the next in a series of translations from the paranoid ravings of my beloved father
The human mind is a complex, confusing organ. Just a tiny nudge - a sensory blip, for instance, or a drop more of one chemical instead of another - can derail all semblance of "normal" perception and send the unfortunate passenger consciousness on a terrible ride through nightmare landscapes. Sometimes it amazes me that a few pounds of water and some sugar-based molecules can function in such a staggering way at all.
An inordinate amount of my life has been spent contemplating what the human brain can do when it's functioning improperly, and my father apparently wants to ensure that a day can't go by without me thinking about aberrant psychology. (All I have to do is stop reading his journal, I know, but it's like quitting smoking - I need a patch or something. Lunacy makes for addictive reading!) The bulk of my childhood was spent in the company of an insane man, and I think deep down I'm always going to have turmoil as I reconcile filial emotion against plain fact. My father is insane, in ways only strong medication and therapy can help, and I cannot and never could provide those to him. There's nothing I can do to make him face reality, or steps I can take to help others help him. Believe me, I've investigated the relevant avenues. The state of Ohio is very porous when it comes to the mentally ill, as the recent election has shown.
I know most of you reading this aren't at all interested in my father, despite his evident delusions that millions of people are taking the time out of their schedules to read and adjudge the relative merits of my "complaints" against his...whatever it is that he writes. I try not to read his malarkey either, but he has his hooks under my skin, and while mostly I just laugh at his conspiracies, many of which seem straight out of shelved Jerry Springer episodes ("My little league coach has made my life hell since I was 12!" "I saw Michael Fortier at a Motel 6 the night before the OKC Bombing!" "I don't have a job or a place to live because there's a conspiracy of Texans in league with my family to do STUFF!" "Something about childhood pictures that really makes no sense whatsoever and that I never explain!" "My son was a spy for the homosexual agenda when he was 14!" "An enormous conspiracy of doctors with nothing better to do killed my mother!"), occasionally he does piss me off. Usually this happens when he insults the memory of my late grandmother with his incoherent babble.
To spare your friends list, my loyal co-conspirators, I'm putting a rant you'd rather not read under here:
Apparently my father can sling around medical terms he learned from my grandmother's autopsy report (which, in the spirit of Ed Gein, he carts around with him wherever he goes), but he can't really comprehend the relatively straightforward circumstances ennumerated in the report. Twice now (that I've seen), he's posted either excerpts or summaries from my grandmother's autopsy. That's not something you'd want your grandson reading, especially considering I read the thing in full when I was 17, when her death was still a fresh scar on my psyche, and especially considering she was a mother to me. My father, I am forced to conclude, either has no love for his mother, or has a twisted, psychopathic form of love that involves living rent-free in her house and taking her money until well into his forties, all the while making conspiracies about her blue eyes and her few friends both openly and behind her back, then suggesting that she faked her death before launching a one-man crusade to throw salt into the wounds of those who really did love her.
Perhaps I'm being uncharitable, but my grandmother spent her entire adult life taking care of my father, in one way or another, and these are the thanks she gets?
Anyay, I present here, for my own pleasure, my father's latest sick ode to my grandmother. My replies are in brackets, as usual, and paragraphs are all of my invention.
BmoneyXX substituted into my journal [That makes no sense, but then, when does he ever?]
From hospital record 64-61-70-00
Hospital Course
The patient is a 71 year old female with no significant
cardiac history. She was apparently involved in a house fire
on Sunday. She had difficulty breathing today and complained
of chest pain and was seen at Miami alley Hospital and was given a
breathing treatment.(Dr called) She subsequently presented to
Good Samaritan Hospital later in the evening about 7:30 to
8:00 with severe substernal chest of at least six to eight hours
duration, abdominal pain, shortness of breath, back
pain, diaphoresis and being cold and clammy. She had a CT scan
of her abdomen done to rule out abdominal aortic aneurysm
rupture. It was reported by the radiologist as being negative.
[Okay, I really need to read through that again, thanks. It's not like I have feelings or anything.]
BULLSHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT. [Compelling counter-argument, Mr. Spock.] She couldn't eat at the motel and the last meal was at McDonalds in Englewood next to the motel. [Ooookay...That has nothing to do with the excerpt above, but I won't dispute it.]
My son Rick had seen her in abdominal pain ONLY muthaas! [Hey! He actually spells my name correctly this time! And also, Einstein, you forgot to mention that she very specifically complained of severe chest pain around 7 that evening, and that's the reason I called 911, as I very specifically told you that night. The medication she had been given for her abdominal pain was working, but this chest pain was new. Simple enough? I would think even a five year old could grasp the difference, but Eric is a special case.]
We had two trips to emergency at Miami Valley in the previous months for stomach pain and they have no record of that at all. [Aaaaaand if they did include that in the report, it would do nothing but reinforce what the rest of the report says, if you can actually understand written English.]
Thanks Rick for being so understanding of the bullshit from the doctors and courts. [You're welcome, I guess. Except there WAS no "bullshit" from either doctors or courts. Maybe the doctors were guilty of not being supermen, which can happen and unfortunately often does, and the courts were just doing their job in processing a man who was skulking around a public park in the wee hours of the morning with a loaded handgun and a teenage son sleeping on a picnic table. Neither qualifies as "bullshit," and that's what anyone can understand.]
Thanks for calling the EMT'S at all. [As if I'd let my grandmother die in hellish agony, you sick psychotic asswipe. What kind of concept do you have of me, anyway? I guess anyone who could say his own mother faked her death for fun wouldn't expect much from his own son.]
It was hell for me to see you and mom ride away when I got back from the house. Fuck all Dayton assholes and the Bush fucks since 2000. [Does he have Tourette's now, too? Because this makes no sense and has no relevance to reality. I mean, I have no love for Bush, either, but he wasn't even placed in the White House for another nine months after my grandmother's death, and in any case has no clue that my father even exists!]
I guess 1 Delaney in the Pacific dumped deserves a n Atlantic Delaney dump also, you know, to balance out and not throw off that good christian Karma. [Umm...He's lost me on this one. Delaney is my grandmother's maiden name, and I guess he could be referring in some bizarre fashion to her death, but honestly, I can't make heads or tails of this. He's been writing a lot that makes about as much sense as a howler monkey underwater.]
From autopsy:
I. heart crap
II. Lacerations of the gastric mucosa:
A. Multiple longitudal mucosal laceratins
B. Large hematoma of the anterior gastric wall.
C. Stomach distended with clotted and fluid blood.
III. Carcinoma of the colon.
[Here we're getting somewhere. Basically, this is how the report reconstructs my grandmother's final days. It's not pretty, but it's not difficult to understand, either:
1. Massive cancerous growths throughout much of her lower abdomen, possibly leading to an aortic aneurysm, and certainly explaining the savage pain she reported from her abdomen, which led to the initial hospital visits over the weeks prior.
2. Massive stress event (house fire and aftermath) causing what seemed to be myocardial infarction, but which could just as easily have aggravated a preexisting aneurysm or gastric condition, causing severe internal bleeding.
Now, it's evident that, even without the house fire, my grandmother would not have lasted another few months, at the most. Multiple cancerous bodies of this magnitude, coupled with internal tissue damage, would have meant that there was nothing medical science could do to save her, even if the doctors had known in advance what conditions she had. This last is important, because doctors do not automatically know everything that is going on in your body. This is a crucial point that my father cannot grasp, preferring to substitute an enormous and basically pointless conspiracy of murder and silence among professional medical caregivers. Remember, this isn't Magnum, PI here - this is real life. Yeah, abuses exist in the medical system, and incompetence or laziness certainly could have played a role in my grandmother's death. I'm not happy about that, but doctors aren't supermen. They did what they could, but it wasn't enough. That's all. Simple, huh? It's not that hard to understand, if you have the capacity to understand anything.
This, unfortunately, my father lacks.]
Happy trails! No big deal for everyday life since 2000. I really feel for the poor people that get so little off the street while the rich say they watch out for you all. Butt why should being poor mean we have to take this shit? Oh well I iz a hopeless. [Again, nonsensical, referring to nonexistent events and postulating yet another enormous conspiracy to account for his own inability to function as a normal human being.]
Current Mood: You half to ask? [What's the other half, hmm?]
Current Music: Talkin bout mmmy regggeneration [Unknown. Referring to a 1960s song, but out of context and bizarre.]
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my father's version of respect for his mother. Like I said before, mental illness is a strange thing.
An inordinate amount of my life has been spent contemplating what the human brain can do when it's functioning improperly, and my father apparently wants to ensure that a day can't go by without me thinking about aberrant psychology. (All I have to do is stop reading his journal, I know, but it's like quitting smoking - I need a patch or something. Lunacy makes for addictive reading!) The bulk of my childhood was spent in the company of an insane man, and I think deep down I'm always going to have turmoil as I reconcile filial emotion against plain fact. My father is insane, in ways only strong medication and therapy can help, and I cannot and never could provide those to him. There's nothing I can do to make him face reality, or steps I can take to help others help him. Believe me, I've investigated the relevant avenues. The state of Ohio is very porous when it comes to the mentally ill, as the recent election has shown.
I know most of you reading this aren't at all interested in my father, despite his evident delusions that millions of people are taking the time out of their schedules to read and adjudge the relative merits of my "complaints" against his...whatever it is that he writes. I try not to read his malarkey either, but he has his hooks under my skin, and while mostly I just laugh at his conspiracies, many of which seem straight out of shelved Jerry Springer episodes ("My little league coach has made my life hell since I was 12!" "I saw Michael Fortier at a Motel 6 the night before the OKC Bombing!" "I don't have a job or a place to live because there's a conspiracy of Texans in league with my family to do STUFF!" "Something about childhood pictures that really makes no sense whatsoever and that I never explain!" "My son was a spy for the homosexual agenda when he was 14!" "An enormous conspiracy of doctors with nothing better to do killed my mother!"), occasionally he does piss me off. Usually this happens when he insults the memory of my late grandmother with his incoherent babble.
To spare your friends list, my loyal co-conspirators, I'm putting a rant you'd rather not read under here:
Apparently my father can sling around medical terms he learned from my grandmother's autopsy report (which, in the spirit of Ed Gein, he carts around with him wherever he goes), but he can't really comprehend the relatively straightforward circumstances ennumerated in the report. Twice now (that I've seen), he's posted either excerpts or summaries from my grandmother's autopsy. That's not something you'd want your grandson reading, especially considering I read the thing in full when I was 17, when her death was still a fresh scar on my psyche, and especially considering she was a mother to me. My father, I am forced to conclude, either has no love for his mother, or has a twisted, psychopathic form of love that involves living rent-free in her house and taking her money until well into his forties, all the while making conspiracies about her blue eyes and her few friends both openly and behind her back, then suggesting that she faked her death before launching a one-man crusade to throw salt into the wounds of those who really did love her.
Perhaps I'm being uncharitable, but my grandmother spent her entire adult life taking care of my father, in one way or another, and these are the thanks she gets?
Anyay, I present here, for my own pleasure, my father's latest sick ode to my grandmother. My replies are in brackets, as usual, and paragraphs are all of my invention.
BmoneyXX substituted into my journal [That makes no sense, but then, when does he ever?]
From hospital record 64-61-70-00
Hospital Course
The patient is a 71 year old female with no significant
cardiac history. She was apparently involved in a house fire
on Sunday. She had difficulty breathing today and complained
of chest pain and was seen at Miami alley Hospital and was given a
breathing treatment.(Dr called) She subsequently presented to
Good Samaritan Hospital later in the evening about 7:30 to
8:00 with severe substernal chest of at least six to eight hours
duration, abdominal pain, shortness of breath, back
pain, diaphoresis and being cold and clammy. She had a CT scan
of her abdomen done to rule out abdominal aortic aneurysm
rupture. It was reported by the radiologist as being negative.
[Okay, I really need to read through that again, thanks. It's not like I have feelings or anything.]
BULLSHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT. [Compelling counter-argument, Mr. Spock.] She couldn't eat at the motel and the last meal was at McDonalds in Englewood next to the motel. [Ooookay...That has nothing to do with the excerpt above, but I won't dispute it.]
My son Rick had seen her in abdominal pain ONLY muthaas! [Hey! He actually spells my name correctly this time! And also, Einstein, you forgot to mention that she very specifically complained of severe chest pain around 7 that evening, and that's the reason I called 911, as I very specifically told you that night. The medication she had been given for her abdominal pain was working, but this chest pain was new. Simple enough? I would think even a five year old could grasp the difference, but Eric is a special case.]
We had two trips to emergency at Miami Valley in the previous months for stomach pain and they have no record of that at all. [Aaaaaand if they did include that in the report, it would do nothing but reinforce what the rest of the report says, if you can actually understand written English.]
Thanks Rick for being so understanding of the bullshit from the doctors and courts. [You're welcome, I guess. Except there WAS no "bullshit" from either doctors or courts. Maybe the doctors were guilty of not being supermen, which can happen and unfortunately often does, and the courts were just doing their job in processing a man who was skulking around a public park in the wee hours of the morning with a loaded handgun and a teenage son sleeping on a picnic table. Neither qualifies as "bullshit," and that's what anyone can understand.]
Thanks for calling the EMT'S at all. [As if I'd let my grandmother die in hellish agony, you sick psychotic asswipe. What kind of concept do you have of me, anyway? I guess anyone who could say his own mother faked her death for fun wouldn't expect much from his own son.]
It was hell for me to see you and mom ride away when I got back from the house. Fuck all Dayton assholes and the Bush fucks since 2000. [Does he have Tourette's now, too? Because this makes no sense and has no relevance to reality. I mean, I have no love for Bush, either, but he wasn't even placed in the White House for another nine months after my grandmother's death, and in any case has no clue that my father even exists!]
I guess 1 Delaney in the Pacific dumped deserves a n Atlantic Delaney dump also, you know, to balance out and not throw off that good christian Karma. [Umm...He's lost me on this one. Delaney is my grandmother's maiden name, and I guess he could be referring in some bizarre fashion to her death, but honestly, I can't make heads or tails of this. He's been writing a lot that makes about as much sense as a howler monkey underwater.]
From autopsy:
I. heart crap
II. Lacerations of the gastric mucosa:
A. Multiple longitudal mucosal laceratins
B. Large hematoma of the anterior gastric wall.
C. Stomach distended with clotted and fluid blood.
III. Carcinoma of the colon.
[Here we're getting somewhere. Basically, this is how the report reconstructs my grandmother's final days. It's not pretty, but it's not difficult to understand, either:
1. Massive cancerous growths throughout much of her lower abdomen, possibly leading to an aortic aneurysm, and certainly explaining the savage pain she reported from her abdomen, which led to the initial hospital visits over the weeks prior.
2. Massive stress event (house fire and aftermath) causing what seemed to be myocardial infarction, but which could just as easily have aggravated a preexisting aneurysm or gastric condition, causing severe internal bleeding.
Now, it's evident that, even without the house fire, my grandmother would not have lasted another few months, at the most. Multiple cancerous bodies of this magnitude, coupled with internal tissue damage, would have meant that there was nothing medical science could do to save her, even if the doctors had known in advance what conditions she had. This last is important, because doctors do not automatically know everything that is going on in your body. This is a crucial point that my father cannot grasp, preferring to substitute an enormous and basically pointless conspiracy of murder and silence among professional medical caregivers. Remember, this isn't Magnum, PI here - this is real life. Yeah, abuses exist in the medical system, and incompetence or laziness certainly could have played a role in my grandmother's death. I'm not happy about that, but doctors aren't supermen. They did what they could, but it wasn't enough. That's all. Simple, huh? It's not that hard to understand, if you have the capacity to understand anything.
This, unfortunately, my father lacks.]
Happy trails! No big deal for everyday life since 2000. I really feel for the poor people that get so little off the street while the rich say they watch out for you all. Butt why should being poor mean we have to take this shit? Oh well I iz a hopeless. [Again, nonsensical, referring to nonexistent events and postulating yet another enormous conspiracy to account for his own inability to function as a normal human being.]
Current Mood: You half to ask? [What's the other half, hmm?]
Current Music: Talkin bout mmmy regggeneration [Unknown. Referring to a 1960s song, but out of context and bizarre.]
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my father's version of respect for his mother. Like I said before, mental illness is a strange thing.