And she reappears. Surprise. Bet some of you had given up by now.
I won’t bore you with the details of how many dozens of times I have started an update all these months and just never finished. I actually started preparing to put up the bare bones of what is to be the new & improved site a few weeks ago. I had finished a new “under construction” index page, which still isn’t up yet of course, and was puttering around on a new Wall, with hopes of uploading it all before I went to bed that night, but in the end just got too tired and wound up going on to bed and saving it all for another day. That was on Monday night, September 10th. And then came, you know, September 11th.
So while that kind of changes what was almost a finished Wall at the time, I really haven’t changed much of what already was, except of course for adding this new beginning section. There’s really nothing I can say that hasn’t already been said a million times so I’m not going to dwell on it much here. I actually woke up that morning right about the time the first plane hit, but seeing as how after all these years of working days I am still so not a morning person and don’t really generally have any contact with the outside world until I’m well out of the house – and the electronic system in my car has gone berserk and I now have no car radio, so I don’t get to listen to Howard on the way to work anymore either – it wasn’t until over an hour later when I arrived at work that I found out what had happened. Very strange. I felt like I must have been like the last person on earth to hear the news.
Anyway, I’ve been fortunate thus far and able to account for everyone I personally needed to know about, in some form or another. Some acquaintances of mine haven’t been so fortunate, and it’s just so sad and awful. This thing was just so huge, it seems like most everyone either knew someone, or knows someone who knew someone, and so on and so on. I was telling someone recently that I had always considered it a privilege to have been fortunate to have known and met such a tremendous number of people throughout my life, from living different places and through various and sundry activities, it always seemed like a great thing, a big bonus. But in this case, in regards to what happened that day, it doesn’t seem like such a privilege and advantage anymore, instead it makes it more probable that I might indeed find out someone I knew was there, someone I just didn’t know was living or working in NYC nowadays, something like that. Like I said, so far I’ve been fortunate, but, statistically anyway, I’m still waiting, like many. I can’t imagine what those who are no longer waiting for news have been through.
So… onto other things. I’ve been gone a while, so even though those who remain actively in my life will be bored with the rest of this, I suppose the Wall deserves a little more in-depth updating than usual.
I am slowly but surely getting back into a more “normal” mode of all things online and Lynnster. This bit of a “break” was actually intentional, though I really didn’t intend for it to stretch out quite this long, it just turned out that way. Still have a few e-mails in the queue to answer (Dave, among others) and I am slowly wading thru some of that, but while I actually had the rare opportunity of one single night in early September with a space of a couple of hours with virtually nothing to do and nothing needing to be done for once, I thought I would go ahead and try to kill a few birds with several stones and do something really shocking like actually updating the Wall., and thus I started, even though I didn’t finish at the time. This current attempt to update here has been, like, a month or more in the making. The next big project, soon I hope, is going to be revamping this entire site, getting rid of a lot of the dead wood pages/dead links/wholly unnecessary links/etc, etc.)… eradicate the unnecessary, that’s my aim, and there’s plenty of it out there, unnecessary I mean. Gonna get rid of tons of stuff. Plus The Monarchs have a new CD soon coming out and I need to be doing some remodeling on that site too. Soon, soon.
So I guess I’ve been away most of the year, which 2001 has been a pretty allover sucky one for the most part. Between being tied up with more sh*t than any one person should have to be snowed under with, and the simple fact that I just kind of hit a personal point of being sick to death of being online after 10+ years of pretty much living my life online in some shape or form, an extended “vacation” became not only necessary due to circumstances, but desperately needed. I was sick to death of being online – not that I haven’t been online at all – yeahsureright – there’ve been extended periods of complete mindless time-wasting and other such (see www.pogo.com, among others, heh heh).
In any case, a few times too often the website, the Wall, and just the general presence of me online period, has caused some conflict or another in my non-online life – nothing terribly exciting, no stalkers or lawsuits or anything like that – just stuff. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, and I just got sick of the BS and frankly just felt like disappearing from all things Web for a while. It seemed like a good thing to do at a point in time when I really didn’t have much to say about much of anything anyway. This site almost came down entirely, I really considered that earlier in the year. Instead I just decided to let sleeping dogs lie and wait it out until I had the time, and the desire, to deal with the site/Wall/etc. at all, again. I really wanted to drape the site in black when Joey Ramone passed away, bless him, but obviously I didn’t get around to that either. When your musical heroes are suddenly becoming lost due to things like cancer and other natural causes instead of drug overdoses and more dramatic circumstances, I guess that’s a sure sign you’re getting old. But I know one thing, Iggy Pop is playing in Memphis this week and that’s cool.
Anyway, so I guess I’m back now, more or less, for whatever that’s worth.
So I guess one question is, where have I been? Not anywhere, really, other than a nice little trip to Baltimore this spring where I fell in love with Baltimore, Annapolis and baseball. I always thought I hated baseball. And who’d have thought at 35 years old I’d suddenly discover, hey, guess what, I actually like baseball. Watching an Orioles game at Camden Yards, now that was totally cool. But other than that I haven’t really been anywhere, other than here and there around the general vicinity. So I guess the next question is what all’s been going on with me and mine, and the answer to that is, well, not that much, or at least not anything particularly great, that’s for sure.
Virtually none of the basic statistics of my life have changed, I’m still in Memphis, same place and same Bat time and channel, same sort of job though I finally saw a promotion & tiny raise this year, which seems almost a minor miracle seeing as how a few months ago some of us (including myself) were fighting to keep our jobs. As for the usual cast of clowns who often appear in name here and elsewhere, everybody else is still wherever they were and everyone’s mostly fine that I know of. And my kid sister and brother-in-law moved to Memphis over the summer, living way far out in the county and far enough for me to gripe about how far out they are, but still a heck of a lot better geographically than Rhode Island, yep. Finally there’ll be a Christmas where all but one member of the family is in West Tennessee now, I can hardly believe it. Anyway, much fun having them and their four crazy cats in the vicinity.
So much of the year has been spent swamped under drowning with work and much other stuff to do (which has been pretty much a constant) and then everything else, which has been mostly spent trying to deal with what’s been an onslaught of seemingly never-ending bad and not-great news and things to be done. My godmother probably put it best when she made the understatement of the century recently, that 2001 just hasn’t been a particularly good year for me and mine. One relative with breast cancer and a mastectomy this year, one parent diagnosed with cancer and another parent who’s hardly been sick a day in life developing a serious heart condition, which we’re still trying to deal with. In between all that, my kitty Molly, she of the Diary of a Mad Kitten section of this site and Maggie’s sister, fell ill with some wild disease that rarely ever happens to cats and passed away in April.
And then as if all that weren’t enough, yours truly goes in for a long-postponed and delayed checkup early this year and well, you know, just when you think things can’t get any worse, right? I went in for a routine exam in February, and three months later, after test after test kept coming back with the results of the latest being worse than the one before again and again, was wondering whether I really needed to get around to finalizing that ol’ Last Will & Testament and all that junk. There’s nothing quite like spending six or so months with your life completely on hold and in limbo, nope.
Yep, you read me right (though I guess most regular visitors here already knew all this anyway)… without going into a lot of yucky gynecological detail, I had a pretty bad cervical cancer scare. Needless to say it was a little bit stressful going from February to May getting biopsied to death and thinking each time the news would be good and instead it just got worse and worse, not to mention all the rest of the stressful issues and things going on with family and other such. The good news is I don’t have cancer, but it got a little too close for comfort really – the “big biopsy” results were just like a step away from cervical cancer and it was extremely fortunate that I went for that first checkup when I did, another six months or a year or more and it’d probably have been too late. Yeah, whew! is right.
So, after I had this yucky surgery in May (that I will refuse to have again unless they knock me out cold this time, no way I will ever be awake for that again – I imagine childbirth is probably less painful!), there was nothing to do but wait. Mainly because everything that was removed had to have time to regenerate and grow back, and thus see if it was normal when it grew back, or came back full of those scary abnormal cells again. Yeah, I didn’t know stuff like that would regenerate either, but apparently it does. I thought that was pretty weird, kinda sci-fi icky or something. Anyway, I spend about three months, actually close to four, being rather certain that the only way I would be able to live the rest of my life without living in deathly fear that every exam was gonna come back positive for cancer was just to, you know, have pretty much everything removed, especially since the original “bad cells” were not just relegated to one portion of my reproductive system, according to the biopsy results. I was pretty convinced that I would have to go under the knife again before the year was out. Now, the thought of that really shouldn’t have bothered me much, seeing as how I’ve been pretty convinced for a while that I’m not ever planning to have children anyway. But it’s one thing to make that decision for yourself. It’s a whole different thing when something suddenly makes that decision for you, you know.
But as it turns out, all that mood-wrecking and angst was apparently for naught, since I’m happy to report that in August I had a perfectly normal test and biopsy result this time, so, again – whew. It’s definitely all been a real mental rollercoaster ride this year, especially with everything else that was going on at the same time, but at least I don’t have to worry so much anymore, for now anyway. I’m not exactly totally out of the woods – I have to get checkups and another exam several more times before I can truly be deemed “normal” (hah!) but if all goes well for the next year or so, I can actually go back to a routine yearly deal like most other women do and won’t really have much to worry about. I get to live a normal life but there’s always more of a chance for me than the next chick that the precancerous cells might come back, so I just can’t ever miss another checkup, that’s for sure. Otherwise, it’s all good.
So the moral to this story, kiddies…. if you’re a chick, don’t ever ever miss a scheduled Pap smear, and if you’re a guy, make sure your women go get theirs when they should. A few more months delay could have well cost me my life, and that’s darn scary, so don’t put yourself or let your loved ones put themselves in that kind of position ‘cos trust me, it ain’t much of a fun place to be. OK, lecture’s over.
So anyway, that’s a good bit of the year right there. I did find there were some interesting aspects of having a potentially dangerous and possibly fatal thing going on, things you don’t even think about when you know or figure you’re all fine and healthy and stuff. Like, things that you forgot you were mad about, all of a sudden you find yourself ticked off about again… or things you were fine about or had blown off before, those kinds of things can make one really annoyed under circumstances like that. There’s also certainly a greater appreciation for the good things and people in one’s life, what was already important certainly becomes much moreso when you think there’s a chance your number may be up before you thought, yep. But it’s real easy to get hopping mad about things both big and small, things you’d forgotten about being mad about, a whole slew of new things to be mad about, and all kinds of other things. Probably needless to say I was in such a mostly lousy mood for a while it was probably a good thing I wasn’t updating the site, heh. But anyway, though I certainly don’t feel as invincible and immortal as I did fifteen or twenty years ago when, you know, you’re a fearless idiot teenager or early twentysomething who doesn’t think anything at all could ever happen to you – still you just don’t really expect to have to deal with such junk like this when you’re in your thirties and it’s real, real easy to get p.o.’d about lots of stuff and stuff that never mattered that much before. But there are nice things too, for one, a crisis like this and you learn who you can count on real quick, in my case it was about 99.99% of those around me so that’s a pretty good deal. I’m happy with that and have much love & happy thoughts for those who stuck with me through the bad moods and the worries and the general p.o.’d-at-the-world-ness.
Anyhow, a pretty happy ending for a relatively scary and yucky year which is now almost over, not much more to report, really. In between all of the above there’s been so much other stuff going on to be dealt with, I really haven’t been into discovering any new music or books or whatnot much, mainly just a matter of time constraints, as in, not enough hours in the days! We’ve also recently had a rather harrowing veterinary ordeal around here, with one of my kitties getting hugely ill with a liver disease that apparently only cats get, and I spent a good bit of the last month dealing with that, fortunately also with a happy ending – he’s fine now – but only after weeks of force feeding and other such fun stuff. I think he just finally made the connection that if he would start eating on his own again, I would stop shoving a syringe full of food down his throat several times a day, which was an ordeal and a half and most of the time I think wound up getting more cat food on him and me than in his tummy, but apparently it worked… and was much better than what my sister went through with one of hers just before that, with her kitty in the kitty ICU for ten days and a feeding tube in her tummy. My vet and I decided to try to treat mine conservatively at home, with the force feeding and the meds, and I really wasn’t expecting the cat to make it so it was a big surprise and relief that he did. He’s happy and eating like a horse now, I’m pleased.
All the other animals are fine as well, with Dobie approaching his 7th birthday next month around Thanksgiving and Dare pushing 16 and not showing any signs of going anywhere, I’m beginning to think he may outlive me.
And, even though we lost little miss Molly this year, her place has sort of been taken as I now have a spare Beagle named Tallulah, AKA Lulu or Lula. Actually she’s a Beagle mix and I’ve decided her other part is probably Dachshund, in any case she’s got a Beagle head and a fat sausage Dachshund body and squatty little legs, and has eked out her place in the household among the rest, including giving Dobie back every bit of grief he deserves for all the grief he’s given his mama, Baby, over the years. Lulu was, yes, yet another foundling… when I found her I was sure someone would be looking for her, as she was pretty fat and healthy and clean when found, now I’ve about decided that instead someone dropped her off where she was hoping some sucker like me would find her. Anyway, she’s a very good dog, very cute, extremely well-trained and other than her habit of snoring louder than most people do when she’s sleeping, I can’t complain and I can’t really even complain about that because it’s really rather hilarious to see and I’ve gotten over the hearing part.
So anyway, I’m good, things are mostly good, things could have certainly been worse. It’s been a stellar bad year mostly, but things are starting to get back to a little more normal again, whatever “normal” means.
One last little bit of stuff here, next time you’re visiting your local bookstore, drop by the Music section and check out a new book called Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad, featuring some pretty cool choices for the base history of ’80s indie music – Black Flag, the Minutemen, the almighty Replacements, and others. But there’s another (albeit very small) reason to flip thru it too, ‘cos when you pick it up and flip back to the back part of the book where the thank-yous & general acknowledgements are, you just might find a name you recognize among the masses… a pleasant and unexpected surprise for moi, that was for sure. There’s something pretty cool about finding oneself, by alphabetical virtue of course, listed next to punk rock legend Legs McNeil! I just love that.
Nothing much else going on and now that I’ve dipped my toes back into the Graffiti pool, maybe I’ll get around to updating soon again. Hope most of you have been good too, and see ya again soon. Later…
