A Day in the Life of a Lobster

When Frau Lobster woke me this morning, she’d had an hour of sleep. She was concerned first and foremost that I get adequate rest, leading me to a recurring thought:

Damnit! Can’t you think of yourself for a change!

So I pretended to supervise our children while she napped. In three days she'd had about eight hours of sleep, Mo being on overdrive lately. Which probably means another seizure soon. She had a big one Friday, and usually that means it'll be a while before another major one. But disrupted sleep and behavior problems that exceed the norm for her are usually harbingers of a hurricane force seizure.

What sort of behavior do I mean? Oh, like bolting when Frau Lobster was letting the honyocks play in the hose, clearing the neighbor's fence, bursting into their house and opening a Coke before anyone could catch up to her.

Anyway, while I pretended, I made it through about half of A.M. Homes' 'The End of Alice,' a repulsive but entrancing book. I've avoided Nabokov because I used to work for a guy who thought 'Lolita' was the sexiest thing he'd ever read. I don't think he ever touched a minor, he just sought out barely legal girls who were underfed enough to be boy-shaped. He'd date professional ballerinas and tell them they were fat. So I always associated that book with pure creepiness.


The Electric Jesus Chixulub (to lighten this post up)

What Homes has accomplished (unless it falls apart in the last fifty pages) is amazing. To sympathetically portray a person I believe should receive the death penalty, and a sort of protégé he's egging on, not a lot of authors can pull that off.

A totally different writer, John Irving, did it with 'Cider House Rules.' I not only believe life begins at conception, I make a distinction between innocent life and the life of someone who has abdicated the responsibilities of a human being. I think a doctor (or pretend doctor) who performs abortions without a literal threat to the life of the mother should be executed for first degree murder. The 'patient' and whoever else enables the procedure should be sentenced exactly as anyone else for the appropriate crime: solicitation of murder, accomplice, accessory.

But in 'Cider House Rules' Irving got me not only to sympathize with the ether addict running the abortion mill, but even with his plans to coerce Homer Wells into taking his place. At least within the context of the story, I could 'root' for what I consider to be the bad guy.

Homes doesn't quite have me rooting for the bad guy, but she does make me think. In the end, I still come up with Old Sparky, the rope, the gas chamber as the solution for child molesters. I don't mean an 18 year old dating a 15 year old, though neither 18 or 15 is old enough to make an informed, consentual decision about sex. But a twenty-something ice cream truck driver touching a 12 year old, or a parent/child situation, capital punishment is the only solution.

Why? Because the crime itself is evidence of a compulsion that probably has no cure. Call it a disease if you want, but just as we quarantine people with incurable, contagious, deadly diseases, the only 100% guarantee against recidivism is death.

Life in prison? First off, that means society has to pay to warehouse these creeps. Then you have the fact that lawyers, judges, parole boards, etc., have a track record of irresponsibility when it comes to keeping those life sentences actually meaning 'life.' And prisoners escape. They also commit sex crimes against other prisoners, who may be incarcerated for less serious transgressions, but may be pushed to act out with sexual aggression of their own once released. I can't prove that the compulsions of a pederast are contagious, but I'd place a higher value on the innocence of one child over the lives of dozens or hundreds of kiddie-touchers.

Damn, this blog is getting to be a downer, eh?

I worked on my own novel in the afternoon. I cant' tell if I'm making it better, but I'm stirring the mess up. I read to Todd for a little over an hour from it. He's a good accountability partner, because he's patient when I stop to scribble on the pages and re-read sections. I wish I could gauge his reactions better. He'll grind his teeth or have a coughing jag and I don't know if it's because my prose sucks that bad or what.

We went to dinner sans Frau Lobster to celebrate my Mom's birthday. A place I once washed dishes at, actually. If you can wash dishes and see the prep-cooks in action in a restaurant and still want to eat there, it's a pretty good restaurant. No Orwell/Palahniuk tales of food service terrorism to report.

Then I got to thinking that since I've been lax on practicing the guitar, why not try playing for Todd? His feeding tube kept jamming, the machine beeps a slightly sharp F. I tried to tune to the machine and play in time to it between the nurses coming to try and clear the blockage. His roommate seemed to like my playing more than Todd did, but then his roommate also laughed every time the beeping started again.

Todd's roommate signs 'yes' and 'no,' not really standard sign, he doesn't have the digit control for that. But he has a system. One of the nurses asked if he liked my playing, and he signed 'yes.' I asked if it was better than my book, and he signed 'yes' and laughed.

"Thanks for the boost to my self esteem," I said. This got another laugh, though Todd had fallen asleep. The nurse assured me that she regularly asks Todd's roommate if she's fat and always gets a 'yes.' He's about half Todd's age, judging from the high school sports team pictures on his walls, but it looks like the same sort of thing landed him in the rehab/nursing home. Might have years of rehab ahead to be semi-functional but he's still got his ornery.

I'd be ecstatic if I could elicit as much rudeness from Todd. I guess this isn't making this blog less of a downer...

Just when you thought this blog couldn't get any worse (Jehovah! Jehovah!)

Our neighbor Hannah has had a relapse of her Burkitt's Lymphoma. She lived a couple doors down from us until a few years ago, then moved a few blocks away. She was probably the biggest boost the Gardner Relay For Life had this year. You never see adolescents in force there, but you did this year. Hannah is 13.

The good thing about this particular Leukemia is it's usually responsive to chemo. The bad part is it's fast and deadly. Plus, it's rare, so they don't have a lot of options for a second course of chemo with the relapse. She's on what I gather is an experimental drug.

Her brother turned out not to be a bone marrow match, which is also not so hot. I'm pretty wimpy about needles, but I had decided that I should look into being a marrow donor. It does involve needles, and it's not exactly painless or easy, but I've had my own life saved against odds, so I feel like I have a debt there.

Unfortunately, according to the NMBP site, I'm not eligible specifically because I'm a heart attack survivor. Never mind that being a heart attack survivor is exactly what made me decide I should look into getting on the registry. There's about a zero percent chance I'd be a match for Hannah, but there's other people out there fighting for their lives.