(the place i'm at is playing 'kiko and the lavender moon'! i listened to this three times in a row whilst walking through the rain of capitol hill not three hours ago! once, at the h street house, i played this for an entire morning at top volume. i was the only one, obviously, at home. the subtle percussion is fucking brilliant. t gave me a signed los lobos poster from a show he went to; it remains rolled up in my hall closet. that's a bittersweet detail. but i digress.)
i did my first shift at the new clinic last night. it was its second day of operation. the place is fucking nice. like, intimidatingly, immediately-wipe-up-your-schmutz nice. the cabinets are a uniform diarrhea color, which is slightly clausterphobic/depressing, but otherwise... it's absolutely lovely. we saw two patients last night. the majority of the evening was spent discussing religion and meth. there is an ipod player but no radio and the silence was stultifying, so i plugged in my phone. i realized that my music does not hold up well for audience enjoyment. the things i've deigned to download are 'really good songs that i don't want to buy an album of' and 'guilty, shameful secrets' and 'i already have all their other songs on cd'. t approached me while i was washing the lone dish. "your music is so beautifully weird" he told me. he disliked the saturday knights and jude but seemed to like link wray and the challengers.
it was awkward, working at the new place. all the faces were familiar but the setting was so fucking foreign; i felt like a clumsy, inept new kid. the receptionist left at 5 and i was forced to check people in and out, which i'd never really done before. i'd never had to! i called the other facility (which was getting slammed, which i felt unneccessarily guilty about) and was kindly talked through the process. there wasn't even anything to clean; the only dust is the residual new-equipment dander that still resides in the shiny sinks and cages.
sweet green likes commuting. i remembered this from my heinous days in tacoma. she does 70 easily, shockless and jouncy. i listened to a.c. newman on the way home and pretended to know the lyrics.
*
a stray dog came into the clinic on saturday. the best part of this xray is seeing people's reactions when they first look at it.
it's a FUCKING BLADDER STONE.
this is a ~10# dog. the stone, on radiographs, measured 3.5cm x 5cm. her dribbly urine looked like watered-down thai iced tea.
she's supposed to have had surgery today.
*
more glimpses of blithe normalcy...
this is the closest these two get to each other.
dirty glass... and, incidentally, jethro.
the blue study... devolving to twilit car-lot flappy things.
my mother called today. she was laid off from the state in december and has been looking for a job ever since. she asked me about an ad for a veterinary receptionist... for the clinic adjacent to the ER i used to work at in olympia. it was a humbling moment... for both of us. i encouraged her to apply and told her to use me as a reference- b and s, who still work there, are some of the best people i've ever met in my life. but it was rather sad- my mother has worked for arco, bp, the government, nursing homes. she's been an executive secretary for over 30 fucking years. i never thought that i'd possibly be her reference. i felt a completely disgusting wave of pity- pity for her situation, disgust for myself. i am so fucking thankful to be employed.
pity is a horrible fucking feeling, no matter what. pity is condescension masquerading as empathy. i am revulsed that i feel that, totally uncontrollably, towards my own mother. towards her situation. towards the fact that apparently, surprise, my father's been nagging at her: "how'd it go today? find a job yet? why's it taking you so long?" towards the sorry state of my grandmothers and their parallel eschelons of daffiness, and my mother's joblessness-induced free time being taken up with them.
"i will never eat with your grandmother again" she said decisively today. the last time she took oma out, oma obsessed about a 'dome sandwich', which turned out to be a hamburger that she couldn't remember the term for, but when the waitress came by she couldn't recall. at all. "i'll have what she's having" she told the waitress, and ended up with eggs like my mother. "she was trying to save face" my mother said. she sounded stoic and slightly annoyed, but i know my mother- it fucking stings. oma had a physical a few weeks ago and my aunt took her to the appointment. "have you ever had surgery?" the doctor asked. "ohh, no" my grandmother replied. my aunt (by marriage) didn't know any better. yes, she's had a fucking choleocystectomy and several broken bones. "that explains the scar" my aunt said.
*
you just don't know. i didn't fucking know. "so what about you guys?" i asked. my mother listed off her medical history: broken toe, foot surgery, breast augmentation, hysterectomy. my father had surgery a week after he was born to correct a strangulated intestine. throat cancer and heart disease runs in her side of the family; breast cancer, depression, and MS on my dad's side. diabetes runs in both. i dutifully wrote this all down on a blank page in my sketchbook.
this was one of those mellow, magical days wherein the sun didn't set, the sky merely became a darker shade of grey.
i finally finished 'working in the shadows.' as an american citizen/consumer (a synonymous concept), you must read it. gabriel thompson. filed under current events at your local odious chain bookstore.
i also reread 'fast food nation.' that is such a boring fucking book. i read it when it first came out, or tried- it's so fucking pedantic. one can communicate without sounding like an uptight prosthelitizer. the slaughterhouse is my 'favorite' part, perhaps because it's the only part of the book where he personalizes the research and actually uses adjectives. for most of the rest, eric schlosser comes off as a self-righteous twat. i like how he included the negative reviews in the epilogue, though.
*
the slow night at work also included discussion about michael moore. p thinks he's a moron. i agreed. "i agree with his basic politics, and roger & me was great because he was still naive enough to not be a douche" i said tastefully. i saw michael moore at the key arena in 2005. it was obnoxious. liberal blowhard comes to fucking seattle? mike mccready and eddie vedder open with a cat stevens song? don't preach to the fucking choir, asshole. challenge our opinions. not everyone attends with obliviousness to the other side of the issues.
i left that evening, that fateful evening in 2005, annoyed and repulsed and feeling talked down to. and i'm so liberal it BURNS.
*
"harvest moon" plays. this place knows my deepest, most wistful secrets.
whilst strolling around this fair berg today, my impulse buy of donna summer's "i feel love" came on the ipod. i was reminded of my love for this song whilst malingering at the capitol hill value village last week. first reaction: big grin and "fuck, i love this song." second reaction: "this is so fucking uncool. i must never confess this to anyone." third reaction: "fuck, did they hear this at work last night?"
there should be an app to 'download' intellectually esoteric contents onto your iphone. it would replace my live version of 'the air that i breathe' and that fucking black-eyed peas song THAT LACKS ANY INTELLECTUAL VIABILITY BUT SAMPLES MISERILOU PRETTY CATCHILY, THERE I SAID IT and fucking '98.6' and whatever treacly nonsense i spent $.99 on whilst sprawled out slothfully in my lair.
*
oh, the modern age! when our flaws become global!
actually, people just need to be honest in their vices.
*
i'm unclear. this means i can walk through here, right?
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