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And so the hangover of working in high heat and poisonous air begins. I will be back outside again today, which makes me all the more excited.
I will say the one thing I love most about working in extreme conditions is how it gets me to act out in the most immature ways. Please look forward to me making an ass of myself, annoying you. I only do it out of love.
Notes
“When you fall down… you get back up though… you always do.”
“Always do… but it sucks.”
During an early part of my childhood my great-grandmother came to live with my family. She had a terrible fall, one that didn’t hurt her but concerned my parents enough to offer to take her in. My mother is a nurse, so caring for an elderly relative was something familiar. My parents had the space in the house for her, a room with it’s own sitting room and private bathroom. It was something of small apartment.
Life with a very old, very frail woman was strange. I believe I was 8 years old at the time she came to live with us. Therefore, I was too young to really be around when my mother was caring for her.
Perhaps a little less than a year of living with us she suffered a terrible stroke. When she had moved in she changed doctors. Her old doctor had her taking large amounts of aspirin to thin out her blood, which helped a little with her arthritis. Her new doctor, quite alarmed, told her to stop taking so much aspirin and switched her over to some better medication. Soon after, her blood started clotting and she suffered a series of minor strokes. She didn’t lose much motor function as many who’ve suffered strokes do, but she was confused. Everything became alien to her, a constant challenge to remember who she was and where she was. I have a vivid memory of her calling me Joseph, which isn’t odd considering it’s my given name. But she started calling my brother Michael by her second oldest son, my great Uncle Paul. She had confused an 8 year-old and a 6 year old for men who where at least 50 years older than us.
The stroke made her more frail. She was lost and confused. Somehow she was still responsive to my mother. She was able to communicate in this grunting manner I could never understand.
As her ability to care for herself diminished, the short hallway between her bedroom and her sitting room became a concern. It was a part of a small upper landing of a narrow staircase that lead to the kitchen. My parents that she might wander out of her room and fall down the stairs. To keep her from doing that they began locking her in the room. As horrible as that sounds we kept her in the room only at night when we couldn’t watch her. So it wasn’t that uncommon for me to wake up in the morning to her being upset and trying to open the door. After a short time of this, her being locked in the room she had another terrible fall early one morning. My mother heard a loud crash and found the woman crumpled over on her side, bleeding from her forehead.
My mother, along with my cousin John, rushed her to the hospital. The fall wasn’t sever, but it did give her a large gash. Afterwards, my mother began sleeping on a futon at the foot of my great-grandmother’s bed. She was able to care for her pretty much all hours of the day. I don’t remember much from this period except for the hardness of the futon, but I imagine it was hard for my mother to wait on this elderly woman at all hours of the day. I don’t know how long this when on for but I believe it was probably 8 to 9 months. My great-grandmother lived with us for almost two years before she passed away. The whole experience was strange, considering how adult the situations where. It’s not that I never expected my great-grandmother to die, it was just strange because as she got closer to the end more and more people were prepared to see her go.
Living in a house where a woman died is never really easy. True, she passed in her sleep while having little to no wits about her when she went. At times it was just too much for me, too many adults having conversations I couldn’t understand or didn’t need to be part of. When my great-grandmother died she took part of the conversation with her, but she also seemed to bring a lot more people together.
I’d say like 10 years ago I was watching Rob Zombie on some MTV show (I know!) where he talked about how he didn’t know what was going on in pop music for the previous decade. Once he started releasing to a larger audience he met all this public nostalgia for music he had never heard before. Duran Duran was novel to him, much after the fires of fandom had tempered to a dim flame.
It was then I wondered if I could shut out large portions of pop culture myself.
Then again, when I go shopping I don’t buy things, I just get what the fuck I need.
Notes(via joecoscarelli)
You’d be surprised how often I feel the twinge of guilt, even when I know I didn’t do something wrong.
Notes
