped. Just stopped. No attack, no infarction: It just stopped. Something about potassium levels being low and all, but the end result was that she had no fresh oxygen to her brain for anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes. She lapsed into a coma.

I didn't find out until Sunday. I was 4 hours North of my hometown closer to Canada than my own bed when I got the call. Within hours, I was here in Florida. She is as expected, listless, unresponsive to all but the most basic request: Blink. Even that seems autonomic. So here she is, my Mother, lying in a bed unable to express her thoughts or feelings. We know from the EEG that there's something going on in her head. We know it's working, but some swelling is keeping her from telling us that. Some part of her head isn't right. She has a living will, and that will states that if she remains this way with no hope of recovery, then yank all the tubes and let her go completely. She never wanted to be a child of twilight and half-lived existence. She wanted to suck the marrow of the bones of life unapologetically, to which she did. But now her life is in the balance. And I'm pulling her towards the living, but never keeping an eye off of what she wants too. Fortunately that choice, selfless or selfish, is not mine. It's my elder brother, the statesman of the family since my Father's passing 2 1/2 years ago.

Even so, I fear she's already died in mind, her body unwilling to slip into the endless night. I hope I'm wrong, but I must prepare for the worst. I must be ready to be an orphan and lose my last connection to where I'm from. My siblings were always mentors, their advanced ages making it nigh on impossible to seek any form of solace in them. My wife has been tarried by matters beyond her control. I stand alone. But I still have Mom, or at least the mortal coil being sustained by machines and the will of others, for the time being. But how do you seek comfort from someone when you're mourning their loss. A modern paradox created by a pair of Docs.

Those of you who followed me from unadvertised links in my signature applied elsewhere: You know who cares about me and my life. Please tell all you know that Thomas is the one needing support. Pray if that's your thing, send vibes my way too. "It's all good," as the kids say. I just need some power, and I think it'd be impossible to leave any to spare.

But all of you: Turn to your loved ones tonight. Call them all or hug them if you can. Life is a stage, and the players parts are over far too soon and out of our control. Don't let them leave without letting them know that they played well.

They played well.

What's the last thing you crafted, constructed or created yourself?

That would be a ready-to-assemble closet organizer. I'm amazed at how ingeniously these things have been engineered to allow for simple and quick assembly. I'm even more amazed at how quickly you can expand on one error in the steps and compound it to the point of near catastrophe. Luckily, Slot A and Tab B were the same size, so there was no permanent damage. If only the human heart worked the same way. Trust me, I'd love to just let go and let my "Tab B" slide in "Slot A", but that would make "Slot B" very sad. So, while I keep finding a way to get Tab B to fit in Slot B, I'll be content to admire Slots A, C, D and DD.

Now if Slot B were to insist and participate in me filling Slot A...

What was the highlight of your summer?
Submitted by ladym.vox.com.

It had to have been somewhere between being recognized as a "regular" by the mom-and-pop store clerks up by the lake (vagueness intended) and getting a deep dark suntan for the first time in years.

This lake is a special place, almost sacred. It's in the middle of nowhere, nearly in another country, where the nearest form of civilization is a port town of two thousand people. I've always been a visitor, someone passing through like the rest of the seasonal tourists who whiz through at seventy-eight miles an hour. But this year... this year I was one of them. They treated me like the neighbor I had come to be over the years and the new friend I had only just become. They joked, I laughed. I joked, they laughed. Much drinking was done, while it was alcohol for them versus the diet Dew for me drinks were still shared nonetheless. This year, I found that home became a much broader definition.

The suntan was a mistake, really. I had forgotten the sunscreen and after wandering in more than a hundred sun baked degrees (Fahrenheit) for four hours, I began to feel what I thought was a burn. The next day, my milk-chocolate skin told me that my perma-tan from youth was not completely lost. I felt like a teenager with a new car, eager to show it off. Looking down at my fingers typing, I can see that it isn't gone yet. It feels good to know that.

What's your favorite vacation destination?

Home. Where else do you have everything you've wanted, everything you need and everything you know? Exotic locations are nice to visit and all what with their new experiences and oppotunities to break free from your routine, but home is where you belong. Next time you have a vacation, have it at home. I bet you'll never feel more relaxed than being able to spend quality time in your personal environment, which is really just an extension of yourself.

I've always had a way with words. The silver tongue fairy was especially kind to me, albeit a bit stalled when I was younger. I've always had something to say, 2 cents to chime in with or some unique insight.

But now I'm here in this interweb thing. It's huge, vast: Gianormous, even. I'm sure everyone has said everything already, twice in some cases and even better than I could in a rare few instances.

So how come no one sees it or pays any attention to it?

We go about our lives hearing who talks the loudest, seeing who takes up the most space in front of us. It's not about right or wrong or anywhere in between. It's our attention that is craved, and what we give up all too willingly. We seem to be happiest when we're being spoon fed what the loudest media is dishing up at the time. We seem to have forgotten what it was like to go to bed still dressed in a bathing suit and flip-flops, just so we could be ready to play the next morning that much faster. We've forgotten that we wanted to be pirate, space faring animal wranglers who deliver mail and ice-cream (provided the ice-cream was endless and the mail was nothing but anticipated cereal premiums) when we grew up.

We've forgotten how to be ourselves, and now we mostly know what we should be... how we should fit...

That, my friends, is why beer is so popular. Only when we use alcohol to strip the veneer off the facade of adulthood can we get down to who we are. Only when utterly lubricated can we slip from these skins and be kids again.

Of course, some of us are lucky to have taken the other path. The path that avoided the complications and drudgery of adulthood. Call it Peter Pan Street, call it Immature Avenue, call it Denial Drive: I'm intimately familiar with the course and have maneuvered it deftly. Ergo, the whole alcohol thing seems silly: My tongue is free to form the words I want without it.

Those words, those ideas, are what I hope to bring to this virtual table. Unabashed, unadulterated, uncompromising and undeniably mine. Toes may inadvertantly be stepped on, others may be offended. I'll just say it now and get it over with.

Neener, neener, nee-ner.

I'm not intentionally targeting you, but really: Aren't you TRYING to hard to be offended anyway?

Oh well. I'm off to save the world. You kids have fun while Daddy is gone.

What's your motto?

I dunno, what's a motto with you?

Seriously, it's "can't complain." Mostly because my heart would leap through my neck and bash in whatever part of my brain I was kvetching from. There are too many complainers in this world and not enough suggesters. If all you can do is complain, put forth the mental effort and come up with a solution, even a crappy solution.

Otherwise, you're neither part of the problem, nor the solution: You're the useless, unwanted reminder.

While the squeaky wheel does get the grease, sometimes it gets broken into pieces, thrown away and replaced with a more tolerant wheel.