Love [UPDATED]
I looked at these beautiful photographs of my niece and her fiancée (yes, two e’s) and the thought that came to me unbidden was, those who would ban or curse or cure this have it exactly backwards. That our love cannot be contained within biological utility is the sign of our humanity.
UPDATE: NOT to say that I don’t think conceiving a baby in love is a mighty and awesome thing. Just that love conceives other things as well.
Bloodsport [Updated]
This entertaining Jean Claude van Damme martial-arts howler was one of our favorite B or C movies. J always reliably enjoyed it, even remembered that he’d seen it before — I actually can’t count how many times we’ve seen it. If I had to work and it happened to be on, I knew I was in luck because I wouldn’t have to worry about him being entertained. I would surreptitiously enjoy it myself in brief space-out breaks from editing. The score is bouncy and the bad guy, played by Bolo Yeung, is deliciously evil, obviously having a wonderful time.
Tonight I’m watching it alone. J is here, but not here. He’s slept all day, and has taken in nothing but a glass and a half of thickened lemonade that I fed him one strawful at a time. Ever since he had that really good day, he’s been weakening and withdrawing again, interacting a little bit, but mostly either sleeping or hallucinating. He feels a little warm, and I’m afraid he might be starting to get aspiration pneumonia. My friends and I were so anxious to get fluids and nourishment into the brief windows of opportunity when he was actively swallowing that some of it inevitably went “down the wrong pipe.” He, too, at the moments when he caught hold and felt how thirsty and hungry he was, drank and ate too fast, and we encouraged that because it encouraged us.
We the healthy lack the patience to slow down our pace to the crawl it would take to keep him with us. We want to rush ahead at life’s clip and if he can’t come along, at some point he’s going to get left behind. It’s ambiguous — ruthless and full of regret and sorrow and frustration.
He and I are largely alone now in this strange space of suspended animation. Even the people from hospice have backed off, because there’s not much they can do. He’s hovering again (the German word is better: schweben), going, as yet, neither way. And I’m trying to neither push nor pull but inevitably ending up both pushing and pulling, sequentially and simultaneously.
I alternate between a kind of rushed, what’s-the-use recklessness and a penitential, painstaking patience. Now I’m thickening all his drinks, pipetting them slowly into him with a straw held in my own mouth, and this morning I suddenly remembered with horror that I’d read somewhere that what causes pneumonia isn’t aspirated fluid or food, but accompanying bacteria from the mouth. I’ve always taken terrible care, like no care, of his teeth (luckily he doesn’t have that many of his own), and I realized that I should have been swabbing his mouth with antibacterial mouthwash, and that not having done so may already be tantamount to negligent homicide. Nor did anyone from hospice mention this to me.
The fact is that someone who has lost both the ability and the urge to drink and eat can’t go on living unless you stick them full of tubes, which I won’t do because it would be torture: mentally he is already some mixture of miserable and elsewhere. We’re all in this awful space where we know he can’t recover to a life worth living (his underlying dementia is progressive, essentially a one-way street with small, cruel reprieves, and it has been deepened a fathom by this illness), and we’re sort of waiting for the decisive turn for the worse and trying to prevent or postpone it at the same time.
He didn’t care or maybe even notice that Bloodsport was on, which made having it on seem helpless and hollow. It’s in this way that our life has become a hollow shell of what it was even before, which, in turn, was a hollow shell of . . . and so on. Like those Russian dolls.
UPDATE: Today he started to quite decisively refuse to drink. He’s not saying anything else clearly, but that “NO!” was loud and clear. I don’t think it’s a mental decision, but a physical decision. So far, he seems comfortable and I feel at peace with it, despite being unable to imagine the world beyond that edge.
Sparks Will Fly!
Apparently the next chair of the House Monetary Policy Subcommittee is slated to be [drum roll]… Ron Paul.
Maybe he won’t want it. Maybe Boehner won’t want him to take it. But gotta say, I kind of hope this happens, just for the sheer entertainment value.
(h/t Weigel).
A New National Holiday?
Spread the word: Charles G. Hill of the blog Dustbury has dubbed yesterday “Refudiation Day.” I think that ought to catch on.
Countersuggestible.
I just realized that that’s the precise word for my current political mood. It ceased to be “ambivalent” quite some time ago.
It feels so good to put your finger on something.
Twittering was going on about this article on Politico, saying that a lot of Republicans are trying to figure out how to defeat Sarah Palin for the 2012 nomination.
Damned if it didn’t make her look good to me. And I was not a fan. (So why didn’t Democrats’ scorn for her have the same effect? Because I discounted it so completely. In the twisted logic of countersuggestibility, that somehow makes sense.)
I twittered that and got an e-mail from Ron:
I’m still unsure if Palin should be president…(first thought: no) but it’s more interesting to see all this stuff play out, while Obama is going in the opposite direction. If Palin can defeat her own party…she may be getting the training needed to defeat the dems! 2 years is a long way off….
I answered:
I’m not sure she’d be such a disaster. Gut instinct is worth a lot more than book learnin’. She could store the necessary knowledge in her advisers.
And Ron wrote back:
let’s say that happens….and she has a successful presidency. Boy…that will mess with a lot of heads. Though it shouldn’t. Isn’t Palin the kind of figure Dems used to be proud came from America? (a la the screwball comedy?)
Bingo. It feels so good to put your finger on something. Even when it’s somebody else’s finger.
That’s exactly what Palin is. She is the first female president out of a screwball comedy: warmhearted, ditzy and clueless like a fox, a character out of the American folk tradition by way of classic Hollywood.
Ambiance 