To Blog Or Not To Blog?

Blogging seems to be a fairly lonely sort of business. One is alone with his thoughts, as is the case 99 percent of the time anyway in life, and the only difference here is that he is for some reason writing them down. Why? So that he can be clear about what he himself is thinking?

No, I don't believe so.

Why write then? Why blog?

One suspects that an audience is either anticipated or imagined. Perhaps it is someone loved. Perhaps someone lost. Perhaps it is a group of like-minded friends. Perhaps it is a group having something in common. Like MS, for instance.

Perhaps we simply want to speak, and to hear a voice in return. Society seems to become less and less a community, more and more a scattering of isolated fragments, buck shot, trying to remember not only what barrel they came out of, but what the original target had been.

We set our fingers to the keyboard, we direct our thoughts into hyperspace. We say, essentially, Is anyone there?

And we wait. And we listen very closely. And we think anew.

There are observatories devoted to listening to space. There are devices that listen to the nearest star, to the nearest galaxy, to the asteroid belt and the rings of Saturn, and to planets and solar systems that are no more than theory.

And what is the answer, what sound does it make?

It is the sound of one hand clapping, I suppose.

Get Rich Quick

My wife is a natural born entrepreneur.

This is a word that would give her some trouble as far as pronunciation goes, being foreign not only to Indonesian, but to English as well. It is not a word that rolls smoothly off the tongue—like moon, or mango, or salamat malam. Rather, it is a word hopelessly at odds with the rolling and trilling Indonesian language.

No matter—for the concept is in her blood, the way duck hunting is in a Labrador’s blood, or mousing in a cat’s. No need for verbalization. She has money in her blood, and of course it must come out and breathe the air of the wide world of possibility, for one can only sell just so much of the raw material to the Red Cross before anemia sets in.

Many a time have I pondered where the root of this proclivity might be found. Does it arise from a childhood of poverty in Jakarta? Does it come from her father’s ambitious, though sadly unrealized notions of status and rank? Or did she catch this particular bug in America, the land of the quick buck and the sly scheme? Are riches dreamed of sight unseen, or only after the feasting of the eyes?

The answers to questions such as these remain to this day wholly in the realm of my own imagination, for Louis is a woman of few words when it comes to the particulars of the forces by which she is driven. She keeps her own counsel. This is both a good thing, as regards the confidence of character (i.e. bull-headed will to go forward), and a bad thing, as shall later be seen in more detail.

The first opportunity to rise in the world to which I was privy (to the tune of ten thousand dollars) was her (which is our) entry into the business of real estate with Pastor Corey Pritchet,

More about that later.

The second was a pyramid scheme wherein one sells memberships in a company offering, ostensibly, free legal advice, which is, in keeping with proper balances and measures, worth exactly what it purports to be worth. The trick is that if the individual entrepreneur can get ten thousands friends, give or take, to sign on to monthly memberships, she will make for herself, oh, say, ten million dollars in the first six months.

I love money, money loves me.

These are the words to a song which is sung at ITTL (I take the lead) seminars.

We are magnets for money. It just keeps gushing in, threatening to choke us.

And now comes my personal favorite. Sex toys.

Yes. I do not know where she initially came up with the idea. Perhaps she was one of ten thousand signed on by another entrepreneur. In any case, one day Louis showed up at home lugging an enormous suitcase filled with penises and vaginas, love beads and love potions, strawberry flavored massage oil, whipped cream, hot pink things that look like minuture toilet plungers; things that hum, things that buzz, things that flash and crawl about like lazy ferrets.

I make a sex party! she says.

Uh . . . .

Now the funniest part of this is not the toys themselves, but the juxtaposition of the toys with the person of Sant Louis—sweet and innocent Louis, church-going Louis—the conservative, proper, level-headed Louis I know and love.

What does this one do? she wants to know.

I sure do love Sant Louis.

Via the inscrutable route of sex toys, we now arrive at Saudi Arabia, and one Mamdouh Al-Shimari. The latest road to riches is to be found in the trafficking of foreign exchange students. Mamdouh is the first, but there will be more coming, Louis promises.

Here is where I get stuck—early on, as always. I am guilty, as often judged, of an inability to see the big picture, to comprehend the vision.

But here’s the thing—I can’t get past the difficulty that seems apparent in the fact that we have only one three bedroom house and four people already living therein. Are we to pack these students in on the sort of racks they have in submarines? Will we have henceforth a mess hall rather than a dining room? Will we send to whole troop on Tuesdays to the laundromat, or just set up our own where the kitchen used to be?

You see, I am easily lost in the details. Money is not in my blood. I am not really sure what is. Multiple sclerosis for one thing—which itself is not amenable to being stretched, exercised, challenged, shaken, or agitated.

But these limitations do not fit into my wife’s vision. And it is for this reason—nothing personal—that I had best shut-up and follow her lead. Faith is not a synonym for success. It is very much more like surrender.

What, after all, do I have to lose?

Travel II

As a matter of fact, while the rest of the fam went to the Tennessee aquarium to gawk over other peoples shoulders at the sea life they could have otherwise seen just down the street from our house in Oregon, I excused myself (claiming to feel seasick), and struck out instead into the unseen, undiscovered heart of Chattanooga. Ambling ever so happily under the rusty October sun, I passed by pre-Civil War churches, houses with blue and red shutters, over train tracks that spilled off the looming slopes of Lookout Mountain like frozen streams. I saluted everyone I passed, listening for accents, weighing the nuances that made one person Tennessee and another Georgia.

By the time the family stumbled blinky-eyed out of the stuffy aquarium, I had found a wonderful restaurant called Sticky Fingers, offering barbecued chicken and ribs, cornbread and greens and beans, and hand tossed biscuits which the employees actually threw at the diners from the balcony above the main floor.

Now does that beat sand crabs and squid, or what? Honestly, what is better--a live shrimp drifting through the murky green water behind three inches of glass, or one that's sitting on your plate next to a little amber pool of Carolina honey sauce?

You tell me.

Travel I

For as long as I can remember I have had this dream of traveling, of wandering wheresoever the whim might take me. The trouble is, I have always been either poor or married, neither of which works well for carefree excursions.

Poverty provides its own definition in this case, so we will say no more.

Marriage . . . well, let me offer an example:

Some years back my second wife and I flew down to Atlanta, Georgia to visit our daughter, living there were her husband and their child. How strange and wonderful it seemed--for one who had rarely been out of Oregon, anyway--the red clay, the humid days, the enormous bugs--June Bugs! It seemed perfectly exotic.

Best of all (or so I had initially thought) was the ocean of history lying all about, just waiting for me to dive in. Specifically, I am talking about Civil War history, in which I had long been an avid reader. Here was the chance to visit the battlefields around the city of Atlanta itself--Peach Tree Creek, Jonesboro! From the city you could drive North and follow in reverse the route taken by William Tecumseh Sherman in his investment of this hub of the Confederacy.

Yet farther north, just short of Tennessee, lay the battlefield called Chickamauga, after the stream running through. Here is where Hood's Texans split the center of the Union line. Here is the gentle knoll where General Thomas, the rock of Chickamauga, held off the final Rebel push in pursuit of the fleeing fragments of the Federal army.

And here, on that same hallowed battlefield, is where the potential of fascination in travel vanished. For what my wife and daughter had in mind was to drive straight through, entry to exit, ten minutes of history from the passenger seat of a rental car.

You can roll down the window, my wife said. I can drive through slowly.

I insisted on getting out of the car. I walked through the grass, upon the ground where thousands had struggled in combat well over one hundred years ago, where thousands had fallen, their country's fate in the balance.

I was thinking I might be standing on the very spot occupied by General James Longstreet's horse when my wife honked the horn.

And then on to Chattanooga and the Sea Life Aquarium.

Sea life in Tennessee? What did they do, truck it in from the Oregon Coast?

This is not travel. Not in my book, anyway.

Fat Head Dog

Having finally gotten my tooth fixed (hopefully), Smokey, the Labrador, decided to break off the one just next to it. He did this with his big, fat, hard head. Now I don't know which tooth it is that hurts--the one that has been under repair, the one Smokey broke, or both.

It's not enough, I guess, to knock me off my feet two or three times a week--which he does apparently just for laughs. Now he has to go and break my tooth. Also he broke my glasses yesterday. Just a quick right cross--didn't even see it coming.

I do not know what I've done to deserve this sort of treatment. I've tried to talk with him, but he just stares at me and tilts his head to one side.

Man's best friend. Right.

The Fountain of Youth

Okay lets get this straight. Multiple sclerosis has absolutely nothing to do with old age! If people would endeavor for themselves to discover the first thing about it, they would find that most people diagnosed with MS are between 20 and 40 years of age. But no, I hear again and again, from people who do not know what they're talking about, that MS is just another malady arising from old age--like senility or arthritis or death itself.

Because I am a good deal older than my wife, certain of her friends insist on advising that this--the risk of illness, or some other form of creaky incapacitation--was an avoidable part of such an arrangement from the start.

My objections, however, cannot help but seem a bit impotent as I totter into the debate on my cane looking exactly like . . . well, like an old man.

Does it sound a little too weird for me to wish I'd been diagnosed at 20?

I figure if anything MS makes me young, because it drops me statistically right smack dab in the midst of a much younger age group.

Put that in yer pipe and smoke it!

MS + X = Y2K

One thing that I have found to be true with multiple sclerosis--having had a couple years now to really appreciate the finer points--is that ones body is not up to dealing with anything else on top of it. A simple head cold, for instance, will cause a total system collapse--Y2K to the corporeal body, only not theory this time, but the real thing. Too many switches are already flipped, too many numbers have already rolled--BAM!, the whole organism crashes to a grinding halt.

And by anything, I do mean anything--the cold virus, yes; but also the toothache, the sprained ankle, the broken bone, the migraine headache. Each and any additional malady will be too much for MS to live with.

A toothache, for instance, is hard enough to deal with on its own merits, right? But adding it in with MS is like trying to load a grand piano onto a little red wagon. Nope, it's just not gonna fly.

Before MS we were accustomed to the rather convenient arrangement wherein a toothache would involve a tooth--maybe even the entire maxillary or mandibular set, maybe even the jaw. Now with MS the pain must go beyond the tooth, into the neck, into the legs, into the feet, for Christ's sake. The toothache must be accompanied not only by throbbing, but by body-wide exhaustion and increasing confusion.

Now try explaining this to someone else.

You fell asleep twice because of a toothache? Yeah, right. You say your tooth is making your elbow hurt? Okay . . . .

On second thought, don't bother trying to explain it.