Playing Doctor

there must be some way out of here

2007-06-25T17:11:00.000-04:00

After four years and one week, I’m making my way out of this town. Everything will be changing and in some ways this will be the last entry for this blog.

There are some things that I haven’t gotten around to explaining, how I invented indie music for example. (It happened on the school bus in the early eighties after I heard some cheerleaders discussing Natalie, Tootie and Blair. I suddenly realized that if Jo and the girls would hang out with cheerleaders, I had to find a new set of friends. It gets a little complicated after that, involving I.R.S. Records and Bob Mould. Anyway, I never got around to telling some stories.)

So let’s end this with some options, Choose Your Own Adventure style:

Click here or here if you’d like me to take a bullet in the head.

Click here or here if you’d like me to wink into the internet one last time.

First Evidence of Undead Threeway Found

2007-06-12T18:13:00.000-04:00

This is not a Wednesday

2007-06-11T05:06:00.000-04:00

I was traveling recently, checking out the new city I’ll be moving to in a few weeks, and in a little coffee house and reading the local alt newspaper. There were three girls sitting next to me on the settee, drinking coffee, chatting and studying.

‘I think,’ one of them said, ‘we should just go on a hunger strike until she breaks up with him.’

That was when I started listening to their conversation.

‘He’s not that bad,’ one of the other girls protested.

‘He is that bad,’ the first girl said, standing her ground. ‘When I think about him I just get mad. I seriously think we should tell her that we are going on a hunger strike until she agrees to break up with him.’

‘Come on,’ the other girl said, in what I considered to be a rhetorical failure.

‘It’s not just him, either,’ the hunger strike advocate continued. ‘She becomes a different person when she’s around him.’

This went on for some time. When their conversation ran out of steam, I decided to join.

‘Would you like to hear,’ I asked, ‘a decidedly cynical take on your problem?’

The three girls all looked at me, two of them apparently interested in what I might have to say, the third one, who had said nothing this far into their conversation, suspect of the intrusion.

‘Yeah,’ the hunger strike advocate said.

‘How old are you?’ I asked. They were 19, 19 and 20.

‘When I was your age,’ I said, ‘I had a few friends who sound like your friend. They started going out with someone and they changed everything about themselves: what they believed and how they acted. They got way too serious about people who were—frankly—jerks. Do I have it about right?’

The hunger strike advocate nodded, listening.

‘After a few years I found out that, even if they broke up with the jerk, they would just find another jerk to be around and eventually they would marry one of the jerks.’

‘I’ve already decided,’ she said, ‘that if they get married, I’m giving them a business card for a divorce lawyer as a wedding gift.’

‘Oh, they’re already engaged?’

‘No, but if they get engaged, that’s what I’m going to give them.’

‘Well, unfortunately—for me anyway, I’m not saying that this is necessarily true for you,’ I said, ‘but for me, they end up marrying the jerk-either this one or another one-and in four or five years you’ll visit them and they will have so completely disappeared into the jerk that you won’t see anything resembling your friend. You’ll end the visit wondering why you were ever friends with her in the first place.’

‘But when she’s around us she is so cool and great, it’s just around him that she changes.’

‘It isn’t him that changes her,’ I said. ‘She changes to be like you when she’s around you. You don’t notice because you’re flattered by it. But she needs more than you can offer. She needs to disappear completely into someone—that’s why her boyfriend outranks you with her insecurity chameleon routine.’

None of them said anything. The hunger strike advocate looked at her knees for a moment.

‘I wouldn’t give up,’ I said, ‘even a midnight snack hoping I could prevent it from happening.’

There was a bit of silence and then she said, most sincerely, ‘thanks.’

‘I wouldn’t thank me,’ I said, ‘what I’ve told you is terribly cynical, perhaps even cruel.’

‘I’ll say,’ said the girl who had so far been silent.

None of us said anything for a while and I felt awkward and a bit ashamed of myself. I stood up slowly, none of us speaking, and walked out of the coffee shop.

The Silent Treatment

2007-05-01T21:33:00.000-04:00

Okay, fair enough.

I know I haven't been posting and there are reasons for this. It's not that there isn't enough going on in my life to write about. Frankly, there's too much. But I've been focusing on things other that writing.

One of my duties this year has involved a lot of teaching and lecturing. By November I had, frankly, grown quite tired of hearing my voice and seeing my writing. Additionally, trying to teach things, I became acutely aware of my own gaps in knowledge, so that has required more late night reading.

The past few months, things have been rather complicated. I did indeed get a fellowship and-unexpectedly-one that starts in two months, rather than the 14 months I was expecting. So I've been scrambling to make the move.

So sorry, but there it is.

So I'll be touch and go for a while.

2007-04-18T05:47:00.001-04:00

The patience of Job.

2007-03-29T20:15:00.001-04:00

Hey, did you guys hear my guest spot on Beware of the Babylon? (click on my picture to hear it)

Everybody Loves You in New York

2007-03-14T05:03:00.000-04:00

Taking off for NYC today. Had great fun in Chicago. More soon.

Thursday in the Park

2007-03-06T18:49:00.000-05:00

I'll be in Chicago for a couple of days and going out on Thursday night. Send me a note at uncynic@gmail.com if you want to join me for a drink.

Music for Any Occasion

2007-02-20T06:12:00.000-05:00

Perhaps you have seen some blogs post music surveys that ask ‘what five CD’s should everyone own?’

I wanted to fill that out, but ended up with about 15 different lists because, frankly, what makes music important to me is that it differentiates, that it is not completely universal. No music is popular with everyone; there are always contrarians who hate—say—Sergeant Pepper, Debussy’s La Mar, or Nevermind.

So I thought I’d take the concept of music everyone should own, and give it a practical application.

The goal is to have a short list of CD’s you could play for any group and have something for everyone—so that everyone would hear one song they loved and at least minimally enjoy the rest. You want to have different genres so that your aunt or grandmother will say ‘who is this? I love it.’ to one CD and another so someone you bring home from a bar will say, ‘oh yeah,’ or perhaps even ‘I’m feeling this.’

The trick is to straddle the line between populist and connoisseur. You don’t want obvious classics that work solely on nostalgia, but you don’t want sound experiments that are just showy extravagances either. (So KC and the Sunshine Band and Captain Beefheart are both out.)

We’ll up the number from five to six, because that seems the number of CD’s that many players will hold. So, I have my list, in fact, I have a few. But you go first. Post your list of six CD’s you’d put in the mixer for a foolproof ‘Music for Any Occasion’ selection. I will give you a caveat: when I say anyone, I mean English speakers from the United States. If we start bringing pygmies or the French into the equation, it will become too unworkable. And morons—you are not responsible for someone who only listens to death metal, dance, or Lucinda Williams. (Not that there is anything wrong with any of them in moderation.)

Choose carefully, because while there is no one correct answer, there are potentially many, many incorrect answers.

How To Write

2007-02-05T05:43:00.000-05:00

Uncynical Wednesdays: I’ll Be Your Mirror

2007-01-31T20:02:00.001-05:00

I’m at the grocery store checkout lane and telling the bagboy ‘put it all in one bag, if you can.’ I don’t say that I’m not ninety years old and can carry more than one item at a time.

So he puts my five items (a quart of milk, a bag of arugula, a pint of cottage cheese, 3 tomatoes, and some Kielbasa) in one plastic bag, then puts that bag within a second plastic bag. He takes the double-bagged groceries and puts it within a third bag. He then takes the triple bag and puts it within a fourth bag.

He hands it to me and it’s so ridiculous I nearly ask him if he’s retarded, except that he actually is retarded—his wide-set eyes are looking at me and his misshapen mouth is in a half smile—so I imagine how badly that would go over. I suspect that his quadruple bagging is making fun of me, but I cannot prove this.

I leave the store carrying the well secured items.

___________________________________

At work the next day, the administrative assistants are teasing one another and one of them says something halfway mean and giggles, saying, ‘I’m going to hell for saying that.’

Somehow they begin talking about hell and one of them says, ‘some people believe that in hell you can’t do whatever you enjoyed on earth.’

I get up and walk around my desk to shut my office door. On the way back to my chair, I think that some people’s hell is a place filled with intelligent, attractive hard workers who are stylish and well mannered.

Hell is other people, indeed.

Robert Anton Wilson

2007-01-29T19:18:00.000-05:00

So the week turned into two and we made a date to go to the opening of the new Nick Cave show. He hadn’t told me if he’d decided to move things forward or continue to withdraw.

We go out for steak before heading to the museum. After we see the exhibit, we’re mingling and drinking and wander around the gift shop.

He finds finger puppet versions of Schrödinger's cat. We are amused by them and start talking about Schrödinger with the gift shop clerk. I’m trying to explain pluripotency and—more specifically—quantum superposition of states. She doesn’t look terribly happy when I try to explain that, until the experimental box is opened, Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead. I try to explain the solution used by many science fiction writers—that the universe splits into infinite realities and it’s simply random chance if we find ourselves in the universe where the cat lives or the universe where the cat dies.

‘What’s troubling about this,’ I tell her, ‘is that until the box is opened, we exist in both of them at once.’

We talk to her for a bit longer. I think he feels bad for her, because as I wander away he pulls out his wallet to buy something. Outside, he hands me one of the Schrödinger cat puppets and holds up an identical copy he has purchased for himself.

When he brings me home, we still haven’t talked about any decision he’s made. He says goodnight and kisses my cheek. I want to kiss him—to do more than kiss, but realize I don’t want to open the box just yet, so I just say goodnight and let him go.

Calicos and Cacti

2007-01-19T05:34:00.000-05:00

My Friend NYCBabylon posted her theory that misogyny could be detected by a dislike for house cats, or rather, that real men love pussies. ‘Cats are complicated creatures and it takes patience, confidence and good communication skills to connect and love a cat,’ she argues. From there she reasons, men ‘who love cats are more patient, emotionally healthy and kinder men than the men who hate cats.’

Maybe.

When I was in college I had a similar theory about houseplants. When I met someone who had an inordinate amount of houseplants, I figured that they must be a very nurturing person, able to form attachments with living things even outside the kingdom Animalia. (I mean ‘inordinate’ in the non-literal sense, obviously, but I mean ‘nurture’ in the literal sense.)

Hemingway loved cats. I even had one of his six-toed feline progeny named, predictably, Hemingway. And Hemingway has somehow become an archetype for what a real man is supposed to be like. But I think Hemingway loved cats for exactly different reasons than Ms. Babylon postulates. He loved cats because they had minimal expectations of him. They would look beautiful around the house and grounds, not require maintenance, and approach him and leave him with an easy coolness and without conflict. He liked cats because they held the appearance of a relationship without the demands of one. He has written much about how this realationship goal was his problem with women.

What I found about my houseplant-raisers was that they—largely—raised houseplants not because their connection to living things poured out from the kingdom Animalia, but because it barely reached into the kingdom Animalia.

Uncynical Wednesdays

2007-01-10T05:51:00.001-05:00

I finally sent out my fellowship applications. Medical fellowships have a rather complicated application process; I’m applying for July 2008 now. The whole thing is computerized. I send my application to a central location and specify which programs I want to receive it. The application is a nine piece conglomeration which includes my C.V. (Curriculum Vitae, an academic version on a resume), med school transcript, board scores, dean’s letter from the medical school I attended, letter from the program director of my residency program, three letters of recommendation (which have to be impressive and from impressive faculty), a picture of my face (front on, face taking up at least 1/3 the image, no smaller than 2 x 2 but no larger than 3 x 4.5), the dreaded personal statement, and a basic application form.

I actually have been interviewing applicants to our program this week. Let me tell you, about half of the personal statements contain the phrase: ‘I enjoy being intellectually challenged.’

I figured I’d start hearing back mid-January, but I got my first request for an interview yesterday. It’s nice that the first program that I’ve heard from is an interview and not a rejection. I’ll keep you all posted as things move along, but I don’t get my final answer until June 27th. I’ve applied to 26 programs: the top fifteen programs, my hometown program, and 10 very good programs. I applied only to programs that are in cities that I am willing to live. I applied to programs in the Boston area, New York City, D.C., Baltimore, Durham (NC), Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle.

_____________________________

Confidential to ML: Why am I unable to say ‘I love you’ until someone’s trying to break up with me? I’m attempting to answer the age old question: ‘is it possible to talk yourself out of being dumped?’ The temporary answer, apparently, is ‘give me a week to think about it.’

I’ll find out next week if I’m singing Carol King’s ‘It’s Too Late, Baby’ or ABBA’s ‘Take a Chance On Me.’

Test Your Christdar

2007-01-09T05:42:00.000-05:00

I’ve mentioned before the difficulty I have distinguishing men who are gay from men who are Christian. They both hold your handshake a bit too long and they both make eye contact a bit too much.

(I learned both of those tricks from an article in a 1983 article in Cosmopolitan titled ‘How to tell if your husband is gay.’ God, VH1, I loved the eighties, too! They were quite specific about how to identify the handshake: ‘even a millisecond too long’ signaled he wanted to suck cock. Other helpful clues included: noticing what you were wearing; interested in his own appearance; and anal warts. I made the last one up, I don’t remember the others.)

Anyway, I still can’t tell the difference between Christian and gay men. Christians want your soul, gays want your body. They’re both just a little too friendly. If you don’t believe me, try it yourself. I culled these 20 pictures by using a keyword search on Hot or Not. I used the keyword ‘Gay’ and took the first 11 pictures that I came up with. I did the same with ‘Christian.’ I expunged one from each. (The two I expunged both scored far into the Not side of the equation and I thought it was in everyone’s best interest to not replicate their images.)

Test your Christdar skills, then run your curser over the pictures to find out if I used the word "Christian" or not. And no lusting over the Christians or preaching to the gays. I expect everyone to behave themselves.

The Year So Far

2007-01-08T05:52:00.000-05:00

It seems like just yesterday it was January first! I thought this would be a good time to stop and reflect on the things I’ve learned and seen so far this year.

Best Television

The Office, Season two, disc 2

I saw this on Tuesday and Wednesday. It was great. I saw disc one in December and, I don’t know, it was pretty good too. Anyway, I liked them both, but I watched disc 2 this year, so the other one isn't really eligible, I guess. I liked the deleted scenes from disc 1 more though, if that means anything.

My friend Anna makes fun of me because I rent my television spread out over the course of years. (I’m almost done with Oz, which I started in 2004, and Carnivale, which I started in 2005. I’m starting the fourth season of Six Feet Under later this month. I’ve decided not to start The Shield or Lost until I finish up the series I’ve already started)

Best Book

Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis

I started this Christmas weekend and finished it New Year’s Day. I had no idea he was even married.

Best Album

At Home with Owen, Owen

For Christmas I received two CD’s from this guy I’ve been seeing for a couple months: At Home with Owen and Ennio Morricone Film Music Volume 1. He said the Owen album made him think of me. I don’t get that, but it’s a great album.

Best Pop Song

‘Over My Head,’ The Fray from How to Save a Life

Great hook, repeated over and over. I suspect this song will be annoying the shit out of us in less than a month. But for now I really like it, despite how mundane the rest of the song is. I’d like to hear it covered by Ted Leo.

Best Video Game (MMORPG)

City of Heroes

I’ve been playing this game since early September and it hasn’t gotten old yet. For the few of you out of the loop, you play MMORPG real time with thousands of other players. It’s like going to the playground for pick-up basketball, players randomly forming and playing as a team, some leaving for dinner and chores and new players joining in. In this one, you play a superhero fighting the AI villainy in Paragon City. It has a great comic-book feel and an easy learning curve style of play. I’m on the Liberty Server, playing a radioactive, gravity-controlling hero named Grav Tron. Join me there.

Best Video Game (non-MMORPG)

Psychonauts

This game is like 3 years old, but I never played it before. There are some serious problems with the game (the controls are terrible and a lot of the game is pre-2003 style with large segments of the game being film clips) but it is cleverly animated and has an amusing story line. You play a young boy at a summer camp designed to help paranormals hone and control their powers. Each mind you enter is remarkably different, some war-torn with traumatic memories (reminding me of Disneyworld’s Mister Toad’s Wild Ride), some pristine and orderly (a Mondrian painting and mobile come to life).

Best Movie

I’ve seen a lot of good movies this year, but the two that stand out the most are The Descent and Lady in the Water. I’m told I saw the European release of The Descent which had an alternate ending. I found the ending the only disappointing thing about the movie. Meticulously crafted with aplomb storytelling, it was immensely satisfying. (Though I did not vomit.)

But I have to go with Lady in the Water. This film was hated by everyone I know as well as nearly every review I read, but I spent a lot of this movie smirking and crying, though to be honest, I’m not sure why I was crying so much. People complained that it was too talky, that Shyamalan was telling rather than showing. But the dialogue was the red herring. It seemed written to intentionally trip up those who didn’t experience the film but who only analyze it. (I’m reminded of Maynard James Keenan telling The Onion the reason he doesn’t print lyrics in his CD’s is because reading is antithetical to hearing and feeling; reading is thinking and analyzing.) You might say it’s unfair to put traps in art to prevent people from understanding what you’re getting at, but don’t look to me for sympathy about someone attempting multiple things—sometimes conflicting things—with a narrative.

1024 by 768

2007-01-04T17:48:00.000-05:00

I’m at the Wild Oats grocery across the street from the Miami Ad School and the guy in line in front of me is talking. He’s alone and at first I think he’s talking to the cashier, but when I look I see he has a palm Trēo 650 attached to his belt at his left hip and one of those earpieces with a microphone on the thin cord that looks too small and intangible to function. The cord is black and has hangs tortuously along his neck.

‘You’re in Rehab? Wow,’ the guy says. ‘Yeah, yeah… No, I think that’s great.’

But his emphasis is on the word ‘no.’ He’s swiping his card and listens for a moment.

‘Four weeks?’ he asks. ‘Twenty-eight days? Wow, that’s kind of long, isn’t it?’

He’s making hand signals at the cashier, trying to tell her he wants his chicken put in a different bag.

‘No,’ he says again, ‘I think that’s great… I mean I had no idea, but whatever.’

I’m putting my stuff on the conveyer belt as he says, ‘Okay, but we’re on for the Super Bowl, right? They’ll let you out on day pass or whatever, right?’ For the first time in the conversation, I can hear concern in his voice. I’m trying not to look at his wincing eyes as he listens. Then, ‘Yeah, but man, it’s only one night. We already have the tickets.’

He’s now picking up his bags and taking the receipt from the cashier. His voice rising as he says, ‘But have you even asked them? They’d make an exception for this. I mean, it’s the fucking Super Bowl, man.’

He is getting angrier as he walks away. By the time the automatic doors open for him, he’s using strings of profanities.

Static

2007-01-02T17:44:00.000-05:00

Hulk Hogan is at the car wash two cars ahead of mine. I’m at the Citgo in South Beach on Alton. There are about 6 or 7 young girls clamoring to have their picture taken with him. I’m a little touched that the years have not diminished Mr. Hogan’s bravado. He is polite and hamming it up with them.

I’m a little surprised that they know who he is, but the next day I find out he has his own reality show on VH1.

__________________________________

There is a seafood restaurant in Miami called Cami’s, but the name is done with graphics and swirls. I interpreted the apostrophe as an accent ague and pronounced it Camís, like the Spanish word for shirt without the final ‘a’. My mother was telling a story about meeting a friend at ‘Kammy’s’ and I couldn’t figure out what restaurant she was talking about for nearly 2 minutes. My sister and mother make fun of me for this still, even though it happened years ago.

On Friday, we were eating lunch at Tiramisu on Lincoln Road and this woman walked by, noticed the next restaurant and said, ‘I haven’t eaten at Spris in forever.’ She pronounced the name of the restaurant to rhyme with piss. I just looked at my plate.

__________________________________

Epilogue: A New Year’s Miracle

At fifteen minutes to midnight, my sister and I decided to ditch the party on the 32nd floor of the Icon and try to make one on Belle Isle before midnight. We cut down Pennsylvania Ave and took 11th to West. The light at 11th and Alton stayed green for us all the way from Penn. That light never stays green.

God must enjoy champagne as much as I do.

each and every one

2006-12-27T06:19:00.000-05:00

Though I had given up on the idea entirely, I received the three paintings from the library yesterday.

They will be hung in my office today.

I’d display some pictures, but my camera’s been on the fritz since a trip to the Virgin Islands. (I think salt water from a bathing suit or snorkel must have contaminated it.)

The Birds

2006-12-20T18:51:00.000-05:00

On Saturday night I ran into someone I had hung out with over the summer.

‘You haven’t called.’

‘My phone’ I said, ‘hasn’t been ringing either. How’ve you been?’

‘Pretty good. I’ve been seeing someone. He’s been talking a lot about commitment,’—commitment was slurred slightly—‘you know, but I don’t feel that strongly about that subject.’ Subject was also slurred. The eyes were a bit unfocused.

‘I’ve never seen you quite like this,’ I said. ‘How much have you had to drink?’

‘Not that much,’ the hand gestured into the air, suggesting my thought was a piffle—admitting a trifle to drink, nothing more.

‘Yeah,’ I said, laughing. ‘Okay.’

‘’See, when he gets talking about commitment,’ there is a slow exhale. ‘I get to thinking about us: you and me.’

‘I haven’t even seen you in two or three months,’ I said. ‘You like this guy? You think there’s potential there?’

‘Yeah, but...’ the voice trails off as the hand slides onto my leg.

Here is a story:

When I was 19, I was walking to the library and I saw a pigeon on the ground. It was walking in loose circles and half dragging one side and twitching. I figured it was rabid (impossible, I now know) so I avoided it. When I walked back to my dad’s restaurant for lunch three hours later, I saw the pigeon again. It was still doing its chorea. Over lunch, my dad told me the city was poisoning the pigeons because they were shitting on people’s cars when they shopped downtown. He said the poison was safe for humans, but the death it caused the pigeons was slow. I cursed the cruelty of capitalism before grabbing a Coke^® and heading back to the library.

When I came back to the pigeon, I stopped and watched it for a minute, sipping my Coke^®. It flopped one way, then the other. My dad had explained it would be a slow death, but I had hoped it would have been over by now. I set my Coke^® down, and picked the pigeon up.

I cupped the bird in my right hand and held it against my body. With my left thumb, I stroked its back, trying to calm it, then I curved my left hand beneath its neck, closing my hand so that its head was held in place as gently as I could. I rotated up with my left hand and down with my right hand, they way you would dry a wet t-shirt.

I opened my eyes. The bird did not react. It did not die, as I hoped. I did not know how slack pigeon’s necks are. I had hoped a quick turn would end the bird’s suffering. I kept its head in position and rearranged my grip so I could give it a second wring. I took a deep breath, winced, and repeated the maneuver.

Still nothing. The bird didn’t even seem dismayed at what was going on. It was not trying to escape. If anything it seemed more comfortable than it had been flopping around on the ground. I repeated the maneuver a third time. My mouth was probably a bit agape by now. I wanted this to be over. If I had it to do over again I’d have been at the library already reading about rattlesnakes or the Supreme Court and the bird would be out here flopping on the ground towards its slow convulsive death.

I wrung its neck six times. The bird now seemed flustered but was still alive. So, with its neck now turned 2100 degrees (360*6), I pulled on the birds head, the way you would open a squeeze top ketchup bottle. I felt the snap and the bird went limp.

I set its body in the bushes, picked up my Coke^®, finished my walk to the library and washed my hands.

I take the hand off my leg.

‘When he gets like that though, I just wonder about you and me. I wonder about us.’

‘There is no us,’ I say, getting up. I stop before I walk away, but just long enough to say, ‘as far as I’m concerned, there’s only me.’

Homonyms and ambiguous phrasing for fun and prophet

2006-12-12T17:35:00.000-05:00

I have spent a lot of today working on my personal statement for a fellowship application. At one point I had written ‘physicians whom I immolate’ rather than ‘emulate.’

I also wrote a sentence that talked about how much I enjoyed ‘being intellectually challenged.’

I’d prefer to come a-wassailing

2006-12-11T05:42:00.000-05:00

I was in another physician’s office on Friday and I noticed something.

‘Why,’ I asked, ‘do you have a candle shaped like an elf who’s dressed as a doctor?’

‘‘A patient gave it to me,’ she said, laughing a bit.

‘The nice thing about getting candles as gifts,’ I told her,’ is that you can throw them away and say you used them. That’s like Awful Gift Getting 101.’

‘The lesson I’m learning today,’ she said after pausing, ‘is not to get you anything, because you’ll just throw it away.’

Till then I carry on with what I know

2006-12-06T05:48:00.000-05:00

I just noticed that the Blogger comment system asks you to ‘choose an identity’ when you post a comment.

That's kind of an amazing offer, isn't it? I’ll take earnest caregiver! Intellectual scallywag? No, that’s wrong. How about a Dark Elf Illusionist? Stop. Five get overexcited.

I’ll take a cross between Ted from the movie Barcelona and the Brendon Frasier character from The Young American, only living in this country. Which I guess doesn’t really make much sense, because a crucial aspect of both characters’ identity is their wanderlust.

Nick Carraway? Forget I mentioned him.

I’m overreaching here. Just streamline what they are asking: Physician. Brother. Son. –but that’s more tombstone than identity.

Damn, I’ll never get to post a comment on this blog.

But how about truculent polymath? Now that's a tombstone I could live with.

Six Twenty-Nine

2006-12-01T18:29:00.000-05:00

I’ve just finished a bath while sipping a Beefeater martini with garlic-stuffed olives. Forgive any typos.

Tonight, the Marquee and I will be going out to celebrate his last night in this town. In a town like this, every friend is precious, even ones that stand you up for thanksgiving. My only consolation is that he’s only moving to Richmond: a town not any better than this one.

I’m also celebrating because tomorrow will be the first day I’ve had off since the 29th of October. We’re going to do the town up wrong. If you have my phone number, don’t call before 2 pm tomorrow.

Six months and twenty-nine days left in this town…

And to top it off, blogger thinks this is written by a robot.

2006-11-29T05:20:00.000-05:00

Some things are going on right now, but I am having a rather intense month and don’t quite have the perspective to write much about it.

So a quick synopsis:

My fellowship application should go out next week.

Some fun stuff happened on the psych ward.

My mother visited for Thanksgiving. The Marquee had his family come in and 'forgot' to bring them to my house for thanksgiving dinner, as we had planned and talked about for over six weeks. So there were four of us sitting around a twenty pound turkey, two containers of cornbread-sausage stuffing, six baked sweet potatoes, a meatloaf sized macaroni & cheese (with Dublin cheddar), a huge arugula salad, buttermilk mashed potatoes made from 5 pounds of potatoes, a gallon of frijoles negros, and over a quart of cranberry chutney.

I think I must have been pretty flustered by his no show, because I ended up ruining the gravy. Then, when I was finishing the pecan pumpkin pie under the broiler, I burnt it.

‘How burnt was it,’ my mom asked when I came back into the dining room.

‘When I took it out of the oven,’ I said, ‘it was on fire.’

Thanksgiving

2006-11-24T16:37:00.000-05:00

Netflix is one of the things for which I am thankful. Netflix is Al Gore’s greatest idea since coming up with the internet.

There’s no video store in this town other than Blockbuster. Can you imagine such a thing? A store that rents edited versions of movies to prevent offending families? There’s one ‘art’ theater here, but it’s been showing Casino Royale and Happy feet for the past couple of weeks, so there you are. If you’re on it too, send me your email address and we can become Netflix buddies. It doesn't entail the benefits of fuck buddies, but it also doesn’t entail uncomfortable introductions and jealousy.

The other thing I like about Netflix is it tracks of all the movies I've rented with them. I seem to be enjoying lists lately, so here is the list of every movie I've rented since July of 2003:

11/21/06 Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Vol. 4, 5 Stars

11/20/06 The House of Yes, 4 Stars

11/16/06 Syriana, 4 Stars

11/10/06 Hi, Mom!, 3 Stars

11/08/06 Frankenstein / Bride of Frankenstein, 3 Stars

11/06/06 The Office: Season 2, 5 Stars

11/06/06 Brother Born Again, 4 Stars

10/25/06 Carnivale: Season 2, 4 Stars

10/25/06 Tenacious D: Complete Masterworks, 4 Stars

10/25/06 Weeds: Season 1, 4 Stars

10/20/06 Miami Vice: Season 2, 4 Stars

10/18/06 Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Vol. 4, 5 Stars

10/16/06 Oz: Season 5, 4 Stars

10/13/06 Blow Out, 4 Stars

10/09/06 Capote, 5 Stars

10/09/06 Weeds: Season 1, 4 Stars

10/04/06 Reno 911: Season 2, 5 Stars

10/02/06 American Graffiti, 5 Stars

09/27/06 Robot Chicken: Season 1, 3 Stars

09/27/06 Nurse Betty, 5 Stars

09/25/06 Midnight Express, 4 Stars

09/20/06 Night Watch, 4 Stars

09/20/06 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, 5 Stars

09/18/06 Entourage: Season 2, 4 Stars

09/14/06 Thundercats: Season 1, 3 Stars

09/05/06 The Office: Season 1, 5 Stars

09/05/06 In the Company of Men, 5 Stars

08/23/06 Venture Bros.: Season 1, 5 Stars

08/17/06 A Better Tomorrow II, 2 Stars

08/16/06 Dark City, 3 Stars

08/10/06 Alias Betty, 5 Stars

08/03/06 Entourage: Season 2, 4 Stars

08/01/06 Jonny Quest: Season 1, 3 Stars

07/31/06 Novocaine, 3 Stars

07/31/06 The Quiet Earth, 3 Stars

07/26/06 Identity, 4 Stars

07/20/06 Everything Is Illuminated, 4 Stars

07/13/06 Columbo: Season 1, 4 Stars

07/12/06 Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic, 5 Stars

07/10/06 Saved! 4 Stars

07/10/06 Oz: Season 5, 4 Stars

Wonder Showzen: Season 1, 4 Stars

06/26/06 The Idiot, 3 Stars

06/21/06 The Passenger, 4 Stars

06/21/06 A Woman Under the Influence, 3 Stars

06/20/06 Aeon Flux, 3 Stars

06/08/06 Inherit the Wind, 4 Stars

05/17/06 Vampires in Havana, 2 Stars

05/04/06 Rize, 3 Stars

04/26/06 Tropical Malady, 4 Stars

04/20/06 Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, 5 Stars

04/17/06 The Safety of Objects, 4 Stars

03/29/06 Nip/Tuck: Season 2, 3 Stars

03/27/06 Good Bye, Lenin! 5 Stars

03/27/06 Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 4, 4 Stars

03/20/06 Barefoot in the Park, 4 Stars

03/15/06 House of Flying Daggers, 4 Stars

03/13/06 Oldboy, 5 Stars

03/02/06 Ikiru, 5 Stars

03/01/06 Shaun of the Dead, 4 Stars

03/01/06 Entourage: Season 1, 4 Stars

02/20/06 Kinsey, 3 Stars

02/17/06 Funny Ha Ha, 5 Stars

02/13/06 Grizzly Man, 4 Stars

02/03/06 Mother, 5 Stars

02/02/06 The Aristocrats, 5 Stars

02/02/06 The French Connection, 4 Stars

01/25/06 Glengarry Glen Ross, 4 Stars

01/25/06 Palindromes, 4 Stars

01/25/06 Desperately Seeking Susan, 3 Stars

01/20/06 Hero, 4 Stars

01/20/06 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 5 Stars

01/13/06 Run Lola Run, 5 Stars

01/10/06 Badlands, 4 Stars

01/05/06 The Shape of Things, 4 Stars

01/03/06 Pretty Persuasion, 4 Stars

01/03/06 Me and You and Everyone We Know, 4 Stars

12/29/05 Thunderheart, 3 Stars

12/23/05 Mr. and Mrs. Smith, 4 Stars

12/23/05 Oz: Season 4, 4 Stars

12/22/05 The Machinist, 5 Stars

12/15/05 Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, 4 Stars

12/05/05 The Lady Vanishes, 4 Stars

11/28/05 Da Ali G Show: Season 2, 3 Stars

11/28/05 Eraserhead, 4 Stars

11/09/05 Gates of Heaven, 3 Stars

10/19/05 Kung Fu Hustle, 5 Stars

09/29/05 A Very Long Engagement, 4 Stars

09/19/05 Eddie Izzard: Dress to Kill, 3 Stars

09/14/05 An American in Paris, 3 Stars

09/06/05 Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 3, 4 Stars

09/02/05 Dogville, 5 Stars

08/29/05 Control Room, 3 Stars

08/19/05 The Secret Lives of Dentists, 3 Stars

08/08/05 21 Grams, 4 Stars

08/01/05 Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Vol. 3, 5 Stars

08/01/05 One Hour Photo, 4 Stars

07/20/05 God Said Ha! 4 Stars

07/20/05 The Edward R. Murrow Collection, 5 Stars

07/15/05 Sideways, 5 Stars

07/15/05 Bad Lieutenant, 4 Stars

06/22/05 Heist, 5 Stars

06/22/05 Carnivale: Season 1, 4 Stars

06/20/05 Pieces of April, 3 Stars

06/15/05 The United States of Leland, 5 Stars

06/08/05 Slaughterhouse Five, 3 Stars

06/08/05 Throne of Blood, 5 Stars

06/08/05 Hard Core Logo, 4 Stars

06/03/05 Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, 5 Stars

05/27/05 SLC Punk, 5 Stars

05/23/05 The Chronicles of Riddick, 2 Stars

05/16/05 Gods and Monsters, 4 Stars

05/11/05 Catch 22, 4 Stars

05/11/05 Before Sunrise, 4 Stars

05/06/05 Big Fish, 5 Stars

04/27/05 Lake Placid, 3 Stars

04/27/05 Cube, 3 Stars

04/27/05 Elf, 3 Stars

04/13/05 Garden State, 5 Stars

04/06/05 The Producers, 3 Stars

03/02/05 I Heart Huckabees, 5 Stars

03/02/05 Alien vs. Predator, 2 Stars

02/18/05 Party Monster, 4 Stars

02/17/05 What Alice Found, 5 Stars

02/17/05 Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, 2 Stars

02/10/05 Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, 4 Stars

02/03/05 Wet Hot American Summer, 4 Stars

02/03/05 Sex and the City: Season 6, 4 Stars

01/31/05 Better Living Through Circuitry, 1 Stars

01/24/05 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 5 Stars

01/20/05 Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Vol. 2, 5 Stars

01/20/05 The First Year, 2 Stars

01/10/05 New York: Episode 5: Cosmopolis, 4 Stars

12/31/04 Deconstructing Harry, 4 Stars

12/31/04 Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her, 5 Stars

12/29/04 Medium Cool, 5 Stars

12/29/04 Sweet and Lowdown, 4 Stars

11/22/04 Stan Lee's Mutants, Monsters & Marvels, 3 Stars

11/15/04 I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco, 5 Stars

11/15/04 Super Size Me, 3 Stars

11/11/04 Rear Window, 5 Stars

11/11/04 Da Ali G Show: Season 1, 4 Stars

11/08/04 Phantasm, 3 Stars

11/01/04 Nip/Tuck: Season 1, 4 Stars

11/01/04 Being There, 4 Stars

10/27/04 The Company, 3 Stars

10/27/04 Six Feet Under: Season 2, 5 Stars

10/25/04 Donnie Darko, 5 Stars

10/11/04 Monster, 2 Stars

09/30/04 Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 2, 5 Stars

09/15/04 Get a Life: TV Series, 1 Stars

09/15/04 Oz: Season 3, 4 Stars

09/01/04 24 Hour Party People, 4 Stars

08/24/04 Space Ghost Coast to Coast: Vol. 1, 3 Stars

08/19/04 American Outlaws, 1 Stars

08/19/04 Undergrads: Freshman Season, 4 Stars

08/18/04 Daria: The Movie: Is it Fall Yet? 3 Stars

08/06/04 Reno 911: Season 1, 5 Stars

08/05/04 Withnail and I, 2 Stars

07/28/04 The Office: Series 2, 5 Stars

07/27/04 Grave of the Fireflies, 2 Stars

07/27/04 Monkeybone, 3 Stars

07/19/04 New York: Episode 4: The Power and the People, 4 Stars

07/12/04 The Full Monty, 3 Stars

06/29/04 The Ben Stiller Show, 3 Stars

06/29/04 The Office: Series 1, 5 Stars

06/28/04 Laurel Canyon, 4 Stars

06/28/04 10 Things I Hate About You, 3 Stars

06/28/04 Everyone Says I Love You, 4 Stars

06/16/04 Dario Argento Collection: Vol. 1: Phenomena, 3 Stars

06/14/04 Ninja Scroll, 3 Stars

06/10/04 Club Dread, 1 Stars

06/10/04 The Limey, 5 Stars

06/09/04 French & Saunders: Living in a Material World, 3 Stars

06/01/04 Journeys with George, 5 Stars

06/01/04 Shampoo, 3 Stars

06/01/04 The Newsroom: The Complete Series, 4 Stars

05/28/04 Touch of Evil, 2 Stars

05/20/04 Shakespeare in Love, 5 Stars

05/20/04 Sidewalks of New York, 5 Stars

05/20/04 Mallrats, 3 Stars

05/20/04 Bridget Jones's Diary, 4 Stars

05/20/04 Evolution: Disc 4: The Mind's Big Bang / What About God? 4 Stars

05/20/04 The Presidents Collection: The Republicans, 5 Stars

05/20/04 The Sting, 3 Stars

05/12/04 Reversal of Fortune, 3 Stars

05/10/04 Some Like It Hot, 5 Stars

05/06/04 Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 1, 5 Stars

05/03/04 Empire Records: Remix! Special Fan Edition, 3 Stars

04/27/04 Barcelona, 5 Stars

04/26/04 Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Vol. 1, 5 Stars

04/26/04 Evolution: Disc 3: The Evolutionary Arms Race / Why Sex? 4 Stars

04/26/04 Six Feet Under: Season 1, 5 Stars

04/26/04 Perfect Blue, 4 Stars

04/19/04 Y Tu Mama Tambien, 5 Stars

04/19/04 The Newton Boys, 2 Stars

04/19/04 Notorious, 5 Stars

04/14/04 Animal Farm, 1 Stars

04/14/04 Dead Man, 5 Stars

04/12/04 Oz: Season 2, 5 Stars

04/07/04 Dilbert: The Complete Series, 2 Stars

04/07/04 The Work of Director Spike Jonze, 5 Stars

04/07/04 Lost in Translation, 5 Stars

04/05/04 Thirteen, 4 Stars

04/01/04 Evolution: Disc 2: Great Transformations / Extinction! 4 Stars

03/31/04 Cancer Warrior: Nova, 2 Stars

03/31/04 A Brilliant Madness: American Experience, 3 Stars

03/31/04 The Deep End, 4 Stars

03/29/04 The Man Who Wasn't There, 5 Stars

03/29/04 Spellbound, 4 Stars

03/26/04 Modern Warfare: Terrorism, Special Forces, 3 Stars

03/24/04 Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, 4 Stars

03/24/04 New York: Episode 3: Sunshine and Shadow, 4 Stars

03/22/04 The Critic: The Complete Series, 4 Stars

03/22/04 Sex and the City: Season 5, 5 Stars

03/15/04 Porky's / Porky's 2: Double Feature, 3 Stars

03/12/04 Diner, 5 Stars

03/12/04 Dogfight, 5 Stars

03/10/04 Evolution: Disc 1: Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 5 Stars

03/01/04 Soylent Green, 5 Stars

03/01/04 Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 1, 4 Stars

03/01/04 North by Northwest, 5 Stars

03/01/04 Derrida, 3 Stars

03/01/04 The Simple Life: Season 1, 4 Stars

02/26/04 The Thin Red Line, 5 Stars

02/19/04 The Lost Weekend, 3 Stars

02/19/04 American Splendor, 5 Stars

02/19/04 Buena Vista Social Club, 4 Stars

02/16/04 New York: Episode 2: Order and Disorder, 4 Stars

02/16/04 Zion Canyon: Treasure of the Gods: IMAX, 1 Stars

02/16/04 Six Feet Under: Season 1, 4 Stars

02/16/04 The Boondock Saints, 3 Stars

02/11/04 The Tick: The Entire Series, 5 Stars

02/11/04 The Truth About Charlie, 4 Stars

02/11/04 Seven Samurai, 5 Stars

02/04/04 Citizen Kane, 5 Stars

02/02/04 To Live and Die in L.A. 4 Stars

02/02/04 Willard, 3 Stars

02/02/04 Sex and the City: Season 5, 4 Stars

01/28/04 Short: International Release #2, 3 Stars

01/28/04 The Deer Hunter, 5 Stars

01/26/04 Patton, 3 Stars

01/23/04 Naqoyqatsi, 4 Stars

01/23/04 Zebrahead, 4 Stars

01/22/04 Six Feet Under: Season 1, 4 Stars

01/12/04 War Letters: American Experience, 5 Stars

01/08/04 Tell Me Something, 3 Stars

01/08/04 Mutant X: Season 1, 3 Stars

01/08/04 Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy, 4 Stars

01/08/04 New York: Episode 1: The Country and the City, 4 Stars

12/31/03 The Manchurian Candidate, 5 Stars

12/29/03 The Bridge on the River Kwai, 5 Stars

12/26/03 Style Wars, 4 Stars

12/22/03 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 4 Stars

12/22/03 Powaqqatsi, 5 Stars

12/19/03 American Movie, 4 Stars

12/10/03 Cannibal! The Musical, 4 Stars

12/10/03 Mr. Show: Season 1, 3 Stars

12/05/03 Existenz, 5 Stars

12/04/03 Modern Times ,4 Stars

12/04/03 Get Your Stuff, 1 Stars

12/04/03 The Hours, 5 Stars

12/03/03 The Dinner Game, 3 Stars

12/01/03 Body Double, 4 Stars

12/01/03 The Queens of Comedy, 3 Stars

11/28/03 Celebrity, 4 Stars

11/24/03 Big Trouble, 3 Stars

11/24/03 The Believer, 5 Stars

11/20/03 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 3 Stars

11/19/03 Dominick and Eugene, 4 Stars

11/19/03 Triumph the Insult Comic Dog: Come Poop with Me, 3 Stars

11/17/03 The Laramie Project, 3 Stars

11/17/03 My Beautiful Laundrette, 4 Stars

11/13/03 Down With Love, 5 Stars

11/13/03 Rabid, 4 Stars

11/11/03 Eight Legged Freaks, 3 Stars

11/10/03 Psycho, 4 Stars

11/06/03 25th Hour, 5 Stars

11/03/03 Vampyr, 3 Stars

10/31/03 The Others, 4 Stars

10/31/03 Army of Darkness, 3 Stars

10/31/03 Best of the Chris Rock Show: Vol. 1, 3 Stars

10/31/03 Immortality, 5 Stars

10/31/03 Things I Left in Havana, 5 Stars

10/24/03 The Queen of the Damned, 3 Stars

10/16/03 The Evil Dead, 3 Stars

10/16/03 Femme Fatale, 5 Stars

10/16/03 Trekkies, 4 Stars

10/14/03 All Quiet on the Western Front, 4 Stars

10/13/03 Pi: Faith in Chaos, 5 Stars

10/08/03 Barbershop, 3 Stars

10/08/03 Spellbound, 2 Stars

10/08/03 Scotland, PA, 5 Stars

10/06/03 What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 3 Stars

10/02/03 Talk to Her, 5 Stars

10/02/03 Intacto, 5 Stars

10/02/03 Kiss Me Guido, 3 Stars

09/26/03 The Fluffer, 4 Stars

09/25/03 Strangers on a Train, 5 Stars

09/25/03 The Original Kings of Comedy, 5 Stars

09/23/03 Rhinoceros, 2 Stars

09/23/03 The Quiet American, 4 Stars

09/19/03 Chuck & Buck, 4 Stars

09/17/03 Suicide Kings, 4 Stars

09/17/03 Punch-Drunk Love, 5 Stars

09/15/03 How to Beat the High Cost of Living, 3 Stars

09/15/03 How to Get Ahead in Advertising, 5 Stars

09/05/03 The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, 4 Stars

08/29/03 All About Eve, 4 Stars

08/29/03 Following, 4 Stars

08/28/03 Tora! Tora! Tora! 1 Stars

08/20/03 Of Mice and Men, 4 Stars

08/20/03 Yojimbo, 5 Stars

08/11/03 Iron Monkey, 4 Stars

08/11/03 Blood Simple, 5 Stars

08/06/03 Series 7: The Contenders, 2 Stars

07/31/03 Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, 5 Stars

07/25/03 The Conversation, 5 Stars

07/25/03 Hell House, 5 Stars

!

2006-11-17T19:21:00.000-05:00

I passed my boards.

Blackbird II

2006-11-15T17:57:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite things about my home is the street I live on. It has a creek running through it: one lane to the left of the creek, one lane to the right. There’s a footbridge in front of my home and many people walk their dogs across it, as it’s the only spot to cross the creek for about four blocks in either direction. Aside from the promenade of hounds, there’s almost no traffic that goes by my home.

So when my sister and mother arrived to visit for this weekend, we had a lovely walk along the creek, then a few blocks over to a French restaurant. Whenever my sister visits, we make it a point of going there, as it has a nice mixed Pâté sampler served with cornichon. We also started with a bottle of the house champagne.

I had the special, steak au poivre. My sister had a thick-cut pork chop with leeks and apples in a calvados cream sauce. My mother had a beet chèvre tart and a butternut squash soup with a bacon chèvre garnish. (She likes chèvre.) For dessert we shared the saffron panna cotta. Everything there—as usual—was superb.

The next afternoon, after returning from the grocery store, we took another walk. This time continuing through the park for another eight blocks to a Mexican restaurant. I’m not normally a fan of corn chips, but I love them at this place. They’re thick and crunchy and seasoned with something more than just salt. It tastes like a mixture of celery salt, lime juice, and a bit of cumin, but I don't know how you’d season a chip with lime juice. The salsa—which I like because it’s all freshly crushed tomatoes—was livened up by my sister who poured nearly a bottle of hot sauce into the dish.

I had the ahi tacos, my sister the veggie fajitas, my mother a flank-steak caeser-salad wrap. My mother’s steak was too salty, everything was otherwise quite good.

We enjoyed our walk back through the park and that evening had dinner at home with my friend the Marquee.

The next day for lunch we grilled the hot Italian sausages we forgot to serve as a pre-dinner snack. We also heated up a can of Campbell’s tomato soup, pouring it into demitasse cups I rubbed with fresh sage. We had refills, but it took a remarkably small amount of soup to satisfy us.

Then they got in the car and returned to Miami.

Blackbird I

2006-11-13T20:51:00.000-05:00

My mother and sister drove up to spend the weekend with me. We’d planned on having dinner Saturday night with the Marquee, whom they’d never met. I suggested we cook a meal and asked them what we should make.

‘We could do hamburgers,’ mom offered, ‘that would be simple.’

‘Hmmm,’ I said, ‘I was thinking more along the lines of a pork loin.’

‘With,’ my sister added, ‘a Rum Orange reduction. And some roasted vegetables.’

‘Roasted root vegetables would be good,’ I said, ‘parsnips, turnips and potatoes,’

‘Sweet potatoes would be better than potatoes,’ my sister said, ‘with some coriander and Moroccan spices. And a frissee salad with a lemon vinaigrette.’

‘How about a lemon caper vinaigrette?’ I suggested.

This went on until the menu was settled. We went to the grocery store and picked out our supplies. When we came home, I made the pâte brisée for the tart, the lemon caper vinaigrette and started marinating the Pork loin in Myer’s dark rum, garlic, bay leaves, peppercorns and the juice from eight Florida oranges.

By mid afternoon, we’d started roasting the eggplant for the ajlouke we were serving for an opening snack. While I concentrated on the Pear and Blue Cheese tart, using Bosc pears and Danish Blue, my sister prepared the roasted root vegetables. We ended up also getting a rutabega, pearl onions and fennel. After she finished the cutting, she built the bonfire to roast them. While she was getting the fire going, I put the pork loin in the oven and put the marinade on the stove top to make the reduction.

When the Marquee arrived, we had the ajlouke and toasted pita in the living room. We also served pickled hearts of palm and artichoke hearts. We served Lillet blanc with grapefruit wedges in chilled tumblers.

We moved to the dinner table and served the salad, mixed greens—rather than the frissee—with dried currents and freshly ground pistachio nuts topped with the lemon caper vinaigrette. We served the Trinchero Family Select 200 Pinot Noir.

After we finished the salads, I served the pork loin with the rum and orange reduction and the roasted root vegetables with Moroccan spices.

I was most excited about the dessert though. A few years back, I was at a tasting and had The Noble Semillon 1999, a dessert wine by d’Arenberg, from Australia. Now, I know what you’re thinking, because I think the same thing all the time, ‘Australian wine? I’d sooner drink horse urine.’ But I think the very things that make Australian wine taste so unimaginably bad, are the right things to make a good dessert wine. The d’Arenberg Riesling is in higher production, but if you can get your hands on the Semillon, do so. At the tasting, I remembered thinking that it would go really, really well with pears and blue cheese. So for the past couple of years, I kept on trying to come up with an autumn occasion to think up a recipe for a pear and blue cheese tart.

And the pear and blue cheese tart and The Noble did go very well together. Most exciting.

I almost got a pitcher of beer poured on my head

2006-11-09T05:42:00.000-05:00

I almost got a pitcher of beer poured on my head last night. Had it not been for my instinctive suspicion of other human beings, my catlike reflexes, and a strong wrist (thanks to holding the laryngoscope with difficult to intubate patients), I would have gone home cold, wet, and smelling of beer.

And I maybe—kind of—deserved it. Long story, don't ask. The important thing is: I am dry.

Love Plus One

2006-11-06T19:10:00.000-05:00

Uisff xfflt bhp, uif Nbsrvff boe J xfsf esjwjoh cbdl gspn Bumboub. Xf xfsf ibwjoh pof pg uiptf hsfbu spbe usjqt xifsf zpv ufmm tupsjft zpv epo’u vtvbmmz ufmm. U-Sfy qpoujgjdbuft po uibu tvckfdu ifsf.

Tp uif Nbsrvff ufmmt nf b tupsz uibu, qspcbcmz vojoufoujpobmmz, sfwfbmt b ivhf bnpvou pg ijt dibsbdufs boe J bn tveefomz gjmmfe xjui bo bxbsfoftt pg ipx hsbufgvm J bn gps ijt gsjfoetijq—uibu xjuipvu ijn J xpvmeo’u ibwf b sfbm gsjfoe jo uijt upxo. If’t njexbz uispvhi uif tupsz cvu J joufssvqu ijn bozxbz, hsbccjoh ijt bsn boe tbzjoh, ‘J sfbmmz mpwf zpv. J’n hmbe xf lopx fbdi puifs boe uibu zpv’sf nz gsjfoe.’ Xf nbef fzf dpoubdu, if opet bu nf boe xf cpui tubsu mbvhijoh bu uif sboepnoftt pg nz joufssvqujpo.

Uijt xfflfoe xf’sf pvu boe esjoljoh boe sjhiu cfgpsf if mfbwft uif cbs if ivht nf, tbzjoh xibu b hsfbu ujnf if ibe po uif usjq. ‘Ftqfdjbmmz uif sjef cbdl,’ if tbzt, tnjmjoh, ‘uibu xbt dppm. Zpv espqqfe uif nbtl gps uif gjstu ujnf tjodf J’wf nfu zpv boe mfu nf tff uif sfbm zpv gps bcpvu 3 tfdpoet, cfgpsf uif nbtl xfou cbdl po.’

Jg zpv dbo sfbe uijt, oqtu uif obnf pg zpvs gbwpsjuf Hfof Ibdlnbo npwjf.

Secret Orgins: Ordinals

2006-10-31T05:38:00.000-05:00

When I was in kindergarten, in preparation for a teacher parent conference, I was asked what I liked best about kindergarten by my teacher.

My answer, I’m told, was ‘lining up.’

Part three of three: Tusk

2006-10-27T05:43:00.000-04:00

It’s Monday a little before seven am and I’m the first one in the office. I’m in the kitchen at the coffee maker because I didn’t have any coffee at home. I pour the coffee in the filter, pour the water in the reservoir tank, put the coffee pot on the hot plate and turn it on. I go to my office—the office that still has no paintings on the wall—and start up the computer. I check to see if any emergent emails came through over the weekend and return to the coffee maker.

Coffee and grounds are everywhere, running over the counter, under the microwave and onto the floor. I begin sopping it up with bunches of napkins and paper towels, when Mick comes in.

‘So it happened to you this morning,’ he says.

‘This has happened before?’

‘Yeah, about once a week,’ he says and comes over and helps me for a moment. I’m trying to sop up the coffee, but it’s still at the point where the napkins are pushing more than they are absorbing. He stops and leans against the wall and says, ‘Can I ask you a question?’

I’m wiping down the hot plate where the coffee pot sits, but I look up at him briefly and say, ‘sure.’

‘I want to ask you a question,’ he says again, and pauses. With all this build up, I figure he’s going to ask if I’m gay or if my buddy was my boyfriend. I don’t want to have that conversation this morning—let alone without coffee—but I’m not exactly relived when he instead asks, ‘Did you leave my party early so you wouldn’t have to see Christy?’

‘No,’ I say, not expecting that question at all.

‘Everyone seems under the impression that you did.’

I’m quickly thinking about how I had asked people in the office if she was coming, how I had known she was coming around ten, how I had asked my buddy several times about the time and—as soon as I heard it was after nine—made my exit.

So I tell Mick that I went to a nine-thirty movie. Hoping it will clear up everything—before realizing it’s also admitting I’d planned on leaving his party to see a movie.

‘Oh,’ he said, pausing, ‘cause I think they’re trying to set her up with you.’

‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘I’m not too sure what that’s about.’

‘Well, doc, let me just say this,’ he says in a tone that lets me know he’s going to break it down for me, with a slight pause between each word, ‘you’re not exactly ugly.’

We kind of laugh and I try not to burn my fingers as I pick up the coffee filter and throw it out. Then I ask who had that impression.

‘Most everybody,’ he said, then his tone changed. ‘It didn’t really matter though, because nearly everyone went home after you left.’ Then he paused for quite a while and said, ‘thanks for ruining my party.’

In the next tenth of a second a lot of things went through my mind. Not the least of which was: Is he joking?

So two-tenths of a second later, I opted for the option where he was joking and I laughed and left the building entirely. I went to get coffee from the emergency department, at least there I know what I’m doing.

Part two of three: Black Magic Woman

2006-10-26T06:06:00.001-04:00

Two weeks ago a woman swung by my new office, let’s call her Christy McVie. Christy’s been with the hospital for twenty years and has a reputation for making things happen. She said, ‘you really need something for these walls.’ So I told her about the paintings and how the librarians were refusing to check them out to me. ‘I’ll have a meeting with them and see what I can do.’

I thought she was just being nice, not really meaning it. But a few days later, I was in her office helping a resident with something and she told me she’d set up the meeting.

‘How are you going to get those paintings?’ I asked, ‘I tried for weeks and couldn’t get anywhere.’

‘I know a few people who can help. I’m meeting with the library director,’ she said, ‘and I’ll get them by being charming.’

We both laughed when she said this, then there was a beat and she said, ‘It’s the same way I’m going to get a date with you.’

In the next tenth of a second a lot of things went through my mind. Not the least of which was: Is she joking? I thought she was married. It never dawned on me to think about whom she would want to date, let alone if I might be on that list.

So two-tenths of a second later, I opted for the option where she was joking and I laughed really loudly, opening the door and heading back to my office. Once there, I became quite devote in the belief that she was joking.

Then I got the email.

‘I had my meeting with the director. She needs to meet briefly with the foundation director to show him the paintings. They will need to tag the frames so that they will be returned to the library in June, but you should have them sometime next week.’

New paragraph, ‘There is a Halloween Party October 28th I’m going to with a bunch of people. Mandatory costumes, 8 pm to 5 am. You can bring some friends if you want, dancing, drinking and fun.’

So I thanked her profusely for moving things forward with the paintings and told her—truthfully—that I would be out of town that weekend and that it was a shame because—untruthfully—the party sounded like a lot of fun.

But looking my response over, it seemed too curt. She had done me this great favor—or started to anyway.

So I thought I’d mention I’d see her at an office party thrown by this guy, let’s call him Mick. However, I didn’t know if she was invited and Mick was at lunch, so I asked our administrator if she knew if Christy was invited. She didn’t know. When Mick came back from lunch I asked him. He confirmed she was invited. So I closed my email with, ‘maybe I’ll see you at Mick’s party.’

About twenty minutes later, I heard our administrator tell Mick that Christy needed directions to his place.

I had, inadvertently, made double plans for the night of the party. Mick—a divorced, retired Navy guy—had given me nearly a months notice. But I forgot about it earlier in he week when I agreed to see The Prestige that night with a friend. Not a big deal, I thought. The party started at six, so I could go, hang out for a couple of hours and head to the movie. Reasonable enough for an office party, right?

So, I run into Christy in the elevator and she says she’s working her other job until about ten and would head over after that. I tell her I wouldn’t be at the party that late. I don’t spell out that I have a movie to go to, because it seems rude to plan on leaving a party to see a movie. She tells me I don’t know how to party and I think she’s right but say nothing.

Saturday comes and I’m running late. My buddy picks me up at 6:30 and I realize I don’t know if it’s full-on food or just snacks. I don’t want to be the guy who eats the entire cheese-cube tray. I mean I don’t want to be the guy who eats the entire cheese-cube tray, again. So we swing by a beer and sandwich joint for a beer and sandwich. Then get a six-pack of Budweiser bottles for party favors. I tell a quick story about how someone at a party brought cans of beer and how strange I thought that was.

‘Who drinks beer in cans?’ I ask.

‘Most everybody,’ my buddy says. I think about it and realize that’s true. Then I buy a six-pack of Budweiser bottles.

It’s a little after seven when we arrive at the party.

Mick’s house surprises me. He’s a divorced, retired navy guy, as I mentioned before. He lives with his cousin and raises ferrets. Over his desk in the office he has a needlepoint image of a wizard holding a crystal ball, casting a spell. So I don’t know exactly what I was expecting—lots of cages and D&D books maybe? But instead it’s a beautiful home in the historic district with antique furniture and a huge flatscreen television that makes all the men envious. His backyard would shame even the Garden Channel.

We sit on the deck chairs in the backyard and he lets me play with the ferrets. He brings them out, one by one, and hands them to me. There is the little baby one, the white one, the fat one, the old one, then the blind one. Something on my leg feels wet, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t go potty on myself. Mick didn’t mention I held the incontinent one.

So all ten of us are having a nice time. My buddy and I have two beers each. Someone has a glass of wine. No one else is drinking. After about two hours, I ask the time. Hearing it’s slightly after nine, I say we’ve got to go. My buddy and I leave. Four other people make their exit at the same time. I don’t give that part of the evening another thought.

Until Monday morning, when the coffee maker explodes.

Part one of three: The Paintings

2006-10-24T06:02:00.000-04:00

July first—for the first time in my life—I got my own office. It was not huge. It was not a corner office, nor did it have any windows. But—for the first time in my life—I had my own office.

I had four empty walls, and nothing to put on them. Three years ago, I had noticed, in the far back corner of the medical school library, a series of five paintings stacked against the wall. Not displayed, not hung, just stacked against the wall. When I saw them, I pulled them out and examined them. They were amazing.

They were modern, cleaned-lined, and flat—almost colorfield—images of surgical scenes: A lymph node biopsy, a lipoma removal, the initial incision for a breast augmentation. One used a fractured, precision style. It showed a figure in scrubs walking toward you, all geometric angles and lines. The scrubs and the surgical mask hanging loosely around the neck were all that was represented: no skin, no head, just the scrubs and surgical mask.

So with this office to fill, I immediately thought of those unheeded paintings and went to the library and asked the head librarian if I could check them out for a year for my office.

Of course, nothing is easy. These paintings, it turned out, were donated by a foundation. There were serious concerns about what stipulations the foundation had made concerning them. To make matters worse, the head librarian was retiring and I doubt she wanted to jump the bureaucratic hoops to allow me to borrow the paintings.

So I was told that they were not permitted to loan out the paintings, but they would contact me if the situation changed.

I did not hold my breath.

No, This Is Halloween

2006-10-20T06:03:00.000-04:00

I was going through my bottom nightstand drawer, pulling things out and showing them to Pasteur, trying to figure out a Halloween costume. I pulled out a Fossil silver-faced watch, then a studded leather wrist band. I pulled out some extra-large flannel boxer shorts with the state university colors and symbol, an extra-small plain white t-shirt, and an earring, all the while suggesting costumes I could create from them.

‘Why do you,’ he interrupted my idea of a before & after diet person, ‘have all this random garbage in your nightstand?’

‘It stuff people have left here,’ I said, ‘after spending the night.’

‘Then,’ he said, laughing at me, ‘why don't you just go as every person you've slept with in the past three years.’

Why I am not Seinfeld

2006-10-17T19:02:00.000-04:00

This weekend the Marquee and I went to Atlanta and almost got into a bar fight.

Well, I suppose, technically, we did get into a bar fight, but no one was arrested or came out with visible scars or missing teeth, so in my book, we almost got in a bar fight.

It started when I, being charming, tried my hand at observational comedy.

We were talking to a couple of guys, Matt and Jason. It was clear Jason was well-past ready to head home, but was hanging out because Matt wanted to. Fair enough. So we’re chatting with them and also with Jessica, a very nice lawyer from Seattle, when some guy with a lip piercing comes up and starts open mouth kissing Matt—right in front of Jason. So this seems like a good time for three-jack-&-coke’s Erik to try his hand at observational comedy.

‘Have you ever noticed how when someone’s waiting at a bar for someone else to be ready to head home there’s always another shoe to drop? Take these two for example,’ this part of the comedy, it is important to point out, only occurred in my head. I then said, out loud, ‘Matt clearly doesn’t care at all about Jason.’

Admittedly, this is funny more in a context of hypothetically saying something. Saying such things out loud isn’t terribly clever. Since no one laughed, I turned from the group and started talking Jessica.

What I didn’t notice was Matt interrupted his kissing to say, ‘you better watch your fucking mouth.’

So I’m blithely facing Jessica when I’m shoved into her and her drink goes down her top and I hear the Marquee say, ‘Get over it you stupid asshole.’ I hear Matt say something and the Marquee continues ‘You want to take it outside? I’ll break you over my goddamn knee, fucker.’

Everyone is suddenly shoving and shouting obscenities. Jason is pulling Matt away from us and I’m trying to shield Jessica from any further assault.

And then it was over.

‘That was kind of weird,’ I said to Jessica. Then, laughing, to the Marquee, ‘Thank you for defending my honor.’

So we head to the bar to replace the drinks that were lost in the scuffle and I see a drag queen and say, ‘That’s an enormous head. I mean, even for a man.’

Secret Origins: The Encased Hippopotamus

2006-10-12T06:04:00.000-04:00

When I was eight, my father took my sister and me to the Field Museum, Chicago’s Museum of Natural History. We were going through the dioramas of African mammals and we saw the encased hippopotamus.

‘Isn’t he a funny looking animal,’ my father said, ‘'he just looks like a big pig, but he’s actually one of the most vicious animals in Africa. More people are killed by hippos than any other animal. They will charge even at a Jeep.’

This was important. It was the first time I realized that I knew more about a subject than my father did. I realized that he had confused an hippopotamus with a rhinoceros. I did not feel dizzy or nauseous. I stared at the glass encased hippopotamus and let my eyes change focus from it to the glass’s reflection of my father’s face as he went on talking about the hippo.

I straightened my back a little and thought about how this changed everything. I had convinced my mother to leave the Catholic Church several years earlier—perhaps a story for another time. By the time I was three, I had open contempt for the notion of Santa. But it had not occurred to me to question my father’s reliability. He was certainly real enough anyway and seemed to know quite a bit about many things. This was the moment, with my gaze continuing to oscillate between the hippopotamus and the glass reflection of my father, I began crafting my wings.

I had no idea at the time how waxen they were.

What's That? You Love Dinosour Comics too? Aww, Baby!

2006-10-11T05:42:00.000-04:00

Did I mention how much I love Dinosour Comics?

With Priests Like These, Who Need Athiests?

2006-10-09T18:31:00.000-04:00

I was driving past a church on Saturday and the marquee announced the Sunday Sermon's title, ‘Spiritual lessons from Superheroes.’

Now, I don't really know this, but I suspect every time a sermon like that is given, God dies a little bit.

Uncynical Wednesdays: Movies I love

2006-10-04T21:54:00.000-04:00

2 Girls in Love (1995), 8 1/2 Women (1999), 9 1/2 Weeks (1986), 12 Monkeys (1995), 13 Conversations About One Thing (2002), 25th Hour (2002), 200 Cigarettes (1999), 1984 (1984), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Abyss (1989), The Accused (1988), Adaptation (2002), The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1984), After Hours (1985), Airplane! (1980), Akira (1988), Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (1990), Alias Betty “Betty Fisher et Autres Histoires” (2001), Alice (1990), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Alien 3 (1992), Alien Nation (1988), Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), All About My Mother “Todo sobre mi madre” (1999), All of Me (1984), Altered States (1980), Amelie (2001), American Graffiti (1973), American History X (1998), American Pie (1999), American Psycho (2000), American Splendor (2003), An American Werewolf in London (1981), An Angel at My Table (1990), Angel Heart (1987), Angels in America (2003), The Animatrix (2003), Annie Hall (1977), Another Country (1985), Apocalypse Now (1979), The Aristocrats (2005), As Good as It Gets (1997), At Close Range (1984), Auntie Mame (1958), Bad Education “La Mala Educación” (2004), Bagdad Cafe (1988), Bananas (1971), Barcelona (1994), Barfly (1987), Barton Fink (1991), Batman (1989), Batman Begins (2005), Batman Returns (1992), Beautiful Girls (1996), Beautiful Thing (1996), Before Night Falls (2000), Being John Malkovich (1999), The Believer (2001), The Belly of an Architect (1987), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Best in Show (2000), Better Luck Tomorrow (2003), A Better Tomorrow “Ying huang boon sik” (1986), The Bicycle Thief “Ladri di biciclette” (1948), Big Fish (2003), The Big Lebowski (1998), The Big Picture (1989), Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), The Birds (1963), Black Hawk Down (2001), Blade Runner (1982), The Blair Witch Project (1999), Blazing Saddles (1974), Blood Simple (1984), Blue Velvet (1986), Bob Roberts (1994), Body Double (1984), Body Heat (1981), Boogie Nights (1997), Bound (1996), A Boy and His Dog (1975), Boys Don't Cry (1999), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Brazil (1985), The Breakfast Club (1985), Breaking the Waves (1996), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Bright Lights, Big City (1988), Broadcast News (1987), Brokeback Mountain (2005), The Broken Hearts Club (2000), The Brother From Another Planet (1984), Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Movie (1992), Bulworth (1998), California Suite (1978), Carnal Knowledge (1971), Carnival of Souls (1962), The Celluloid Closet (1995), Chicken Run (2000), Chinatown (1974), Citizen Kane (1941), Citizen Ruth (1996), Clerks (1994), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Clue (1985), The Company of Wolves (1984), Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), Contact (1997), The Contender (2000), The Conversation (1974), Cook, the Thief, His Wife, Her Lover (1989), The Cotton Club (1984), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Crimes of Passion (1985), Cronos (1993), Cross Creek (1983), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Cry Freedom (1987), Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Darkman (1990), Dazed and Confused (1993), Dead Man (1995), Dead of Winter (1987), Dead Ringers (1988), The Dead Zone (1983), Death and the Maiden (1994), Death of a Salesman (1985), Deathtrap (1982), The Deer Hunter (1978), Defending Your Life (1991), Deliverance (1972), Diner (1982), Do the Right Thing (1989), Doctor Zhivago (1965), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Dogfight (1991), Dogville (2004), Donnie Darko (2001), The Doom Generation (1995), The Doors (1991), Down With Love (2003), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), Dreamscape (1984), Drugstore Cowboy (1989), Drunken Master (2000), Easy Rider (1969), The Edge (1997), The Edward R. Murrow Collection (2005), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Election (1999), The Elephant Man (1980), Elizabeth (1998), The Emerald Forest (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), Equilibrium (2002), Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Everybody's All American (1988), Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex… (1971), Existenz (1999), Fame (1980), Fantasia (1940), Far from Heaven (2002), Fargo (1996), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Femme Fatale (2002), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), Fight Club (1999), A Fish Called Wanda (1988), Flirting with Disaster (1996), The Fly (1986), The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003), Frank Lloyd Wright (1998), Frogs (1972), From Hell (2001), Funny Girl (1968), Garden State (2004), Gattaca (1997), Get on the Bus (1996), Ghost in the Shell “Kokaku kidotai” (1995), Ghost World (2001), Go Fish (1994), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather, Part II (1974), The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), The Goodbye Girl (1977), Gorky Park (1983), Gosford Park (2001), The Graduate (1967), The Grifters (1990), Groundhog Day (1993), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), Hair (1979), Happiness (1998), Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), Harold and Maude (1971), Heathers (1989), Heist (2001), Hell House (2001), Henry & June (1990), High Fidelity (2000), The Hotel New Hampshire (1984), The Hours (2002), House of Games (1987), The House of Mirth “Chez les heureux du monde” (2000), How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), The Hunger (1983), I Am Trying to Break Your Heart “WilcoFilm” (2002), I Heart Huckabees (2004), I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988), I'm the One That I Want (2000), The Ice Storm (1997), An Ideal Husband (1999), If These Walls Could Talk (1996), If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000), Igby Goes Down (2002), Immortality “The Wisdom of Crocodiles” (2000), The Importance of Being Earnest (2002), In Cold Blood (1967), In the Company of Men (1997), Intacto (2001), Jackass: The Movie (2002), Jacob's Ladder (1990), Jaws (1975), The Jerk (1979), JFK (1991), Journeys with George (2002), Jungle Fever (1991), Kalifornia (1993), Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), The Killing Fields (1984), The King of Comedy (1983), Kissing Jessica Stein (2002), Kung Fu Hustle (2004), La Cage aux Folles (1979), La Femme Nikita (1990), Labyrinth (1986), The Lair of the White Worm (1988), The Last Supper (1996), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Legend of Drunken Master “Jui Kuen II”(1994), Life Is Beautiful (1997), The Limey (1999), The Lion in Winter (1968), Little Big Man (1970), Little Man Tate (1991), Live and Let Die (1973), Living Out Loud (1998), Logan's Run (1976), Lolita (1997), The Lord of the Rings (1978), The Lost Boys (1987), Lost Horizon (1937), Lost in America (1985), Lost in Translation (2003),Love and Death (1975), Ma Vie En Rose (1997), The Machinist (2004), Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991), Magnolia (1999), The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), The Man with Two Brains (1983), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Manhattan (1979), Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Married to the Mob (1988), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), MASH (1970), Matewan (1987), The Matrix (1999), The Matrix: Reloaded (2003), The Meaning of Life (1983), Medium Cool (1969), Memento (2000), The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc “Jeanne d'Arc” (1999), Metropolis (1927), Metropolitan (1990), A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982), Miller's Crossing (1990), Minority Report (2002), Miracle Mile (1989), The Mission (1986), Mo' Better Blues (1990), Mommie Dearest (1981), The Monster “Il Mostro” (1994), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Mother (1996), The Muppet Movie (1979), Murder by Death (1976), Murderball (2005), Muriel's Wedding (1994), My Bodyguard (1980), My Life as a Dog (1985), Napoleon Dynamite (2004), Nashville (1975), National Lampoon's European Vacation (1985), National Lampoon's Vacation (1983), The Natural (1984), Natural Born Killers (1994), Nick of Time (1995), A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (1988), Nine to Five (1980), North by Northwest (1959), Notorious (1946), Notorious C.H.O. (2002), Nurse Betty (2000), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Office Space (1999), Oldboy “Oldeuboi” (2003), On Golden Pond (1981), On the Waterfront (1954), Once Upon a Time in China (1991), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Orgazmo (1998), The Original Kings of Comedy (2000), Orlando (1992), Outland (1981), Paper Moon (1973), Paragraph 175 (2000), Parenthood (1989), Passion Fish (1992), La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Phenomenon (1996), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Pi: Faith in Chaos (1998), The Piano (1993), The Pillow Book (1997), Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987), Planet of the Apes (1968), The Player (1992), Pleasantville (1998), Point of Order (1964), Poison (1991), Poltergeist (1982), Postcards from the Edge (1990), Powaqqatsi (1988), Powder (1995), Power (1986), The Presidents: Republicans (1998), Pretty in Pink (1986), Prick Up Your Ears (1987), Primal Fear (1996), Princess Mononoke (1997), Private Benjamin (1980), Psycho (1960), Pulp Fiction (1994), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Purple Rain (1984), Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), Raging Bull (1980), Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Raising Arizona (1987), Rambling Rose (1991), Ran (1985), Rashomon (1950), Reagan: American Experience (1998), Reality Bites (1994), Rear Window (1954), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), The Ref (1994), Repo Man (1984), Requiem for a Dream (2000), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Restoration (1995), River's Edge (1986), Robin Hood (Disney), (1973), Roger & Me (1989), Roger Dodger (2002), Romancing the Stone (1984), Romeo + Juliet (1996), Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997), Rope (1948), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), Roxanne (1987), The Rules of Attraction (2002), Rumble Fish (1983), Run Lola Run (1998), Safe (1995), Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic (2005), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Say Anything (1989), Scanners (1981), Scarface (1983), School Daze (1988), The School of Rock (2003), Scotland, PA (2002), Screamers (1996), Secretary (2002), Serial Mom (1995), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), Seven (1995), Seven Samurai (1954), sex, lies, and videotape (1989), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Shallow Hal (2001), The Sheltering Sky (1990), Short Cuts (1993), Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Suprmasochist (1997), Sidewalks of New York (2000), Sideways (2004), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Silkwood (1983), A Simple Plan (1998), Sin City (2005), Six Degrees of Separation (1993), Sixteen Candles (1984), The Sixth Sense (1999), Slacker (1991), SLC Punk (1999), Sleeper (1973), Sling Blade (1996), Slums of Beverly Hills (1998), Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997), Snake Eyes (1998), Sneakers (1992), A Soldier's Story (1984), Some Kind of Wonderful (1987), Some Like It Hot (1959), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), Something Wild (1986), The Sound of Music (1965), South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (1999), Soylent Green (1973), Spider-Man (2002), Spirited Away “Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi” (2002), Splendor in the Grass (1961), St. Elmo's Fire (1985), Stand by Me (1986), Star Wars: Episode V: Empire Strikes Back (1980), Stealing Home (1988), The Straight Story (1999), Strange Days (1995), Strangers on a Train (1951), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Super Troopers (2002), Superman II (1980), Superman: The Movie (1978), Swimming to Cambodia (1987), Swingers (1996), Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance “Boksuneun naui geot” (2002), Take the Money and Run (1969), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Talk to Her “Hable Con Ella” (2002), Talking Heads: Stop Making Sense (1984), Taxi Driver (1976), The Terminator (1984), Terminator 2 (1991), Terms of Endearment (1983), Thank You for Smoking (2005), Thelma & Louise (1991), There's Something About Mary (1998), The Thin Red Line (1998), The Thing (1982), Things I Left in Havana (1997), Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her (2000), Thirteen Days (2000), This Boy's Life (1993), This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Three Kings (1999), Threesome (1994), Throne of Blood “Kumonosu Jo” (1957), ¡Tie Me Up! ¡Tie Me Down! (1990), Time After Time (1979), To Die For (1995), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Tootsie (1982), Total Recall (1990), Trainspotting (1995), The Triplets of Belleville (2003), The Trouble With Harry (1955), True Believer (1989), True Stories: Talking Heads (1986), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), Unbreakable (2000), The United States of Leland (2004), The Vanishing “Spoorloos” (1988), Velvet Goldmine (1998), Vertigo (1958), Videodrome (1983), Waiting for Guffman (1996), Waking Life (2001), Wall Street (1987), War Letters: American Experience (2002), The War Room (1993), Watership Down (1979), Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996), Whale Rider (2003), What Alice Found (2003), What Have I Done to Deserve This? “¿Qué he Hecho Yo Para Merecer Esto?!!” (1984), What's Up, Doc? (1972), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Wings of Desire (1987), Without You I'm Nothing (1990), Witness (1985), Wolfen (1981), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), The Work of Director Spike Jonze (2003), Working Girl (1988), The World According to Garp (1982), X-Men (2000), X2: X-Men United (2003), Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001), The Year of Living Dangerously (1983), Yojimbo the Bodyguard (1961), Young Frankenstein (1974), Z (1969), A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), Zelig (1983).

Secret Origins I

2006-10-02T19:33:00.000-04:00

Do you remember the first time you realized that you were different? That things were different for other people than they were for you? It wasn’t that rules didn’t apply to you; they just applied differently.

I was six when I first figured it out about myself, in the hayloft of my family’s farm—my feet perched on a crossbeam, heels and toes hanging over its edge. I watched the cattle twenty feet below me. I faced up and—arms outstretched—fell forward and arced out over the herd, swallows and sparrows took flight around me as I flew to the other side of the barn, barely aware of the rope harness my cousins had fashioned around my chest and shoulders.

The cattle spooked and shoved each other, beginning a slow stampede from the barn. My cousins pulled the rope and I flew upward. Grabbing another crossbeam, I pulled myself onto it.

I stood—arms akimbo—surveying the scene, well impressed with my feat.

It was my first realization that the laws of gravity were malleable. Though it had required my cousin’s technical expertise, a good deal of rope, and the hay pulley, those details seemed negligible and I wondered what other humanly limitations I would soon find ways to circumvent.

Ben Stiller is truly this generation’s Jerry Lewis.

2006-09-29T05:59:00.000-04:00

That’s all. I’m not bothered by it; I just think we need to come to terms with it and move on before he devises some sort of web-based telethon.

They call her Natasha but she looks like Elsie

2006-09-25T05:38:00.000-04:00

So I’m kissing and trying to get clothes off, but meeting all kinds of resistance. I stop and make eye contact.

‘What’s,’ I ask, ‘going on? ’

‘Have you ever,’ I’m asked, ‘heard the phrase, “why would he buy the cow when he can get the milk for free?”

‘I have no idea what that means,’ I say, ‘my family raises beef cattle. ’

Fame, It’s more fun with your friends

2006-09-21T06:17:00.000-04:00

One of the many things that PlanetDan is far too modest to mention is that he is a fucking rock star in Minneapolis.

We’re not out for two minutes when I hear someone shout ‘Dan.’ Dan dutifully stops as someone tells him how much she enjoys his site and how long she’d been reading it. Dan says something to her, undoubtedly polite. I introduce myself to her and she looks at me for a half second. T-bone hands her a credit card and tells her to get us some drinks, which she does.

‘Nice,’ I say, nodding at T-Bone. She comes back with our drinks and a second of what would become many rounds of Jaeger bombs.

Then someone else comes up to Dan, ‘I recognized you from your blog.’ He exchanges pleasantries and I start talking to her. She asks me a lot of questions about what Dan is really like and and how well I know him. We do shots together and I’m not sure what happens to her after that, but then someone else is trying to talk to Dan. She’s trying to get herself invited to an after party.

‘Look,’ I tell her, ‘his parties make Big Brothers’ video for ‘The Party is On’ look like my cousin’s bar mitzvah. If you want an invite, you’ll need to help get me to a store that sells body paint. We need both green and blue. And we need the big, jumbo sizes. There were so many people last night that we ran completely out, and there’s not even much yellow left. And let me tell you, Dan doesn’t want to see anyone in purple body paint.’ I pause and look around for my drink. After checking the bar and the table, Dan points to my hand and I find my drink. Leaning into her, practically whispering, I say, ‘He hates purple body paint. It’s just too painful for him to blog about. It’s even worse than soup.’

She turns to Dan and points at me, asking him something. I shoot her a smile. She walks away.

‘What was that about,’ Dan asks. I shrug.

Things get a little blurry after that, I remember something about getting into a fight with a bald man who refused to tattoo ‘Dan Forever’ on my neck.

The next morning over giant doughnuts Dan asked if I got that girl’s phone number.

‘What girl?’

‘That girl you pulled off me at the end of the night.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I say, shaking my head and sipping my coffee.

‘The girl you had your arms all over,’ he says, patiently. ‘The two of you were doing something with your phone.’

‘Nope,’ I say. Picking up my phone and scrolling through the names to demonstrate I recognize all the numbers.

It only takes a few scrolls to see, ‘ali msp.’ In the custom section it says, ‘tell dan to call me.’

I’m a SatelliteDan.

How I Invented French Kissing

2006-09-19T06:11:00.000-04:00

‘My favorite song’s Imagine’

‘That's great,’ I say, laughing. But the face doesn't give and the eyes don’t look knowing; they look dreamy. I stop laughing, ‘You're kidding, right?’

‘Olena Adams has this amazing version that makes me cry every time I hear it.’

At a dinner party it’s easy enough to create a distraction to get someone to quit talking. You can reach for your wine and allow your hand to venture into the path of the water glass that sits to the left and twenty degrees away from the table edge, just to the right of the dessert spoon’s handle.

But in a bar, knocking over a glass isn’t enough of a distraction: You have to fill their mouth with something. This bar didn't have peanuts, so I leaned in and did the job with my tongue.

That’s how the world learned about French Kissing, and it’s still a great way to stop someone cute from saying stupid things.

Airbag/How Am I Driving?

2006-09-18T06:12:00.000-04:00

When I visited Minneapolis PlanetDan, K*Mack and I went out for Mexican and I suspected we’d have a problem with gas. I didn’t suspect the gas would be carbon monoxide.

One thing you may not know about Dan is how narrow his garage is; it’s so narrow that you can’t open the passenger door in the garage. So I had developed the routine of getting out of the car while it was in the driveway, walking into the garage and standing by the basement door as he parked. But standing there as the car advanced reminded me too much of the Karma Police video and I started going into the house and waiting for him there.

So after the mexican restaurant, K*Mack and I wait for Dan in the basement while he parks the car. We watch the end of a movie of the week with Bionic Woman Lindsey Wagner, about a pregnant widow who learns to love again, an episode from the second season of Miami Vice, the one where Gina tricks a rapist into going after her so she can shoot him in her home, and then The 40 Year Old Virgin, which I refer to as The Dan Miller Story.

We got home from the restaurant before 10 and it’s nearly 1 am when Dan says, ‘What’s that beeping?’ I tell Dan that it’s just the movie. ‘No, it’s not,’ he says, getting up, looking a bit alarmed. ‘I think it’s my carbon monoxide detector.’

My first thought is, ‘that’s why I don’t have one of those things. Just another thing to malfunction and go off because its batteries need replacing,’ but I follow him down to the basement and—sure enough—the readout says 280 parts per million. At levels over 75 people start to feel symptoms. Levels over 200 can cause unconsciousness and/or death.

I walk to the garage and lean my ear to the door. He drives a car with an incredibly smooth ride and engine, so it takes some straining to hear that it is, in fact, still running.

‘Dan,’ I say, ‘I think you left your motor running.’

He walks to the door, takes a big gulp of air, runs into the garage, activates the garage door opener, shuts the car off, and runs back.

‘You don’t have to run.’ I say, ‘It doesn’t work like that. It’s a length of exposure thing.’

‘My lips are starting to swell up,’ he says, a bit panicked.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘you’ll be relieved to know that carbon monoxide doesn’t cause lip swelling.’

During that brief opening of the basement door, the carbon monoxide level in the basement jumps up to 370. We move the detector into the kitchen, it’s only 50 there. In the living room where we had been watching television, it’s less than 20.

‘No one’s calling the fire department,’ I say. With levels so low in the area where we had been watching television, we could take care of this on our own. EMS would be obliged to swing us by the ED and we’d get arterial blood gases to establish that we had not had a sufficient exposure to suffer any serious effects.

K*Mack, Dan and I put fans in the windows around the house and in the garage door. The levels drop to below 20—even in the basement—before Steve Carell loses his cherry. (Spoiler. Sorry.)

Since we decided to leave the doors open overnight to ensure the gas didn’t reaccumuliate, Dan stayed up to gaurd K*Macks door.

‘You realize, Dan,’ I tell him before I head off to bed, ‘that if we’d died USA Today would run the story as an internet cautionary tale: Double Blogger Suicide in Twin Cities.’

I & O

2006-09-14T06:21:00.000-04:00

For the great bulk of the summer I had assumed that the headaches were from reading 40-80 pages of medical reviews each day. I suspected the tearing eyes and vague sense of disorientation were from processing the enormous information load through serial naps and caffeine supplements.

But the boards came—thankfully—and—just as thankfully— also went. And the headaches persisted.

When I turned on my computer last week, this list was saved as a Word document on the desktop. I know who put it there, but I don’t know how.

I post it with the hope that doing so will prompt them to leave me in peace for a while.

In	Out
The Economist	NY Times
June 17, 2007	January 1, 2000
Videogames	The Novel
Bathing Regularly	Ethan Hawke
Phone sex	Threeways
MRSA	MSSA
Re-evaluating definitions	The persistance of memory
Fun, natural fun!	Sophistry
Fetishism	Animism
Blackouts	MADD
Eczema	Psoriasis
Bed bugs	Bacteriophages
Riemann sums	Lucky guesses
FFXI	WoW
Galapagos	Catalina
Friends	Lovers
Girls Are Pretty	Lifehacker
Barack Obama	Kathrine Harris
The Sundays	Artic Monkeys
your own voice	best. jargon. ever.
Okra	Eggplant
Asexuals	Bisexuals
Ancho	Chipotle
Aaron Eckhart	Brittney Spears

Uncynical Wednesday

2006-09-13T06:09:00.000-04:00

2006-09-11T05:47:00.001-04:00

Here Comes Your Man

2006-06-04T08:21:00.000-04:00

Coming the second week of September:

New Stories!

A return to my ‘earlier, funnier work,’ honoring a request for ‘more In/Out, less In & Out,’ and an exhaustive post on how my name is Erik, not Eric.

For those of you interested in more from this season, you can read—or re-read—the entire second season by clicking the archived Review of Symptoms to the right. Rather than archive them by month, they are divided by titles: Baseline, Circadia, Homeostasis, Symptoms, and Fulminance. First season archives are still organized by month at the bottom of the page.

I’ve also written a little synopsis about the source material for the post titles. There’s one for Baseline, Circadia, A Shift in the Homeostasis, The Symptoms Begin, and Fulminance. There’s also information on the music used for the soundtracks.

2006-04-28T06:33:00.000-04:00

What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?

2006-04-27T06:16:00.000-04:00

I’ve returned home and am searching through CD’s that I don’t play much. I see Leonard Cohen, Me’Shell NdegéOcello, Neil Young, and The Jody Grind. I pull out covers with images of the Union Jack, half-manikins, and 1960’s pin-up boys. I pop in Suicidal Tendencies and start it up while thumbing through other discs.

I reach underneath my bed, pulling out shoeboxes, small bags, and stacks of papers. Wisps of dust—too large to be called wisps, really—waft out and cling to my scrubs. Post-call mornings residents usually suffer from the triad of halitosis, narcosis, and priapism. Today, mine is marked by rhinorrhea, nausea, and palpitations.

The boxes I’m opening only have shoes in them. The bags have screws, electrical wires and used paint brushes. I begin going through the papers, but they’re just old undergraduate essays.

I move to the living room and begin pulling books from the shelves. Ionesco Beckett and Sheppard fall to the floor as I search behind their group. I thumb briefly through Miller. I see Ellis, but don’t pick him up. I move down and flip through the pages of Amis and Camus, letting loose sheets and notes fall out. I’m remembering bits and pieces from them. Sketches of ideas are scribbled on the backs of receipts for coffee and beer, airplane tickets, and grocery lists. (‘When did I need phosphorus-free detergent and a pizza stone?’ I wonder, before moving on.)

I remove the cushions from the couch and check the crevices. A dollar forty-seven in loose change and two pens. I search again. My hand singles in on a small rectangular shape—my fingers feeling its openable rim—and I grow excited. I try to grasp around it, but it’s deep. I use my other hand to force open the springs so I can reach further inside. I tease out a corner, clasp onto it and try to pull it from the couch, but it falls from my grasp and deeper inside. I can no longer touch it. I’m sweating and the dust from under the bed has caused some lachrymosis.

I’m inturrupted by a knock on the door. Looking out the window, I see Merteuil standing on my back porch. She sees me and lifts her hands, dangling a six-pack in one hand and a McDonald’s bag in the other, saying ‘Ready for some beer and McMuffins?’

I open the door for her and walk into the living room, turning on the television. Merteuil steps over the CD’s, books, and videotape strewn around the room.

‘What the fuck happened in here?’ she asks, returning some of the cushions to the couch. I grab a beer and sort though some of the stuff on the floor. I tell her about the Gosling’s death.

‘Fuck me,’ she says when I’ve finished. It’s an expletive, not a request. There’s a moment before she says, ‘You know what your problem is?’

‘Christ,’ I say, biting into a McMuffin and flipping channels. ‘If I say yes will that stop you from telling me? You’re a surgeon, not a psychiatrist.’

I hold the channel on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

‘You really pissed Pasteur off the other night, Erik.’ she says. ‘He’s supposed to be your friend. Have you noticed you get along with strangers: Nurses, clerks, techs, even docs from other specialties?’

‘Are you trying,’ I ask her, ‘to do the routine where you talk a lot of obvious shit to get my guard down?’

She doesn’t say anything for a while.

‘When I die,’ Betty White—as Sue Ann Nevins—is saying. ‘I want to be cremated and have my ashes thrown on Robert Redford.’

I laugh and Merteuil looks from the screen to me

‘You love her, don’t you?’ she says.

‘Stockholm?’ I say, shrugging, ‘sure.’

‘I mean Sue Ann.’ she says. She knows my drunken confessions; she knows the answer to this question. I’m trying to ignore her. I finish my second beer and grab a third.

‘If you want to shame someone, Erik, shame yourself. You love her,’ she says, motioning to Sue Ann, ‘but you’re the complete opposite. Let’s face it, you aren’t half the badass you think you are.’

I change the channel: Columbo.

‘Your lucky day,’ Merteuil says, ‘two heroes in two minutes time.’

‘If you think,’ I say, ‘that’s why I like her, you’ve missed the point.’

‘No, I haven’t. I get the whole Columbo thing,’ she says, then leans in and practically whispers, ‘but you’re the opposite of what you want to be.’

I grunt.

‘Patients,’ I say, ‘want shamans and gods.’

‘Just one thing I can’t quite figure out,’ Columbo says, turning around, after talking to the suspect.

We watch the rest of the show in silence.

‘You’re a pretty smart cookie,’ Merteuil says, standing up to leave as the credits start. She kisses my forehead, saying, ‘you’ll figure it out.’

I blink at her for a moment. She grabs her keys and walks out. I sit on the couch for a while, looking at the mess I’ve made—books, papers, and cushions still on the floor—before going to sleep.

A few weeks later I’ll get the shit beat out of me. A few days after that, I stop shaving my upper lip.

Trouble Sleeping

2006-04-26T10:42:00.000-04:00

This post has a soundtrack click here to hear it.

The HIV Gosling has continued to deteriorate. He’s now on a venturi mask at maximum oxygen concentration. The sound of the oxygen rushing into his mask makes it difficult to hear his weakened, whisper of a voice and he’s too short of breath to repeat himself.

I’ve discussed life support with him and the Geese several times. Part of the problem with pneumocystis is how friable it makes the lungs. A ventilator will likely rip his lungs open, collapsing them. I explain that if we put him on the ventilator, it’s extremely unlikely that he’ll ever be taken off of it.

I also explain that it’s probably the only chance he has at living much past tomorrow. I tell them he’s dying and recommend we try to make him comfortable during the process.

Neither the Geese nor the Gosling are willing to make a decision. They want to make the decision tomorrow.

‘What if he needs it tonight?’ I ask.

‘We’ve got family coming in tomorrow, keep him off of it tonight,’ the Goose, Sheri, says.

My forehead aches when she says this.

I close my eyes and run the Next of Kin algorithm again to ensure that she’ll be the decision maker when he cannot make his own. But I’ve run it twice already and know she’s the next of kin. Though the Gosling originally mentioned his ex-boyfriend, that guy never showed up and the Gosling began deferring to Sheri.

‘Well, putting him on life support isn’t something I’m going to do willy-nilly,’ I say. ‘I’m not going to do it unless I think he’s going to die without it.’

‘Don’t let it come to that,’ she says.

I look at the Gosling, looking even gaunter than when he first arrived. His hair’s greasy from his constant bouts with sweating and then chilling down. He’ll go apneic briefly, then breathe rapidly for a bit, the rate slowing, slowing, then apneic for a moment, then repeat the cycle.

‘I don’t know that I can prevent it,’ I say.

Something changes in her at that moment. For the first time since I’ve known her, her face weakens. For the first time since I have known her, she reaches out and touches me, taking my hand with both of hers. She says one word.

‘Please.’

I’m filled with revulsion. She hates me. Her effort to appeal to me to save her brother repulses me. My only power is to ease or prolong her brother’s agony.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ I say and extricate my hand from hers and myself from the room.

I’m overnight in the hospital that night and quite busy with new patients. I try to nap at 10pm, but get only fifteen minutes before a diabetic crackwhore comes into the ED in ketoacidosis. She does this once or twice per month. The ED doc makes the running joke about trying to figure out how to combine insulin with cocaine to keep her healthy.

I’m writing her admission orders around 11pm, when I get a call from the Gosling’s nurse. His breathing seems to be worsening. I order an ABG and some stat Nebulizer treatments.

On my way back to the MICU, I swing by his room. He’s confused, can’t even get a single word out, but maintains eye contact with me. Clinically, he’s worsening, but his ABG’s no worse than earlier in the day. I adjust him to enhance the anatomy of efficient breathing. I feel nauseous and uneasy. I should either be intubating him or giving him opiates.

In the MICU a patient with a subdural bleed has started seizing and is in status epilepticus. The MICU nurse and I work together to break the seizure. When he comes out of it, the nurse and I get him to the CT scanner to see if the bleed has significantly worsened.

It’s nearly 2am when I get a chance to break for a midnight snack—onion rings. I get another call from the Gosling’s nurse. She tells me he’s become agitated and confused and has been pulling the oxygen mask off his face. She’s spending all of her time in his room reapplying the mask.

I go up and examine him, putting the mask back on him. His O2 sat is in the high 80’s with the oxygen mask. Without it, it quickly drops to a level incompatible with life. His arms are weakly flailing, trying to remove the mask. His eyes are panicked and locked on me.

‘You need this,’ I tell him, in a soft, reassuring voice. ‘Don’t take it off. It’s keeping you alive.’

His hands continue to reach up toward the mask. I hold his hands by the bed to prevent this.

Should I make the confession now? Can you already see what’s going on, despite my lack of details? Is it obvious to everyone but me?

‘Get the restraints.’ I say to the nurse. She gets the restraints and ties his arms to the side of the bed. His oxygen sat’s stay in the upper 80’s now with the mask safely in place. He’s so exhausted himself in the struggle that he’s asleep now.

The CT of the subdural patient is relatively unchanged. I call the neurosurgeon and we review the scan together. My intern pages me with questions about a hypertensive patient and I tell him what meds to order. The Orthopods call me and ask me to do a pre-op evaluation on a hip fracture that they want to take to the OR in the morning.

At 4am I look in on the Gosling. He’s rapid panting like a big dog in the summer’s heat. His eyes are wide open, but not focused on anything. His hands are straining against the restraints, trying to reach his mask. This continues throughout the night.

At 7am, my intern, the bumbling one, shows up.

‘It looks like he’s trying to take the oxygen off,’ he says.

I explain that when patients are delirious they try to remove all the medically invasive tubes from themselves. I explain that it’s a predictable pattern.

‘But he’s not going for the IV’s or the Foley,’ he says, his voice politely lilting to suggest a question. But it isn’t a question. It’s obvious. The Gosling’s staring directly at me.

Nausea rolls over me and my stomach and bowels tighten into stone.

I call the Geese into the hospital. When they arrive, we talk at the bedside.

‘He wants the oxygen off. I need to make him comfortable. Now.’ I tell them. Sheri looks at the Gosling. She’s not crying, but clearly only because of extreme effort. She nods and goes to her brother.

I go to the nursing station and begin writing orders for a fentanyl drip. While I’m talking to the nurse, one of the Geese comes up to me.

‘He’s changed his mind,’ she says, ‘we told him his aunt and uncle are driving down this weekend, so he wants to stay on the oxygen for two more days.’

I close my eyes and rub my forehead.

Another of the Geese comes out of the room and looks at me expectantly.

I walk into the room.

‘Just the oxygen,’ Sheri says, crying and holding his hand, ‘not the ventilator or intubation.’

‘You think’ I ask, genuinely, ‘that he can make decisions right now and he wants to stay on oxygen for two more days?’

‘Yes,’ Sheri says.

The Gosling is panting into the mask, his head’s turned to the right and he’s looking down. He’s developed a patchy beard since he’s been in the hospital. His hands are still tied at his sides.

‘Well, then,’ I say, ‘I can untie his hands and he won’t remove the mask.’

Sheri looks at me and then at the restraints. Neither one of us say anything, waiting to see who will call the other’s bluff.

I walk over to his side, release the Velcro and unfasten the clip of the restraint off his right hand. He raises it and pulls the oxygen mask off his face and over his head with clear purpose.

‘No, Bobby,’ one of the geese says, crying, ‘don’t.’

He drops the oxygen mask off the bed and his hand falls to his side. I release his other hand. I walk behind the bed and turn off the oxygen valve. Without the oxygen rushing through the tubing, the room becomes quiet and funereal.

I come out from behind the bed and look at the Gosling, surrounded by the Geese. He’s staring at me.

He lifts his hand and slowly—ever so tenderly—raises his middle finger directly at me. He holds it—firmly in the air—for nearly five seconds, his eyes locked on mine as I stare at the finger. Sheri sees what he’s doing and closes her hands over his.

I take a deep breath and turn to leave the room. One of the Geese is in the doorway. As I walk past her, she mutters one word, ‘murderer.’

My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys

2006-04-25T06:01:00.000-04:00

The Marquee and I are eating Barbeque at KC’s and he’s telling me about the disaster of Merteuil’s night out. She and the Tech both got drunk early on. Her husband and the Tech’s girlfriend—who were not drunk—got bored and left early. Not only did Merteuil not spoil things with the Tech’s sideline hook-up girls, she and the Tech went home with one of them. It’s unclear to the Marquee whether or not they had a three-way.

‘You don’t suppose her husband’s sleeping with the Tech’s new girlfriend?’ I ask the Marquee, dipping my pulled pork sandwich in the sauce.

‘The way Merteuil tells it,’ the Marquee says, ‘hubby ain’t got no sex drive.’

‘Maybe just not with her,’ I say, ‘Maybe he’d become Keith Moon if he was with someone else.’

The Marquee doesn’t buy my argument. I dig into my baked beans.

‘Here comes your man,’ the Marquee says.

I look up and around and don’t see anyone. He nods at the television and I see they’re playing Columbo.

‘I love this guy,’ I say, grinning.

‘How’s Birmingham,’ the Marquee asks.

‘Haven’t heard anything,’ I say, shrugging and putting more of the sandwich in my mouth. ‘Saw him out the other night. He gave an upright, non-moving wave and then looked away. I guess that’s done.’

‘Too bad. He was cool,’ he says. ‘Stockholm?’

‘She’s going to stay in Montgomery with her ex-boyfriend,’ I say, chewing and half-laughing, ‘Make me an angel that flies to Montgomery.’

‘And dear Chicago?’ the Marquee asks, grabbing some of my fries.

‘I think the thing you said was true,’ I say, ‘I’m going to die alone and sad.’

‘There must be some mistake,’ the Marquee says, opening up his sandwich and examining its contents, ‘I didn’t order this with extra melodrama.’

‘You don’t like music, do you?’ I laugh, swigging back the rest of my beer. ‘Let’s go back to my place. I’ll play you some you might enjoy and we can drink bourbon.’

He belches and agrees.

Hejira

2006-04-24T06:39:00.000-04:00

I met the ovarian cancer patient only once before and it was about two weeks ago. I met her oncologist in the elevator a few days later. I informed him that she had just come into my care.

‘I wouldn’t,’ he cautioned me, ‘waste too much energy developing a relationship with her. She won’t be around for long.’

I laughed, saying ‘ouch.’

She’s in my clinic exam room now, waiting to be seen. I go in the room and she’s still concerned about her blood pressure, which is not ideal, but not acutely high.

‘I noticed,’ I tell her, changing the subject, ‘that you were in the hospital this weekend.’

She nods.

‘What happened?’

‘I’s vomiting all weekend,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t keep nothing down.’

‘Did you get chemo on Friday?’

‘Yes sir,’ she says.

‘Were you vomiting before the chemo?’

‘No,’ she says.

‘You understand that the chemo isn’t going to cure you,’ I ask her again. ‘Just perhaps keep you around a bit longer or be more comfortable.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well,’ I say, taking a deep breath, ‘it appears the chemo isn’t making you more comfortable. In fact, it seems just the opposite is happening.’

She doesn’t say anything. I consider how to proceed. In the spring and fall sometimes people will take chemo to extend things a few weeks, to see someone graduate or make it through one more Christmas. When it happens in the winter or summer, sometimes people have some other short-term goal.

‘Is there some big event coming up for your family?’ I ask. ‘Someone pregnant or coming home from somewhere? Some particular thing you are hoping to see before you die?’

‘No,’ she says, a little surprised.

‘You understand,’ I say, perhaps too firmly, but wanting to make myself clear, ‘that you are going to die.’

Our eyes lock on each other. Neither of us says anything or moves. Like a child’s contest or a war negotiation, we’re waiting to see who blinks first.

‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ she says, harshly, ‘Cry?’

‘No. I want you to understand there’s nothing your cancer doctor or I can do to stop you from dying. I want to change the focus of your care from trying to extend your life by a few days or weeks to making your remaining time as comfortable as we can.’

She doesn’t say anything.

After a bit, I take my stethoscope and listen to her heart and lungs. I begin writing my note. After a bit, she begins talking.

‘I ain’t afraid of dying. I lived a good Christian life. I read my bible. I go to church. I don’t mess with no alcohol or smoke no cigarettes. I ain’t never gone out and messed about.’

She frames these as criteria for not fearing death, but there’s anger in her voice. They’re objections to her diagnosis. They are eminently logical.

There’s more silence.

‘Do you remember when I first met you, I said you seemed older than you were?’ she says.

‘Yes, ma’am. I remember.’

She stares at me now. I’m not sure what she wants me to say.

‘Alright then,’ she looks at the ground. She’s disgusted and finished with me and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say, what she wants me to do.

I get up and through the closed door of the exam room, I hear her say ‘Damn Yankee.’

I sit down with a group of nurses in their break room. One of them is talking about a doctor that she finds attractive, but doesn’t know his name. The other nurses are trying to figure out who she’s talking about. When I join them they pretend they’re going to change the subject for a moment or two, but revert to the game of twenty questions quickly enough.

Eventually we figure out that she’s talking about Pasteur. The girls are in agreement that he’s pretty hot and, they claim, has a great ass.

‘Erik can hook you up,’ one of the nurses says. I chuckle, eating a peanut butter cookie. The nurse is—not unattractive but—not Pasteur’s type: she’s about twenty pounds past the technical definition of obese.

‘You don’t want to go out with Pasteur,’ I tell her.

‘Why not.’

‘He’s kind of a flake,’ I say, which is true enough.

‘So?’ one of the nurses says, ‘We’re not looking for a soul mate.’

‘We’re just looking,’ one of the other nurses says, ‘for a check-mate.’

The other nurses give a bit of a disgusted groan when she says this.

I laugh, saying ‘ouch.’

An half hour later, I’m walking through the ED and I see the ovarian cancer patient laying in one of their stretchers. The timing is so tight I know she went directly out of my office and into the ED. I shake my head and avoid eye contact.

I laugh, saying ‘ouch.’

Secret of the Easy Yoke

2006-04-20T05:50:00.000-04:00

Frank Sinatra used to say he orchestrated his albums so their timing would match the timing of bringing a date home.

You walk into your apartment, put on the LP and pour the drinks, make some small talk, then move to the couch and slip off your shoes as the conversation becomes more intimate.

It was when she’d be wanting to be kissed that you’d heighten her tension by leaving her to flip the record. Perhaps you’d return to the couch. But perhaps she’d follow you to the turntable and you’d kiss her, leading her to your bedroom…

I can say fairly certainly that Pedro the Lion doesn’t orchestrate their CD’s thusly.

I’m on top of Stockholm and we’re at the point in the evening beyond the kissing and small talk. Both of us concentrating on this moment. David Bazen begins slowly bleating, ‘Suddenly, I don’t love you at all… I don’t love you at all… I don’t love you at all…’

I stop and sit on the side of the bed, exhaling the words ‘Fuck me.’

‘What?’ Stockholm says, confused.

‘It was an expletive,’ I say, walking to the stereo to change the CD, ‘not a request.’

When I get back into bed, I start rubbing her back and we talk, listening to Nina Simone’s Pastel Blues. She tells me she’s going to Montgomery for the weekend.

‘Doesn’t your ex-boyfriend,’ I ask her, ‘live in Montgomery?’

‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘it’s no big deal. I’m just going to see my dog.’

I lift her hair and kiss the back of her neck, not understanding that this is the last night she’ll ever spend in my bed.

Seen the Doctor

2006-04-19T18:23:00.000-04:00

When the Marquee’s in the Men’s room, Dr. Pasteur walks into the bar and joins me and Merteuil. I call for an extra mug and pour him a beer as he tells us about a primary adrenal insufficiency he diagnosed today. He tells us about the patient’s symptoms and how he figured out it was adrenal insufficiency, but then he told me about the lab results.

‘That isn’t primary,’ I correct him, ‘it’s secondary.’

‘No,’ he explains to me how he and his attending had discussed the results and made the diagnosis.

‘Your attending’s wrong,’ I say. ‘It’s secondary.’

Pasteur asks Merteuil what she thinks.

‘I haven’t thought about it for a long time,’ she says. ‘I think it’s secondary, but I’m not sure.’

‘A Goddamn surgeon can recognize it’s secondary,’ I tell Pasteur.

The Marquee comes back and Pasteur tells him the lab results.

‘Primary,’ Pasteur asks, ‘or secondary?’

‘Secondary,’ the Marquee says definitively. I raise my eyebrows at Pasteur and hold my hands palms up, come-unto-me style.

Merteuil changes the subject, telling us her tech is going out tonight with his new girlfriend. She knows that two of his regular hook-up chicks are going to be out tonight too.

‘I’m going to be starting some shit tonight,’ she says, smiling. She explains she’s going to make sure his other girls find out he has a new girlfriend, effectively knocking them out of his picture. ‘Once I’ve junked his other options for regular poozle, he can’t fuck things up for me and my husband, cause it’ll fuck things up for him and his girlfriend.’

Pasteur grunts. We look at him.

‘You guys are right,’ he says. ‘It is secondary.’

There’s a moment of silence while we figure out he’s talking about our last conversation.

‘Erik,’ the Marquee says, setting me up to do the Broadcast News bit, ‘it must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you're the smartest person in the room’

‘I rather enjoy it’ I say, laughing. ‘How is it for you?’

‘Quite nice,’ he says, ‘thank you for asking.’

‘You guys are assholes,’ Pasteur says, pouring himself the remainder of the pitcher of beer.

‘He’s drinking our beer,’ the Marquee says, ‘and somehow we’re the assholes?’

‘Typical,’ I say, reaching into my pocket as my cell phone issues its voicemail tone. I look at the screen and see it’s from the Firefighter.

He went to see the doctor, who told him it wasn’t herpes. The relief and elation in his voice is as jubilant as the bass guitar in XTC’s Garden of Earthly Delights. He says his doctor told him it was bullous impetigo.

I think it out: clear vesicles on a crusty erythematous base. Fuck me. How fucking obvious. How could I have missed it?

And while I’ve never been so delighted to be wrong, I’m horrified at the night I’ve put the firefighter through. My stomach turns inside out. Misdiagnosing an STD kind of cuts into your chances of winning back someone’s heart.

I tell Merteuil and Pasteur what happened with the firefighter last night and give the Marquee the update.

‘Those Family Practitioners,’ the Marquee says when I tell him the diagnosis, ‘see so much of that shit.’

‘On the plus side,’ Pasteur says, delighted at my shame, ‘after he finishes the antibiotics, you can go back to sucking it.’

‘Ever the charmer,’ I say to him, laughing half-heartedly, closing my eyes to think.

‘You know your problem?’ Pasteur asks me.

I open my eyes and look at him.

‘You believe your own hype,’ he says to me. ‘I’ll give it to you, a good portion of the time you’re right. You pick up on things I miss. But you miss things, too. You’re wrong a significant portion of the time. So you save some lives,’ he leans in and quiets his voice. ‘Guess what, Erik? It’s your fucking job. There’d be something wrong if you didn’t have rescue stories to tell. You think I don’t have families that kiss my ass when they see me? We all do. But we don’t let it go to our head the way you do. We don’t pretend that we’re gods from on high, giving fire to mankind like we’re Proteus.’

‘You mean Prometheus,’ I say, finishing my beer and getting up from the table, ‘I’ve got to go meet Stockholm. Merteuil, good luck with your plan tonight.’

As I’m walking out the door, I hear Merteuil say, ‘I can’t believe none of us have worked in a good Stockholm Syndrome joke.’

The Soft Bulletin

2006-04-18T06:17:00.000-04:00

Stockholm and I are supposed to meet tonight, but when I get home from work the Firefighter calls.

‘Hey Erik,’ he says and asks me for a favor. ‘This is rather embarrassing.’

He tells me he’s developed a rash ‘down there.’ He has several painless bumps over a single red area at what sounds like the corona. He noticed it about five days ago. He admits to only one sexual encounter in the past six months and it occurred one week before the rash came up.

‘Do you want me,’ I ask, ‘to look at your penis?’

We both laugh, uncomfortably.

‘Well, I can see my doctor tomorrow,’ he says, ‘but the more I think about it, the more I’m freaking out about it.’

I tell him to come over, then call Stockholm and reschedule our date for tomorrow, telling her something’s come up. I don’t tell her it’s my ex-boyfriend’s diseased penis.

When the Firefighter gets to my house he tells me the full story.

He knows exactly one other firefighter whom he suspected to be gay and they’ve always been friendly, if not exactly friends. So he suggested they meet for a beer and ended up meeting the firefighters’s ‘friend.’ So far reasonable enough, right? But then he and the other guy’s friend start playing footsie under the table. At some point they exchange numbers and the friend started text messaging him the next day, eventually texting him an invitation to his apartment.

So he goes over, expecting to meet—he tells me—them both, but it’s just the friend. Blah blah-blah. Now he has a rash.

The differential for sexually transmitted diseases that cause a rash is not terribly long: Syphilis, Chancroid, Herpes, Donovanosis, Lymphogranuloma venereum. Some things can also enter the differential, depending on the history and appearance of the lesion: Mulluscum contagiosum, HPV, Scabies and trauma (carpet burn/denim sore).

Of those, what will you actually see in practice? Well, in my practice, I see none of them. Right now, I specialize in sepsis, crack chest pain, and brain hemorrhages. I only see STD’s in patients with advanced AIDS, where they take on Three Mile Island proportions.

But doctors who do see genital rashes mostly see rashes caused by Herpes. The next most common thing they see is—well—herpes. After that, they occasionally see herpes. Syphyllis and what-have-you are all pretty rare. Herpes is pretty common.

We go into my bathroom and I turn the lights up bright, I get gloves out of my medical bag and put them on. I sit on the edge of the bathtub and have him drop his shorts while standing directly in front of me.

The Firefighter’s lesion looks worse than this but not as bad as this. There’s a collection of clear vesicles over an area of erythema, but the whole thing looks crusted over. The vesicles look like herpes. But herpes doesn’t crust over.

‘Have you been putting anything on this?’ I ask.

‘Most everything I can find in the medicine cabinet,’ he says, embarrassed and horrified at the situation.

That would explain the crusting. Convincing for herpes now, except for one thing.

‘It doesn’t hurt or sting or even itch?’ I ask.

‘Nope,’ he says.

Herpes hurts. It’s painful. I roll the shaft of his penis up with my gloved hand. I also check for any inguinal lymphadenopathy. Nothing.

I sigh his name sadly, squinting at the lesion, and say ‘this looks like herpes.’

He grunts, numbly.

I have him pull his shorts up as I remove my gloves and wash my hands. He walks back into the den.

‘Mind if pour myself a drink,’ he asks and pours us both some scotch.

I check my copy of Fitzpatrick’s Atlas of Dermatology and my Hopkins ABX Guide. I call the Marquee and run the case by him, hoping I can come up with a convincing alternative diagnosis.

‘I don’t know, dude,’ the Marquee says, ‘it sounds pretty convincing.’

I tell the Firefighter that I might be wrong and that he should see his family practitioner the next day. He agrees to do so, but I know he doesn’t take my protest very seriously.

‘I suspect you’re right,’ he says. Mulling some idea, while the scotch warms his mouth. He laughs a bit. He tells me a story from his college years about a friend who pursued someone for nearly two years and when she finally slept with him, ‘all she got out of it was a bad case of herpes. We laughed about it then… I’m feeling a little differently about that story now.’

‘I don’t mean to sound,’ he says, ‘like I am feeling a lot of self-pity here. But since I decided to come out, I’ve been thinking how I was finally going to explore this and have some fun. That’s not going to happen now.’

I refill our glasses.

‘I even rented some gay porn last Saturday. It was good’ he says, with strong emphasis on the word good. ‘It was called The Young Gods. I was jerking to it for over two hours.’

‘Two hours?’ I say, incredulously, ‘porn flicks don’t last two hours.’

‘Um,’ he says, shamefacedly, ‘I rewound some of the scenes and watched them twice.’

‘Two hours?’ I say. ‘What’d you use for lube?’

‘Spit and pre-cum’

‘For two hours?’ I say, trying not to sound like a parent scolding a child. A friction rub wouldn’t explain the vesicles, but it might explain some of it. ‘Make sure you tell your doctor tomorrow about that.’

He remains unconvinvced and by the end of the evening, we polish off most of my bottle of Glenlivet 21.

The Candyman

2006-04-17T06:14:00.000-04:00

I'm standing in line at the Walgreen's, buying yet another padlock. I’m forever leaving them on the bench at the locker room and though there’s always a large collection of padlocks in the lost and found box, none of them are ever mine. So I’m continually replacing them.

I’m also buying a box of condoms.

This is the second time in as many months that I’ve been at this drugstore buying this combination of items. When I get to the teller it’s the same woman who rang up my padlock and box of condoms as last time.

She gives me a dirty look.

‘Oh,’ I say, refusing to be shamed be this half-toothless ashtray of a woman. I grab a bag of taffy from the display and place it on the counter, ‘I'll also take one of these.’

When I get outside, I check my messages. Again. Still nothing.

Chicago hasn’t returned my calls since our last date, which is not that big of a surprise.

But neither has Birmingham, and I have no idea why. Things were cool the last time I saw him, but he hasn’t returned my calls in over a week.

‘Perhaps he’s working on an undercover case,’ I tell myself, even though I know he doesn’t work undercover.

I know that both of them will be the roads less traveled, at least traveled by me.

I pop some taffy in my mouth and think of the toothless drugstore clerk, while dialing Stockholm’s number to confirm our date for tonight.

Humble Daisy

2006-04-14T01:24:00.000-04:00

Now, folks, you might know a mess about pride and uppitiness, but I tell you what… our boy Erik’s ’bout one queen shy of a royal flush in that department. And the thing about all this pride, what the fancified like’n to call narcissism, is it’s a fragile house of cards and his’s ’bout as high as Babel’s tower.

What he don’t know is, his best hand’s already been played. The cards he thinks he’s got in his hand are about to be played against him and there’s a breeze starting to blow.

Do you see some of those cards startin’ to waver? How many you think need give way before the whole mess tumbles down?

Stay set, folks, and we’ll see how it’ll play out.

She is Always in My Hair

2006-04-13T05:47:00.000-04:00

[At a bar, Merteuil is telling Pasteur and I about how the tech she's having an affair with has a new girlfreind. I haven't figured out how to write that bit, so I’ll do it over the weekend, rather than holding the rest of the post. Check back for that it if you’re interested...]

‘Hello, my Hipsta’, how’s it hanging?’ Stockholm says, surprising me in the bar.

‘You’re so wrong,’ I say, laughing.

‘It’s not the racism he has a problem with,’ Dr Merteuil says, ‘It’s the graffiti.’

‘Absolutely fucking brilliant, the both of you,’ I say, kissing Stockholm and introducing her to Merteuil and Pasteur.

‘I’ve heard so much about you,’ Merteuil says.

I buy Stockholm a drink and the four of us move to a table. Pasteur begins lightheartedly exacting his revenge on me for the episode this morning in clinic.

‘Have you seen the two reactions he has for stories he’s not telling?’ Pasteur asks Stockholm about me. ‘He has “fascinating” and “interesting.” If you get an “interesting,” you’re okay, as he deems your conversation worthy of listening to…’

‘Nice,’ I say, harshly, interrupting him.

‘Oh, I’ll get to your “nice” in a minute,’ Pasteur reclaims the talking stick and shifts his attention back to Stockholm, ‘but when you finish telling him your story, he was interested in some stupid bit about your word choice or the tense of a verb or the alloy they make streetlights out of and where it’s mined.’ Merteuil laughs and Pasteur continues. ‘But God help you if you get “fascinating” because, should you chose to brave ahead, his eyes glaze over for a bit and he won’t say anything until he snaps out of it and does this…’

Pasteur does this performance peice, half imitation of me, half zombie routine, suddenly snapping awake and looking confused. Merteuil and Stockholm are laughing. I’m trying to look bemused.

‘Then he’ll look at you and go “What? Hunh? Are you still talking?” This,’ Pasteur says, ‘like many of the things he does, is funny, but only the first two or three dozen times he does them. If he’s really feeling threatened he goes with…’

He holds his hands out presenting me.

‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ I say shaking my head and smiling.

‘Merteuil?’ Pasteur, switching the direction of his presenting hands, now shaking them like a carny barker.

Merteuil deepens her voice and adds a nasal element to imitate me, ‘That’s great material. You should take that shit on the road.’

The three of them are laughing and enjoying this. I sigh, loudly.

‘That line was funny in,’ Pasteur says, ‘what was it 1997?’

‘Yeah,’ I attempt to usurp, ‘it’s almost as old as your bleating of “more cowbell.” Which was funny for what? Three and a half minutes?’

‘That cowbell shit is already played,’ Stockholm agrees.

‘It was already played two fucking years ago, when I first met him’ I say.

‘Nice,’ Pasteur says, harshly, adding the nasal element to imitate me.

They all laugh but, under the table, Stockholm puts her hand on my knee.

Everybody Loves Me, Baby, What’s the Matter With You?

2006-04-12T06:20:00.000-04:00

I’m in my clinic finishing a note on an obese, hypertensive, diabetic patient. My attending is reviewing a case with Pasteur. His patient’s come in with lower back pain and Pasteur renewed his antihypertensives and, after a bit of arguing, Lortabs.

Our attending is pointing out that the patient’s hypertension is uncontrolled and needs a third blood pressure agent. She asks when the patient’s last mammogram and colonoscopy were. Pasteur doesn’t know. The attending asks if I am done with my chart. I hand it to her.

‘She how nicely he does this,’ she says, looking over my documentation, referring to me by my title and surname in her thick German accent.

She points out how I’ve documented discussing the importance of blood pressure control when I prescribe a new medication, telling my patient that “every point over 130 systolic blood pressure increases your chances of having a stroke or heart attack in the next year.”

I’ve included obesity as a diagnosis and set a goal of one to two pounds weight loss per week for the next two years. Recording the phone number for the YMCA that I have given the patient so she can participate in water aerobics. I’ve given her a script for a mammogram in October, a referral for Ob/Gyn—who have special equipment for performing Pap smears on the morbidly obese—and document that she had a negative colonoscopy in 2002.

Pasteur is staring at the two of us. If I am reading his face right, he is trying to decide which of the two of us he hates more. I smile at him.

‘Yes, Erik,’ he says in a way that I should probably call drolly, but I’ve never liked the word. Let’s say sardonically, an awkward and perhaps archaic word, but one I prefer. ‘Sometimes I lay in bed at night, wishing I could be more like you.’

‘You know, Dr Pasteur,’ I say, laughing, ‘sometimes I wish I could be more like me.’

I Wish I Was the Moon

2006-04-11T06:10:00.000-04:00

You’re in your car in front of the Firefighter’s apartment and looking out at the river as he’s talking, but you’re not really listening. You’re trying to figure out if you can kiss him. You weigh the everything, how he answered the door in his underwear, the invite to dinner, the confession. When I say you weigh everything, I mean you consider all the data that supports the decision you’ve already made and ignore all the signs he’s actively giving you that he does not want you to kiss him. His hand is resting on his knee, so you put your hand on his.

‘When you broke up with me,’ you say, ‘what made it so difficult for me was that you did it because you couldn’t continue to lie to your friends and family. Your integrity was at stake. Your integrity and belief in a definable, knowable truth are part of what I loved about you. It put me in the precarious position of loving you more for having the integrity to break up with me.’

You lean your head out the window and look up at the moon. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t remove his hand from yours.

‘But that was countered,’ you say, ‘with my suspicion that you were turning your back on a larger truth. You could stop seeing me, but that wouldn’t change that you wanted to. If that were true, you’d still be lying to your family and, more importantly, yourself. But arguing that you loved me was too self-serving a position for me to make. Even though I had tangible evidence that it was true: My shirt was soaked with your tears when I left your apartment that night… Unless they were crocodile.’

‘They weren’t,’ he says.

And that’s all you need. You reach across his neck and pull his face into yours and kiss his cheek. Your right and his left hand continue to rest on his knee, but he uses his right hand to half-hug you. You move your mouth to his lips. He kisses you back, briefly, before his right arm changes from a hug to a lever to separate you.

He gets out of the car, saying ‘I’ll call you’ before half-slamming the door shut and walking up the lawn into his apartment.

In the still of the night, on the empty street, you look up at the moon. You look out on the river.

You close your eyes and fight off the nausea.

Enjoy the Silence

2006-04-10T08:12:00.000-04:00

‘How’s Becky?’ you ask.

‘She’s fine,’ the Firefighter says, pausing before continuing, ‘I broke up with her a long time ago. I didn’t see the point in stringing her along.’

Your glass is half-full but the second pitcher is nearly empty. You’re both a bit drunk.

‘Stringing her along?’ you ask and then wait. There’s a long moment of what seems to be silence despite the music and conversations going on around you. You’re drunk, but not so drunk that you’re going to start shooting your mouth. You wait him out.

‘Yeah,’ he says, taking a huge breath and saying, improbably, ‘I wasn’t really going to tell you about this.’

It seems unlikely that he would have dinner with you and not mention the decision you can already see coming. You continue to wait in silence. You bounce your fork off the table once and hold it between thumb and forefinger, your elbow anchored to the table and the base of the fork hovering a few centimeters above menu encased under the glass tabletop. Your eyes half-down—avoiding contact with his—emulating a pack animal reassuring a sub-dominant. You can see he looks at your face briefly before continuing.

‘You’ve heard Donald Rumsfeld say, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had,”’ he says pausing again. You make a brief, reassuring glance to his shoulder, not even looking at his face. ‘I’ve realized I—I’ve been trying to live my life as I wished I was, not as I was.’

He’s stopped talking again and there’s a light curiousness in your gut during this silence. At this point, he’s committed to finishing, so you make eye contact again and give a reassuring nod. But you can’t quite gestalt his voice breaking the silence with the words ‘I’m gay.’

You become the character in a science fiction movie who’s introduced to the fantastic creature—or the man out of time—and has to go through all the predictable and formulary disbelief of how this affects what you thought to be immutable reality and transition into the character who gets his shit together and jump on that motorcycle and drive, goddamnit, drive!

The Sleep of the Just

2006-04-06T21:25:00.000-04:00

When you returned the Fireman’s message he suggested you have dinner with him, so two nights later you find yourself knocking at his door, ready to pick him up. You can hear his shoeless feet padding toward the door and see the handle turn and the door opens a bit.

‘Hey Buddy,’ he says, already padding back toward the bathroom, turning his head to make brief eye contact, wearing only his white BVD’s. “I’ll be ready in just a sec.’

As you open the door and walk into his living room, you watch him walk. His back is more muscular than it used to be. He’s been working out.

It’s going to be a long night.

You’re looking at his fish tank, talking to him as he finishes dressing in the other room. You ask him about his father’s health. How his brother’s doing, the one that likes Elvis Costello. You tell him he’s still wrong and his brother’s still right: there’s no such thing as too much Elvis Costello.

You head to Mudville, a sports bar, and share a pitcher of Bud and 25 wings—volcano style with blue and celery. You’re not talking about a year ago. There are two moments when he turns from the pre-season football show and catches you staring at him.

The first time he politely ignores you.

‘You’re staring at me,’ he says when he catches you the second time, ‘like you’re thinking about fucking me.’

Fifteen months ago, long before you broke up—or rather before he broke up with you—and even before a curious half-second pause preceded his voice before saying ‘I love you’ and before the timbre of his voice changed when he said it, you knew he was slipping from you.

When someone pulls away from you, you usually deal with it in an obvious and predictable manner: you become surely, you raise the stakes. If someone’s getting shaky, you make certain to rattle them loose.

But the Fireman was a grand experiment: you stayed the course, you didn’t waver. When it became clear you were going to lose him, you did what was either the single most heroic or idiotic act of your life.

In the moment when you knew yourself to be the most vulnerable, you didn’t lash out or walk away. You didn’t do any of the tricks that would keep you safe. Instead, you just told him you loved him and you’d do what you could to make it work, if he thought it was possible to make it work.

Though you didn’t realize it at the time, at that moment, you were Obi-Wan Kenobi powering down his lightsaber and allowing himself to be slain.

Now, you could argue that you were being sadistic, that you were making things difficult, raising the bar to prevent the breakup. But that argument would be wrong. You weren’t thinking of even the simplest of Jedi mind tricks.

You could also argue that you were being masochistic. You were allowing him to brand you, knowing how much it would hurt, knowing how many months you’d spend alone and watching Netflix, reading Harrisons, and thinking of last year’s roses. But that argument would be wrong as well. You derived no pleasure or thrill from it. You were, in full possession of mind, not outfoxing, not controlling, not manipulating. You were admitting to another human that he controlled the situation.

If you knew an onomatopoeia for the powering down of a lightsaber, you’d type it into this point of the story…

So when he told you that he couldn’t do this anymore, that he couldn’t continue leading a double-life and hiding you—and what he was doing—from his friends and family, that he ‘had to stop,’ there was nothing left for you to say but ‘okay’ and walk out of his apartment.

It was this year of isolation—not fucking him—that you thinking of when you were staring at him.

‘We’re out of beer,’ you say, pouring the last of the pitcher into his glass.

Feel Good, Inc.

2006-04-05T19:31:00.000-04:00

Dr Pasteur tells me the emphysema lady has failed several attempts to wean her from life support. She’s been lucid enough to refuse a tracheostomy, a surgery required for long-term mechanical ventilation, and has asked to be removed from the machine, understanding that this will likely result in her death.

Intubated patients typically have their wrists tied to the bed and require huge amounts of sedation to tolerate the tube that goes 23 centimeters down their throat and the machine forcing air in-and-out of their lungs. Here’s an interesting thing about the long-term effects of smoking: emphysema patients often find the experience of being intubated refreshing compared to their typical sensation of suffocation. Because of this, they don’t require much sedation and are able to communicate and interact while intubated.

When I swing by her room, her family is at her bedside. The nurse tells me they’re waiting for the arrival of one more family member before removing the tube. I go in and talk to the woman for a moment. She recognizes me and writes the words ‘how long’ on a legal pad.

‘Before they take the tube out?’ I ask.

‘No,’ she writes, ‘after.’

She’s asking me how long she’ll have until she dies. She has more foresight than many people. Most people wait until after the tube is out to ask this, imaging it will occur right away.

‘I can’t say ma’am. It might be hours. It could be months. Physicians are notoriously bad for those kinds of estimates,’ I tell her. Then I lean in and—in sotto voce—say, ‘We’re not really God, we just think we are.’

The ventilator alarms go off when she bucks it, laughing. Her family laughs too. Even lame jokes go off like gangbusters in a room like this, everyone aching for a moment of life as they await death.

After a moment she writes, ‘how long really?’

She stares at me for a moment then underlines the word ‘really.’ I look at her husband and then her. They both stare at me expectantly. I pick up the vent sheet to check her blood gas and the vent settings. I give a little shrug, then say, slowly, ‘between six and twelve hours, probably.’

Everyone closes their eyes.

She writes ‘thank you’ on her legal pad.

Her husband shakes my hand.

Two hours later, I receive word that she died while her family was in the cafeteria, thinking they had more time.

Fuck, I think. God fucking damn it.

Runnin’ Out of Fools

2006-03-29T17:05:00.000-05:00

The fireman the Marquis referred to the other night was a bit of a painful story for me.

I met the fireman at the basement bar of a Thai restaurant about a year and a half ago. I sat at the only available stool, which was next to him and his firemen buddies. We hit it off instantly, arguing politics and besting one another at trivia.

Eventually our knees were occasionally touching. Then hands briefly on an arm or leg as a story was told. When I got up to go to the bathroom, I pushed myself up on the back of his barstool and slid my hand along his back.

Later in the evening, when the attraction was fairly obvious, he asked if he could come back to my place and play Cowboys and Indians.

‘Cowboys and Indians?’ I asked.

‘I figure,’ he said, smiling, ‘everyone wants you to play doctor.’

And how can you not fall for a line like that?

For the better part of four months I had someone who could argue with me, could tell me interesting things, make me laugh, someone who I wanted to hang out with. You know the drill and what I’m getting at. It was perfect, except for one thing.

When he broke up with me, he said he couldn’t be gay, or whatever. That he would not feel safe if the guys at work knew, not to mention his family. That was in the spring of 2004. I haven’t heard from him in over a year and at that time he was dating some woman named Becky.

After Stockholm leaves I see a message on my phone. When I see it’s from him, I feel nauseous.

Jump in the River

2006-03-28T05:40:00.000-05:00

When I see Stockholm on Sunday night she’s so beautiful I feel a little saddened.

‘God,’ I say, brushing her hair from her ear so I can kiss her and whisper, ‘you’re gorgeous.’

She smiles and lowers her eyes in a way that I don’t think is possible for American women to do. It’s so adorable, it makes my eyes hurt.

Dinner is Middle Eastern; we share fool, dolmas, lamb kabobs, and some spinach pies. She tells me she saw the trailer for the upcoming Capote and can’t imagine sitting through two hours of that grating voice.

‘I’m going to have to see it,’ I say, dutifully. ‘In 1999 I was at the Delano carrying on and said that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s so brilliant I could watch him sitting around huffing spray paint. I have no idea who was in the crowd, but when Love Liza came out three years later, I felt personally responsible.’

This story is true, technically, and I tell it as a real confession. The look in her eyes lets me know she gets it.

‘Well, what are you going to do?’ she says, shrugging and taking a sip of her Tucher Weiss, ‘But those are your demons, not mine, so don’t expect me to go with you.’

‘Fair enough,’ I say, popping a Makdous in my mouth.

When we get back to my house, I’m sitting on the bed with her standing in front of me and we’re kissing. I’m using my thumb to trace the outline of her costochondral margin. I begin to unbutton her shirt. She takes my hand and stops me. I’m a bit confused by this.

‘I can’t stay the night, I’m volunteering at the woman’s shelter early tomorrow,’ she says.

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘do you have to leave right now?’

She sighs in a way that I fear is going to lead to a big conversation and am relieved when she says, ‘Well, and there’s an issue with a bit of blood. Not much, but it’s there.’

‘I’m a doctor,’ I say, kissing her neck, ‘I’m not bothered by a little blood.’

Selfless, Cold and Composed

2006-03-27T05:57:00.000-05:00

We’re at Ruth's Chris Steak House listening to the speaker. He’s finished and community physicians are asking questions to make it sound like they read the New England Journal of Medicine, but reveal that they only read the titles of its articles.

The Marquis and I are ignoring them and whispering to each other.

‘You know how when you’re so attracted to someone,’ I’m saying, ‘that your jerk off orgasms are exceptionally great, leaving you dazed and confused? I’ve got that going on with all three of them.’

‘You’re jerking off about them,’ he asks, ‘after you’ve already had sex with them?’

‘I know,’ I say, shaking my head and looking down at the table to avoid eye contact.

‘You haven’t been this gone since that firefighter,’ The Marquis says, referring to something that happened over a year ago, ‘at least you’ve diversified yourself this go round.’

‘I feel a bit guilty,’ I say. ‘but at least two are going to self destruct. I just don’t know which two. If I knew one was going to work, I’d cut the others off.’

‘No you wouldn’t,’ The Marquis says laughing, then after some silence. ‘Besides, if you break up with them now, you’ll be in pain and they’ll be in pain. If you wait until the situation declares itself, they might still get hurt, but at least you’ll be spared. No sense in two people being hurt.’

‘There’s a certain logic to that,’ I tell him. ‘But the longer things go, the more it’s going to hurt them.’

‘Not necessarily. They might get tired of you, motherfucker,’ he says. ‘And if you break things off right away, they might be hurt that you didn’t give them more of a chance.’

I look away for a moment and listen to the speaker explain the details of a study for the community physician who sited it and how it’s not applicable to the disease being discussed.

‘I’m so glad I have a friend like you,’ I tell The Marquis, picking up my glass of Stags’ Leap Petite Syrah and toasting him.

Milk & Honey

2006-03-24T11:59:00.000-05:00

The Marquis and I are finishing our Belvedere martinis when Pasteur calls my cell phone, ready to take us to the next stop of the evening. Pfizer’s taking us to the Ruth's Chris Steak House tonight. I usually avoid these things, but the speaker’s a friend of mine and he’s smart, so I’ve agreed to go.

‘I’m a birthday candle in a circle of black girls,’ Pasteur says happily over the song when we get in.

I’m immediately sorry I gave him a copy of Alligator by the National. Irony needs to be difficult and inaccessible, like Zappa’s Thing-Fish, or it’s not irony anymore. I chastise Pasteur, ‘Don’t sing what you don’t understand.’

At a red stoplight downtown we see one of the HIV crackwhores who frequents the ED a couple times a month.

‘Hey Lorshonda!’ I say, giving her an unmoving hand wave.

‘Hey Boo,’ she says, walking over to our car.

‘You taking care of yourself?’ I ask her.

‘You know I am,’ she says, puckering her mouth, pulling her face into her shoulder and laughing.

Pasteur reaches into the backseat and grabs a bottle of water. He reaches across me and hands it to her.

As part of our salary, we’re given a meal allowance of seven dollars per meal. Pasteur doesn’t eat much, so with his leftover allowance he buys bottled water to give to the hobos and crackwhores who hang out at stoplights and show up at the ED dehydrated. I’d kind of forgotten that he did this.

‘Thank you, sweetness,’ she says.

‘Plan for coverage tonight, baby, it’s supposed to rain,’ I say as the light turns green and we drive off.

The Great Valerio

2006-03-23T18:21:00.000-05:00

The HIV gosling improved at first, but for the past four days his white blood cell count’s been dropping and he’s now neutropenic.

His breathing’s slowly worsened also. A blood gas today finds he’s developed a methemoglobinemia. This is certainly from the trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole we’re using to treat his Pneumocystis pneumonia. I suspect it’s also causing his neutropenia. Unfortunately, it’s one of the few drugs that will treat his infection. There’s a few other drugs I can try, but when I see his X-ray, I’m less enthusiastic.

His X-ray looks like shit. I suspect his initial improvement was from the steroids and not the antibiotics. Pneumocystis, if you’ll recall, kills about 20% of people who get it. If you change antibiotics because of their side effects, it doesn’t change survival rates. But if you change them because of a treatment failure, his odds of dying increase to somewhere between 75 and 100%. And his X-ray looks like a treatment failure.

Explaining things are looking bad without removing hope is, as far as I can tell, an impossible tightrope act. Each family has their own length of despair, their own thickness of denial, and you have no idea what kind of rope you’re dealing with until you’ve lost your balance.

‘You’re always giving me such fucking horrible news,’ the gosling says to me, angrily, ‘can’t you even give me one good thi—’ but he’s coughing too badly to finish his sentence.

‘Your kidneys are doing okay,’ I offer.

‘Oh, well, that’s something,’ one of the younger geese says, ‘isn’t it?’

She’s ignored by the others, who are, in their usual manner, trying to stare me down.

‘I think we need to discuss what you’d want done if things continue to get worse,’ I say.

‘No, Doctor, we don’t,’ says one of the older geese, I think it’s the one named Sheri, ‘because what’s making him sick is your pessimistic attitude. My brother’s going to get better and just because one drug didn’t work doesn’t mean that the next one won’t.’

I don’t say anything for a moment. I don't want a rapid back and forth. I allow silence to serve as a pressure valve to dissipate some of her anger.

‘I hope you’re right and he responds,’ I say, slowly, ‘but if—god forbid—he doesn’t, I don’t want you to have to make decisions in the heat of the moment. I’d like you to be able to talk about things.’

‘Doctor,’ another of the geese says, in a way that John Grisham would probably describe as steely, ‘he’s going to get better.’

I run a quick algorithm of the different possible conversations that could follow from this point. None of them lead to a good outcome. Sheri and the other geese are too powerless. Unable to hate God, I have become their enemy. They need a small victory, so I acquiesce and give them some control over the situation: I ask them if it’s okay to start the new antibiotic. I spell the name so they can look it up on the internet later. They give me permission to start it.

At the nurses’ station, I’m calling the ID fellow and asking her to see the patient, while trying to figure out how I can salvage some therapeutic relationship with this family.

I continue to think about their flightless form into the late afternoon when I run into the ID fellow. She tells me she was thrown out of the room entirely and the geese were refusing to let her come back.

The Beautiful Ones

2006-03-21T17:26:00.000-05:00

I’m on the elliptical machine at the gym and Oprah Winfrey’s on television talking to Charlize Theron. I unplug my earphones from my Rio and plug them into the television outlet, hoping she might talk about the upcoming AeonFlux flick, but they’re talking about Monster and North Country. Oprah’s asking Charlize why she has this amazing asset of her beauty but picks roles that make her appear unattractive.

Charlize says that it isn't something she seeks out, that the appearance comes naturally as she gets into the character. Then she says she believes that outer beauty is simply a reflection of our inner appearance. When she says this even Oprah’s impressed and can’t say anything for a moment. Kind of stunned, Oprah says, ‘I’m having an a-ha moment right now.’

In the mirror, I check my posture and adjust my hair.

I’ve Been so Good up till Now

2006-03-20T05:55:00.000-05:00

At the pizza joint, Chicago and I share a pizza and a pitcher of Peroni.

He’s telling me about the cadre of kids he takes care of at the Boys & Girls Club. I’d forgotten the way his eyes lit up when he talked about them, and I’m swayed by this. He’s excitable now because of the topic, and while he talks I eat the lion’s share of the pizza–it’s called the T-Rex and it’s got a whole lotta meat.

We’re making plans for going to the kickoff game against the Bengals and talking about our post-college rogue years. He asks me about the picture on my refrigerator. It’s of me in my scrubs with the family of one of my patients. I tell him the patient’s story. Things are good up till now.

That’s when he asks me what kind of medicine I want to practice, and I tell him that I love infectious disease.

I talk about how bacteria in certain towns, or even within certain hospitals, develop resistances to antibiotics and how the choices we make as physicians effects those resistances. I talk about plasmids and spontaneous mutations, vectors and fomites. About the excitement of watching a microscopic diorama of evolution at work.

I talk about the enjoyment I get working with HIV and virulent strains of hepatitis, and about the way the field is changing, incorporating genomics and DNA probes as well as the challenge of genotyping for resistance patterns and potential vaccines.

I again say how much I love infectious disease.

I guess I’m a bit carried away because he’s looking at me—not quite but—almost in horror.

‘I don't love infectious diseases,’ he says, before looking down at the table and adding, ‘I hate them.’

And something’s changed. I try to clarify that I mean I love treating infectious disease rather than the diseases themselves, but it does not seem to sway him.

When we finish the pizza, he says he needs to turn in early.

When he tells me how to get to his house, I try to show him a shortcut, but there’s a dead end where I thought there was a pass-through and it ends up taking us a little out of our way. He doesn’t say anything after that.

When I kiss him goodnight, he removes my hand from his neck. I watch him walk from my car until he is in his home.

You Can’t Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want)

2006-03-17T06:10:00.000-05:00

After last night’s overindulgence with Birmingham, the plan tonight with Chicago is low key: pizza and sharing a pitcher of Peroni.

When I drive to Chicago’s house, his roommate’s sitting on the front porch. I turn off the ignition and the sound of The Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream, which was playing loudly, abruptly stops. As I get out of the car, his roommate says, ‘Are you sure you’re gay?’

‘Look who’s talking,’ I say, walking past him, ‘patchouli boy.’

‘I don’t wear patchouli,’ he objects.

‘You listen to reggae, close enough,’ I say.

I knock on the screen door, call out Chicago’s name, and walk into the house.

‘Hey, boy,’ he says, coming out from the kitchen with two beers in his hand. ‘Want one?’

I take the beer and kiss his cheek.

He shows me around the house. I politely ignore the bong next to his reggae couch. And then the unexpected: when I see his bookshelves I have two virgin experiences.

The first virgin experience is finding a doppelganger of my own library. He has the requisite Hurston, Hemmingway and Marquez, but also Gaitskill, The Safety of Objects, & Winterson. Of course he has that early 1960’s New Directions edition of Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, but a copy of Tyrannus Nix? sits next to it. He’s got a nice size dictionary and bible with a sizable grouping of Camus, Orwell, Gertrude Stein, C.S. Lewis and WCW. He doesn’t have any cyberpunk or Jim Thompson, but he’s got at least eleven cool ass titles that I’d been meaning to read for fifteen years.

The second virgin experience followed from the first: I became aroused looking over someone’s bookshelf—I mean really aroused. To distract him while I readjust my jeans, I ask if he has any Patchen.

He’s leaning with his hand outstretched against the wall and looking down for the book, looking relaxed and intelligent. I lean into him and kiss the side of his neck, right where the sternocleidomastoid muscle bisects the unshaven scruff from the smoothness of the rest of his neck.

Constantly risking absurdity, indeed.

Something So Strong

2006-03-16T12:13:00.000-05:00

Birmingham and I end up drinking Crown & water at a dive bar. Walking back to his house drunk, we fall asleep on top of each other, clothes still half on.

I wake at 5:45, driving directly to the hospital, showering in the O.R. suite and putting on a pair of scrubs.

One advantage of being a doctor: you get to work in what is essentially a comfortable pair of pajamas.

Listen Like Thieves

2006-03-15T03:59:00.000-05:00

My dad’s called me from Iowa and asks how things are going.

‘Really well. I’m meeting interesting people for the first time in a while. It’s nice,’ I say, ‘this past year I’ve been alone. Going from work to studying and reading, not much interaction with other people, except for a few out-of-town friends. I feel like I’m coming out from a dark period of my life.’

As I finish the last sentence he begins laughing, really loud.

I don’t say anything.

‘I’ve never seen this commercial before,’ he says, ‘it’s really funny. This guy just got smashed through a wall.’

South Central Rain

2006-03-13T07:34:00.000-05:00

Stockholm picks up as the fifth ring begins.

‘I waited for your call.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I apologize, ‘work ran late.’

There’s another moment silence.

‘I’m sorry about last night,’ I say, ‘also.’

‘Sorry for what?’ she asks.

‘Sorry for laughing,’ I say.

‘But not for finding it funny.’

‘No,’ I admit, ‘not for finding it funny.’

‘Then I’m not sure we have anything to talk about…’

I can hear the sounds of the restaurant kitchen in the background and hear the sound of her lighter: she’s in the back alley. And lighting a cigarette. I quickly run through seven different algorithms for lighting a cigarette after making that statement. Of the plausable terminal boxes, none involve trying to get off the phone. She’s only trying to play it cool; she wants me to move things forward.

‘There are always hipsters to make fun of,’ I offer, recalling a previous conversation we had.

‘You know, I’m starting to realize that it’s hating hipsters that makes someone a hipster,’ she says. This sounds like she’s challenging me, but she’s not. She’s moving the conversation forward. We talk and banter as she finishes her cigarette.

‘Can I take you out Sunday?’ I ask. ‘Someplace nice?’

‘Only if I choose the wine,’ she says. I can hear her smile through the phone.

‘Deal,’ I say, smiling.

How to Disappear Completely

2006-03-10T18:26:00.000-05:00

‘That boy has no game,’ I’m saying to Dr Merteuil about Dr Pasteur. ‘You want to see his idea of game?’

As a radiologist friend—a cute blonde—walks by, I grab her hand.

‘Play a game with me,’ I tell her, ‘Pretend I’m Pasteur for a sec.’

She smiles and shows some teeth.

‘Hi,’ I say in my Dr Pasteur voice, ‘what’s your name?’

‘You know my name,’ she says, still holding my hand and giving it a little squeeze.

‘No,’ I say, back in my own voice, ‘Pretend I’m Pasteur and you don’t know me.’

She looks at Merteuil and then agrees.

‘Hi,’ I say in my Dr Pasteur voice, ‘what’s your name?’

‘Sara.’

‘Sara,’ I say, still in my Dr Pasteur voice, ‘can I have your phone number?’

The three of us laugh and Sara yanks her hand out of mine dramatically. She walks away shaking her head as Merteuil and I continue to laugh.

‘I’ve seen him try that shit fifteen times,’ I say. ‘Not in bars either—with other doctors.’

‘You know that blonde Ob/Gyn,’ she asks, laughing. I nod. ‘She agreed to go out with him. So he takes her to Outback Steakhouse.’ She starts laughing so much she stops talking for a moment. ‘He tells her he chose the restaurant because he knows she’s Australian.’

I’m laughing too, but I’m confused.

‘She’s not Australian,’ I say. ‘She’s South African.’

‘I know,’ she says, laughing so hard she’s crying.

I’m laughing, but glance out the window when I think I see Pasteur coming in from the patio entrance, but it’s just a reflection and a trick of the light.

What Do You Do?

2006-03-08T05:23:00.000-05:00

I stop staring at the door. I wonder around the house, moving from couch to computer desk to kitchen and to bed.

I get up and put in Costello’s My Aim Is True on the stereo.

I go back to bed. I fidget. I get the phone and open it, scrolling through the names. Once, before phonebooks were digital, I told someone ‘every time I go through my phonebook, my fingers always seem to land on you.’

Tonight they land on ‘send,’ and I press it, though it’s after midnight.

I hear the voice inhaling as the phone picks up, and hear the last half of a groggy hello.

‘Hey there,’ I say, ‘what are you doing?’

‘Nothing’ Birmingham says.

‘I didn’t wake you, did I?’ I ask, but head off my own question. ‘I was just thinking about you.’

‘That’s nice,’ he says, still half-asleep. ‘You wanna come over?’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Okay,’ he says.

‘Are you going to remember this or should I remind you?’

‘Better give me a reminder.’

‘Sleep well,’ I say and hang up. I lay down with happy anticipation for tomorrow night.

How Fucking Romantic

2006-03-06T06:01:00.000-05:00

I’m staring at the door handle she has just used to leave me.

Fuck.

I hear her engine start and see the garage silhouetted by her headlights. The car revs and then fades as she drives away from my house.

I can feel the weight of my body shift from my heels to the pads of my feet.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck fuck.

Now I’m All Over the Shop

2006-03-03T05:55:00.000-05:00

Stockholm comes over after a difficult night at work. We’re in bed and she’s lying with her head in my lap while I stroke her hair.

She’s telling me about an asshole customer, but she’s not explaining why he’s an asshole. Eventually she explains it was because he told a joke she didn’t like.

After much needling from me, she tells me the joke.

It’s a bad idea to laugh when someone’s head is in your lap and repeats a joke that defined its teller as an asshole. I know this. Unfortunately, when someone’s head is in your lap stifling laughter is obvious. When her head is shaking because of your laughter and she gets up and starts putting on her clothes, you have to turn on major game.

There were many I’m sorry’s and baby’s, cooing and softly rubbing her forehead and cheek with your thumb. You know you have to make her stay. If she leaves like this, she won’t be coming back. This is not the time to make her laugh. Laughing will remind her of your laughter.

This is the hard sell.

This is, after the cooing and apologies, after the thumb rubs and baby, baby come here, put down your keys, after she softens when you kiss her neck, but stiffens again and looks for her shoes, after you crouch beside her as she slips them on, after another don’t go, don’t leave, stay here, stay with me, that’s when it just slips out, and you haven’t been drinking so you have no excuse.

It just slips out and it’s there and there it is, and she looks at you, after you’ve said it, and you see her surprise and your chest is throbbing and feels waterlogged.

You can feel yourself breathe.

‘I should go,’ she says, but she’s softened. She steps toward you and kisses your cheek. You don’t move. You feel yourself blinking, a series of fast blinks one after the other. You’re trying not to twitch. She’s already facing the door, but turns to you for the briefest of moments.

‘Call me tomorrow,’ she says, ‘if you meant that.’

Accidents Will Happen

2006-03-02T05:46:00.000-05:00

Chicago utters the words ‘I love reggae.’

Not Bob Marley—or even Jimmy Cliff—he loves reggae music in general.

Love in an Elevator

2006-03-01T05:46:00.000-05:00

A few days later I’m waiting for the elevator in the central elevator bay, which I usually avoid. I’m using the central bay because the west bay is not working today, which is—unfortunately—not unusual.

The central bay was built as part of the original hospital in the nineteen-forties. As you travel up, it feels like the elevators move by a series of connected rubber bands. You can feel variations in your speed and watch passengers grab the handrails, nervously glancing at one another. When your floor is reached, the elevator car will slow, stop, lower, and than raise a bit. The effect can be compared to motion of a Slinky as it finds its hanging point. They usually stop within a foot or two of the floor. Often not the floor you requested, but close enough that you only have to take the stairs up or down a single flight.

On each of the floors the elevator bay is equipped with phones so when you walk by the hall and hear the screaming of people trapped in between floors you can let elevator maintenance know. I have that phone number programmed into my cell phone. I also have a fair number of friends I made while trapped between floors.

The newer elevators in the west bay do not trap you (much) and don’t move with rubber band motion, but they’re frequently broken.

So I am at the central bay, waiting.

A smiling, thin, middle-aged black man joins me. He presses the up button, though it’s already lit, to announce that he—also—is waiting for the elevator. He then asks me if I am a doctor.

I’m looking at my shoes when he asks this, so in my field of vision I can see my white coat, my stethoscope, and the embroidering—cheap embroidering—of my coat that spells out the word ‘Doctor’ before my name begins.

He’s friendly enough and I haven’t been able to immediately glean his angle, so I just say yes.

‘Awesome job you have, man.’

Though awesome’s meaning is rather specific—either awe inspiring or excellent—it can be pronounced many ways, and the pronunciation very specifically communicates which meaning is intended. His meaning was clearly not the Bill & Ted variety of ‘great job with golf and cash and seeing naked chicks.’ His was of the church going variety with ‘vocation and mission and helping the afflicted.’

‘Sometimes,’ I said, a bit flatly but punctuated with a—hopefully—pleasant nod.

‘Well, I think it’s an awesome job,’ he said and began talking about why he thought so.

I pressed the call button again.

He kept talking when we got on the elevator.

‘I have a friend who’s a doctor,’ he said, ‘and he says that when he sees the complexity of the human body, the hormones and the way they’re regulated, he says its clear we’re designed by an awesome God.’

I knew doctors like his friend in medical school. They were the kids who confused landscape design’s approximation of natural beauty with its reversal: natural beauty’s approximation of landscape design.

Granted, the simplified flow charts and regulatory pictogram that recall electrical schematics and circuit diagrams can be misleading. Illustrations that explain the way something works can be mistaken for the why something works.

These people revealed themselves with their confusion when the way and the why were at odds with each other, when elements had no obvious use, or no discernable why: the molecular equivalents of an appendix.

I don’t join the religious fervor of people who mock creationists. They often have less understanding of the history and details of evolution than a twelfth-century peasant understands the Holy Roman Empire yet rails against paganism.

I tried to make eye contact with him, to be friendly, but what I was really thinking was that his friend was probably loved by his patients—because, contrary to popular opinion, you don’t have to be a great thinker or possess great understanding to be a good doctor: For the most part you can get by with memorized algorithms and lists. That kind of doctor is loved by his patients because he refers everything out to specialists. The patients think they are special, why else would they go to a specialist? But that kind of doctor doesn’t truely understand what he’s observing.

To be a great doctor you have to kill your own awe. You must be willing to defy god, to tinker with his creation, to alter and change the way the human body functions to keep it alive until it can resume homeostasis.

I am not awed by man’s body. There is no dread in my soul. When a patient is dying before me, he’s a mathematical equation that must be solved, a brain teaser, an Encyclopedia Brown Mystery whose clue needs to be discerned. I have no time or stomach for awe and wonder.

People wonder why doctors think they’re gods; I can explain it quite easily. Place you fingers on a cold, pulseless wrist. Say words that serve as an incantation that send women in white scurrying to administer agents of your choosing. Feel the pulse return to the wrist. Watch the eyes open.

It’s a simple parlor trick.

But go out and talk to the brain teaser’s daughter, the equation’s wife, the mystery story’s mother. You’ll have to avoid their eyes. Their eyes are full of the awe and wonder and dread that you have tried to kill. If you were in awe, if you felt the wonder of what you were doing, you would crumble. You would not be able to function in those crucial moments. And their watering eyes praise you. Their hands clasp around yours in gratitude. They tremble as they give you thanks.

You then—as I now, in the elevator—won’t know what to do with such praise.

The smiling, thin, middle-aged black man in the elevator has almost reached his floor. It has stopped just shy of it and, after I help him step the eighteen inches up, he turns to me and says, ‘God loves you.’

‘Yes,’ I say, pressing the door close button, ‘I’m aware.’

Everlong

2006-02-23T17:53:00.000-05:00

A technical note:

This post has a soundtrack click here to hear it.
It augments the writing, so if it didn't work, try this link instead.

Saturday morning, I work my first shift moonlighting. It’s mildly exciting to work for six hours and make a week’s salary.

I meet Stockholm for lunch over a bottle of Shafer Pinot Gris and she decides to come to my house for a bit.

‘You want to listen to “Afternoon Delight”?’ I ask, trying to pick out the music. When I was seven and listening to this song, I thought it was going to be something like Turkish Delight and desperately wanted some.

‘Do you have “Summer Lovin’”?’ she asks, looking over my shoulder, wrapping her arms around me. I know she means ‘Summer Nights’ from the Grease Soundtrack, but I don’t correct her. I grab Carol King’s Tapestry and put it in the player.

What is it about making love on a summer’s afternoon that seems the pinnacle of romance? Is it some collective game we play, pretending ourselves back in Eden? I see the reflection of our naked bodies outlined by the summer foliage of the window in the protective glass of a sketch of the Duomo and Santa Spirito in Florence. I barely recognize myself. I have a hard time turning away from the reflection.

When I roll her on top of me, I’m surprised at my strength. This, I think, was the first time that I noticed a tangible difference in my abilities since I started going to the gym. I seem to hold her high in the room and I’m grateful I don’t have a ceiling fan above my bed. Afterwards, we’re both shining with sweat, but I’m not breathless.

‘Cool,’ I remember thinking. She begins to get dressed, a bit late for work. I kiss her goodbye and head back to bed to take a nap.

When I wake up, I check my messages. Chicago’s called to say that he wants to meet me late in the evening, and Birmingham called saying he went fishing and wants to join me for a couple of beers in the early evening.

I throw a couple eggs, a cup of milk, and a fist full of strawberries into the blender and drink it while watching Bad Lieutenant and then go back to sleep.

When I wake up, the night is cloudless and bright. I walk to the bar under the stars. I look up at the milky way and think about A Zed and Two Naughts and how many billions of years of astronomical arrangement and millions of years of biological evolution has been undertaken, all so I could experience this day, this evening’s walk.

‘It’s all been leading up to this,’ I say out loud, into the night.

I get to the bar and see Birmingham with his friends. When he sees me he shouts, ‘hey there, buddy!’

I laugh and join them. He throws his arm around my shoulder in such a way that no one thinks about it but me. They pour me a beer and everyone is shouting and having fun with mock bravado. Around nine, a few of his friends head home to help put their kids to bed. Birmingham takes this opportunity to drive me home.

I’m walking to the fridge to get us some beer when he jabs me in the side. I grab his wrist and spin, twisting his arm slightly. I still have hold of his wrist when I see his smiling face. I relax my grasp.

‘You want,’ I say, smiling, letting go, and taking a step back, hands open and at my sides, ‘ some of this?’

We take it outside, take off our shirts and begin wrestling in the backyard. He easily has twenty pounds on me, but I hold my own.

‘You’re pretty wily,’ he says, after I escape from a hold.

‘I grew up in Iowa,’ I say, ‘you’re not going to pin me unless I let you.’

He attempts again, and tries to roll my face onto the ground.

‘Not the face!’ I shout. Thinking of the difficulty of explaining a black eye at work.

‘Will you let me?’ he whispers, not relaxing his grip, and we head inside. We’re both filthy, mud on our skin and leaves in our hair, and we jump into the shower together.

By 11:30 Birmingham has returned to his friends at the bar and I head to the bar where I met Chicago. Chicago’s already there and our faces light up when we see each other. We drink shots to ourselves and talk about music we love.

By 2 am, we are lit and laughing and allowing our hands to rest on each other’s shoulders or touching each other’s knees for emphasis as we tell stories. We make the short trip back to my home safely and things get a little foggy.

Things that I remember: him looking over my wall of CD’s and grabbing Joe Jackson’s Body and Soul, my pouring Myers rum into the leftover limeade from Monday. Things I don’t remember: how all that broken glass ended up in the bathroom and what happened to the light fixture above my bed.

At some point before dawn, we were both in my backyard in our boxer shorts, him smoking, me telling some ridiculous story. When we went back in, I remember standing behind him and thumbing his waistband and bringing his shorts down. I took hold of his neck and pulled his back into my chest and held his ear to my mouth. I was drunk and was trying not to breathe hard, but I knew that I was. When I reached around his waist and pulled it closer to me, he—also breathless—said the words that formed the pinnacle of my summer, perhaps the pinnacle of a man’s life:

‘I feel like I could listen to you talk forever,’ he said, ‘plus,’ he added, importantly, ‘you know how to fuck.’

In the morning, my alarm clock starts playing Berlioz’s Rêveries, I wake and quickly prepare for work, leaving him in my bed.

Can you feel it then? Is it palpable? This is me on top of the world: falling in love with people who are falling in love with me. Excelling at my job and being recognized for it. Living a dream in all its glory.

You can hear the ratcheting as I rise and rise up and up and up. You’re there with me, aren’t you?

Looking out, seeing the ground fall away as you rise higher and higher, at first feeling ten feet tall, then you’re in the branches, then over the trees and seeing more distant buildings, then over the rooftops, and you’re looking out—out over everything and taking in the horizon. The very earth feels beneath you. Maybe its sunset and you’re seeing all the oranges and purples in the sky. It’s beautiful.

That’s when the sound of the ratcheting curiously changes. You can feel yourself disengage from the chain, and you feel a premonition somewhere near your umbilicus. It’s then that you realize you are at the pinnicle of a rollercoaster, and it’s a long, long way down…

Let’s Get Physical

2006-02-22T06:35:00.000-05:00

There’s one more thing we need to discuss before I tell you about Saturday. I have, for most of my life, avoided the gym.

When I was seventeen, my mother warned me, ‘you’re very beautiful for a boy, be careful: people will try to use you for that beauty.’ While I liked the idea of being used for my beauty, her warning imbued me with enough concern to eschew enhancing my physical beauty and enough arrogance to believe such eschewal was in my best interests.

Around the same time, I heard Katherine Hepburn say that she didn’t like to watch her movies because, she said, ‘it’s like watching myself rot.’ At that point, I made the decision to put off working out until I was older, so that as I aged, some aspects of my physical form would be improving, even as age took its toll.

I came up with a game plan: I would begin aerobic exercise in my mid-thirties for its cardiovascular benefits, as well as its fat reduction. Thirty minutes per day, four or more days a week. Strength training would begin in my mid-fifties; the resistance would increase tensile strength of bones and prevent fractures, as well as improve my musculature.

But recently several new studies have suggested that the bulk of calcium deposition occurs during our mid-thirties. This meant that strength training should begin concomitantly with the aerobic exercise.

So in mid-March, I joined a gym and began working out a half hour a day, four to five days per week. I had no idea what I was doing and ended up injuring myself so badly I hobbled around on a cane for about three days.

After that, I got a trainer who tells me what to do in a safe manner and allows me to think about other things while I work out.

As my body began to change, some things were difficult to get used to. I normally sleep on the softness of my arm, but it was now lumpy and hard. At first I used the Stairmaster too much and when I turned around I was knocking things over with my over-developed ass. To take care of that problem, I switched to what my friend refers to as ‘the fancy prancer’ but what my trainer calls the elliptical machine.

I wasn’t quite used to the increased strength and stamina either, but it turned out to be rather useful, as you will soon find out.

This is a lot of verbiage when a simple photo montage will do, so here you are. Or, rather, here I am.

Boy’s Don’t Cry

2006-02-20T05:18:00.000-05:00

Friday afternoon Chicago calls and leaves a message saying his sister has come into town and he has to cancel for tomorrow.

When I get to the bar that night, it’s pretty empty—or rather, completely empty except for a drag queen, a bartender, and the local coke dealer playing darts in the back. I order a Budweiser and make small talk with the drag queen.

‘Sure is coming down out there,’ I say, watching the rain.

‘It sure is,’ she says. ‘You can tell its spring because it’s raining so hard.’

I pause, then say, ‘but, it’s not spring: It’s the middle of July.’

‘Then why the hell’s it raining so hard?’ she says, pursing her lips, flipping her hair up, and turning away from me.

I didn’t, but I could have, think about how there was almost exactly a month until my birthday. I could have, but didn’t, think about what that month would hold for me. I could have also wondered what the next eight months would hold for me. If things continued the trajectory of the previous eight days, I’d be named Surgeon General or develop a successful cancer vaccine. I could have wondered that, but I didn’t.

It certainly didn’t occur to me at the time that in November I would start a story that was set into motion by the events of this week, that I would spend two months documenting a single day, and that by mid-February I would still be explaining what transpired the week of July 17th, 2005.

I was simply enjoying the summer. Enjoying the company of these people. Even enjoying the rain shower.

I wait until the rain lets up and then leave the bar alone, the wind blowing the remnants of the shower on my face and tee, its wetness darkening small circles of cloth on my chest and sleeve. I get in my car and listen to John Vanderslice’s Time Travel is Lonely, as I drive into the night, on my way back home.

We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes

2006-02-16T06:06:00.000-05:00

The decision on whom will be chosen for chief resident has been looming over those of us nominated for several weeks now. It’s been all but promised to one resident. When I was asked to interview, I did it more for the experience than with any real expectation for the job.

So when I’m chosen and offered the contract to stay on for an additional year as chief resident, being an attending physician and responsible for the residents and our conferences, I’m a bit nonplussed, but pleased and honored.

I go out for a celebration dinner with Dr. Pasteur, whose ass is still smarting from the tongue lashing he received two days previously. We have Daiginjo Saki with our sushi and forgive each other. I forgive him for nearly killing my patient. He forgives me for ensuring that he was held responsible for it.

The marquis shows up and we pour him the remains of our bottle.

It’s Thursday night and they want to head to Square One, a nearby bar in the basement of a Thai restaurant. I leave them there and head over to Stockholm’s restaurant. When I walk in, she sees me and her face lights up. When I see that, mine does also. She pours me a glass of the Trimbach ‘Cuvee Frederic Emile’ Alsace Riesling and I tell her the news.

She takes a break and we head through the kitchen into the back alley. She smokes while I drink my wine and kiss her neck. I love the way white wine cools my tongue and makes her neck feel warm. Her hair combines the scents of a clean, subtle shampoo with the steak and mussels she’s been serving. It’s curiously exciting.

‘What time,’ I ask her, ‘do you get off?’

‘Soon,’ she says, pulling her neck away from me, still holding my hand.

‘Can you come to my house,’ I ask, ‘and play?’

‘Yes, I can,’ she says. ‘do you have any fun toys?’

‘Oh yes,’ I say, ‘I do. I do have toys.’

What toys, you ask? Lets just say that membership has its privledges.

Uncynical Wednesday: The Gambler

2006-02-15T05:52:00.000-05:00

In Monday’s post, I mentioned that I won a bet among five physicians for guessing a patient’s CD4 count. It occurred to me that I should say a word about it, but thought it was off-topic and, to be honest, wasn’t sure if anyone would think it needed explanation. Apparently, it did.

Here’s the deal: physicians bet about everything. CD4 counts are perhaps our more benign wagers. Before a biopsy is back, we put our chips on adeno versus squamous carcinoma. We play our cards on whether someone is having acute coronary syndrome or indigestion. We lay odds on someone having a pulmonary embolism versus being a hysterical whiner.

When physicians make such bets, it’s not idle gamesmanship; physician bets are about testing clinical acumen.

I listen to someone’s chest and bet with my interns about the specifics we’ll see on chest x-ray. When they lose, I have them go back and listen again. Sometimes, my intern will win and I’ll go of my own accord—and dishonor—and listen again.

I even place bets with myself. I look at a jaundiced patient’s eyes and estimate their bilirubin. I’ll look at the pink under a tongue and guess a patient’s hemoglobin. I’m at the point now where I am trying to estimate combined hemoglobin and bilirubin. When they both hit seven, white people turn a most curious shade of chiffon.

So why bet? Why enter pools? Labs aren’t always available. At my hospital, CD4 counts are only run on weekday mornings. That’s assuming we have an HIV diagnosis established, which takes three or four days. As a patient’s CD4 count changes, the antibiotics I choose change. The bugs that cause their illness change. The way they will respond to treatment changes. By wagering, we’re keeping tally of our ability to assess a patient’s needs.

More importantly, lab errors occur. By predicting what the lab values should be, I’m able to spot errors. When other physicians have been ready to transfuse a patient, I’ve had blood counts repeated and found the severity of the anemia was a lab error. I can think of eight patients who I’ve spared the risks of a blood transfusion in the past four months—to say nothing of the blood that was saved for a patient who actually needed it.

Betting is an effective way for physicians to keep us improving ourselves. I lost a bet to a surgeon this weekend, blaming his mismanagement of a patient’s IV fluids for an electrolyte abnormality. I wrote a consult telling him to change the fluids to fix the problem. Turned out, I was wrong. We later discovered that the patient was secreting inappropriate antidiuretic hormone. I’m not likely to make the same mistake again.

Physicians are, all day, betting. Betting on your diagnosis, gambling that their intervention will make you well. While our wagers make a game of our very serious job, they remind us that something is on the line.

Different attendings have different wager amounts. The standing bet for one oncologist is always a Can of Diet Pepsi. A certain intensive care physician always bets One Shiny Penny. These physicians are so good that they almost never lose, but I’ve never seen a can or coin change hands.

When physicians are constantly testing their acumen, they get so good that they can start setting up the treatment right along with ordering the diagnostic studies. Their patients start getting better that much faster—or, when appropriate, are made comfortable that much sooner. Since its Wednesday, I won’t mind the cheese of saying that it’s their patients who are the winners.

And if you’re gonna play the game, boy, you gotta learn to play it right.

H.W.C.

2006-02-14T06:12:00.000-05:00

When I leave the hospital I check my messages.

Chicago’s called and confirmed our plans for Saturday. I’m deeply relieved to hear his message. To be honest, I spent a fair amount of the day fretting that he wasn’t going to call me at all.

Birmingham has also just called, leaving a message telling me I should meet him at the bar. So I drive to he bar and meet him.

We have a beer, have dinner in a dive Vietnamese restaurant nearby, and head back to my place. We dip into my Glenlivet 21. We’re both sitting on my couch, our knees touching, leaning forward to set down and pick up our glasses. I’m telling him about my clinic, explaining the way we performed certain tests.

That’s when he says something so perfect, so amazing, that had I been writing a script for him to read, I couldn’t have given myself a better gift. It starts like this:

‘I’m so amazed how much you have to know to be a doctor.’

Now this is below the belt because, much as I’ll deny it, if you fawn over my intellect, I’ll become a slobbering idiot for you. But then, he tops it with this:

‘You spend so much of your time teaching. I’d like to give you a day where you can sit back and relax.’ We live near a historical site and he majored in history, I knew this already. ‘Let’s spend the day there and let me show you some of the things I know about.’

Now, I’m not a fellow to talk about sporting wood or growing a chubby, but the combination of the fawning and the offering was too much for me. I set down my scotch and grab his collar, drawing him to me, kissing him.

One thing I’ve never heard talked about, but that I have experienced a few times, is that when men—men who don’t usually have sex with other guys—do have sex with a guy, their amount of ejaculate is tremendous. I mean beach towel tremendous.

Now understand, I’m a doctor, I’m used to people exaggerating about fluids. Patients tell me they bled pints, that they vomited gallons, that they coughed up liters of phlegm. But there’s a difference here: They’re not used to seeing blood on the floor, vomiting, and sputum production. I’m familiar with typical ejaculate: personally, clinically (3-5 cubic centimeters), and via video and photographs.

The amount of ejaculate in this situation is undeniably atypical and enourmous. I can see the puzzlement in his face and in his voice when he says, ‘where did all of this come from?’ while wiping his spunk off his chest, his shoulders, off his own face, off my pillows and headboard.

We shower off. I change the sheets and throw the pile of towels in the wash. I’m not sure how to deal with the headboard—Pledge? Murphy Oil Soap?—so I just use a fifth towel and warm water. I lay down next to him, throwing my arm across his chest and gently thumbing his ear as we talk and drift into sleep.

Today

2006-02-13T05:45:00.000-05:00

The next day, most of the patients I introduced you to left my service. Some were transferred to other services—the pancreatic cancer guy went to surgery’s and the batshit-crazy drunk lady went to psych—some were discharged—the snakebite guy.

The HIV guy did, in fact, have AIDS and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. (For those that strive to be hip with their toxonomy, it has been renamed Pneumocystis jiroveci. No More PCP, now PJP, which does not taste great with a glass of milk with its crusts cut off.)

He had to stay in respiratory isolation for a few a while to ensure he didn’t have tuberculosis, but he started to show some improvement even in those first few days. His CD4 count, for those of you who know about such things, was 13. I won the bet of the five physicians in that pool—closest without going over—I guessed 11.

The emphysema lady, the lady for whom I wrote impossible admit orders, bears some mentioning.

After I left, the nurse saw my impossible orders and asked Dr. Pasteur, the ICU resident, to amend the orders so the patient could be moved out of the ED and into her hospital room. Trying to help the nurse out and, I guess, believing I had made an error, he changed my orders and the patient was sent upstairs.

Around 5:30 am, she quit breathing.

A code blue was called. She was intubated and put on a ventilator. I arrived at 6 am as they were preparing the patient to be moved to the ICU. I looked at the patient and then at Dr. Pasteur.

‘Good call last night with her,’ he said to me, with a surprising amount of sincerity.

Now, I’m not a violent fellow. I’m not one to start—or even get into—fights. But hearing him acknowledge that I’d told him the patient was in no condition to go to the floor, that she would poop-out and quit breathing, that she would code if he didn’t intervene—and he did not intervene—was too much for me. I wanted to slam him against the wall. I wanted to grab the lapels of his white coat and twist them as I hissed into his face, mere inches from his nose, my spittle violating his cheeks and eyes that my call, that my judgment, my acumen was useless because of his impotence, his lack of insight, his writing orders on a patient who belonged to me.

But instead I’m just staring at him. I know he’s going to be publicly humiliated when the MICU attending reads my note from the previous night. I’m standing in silence for a full ten seconds, then ask, ‘who’s your attending this morning?’

I ask this, not because I don’t know who his attending is, because I do know. I ask him this because I want him to think about the intellectual tear down he’s about to receive. I want his nausea to begin now.

He tells me the name, closing his eyes and shaking his head, beginning to anticipate his berating.

‘You should probably,’ I tell him with faux compassion, ‘lube with K-Y now; he won’t spit when he tells you to grab your ankles.’

The Dream Academy

2006-02-06T21:19:00.000-05:00

I’m at concert, but I can’t see the stage. I’m shoving my way through the crowd until I’m at the foot of the stage and see Tim Finn. He seems to recognize me and pulls me onstage. He tells me we’re going to duet XTC’s Ten Feet Tall. We start and I’m letting him hit the high notes while I stick with the gravelly parts. The crowd seems to love it, but when I look over at Mr. Finn, I can tell something is very, very wrong. I mouth the words, ‘what’s wrong?’

I can see his lips pantomime the words ‘you can’t sing.’

I wake up laughing. I have the worst reoccurring dream in the world. Phantasms of Tori Amos, Bob Mould, Kelly Clarkson, and Sinead O’Connor have all told me that I can’t sing. But still, my id persists in putting me on stage to be deflated again and again. For the record, Sinead was the rudest: A wall of bricks, indeed.

I look at the clock. It’s just before midnight. Stockhom is still asleep.

I get up and go to the bathroom to micturate. As I’m standing there and playing with the stream, I think about my HIV patient. I call the nurse to ensure the urine studies have been sent to the lab, then crawl back into bed with Stockholm.

Girls Can Tell

2006-02-03T10:45:00.000-05:00

‘You need to listen to this,’ Stockholm says, getting a disc out of her car when you return home from the restaurant.

‘What do you know about the things I need?’ you ask, grinning, holding the kitchen door open for her, and kissing her neck as she walks past you.

You pour two glasses from the remains of an open bottle of 2001 Muscat de Rivesaltes by Château de Jau, adjust the lighting in the house and start the disc.

‘Hit track eleven,’ she says, slipping behind you.

‘It goes all the way to eleven?’ you find yourself saying before you can hide your geekiness. She ignores the comment.

You begin to listen, your back to both her and your bed.

She slides her left hand along your waist and under your shirt. You turn the music up and your body to the right; her hand holds its place and runs along your left lower ribcage as you turn.

You place your left hand on her upper sacrum and apply a constant, gentle pressure. You kiss her neck to distract her from the pressure for a slow thirty seconds. You hold your lower lip over her carotid artery, feeling the pulse at first quicken, then slow as the sacral pressure causes a parasympathetic release.

With your right thumb you hit the replay button on the remote. Then, with the same thumb, press firmly against her sternal notch, remote still in hand.

You run the knuckles of your left hand up her spine, opening and turning your hand at the top of her scapula to support her neck. You lean into her and—just before she looses her balance—you throw yourself onto the bed, turning as you fall, pulling her on top of you…

The first time you saw a woman have an orgasm, you were frightened by it. The way her face contorted and the wounded rabbit-like noises convinced you that she was having a seizure. You were halfway to the kitchen to get a spoon for her to bite by the time you figured out what was going on. You now know that the fear of swallowing one’s tongue is a myth, and you are no longer afraid of orgasms.

‘Want some cake?’ you ask her afterwards, getting up to serve some cake.

She puts on an oversized tee from your drawer. You hand her the plate of chocolate and walk out into the porch. The two of you sit, enjoying the night air. She eats some and feeds you some. When the cake is gone, she lights a cigarette.

‘So,’ she says. ‘Really, what’s your story?’

And between the wine, the sex, the chocolate, the night air, and the exhaustion of the day, you tell her your story. You tell her things you wouldn’t tell the internet, tell the world, that you wouldn’t tell—perhaps—even your friends and family.

‘Okay,’ she says, pausing, when you’re finished, ‘just don’t break my heart.’

You take her hand and lead her back to your bed. You close your eyes and kiss her forehead. She nuzzles against your chest as you both prepare for sleep.

‘I feel like this day has lasted eight weeks,’ you mumble as you fall into sleep.

Extraordinary

2006-01-31T19:25:00.000-05:00

Stockholm and I go to a nearby restaurant that has half-price wine on Monday nights. She defers the wine choice to me, I order the Murrieta's Well White Meritage 2003. It’s sweeter than the 1998 bottle I was thinking of and it occurs to me that it was the Vendimia that Murrieta's Well did so, well, well.

‘It’s nice,’ she says, being a good sport. ‘I’m sure it will go fine with the food.’

The menu is curious. I don’t say anything, not wanting to appear a snob, but I smirk when she points out what’s so weird about the menu.

‘The ingredients are everything you’d hope for: deep six arugula, flown-in Wahoo, black-bean sauce, morel mushrooms, red-curry coulis, Maytag blue cheese,’ she says. ‘But, it's like they were put together by a computer. On this menu, they’re a single dish.’

‘You might get away with it on Veal,’ I say, laughing, ‘but how would you even taste the Wahoo?’

‘It’s like using Belvedere to make a Bloody Mary,’ she says, almost apologetically.

I’m staring into the menu, letting her take the lead in this dissection, trying not to mock their creamy French onion soup.

I order the Vichyssoise. She orders the chicken and chèvre pizza.

She tells me she can’t stop listening to a Newcastle band called Maxïmo Park.

‘I haven’t heard of them,’ I say.

‘I’ll burn you a sample,’ she offers.

‘What else are you listening to?’

‘Well,’ she says, grimicing, ‘I’ve heard some of the Liz Phair album that’s coming out soon. It’s even worse than last year’s overproduced piece of crap.’

I have to adjust the napkin in my lap hearing her talk like this.

‘I think the overproduction was part of the point,’ I say.

She leans over the table and whispers ‘bullshit.’

‘I’ll be the first to admit that I’d be her battered husband,’ I say, smiling. ‘She could heap abuse on me and I’d make every excuse for her in the world. But this is my take on the album: she declares herself in the opening verse. When she says “I burn letters that I write to make you love me” the letters are songs and the “you” is her audience. She’s setting the album up as a metaphor: Pretending it’s about her approach to relationships, she’s wrestling with who she is and who she wants to be.’

‘I never thought about it like that,’ she says, nodding. Then she stops, leans forward and, while laughing, hisses, ‘bullshit. It’s a sellout album.’

‘It’s not a sellout if nobody buys it.’ I say, pouring her more wine. ‘More Meritage, cutie?’

‘Are you intentionally quoting Juliana Hatfield?’ she asks, laughing.

‘Did Hatfield sing about Meritage?’ I ask, blankly.

She laughs.

‘If you keep talking dirty to me,’ I say, ‘I will mount you on this table.’

She laughs as the waiter places our food on the table.

We begin eating. My soup is decent.

‘There’s something strange about this pizza,’ she says.

I place my soup in front of her and eat a piece of her pizza.

‘The crust,’ I say. ‘It’s Boboli.’

I explain Boboli to her.

‘I guess,’ I say, ‘we should be grateful that at least the vichyssoise was cold.’

Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)

2006-01-30T20:02:00.000-05:00

I inhale with a start before I open my eyes. I’m up to my neck in warmth. I turn off the faucet and soak, listening to Creeper Lagoon’s Take Back the Universe and Give Me Yesterday. I get out, towel off, wrap the towel around my waist and stir up a pitcher of limeade, pouring myself a tall cool glass and topping it off with vodka.

I respond to some emails and begin a rough draft of this entry. I lose track of time and am still in a towel when Stockholm knocks at my porch door.

I kiss her briefly and apologize for being undressed. Kirsty MacCall’s Titanic Days is playing now. I pour her a vodka limeade and walk into the bedroom to dress.

I’m trying to figure out what shirt to wear. I’m staring at seven different shirts, but have no idea what they will look like on me. I hear her ask, ‘So what’s your story?’

I lean back out the hall, still naked from the waist up, and see she’s browsing through my bookshelf. I instinctively say, ‘huh?’

‘What’s you’re story?’ she says.

‘Me?’ I say, chuckling. ‘I have no story.’

I lean back into the bedroom. The red shirt is a too red, I think, and the zippered front looked fifties-bowling-retro in the store, but every time I’ve put it on its looked McDonald’s drive-through-cashier.

I can hear her walking through the dining room toward my room. Her footsteps hesitate. The cadence of the aquarium pump deepens: She must be leaning against its glass.

‘Is this shirt too blue?’ I ask, coming out of the bedroom and changing the subject. I furrow my brow a bit, quizzically, squinting my left eye. She’s leaning against the aquarium. She smiles at my apparent confusion. She takes a half step forward and kisses me.

‘It’s fine,’ she says. The cadence of the aquarium deepens again as I kiss her neck and she leans her hand against the aquarium.

‘Why do you have such a huge tank with no fish in it?’ she asks, her eyes searching the water for any sign of life.

‘I’ll tell you about it at the restaurant,’ I say, laughing and grabbing my keys.

Soothe

2006-01-27T06:30:00.000-05:00

I get home and shed my scrubs as I walk in the door, as I do at the end of every day. I remove my socks and hold the pile against my side walking to the bathroom in my boxers. I throw the contaminated clothes in the laundry bin, toss the boxers in too, turn the shower on and climb under its stream.

After the initial layer of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Stenotrophomonas maltophila has hopefully been rinsed from by body and gone down the drain, I flip the lever and begin filling the tub. I lay myself down and allow the water, warm and calming, to slowly fill around me. I close my eyes, trying not to think of the patients I’ve seen today.

Inhale. Exhale.

In the tub, with the water running, I fall asleep…

What If We Give It Away?

2006-01-26T19:05:00.000-05:00

I walk into the bar and squint, trying to adjust my eyes to the light. I see Birmingham sitting at the bar and I saddle up next to him, lean in and say, ‘Hey, Popeye.’

He gives a slow turn of his head, sees me and gives a half grin, saying, ‘You still picking your feet in Poughkeepsie?’

I give him a full laugh, but it shouldn’t surprise me that he gets the reference. Law enforcement types should, right?

I order a bottle of Budweiser and the bartender—an over-tanned blonde in her late forties wearing a dirty tan t-shirt depicting two lobsters playing tug of war with what looks like a piece of licorice—says, ‘coming right up.’

When she brings it, Birmingham calls her by name and tells her to put it on his tab. I’m amused by this.

‘Thanks.’ I say, giving him an air toast.

We talk for a bit, minimally referencing what we did at work.

‘Worked on a case,’ he says.

‘Saw patients,’ I say.

It’s relaxed and casual, this give and take. Easy like Sunday morning, you might say. We make plans. I finish my beer and say goodbye.

I extend my hand and he shakes it firmly. I give him a wink. He pretends to look panicked for a half second, then his face opens into a laugh and he returns the wink.

I’m smiling as I walk out the door.

El Baile del Perrito

2006-01-24T18:47:00.000-05:00

The MICU resident, Dr Pasteur, is explaining to me why he’s not taking the emphysema patient onto his service.

‘I talked it over with the ED and we all think she’s stable,’ he says. ‘Did you see her blood gas?’

I frown. I explain my interpretation of it, but he doesn’t buy it.

I consider asking him to page his attending and discuss the case with him, knowing the attending will side with me. But I don’t have the stomach to be such an outright asshole to a friend.

‘Just keep a close eye on her tonight, will you?’ I say, after more discussion, finally relenting.

But then, after saying that, I cheat. Pretending to trust him to watch the patient, I write my admission orders in such a way that she will not be allowed to be moved to her hospital bed. Stuck in the ED overnight, the ED docs will see her deteriorate and be able to intervene.

My interns and I finish our work and sign out our patients, turning over the collection of pagers we carry. I explain to the overnight physician why I had written an impossible order for the emphysema patient. I tell him not to change it and defer any questions to me in the morning.

Then I get in my car, throwing my white coat and stethoscope in the trunk, and head to the bar to meet Birmingham for a beer.

Call Call

2006-01-23T06:13:00.000-05:00

My intern is paging with questions about the Trimethoprim/Sulfamethoxazole dosing and whether or not we should start treating for TB empirically. Did I show you the chest X-ray yet?

I see Dr Merteuil and she taps the corner of her mouth with two fingers together, signaling a smoke break.

‘Five mg’s per kg Q six of the trimeth component,’ I tell him, heading out with Merteuil. ‘And no.’

She tells me the pancreatic cancer man’s surgery revealed omental caking. I scrunch my nose at the bad news. We walk into the smoking garden the hospital furnishes us; this generosity is to prevent patients from seeing our hypocrisy.

My phone receives a clear signal for the first time in hours. It begins a polyphonic verisimilitude of Pedro the Lion’s ‘I Am Always the One Who Calls’ to alert me that I have new messages. I check the display. Three new messages—I like that number.

I autodial voicemail and sit next to her on the bench. The first message is Stockholm telling me she had a nice time on Saturday.

‘Stockholm doesn’t have to work tonight,’ I tell Merteuil while listening to the message. She lights a cigarette, taking a long drag from it. ‘She wants to have dinner.’

I press nine. The next message is Birmingham.

‘Birmingham wants to grab a beer tonight before meeting some friends,’ I say, raising my eyebrows at Merteuil.

She nods, looking at something on her cigarette or her fingers, I can’t tell which. I press seven.

The third one is my mom.

‘And my mom loves me.’

‘That’s the only one worth talking to the bank,’ she says, pointing at me with her cigarette.

I take the cigarette and inhale a slow drag from it. I hold the smoke deep within my lungs—absorbing its cancer-inducing goodness—and hand the cigarette back to her.

No word from Chicago, I think, scratching my neck. I should have shaved today.

‘Must have been a rough one,’ she says, mocking me, ‘bad boy. Don’t pick up my filthy habits.’

I exhale, glancing at the brief cloud of sparrows crossing overhead.

‘You know the type that deals with illness by deciding that the doctor needs to read WebMD?’ I ask her.

She nods.

‘I’ve got a flock of them. I spent the past forty-five minutes explaining the difference between MRI’s and CAT scan’s, when I should have been the discussing epistemology of disease, the scientific method, and the percentage of the GNP that’s spent on useless medical tests.’

‘I’m done with my cigarette,’ she says, standing up, ‘and you’re boring me now.’

I laugh and we head back inside.

The Geese of Beverly Road

2006-01-19T06:10:00.000-05:00

Whoever said there’s no such thing as a stupid question was probably the one asking the question.

It must have been repeated by junior high teachers who were desperate for any interaction with students. It’s like Michael Jackson says, ‘if you repeat a lie often enough, people consider it to be true.’

I emerge from my encounter with the ladies forty-five minutes later, hen-pecked, chick-pea’d, and pigeon-toed. And while that doesn’t make any sense, neither did these ladies.

Now, understand, I’m used to dealing with people who finished school during the sixth grade. It’s not unusual for patients to tell me that they cannot read. These patients ask—comparatively—good questions: Am I going to die from this? Is there a cure? How long will I have to take these pills? Did I do something to bring this on myself? How can I ever thank you?

These women had clearly tried to figure out what was wrong with my patient, and had come up with some diagnoses that made less sense than a thalidomide baby at an arm wrestling competition.

We began with me explaining that the patient showed signs of severe immunocompromise, that he hadn’t been tested for HIV in many years despite risk factors—which I did not specify—and while I did not yet know what was causing his diarrhea, my larger concern were his lungs. I explained the two things I was most concerned about were Tuberculosis and PCP.

There was a moment’s silence. Then it began.

‘Could he have cancer?’

Well, yes, he could, I explained. I didn’t have any evidence of it, but it is possible that there was also an underlying carcinoma, as HIV patients are at high risk for some forms of cancer.

‘So he’s tested positive for HIV?’ one of them asked

‘No.’ I resisted the impulse to say that I had just explained that he had not been tested. ‘He shows signs of it, but we haven’t tested him for it yet.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m in here talking to you first. We’re going to do a full battery of tests to sort out the diarrhea and the cough and everything else.’

‘Shouldn’t you be doing that now?’ another one asked.

‘The lab runs the test in the morning. I’ll have the orders written by then without difficulty.’

‘What about Hirschsprung’s disease? Have you considered that?’

This catches me by suprise. Hirshsprung disease is usually diagnosed several days after someone is born. It is not a subtle diagnosis and is usually quite evident for the entriely of one’s life.

‘Does he have a history of Hirschsprung?’ I ask

‘No.’

‘Well, Hirschsprung disease causes constipation, so I don’t think—’

‘It also causes malnourishment. Are you telling me he’s not malnourished?’

I begin to explain the way that Hirschprung disease causes malnourishment when another of the ladies cuts me off.

‘Could he have DiGeorge’s syndrome?’

I suddenly realized they had consulted a book of pediatric diseases. I attempted to smile beneficently.

‘No.’ I said.

‘Shouldn’t you run tests to make sure?’

‘Are his ears normal?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he retarded?’

‘No.’

‘Did he live past the age of two?’

She looks at me, not saying anything.

‘He doesn’t have DiGeorge’s. But I tell you what: if everything turns out negative, I’ll do a chromosomal analysis for you.’

‘Why don’t you do it now, to speed things up?’

This continued for an excruciating forty-five minutes. I felt like Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer. Thankfully my pager started going off.

I apologized for having to ‘cut things short’ and made my exit.