homesick

I am home and I am sick. I have something like a cold, but not really. My head is pounding like a baby chick is trying to get out my right temple, or sometimes like it is full of mud, or some other metaphor I can't quite grasp. I can't think, and I will spend the next few minutes proving it.

I am trying to work at home without a brain. I got up this morning, took two Extra-Strength Excedrin and a baby aspirin kicker, pretended to feel fine and left for work. I dropped Duffy at daycare and went to work for two hours. I couldn't trick myself into feeling better, so I gathered up some work and took it home with me. Portable work. I'd rather be asleep.

When Duffy was a puppy, he needed daycare on days I couldn't keep a close eye on him. Now, he is a big boy, fairly well-mannered, and still I take him once a week. I don't take myself to a spa once a week, do I? I don't pay somebody to make my day fun once a week, do I? But this little white dog.... he gets all the breaks. There is a new inside dog park now, Fido-Land or something. They have a pool and lifeguards. Lifeguards for dogs. So Portland. Do they teach them how to human-paddle? Really? If the dog can't swim, well, I just won't say. My PETA friends would be horrified.

So, I'm killing time for a 1:30 conference call, which I will take on my home phone and I hope it is able to do that sort of thing. Not so sure.

monkliness

I keep thinking, what with my general lack of people skills, that I would do well in the monastic life. I would, I think. Of course there are a couple of caveats: first, I'd have to be allowed to decorate. And it would have to be a nice monastery with, like, Pottery Barn candlesticks and dripping wax and great calligraphers to take notes. And nice monks. Nice, quiet monks. Second, they'd have to leave me alone. I wouldn't want to be bothered all the time. I'd make bread or garden or whatever their gig was, but beyond that, I'd want to be left alone.

Peace and quiet. They are not the same thing, but they do go nicely together.

opine

NEWSFLASH!!!!!!!!!!!
There is some groundbreaking news from the world of alzheimer's research: if you are nice to people with dementia, their behavior improves. If you let them have their way, they act better.

Stunning.

This new buzz is being touted as "emotional memory." I have it. You have it. They have it--only a little bit differently. While you and I can refer to the specific insults of any given shitty day and report, ad nauseum, who did us wrong (often leaving out any fault of our own), people with Alzhiemer's no longer have the ability to recall specifics, or to cope with the residual negative feelings that bounce untended in the growing white space of shrinking brains. This inablity to process and compartmentalize negative emotion results in "sundowning" or late-day agitation.

So they act out: Busy. Destructive. They wander. They pillage. They prowl.

But here's the thing: I shoulda written this book twenty years ago, this book about being nice. But like so many afterthoughts, I didn't. I was busy. Yet another story for yet another day.

But don't you think its apropos, on this day after another mass shooting, that being nice is a lesson lost on most Americans?

We have thrown billions of dollars at Alzheimer's research to find a medication that will cure what I think is pretty much just brain failure -- like heart failure. I am over simplifying, I know. (Alzheimer's disease is its own monkey, unlike some of the vascular dementias, etc. and could possibly benefit from these curative efforts.) But most, if not all of those resources, are being scooped up by and for the pharmacological arena, lobbied for by the health insurance monster, which, in my lengthy experience does not operate on such diffuse concepts as niceness. We have never paid more than peanuts for the front line work of caring for people who can no longer care for themselves. Old people. The future us.

Personally, I'm all for letting the inmates run the asylum. Its so much easier. So much. If they think its breakfast time, cook eggs for heaven's sake. Who cares? If they think its Christmas, sing Silent Night. If the diabetics want chocolate, let them have it. Christ. We want them to live forever but don't want to take care of them. What? The trick is to find the right people to do the simple work of caring. And, oh yeah, pay them peanuts. Simple. David Troxel coined the concept of "knack: the art of doing difficult things with ease," referring to caregiving for dementia patients. I thought of it first, but like I said, I was busy. Even Patrick Swayze said it in Road House: "If somebody calls you a son of a bitch, be nice."

So, now that Gabby what's-her-name is head-shot and the boy, who pulled the trigger on the gun that Palin aimed directly at her, is in custody-- if we don't take this time to review simple manners at the congressional level, I think we are missing an educational opportunity.

Be nice.