tributes

So, my theme has changed from apathy to, well, whatever is a step up from that. The primal shrug. It isn't so much that I don't care, as that I can't care about everything as much as it seems to need to be cared about. There you have it.

I'm so happy for Mark that he finally made it out of there. Another one. Another in an endless line of lives that have, six degrees of Kevin Bacon, touched mine. He was so smart. The history is this: Mark cracked his head while four-wheeling at 19 years old........ then, died at 45ish. Long damn life. He should not have lived. Quadraplegic, mostly deaf, half of half of one eye. But you gotta hand it to the guy, he could still appreciate Victoria's Secret catalogs. God bless testosterone. He could hand spell, and so could I. That was the basis of our friendship. That, and I had the rarely respected authority to boss around the people who took care of his body. I tried to take care of his mind.

He wasn't a very good speller.

Or driver. He had an electric wheelchair -- one of those giant red Jazzy models that take up more room that they should and weigh as much as my house. But the thing about Mark was he never really got it that he couldn't do stuff. He kept a very high opinion of his abilities, all evidence to the contrary, and was fearless.

He thought he could roam the streets in this wheelchair--no eyes, no ears-- and we just couldn't let him. I wish we could have. I wish I could have just opened the door and let fly. But better judgment won out and he remained imprisoned. Cared for. If we had care about him rather than for him, we would have locked him in a room with scantily clad women drenched in hot mustard and barbeque sauce and let him indulge himself to death. He did love mustard. I tried to explain to him, time and again, the importance of safety and my burden of protection. But he didn't get it.

The place where he lived, where I lived from 8 to 5 monday through friday for years and years, sat on top of a hill, with locked doors and window alarms. One day the locked door was just open, just barely, and he charged it in his electric wheelchair. He made it as far as the curb, tipped and fell into the street. As I ran out behind him, righting the ten-ton chair with six other staff, his fingers were madly spelling "I- l-e-a-r-n-e-d." I don't know if he did or not. We took the chair away from him. It wasn't safe. It wasn't. Still, I hated doing it. But he was running over people, and that wasn't okay.

With the old people, tributes feel different. With Mark, it just seems a long time comin'. There is no life to review. There is a State system of care provision that is imperfect and easily indicted, and Mark was a victim and recipient of it. It is better than nothing. Idealists would not agree with me, but fuck them. Idealists don't want the Mark's of this world free or visible. They think they do, but they haven't been to the circus. They haven't seen the man behind the curtain. Mark was not pretty. His life was miserable and expensive, and I can't speak for him, but it looked too damned hard from where I sat.

Some tribute, eh?