My grandmother’s real name is Helen, but everyone in my family calls her Daro. It’s one of the first words I ever said, apparently — I just pointed at her and yelled it out and it stuck, simple as that.
Daro is 95 years old. She lied about her age her whole life until she turned 90, and then she started telling EVERYBODY. She’s a relentless self-promoter, a tireless artist, creator, and outsider poet. And man, she’s full of wisdom that she does not mind sharing at all.
Here’s some classic wisdom she shared with me when I visited her over Labor Day weekend:
We were sitting at the dinner table eating a home-cooked meal. Sort of. She proudly announced to me “I never use the oven anymore, Jeffrey. I just do everything up here in the microwave now, and it’s great!” We had some microwaved vegetable soup with a salad of romaine leaves covered with canned pears, and canned peaches. “Try some of the dressing I invented just tonight, Jeffrey,” she told me, all excited. “I came up with it myself. It’s mayonnaise with pineapple juice mixed in!” Read the rest of this entry »
My friend Rob and I have this ongoing juvenile argument.
He loves to ask people:
Which is better, having one testicle, or having three?
He’d rather have one, he says, because
I’d rather be a little sad than a lot creepy.
I disagree. I’d rather be strange than pitiful, myself. But it turns out I might not have much of a choice.
A few weeks ago, I was doing a bit of a self-test — got to do these things once you’re in your ’30s — and I discovered that one of my testicles was the approximate size and weight of a Cadbury Creme Egg. I made an appointment with a GP who gave it a perfunctory juggle, shrugged, and put me on antibiotics for a week.
It didn’t work. I got referred to a specialist who I went to see today. He ran some ultrasounds, then frowned and called up NYU, sent me across town for an emergency sonogram.
“That can’t be good,” I thought as I got into the cab. But it was all moving too fast for me to think about it.
So there’s this mass growing in the center of one of my nuts, making it all big and really hard. It feels like I could pound nails with the thing. Or really surprise someone in my Muay Thai class. But instead of being useful it’s consumed a lot of the healthy tissue in there and needs to come out.
As the doctor says, if it’s benign, it’s a problem because it could keep growing. If it’s malignant — out it comes, too. The procedure’s called a Radical Orchiectomy, and it’s about as fun as it sounds.
Luckily it doesn’t seem to have spread anywhere, and it’s been caught early. This is one of the few truly curable cancers in the world. Lance Armstrong let his go WAY further than mine, and he’s fine.
But still. Ain’t THAT a bitch. I’m going to lose one of my testicles, sooner rather than later. And I’m not even going to get to lose it to a hungry octopus, or at the tip of a pirate’s saber, or some other cool way. Just to one of the most common, curable cancers in the world.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m getting a second, third, opinion. And I feel lucky that this isn’t gonna take me out. Or at least not for long. Reproductive health and hormones should still be ticking right along. That’s why we have two of these things, apparently.
But I’m reeling, feeling betrayed by my body and mourning the loss of a body part already. I know it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I mean, SHIT.
So tomorrow’s going to be more doctor’s appointments and blood work, just to be sure. I’m told that I can get a prosthetic testicle put in during surgery if I want one. Not sure what to do about that one just yet. Does it even matter? Or, more importantly: does it cost much extra to get two prosthetics in addition to the real one?
**Update** I just had an idea. I wonder if I could get a musket ball from the Civil War encased in silicone and put in there instead. That could be really cool — keep a little Virginia with me at all times.
I wear a three-piece suit to work every day now. Now punk rock’s a prepackaged dream, a preservative-riddled batter you can spray out of a can and into your lifestyle, cook it up and presto, instant rebellion. Music’s not scary anymore, and when people howl and flail at their guitars it’s an animatronic history lesson, not the real thing.
Also those damn kids keep running on my lawn.
I don’t mean to be cranky and morose. But Lux Interior died today, and the world’s a lot more boring without the Cramps.
I made this photo in the Sleeveface style as my own little R.I.P.
Bonus points if you see that I’m wearing the album cover on my t-shirt, too.
I wrote a little story about my relationship to Lux and the Cramps — check it out after the jump if you like. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been staring at the screen for days trying to write this and I don’t have any idea what to say. The newspapers have it easy here — they just have to report the facts about strangers. Writing a memorial for the twelve year old sister of a good friend, that’s hard.
When that little girl’s been murdered and the whole thing’s been all over the Washington Post already, it gets even harder.
The father of 12-year-old Marisol Caceres was arrested in her killing and jailed without bond yesterday as more grim details emerged about the girl’s strangulation Tuesday in her family’s Northeast Washington apartment.
I’m just putting this here for the strangers, and I really, really hope Jose and Marisol’s family understand that I’m only repeating this so that strangers understand the story. I’m going to let the Post do the heavy lifting here and just explain my angle …
Not only was he the most thoughtful, intelligent, precocious and wise 19-year-olds I’d ever met — he may have been one of the wisest human beings I’d ever met. Once he opened up to me a little, he was this busted fire hydrant of knowledge about philosophy, classical music, video games and maybe jazz, too. The only organ bigger than Jose’s mind is his heart. I remember a lot of late nights at our friend Danielle’s place, him telling me about growing up in Columbia Heights while I made us dinner. He was telling me about his apartment when he just trailed off and gaped at the burritos I was putting together.
“You just like, made that right here, man?” he asked. “Can you teach me how?”
I think that may have been one of the most fulfilling nights of my life. We saw each other a lot over the next year, talking about all kinds of stuff — his girlfriend, his dog, school, and his family. He loved his little sister so, so much.
From the Washington Post’s article about Marisol’s memorial:
“She was open to new friendships and always creating new ones,” her family said in a statement. “She always found a way to make us laugh. She was the youngest of the family yet she was, in many ways, the oldest because of her demeanor. She lived her life vividly by visiting museums, taking up martial arts, and sharing new thoughts and interests.”
She liked soccer, too.
She always took very good care of her little nephew.
She loved her dog, Moe, and her pet birds.
She liked video games and movies.
She never hesitated to share her cosmetology techniques.
And she was always a princess on Halloween.
I never met Marisol, personally. I saw her waving to Jose from across the street, heard him talking about her a lot. It’s hard for me to memorialize someone I never knew directly. But I’ll say this: I saw her effect on Jose, and I could feel his love for her just pour out of him when he told me how smart she was, how kind and giving she was even as such a little girl. Jose and his family had it tougher than most of us can imagine for a very long time, and they had a lot of reasons to be cynical. But when they looked at Marisol they felt pure love and a tremendous, giddy hope.
Now Marisol’s gone, and I’m all the way up here in New York. I have no idea what else I can do. So I’m doing this:
Marisol’s family needs money now. They need it badly. Her mother does not receive generous bereavement benefits. Cell phone bills still need to be paid, laundry needs to be done, and people still need to eat. And above all else: they have to move as soon as possible. Imagine having to come home to that same apartment every night.
***UPDATE***According to my friend Danielle at YARG, the family has since found housing. This does not at all change their need for money, mind you, but they do at least have a new place to sleep and try to rebuild their lives.***
I’ve never asked for donations on here before, and it’s going to be a long, long time before I do it again. But this is really, really important, and every little bit helps. It’s so easy to spend money — five bucks to download the new Radiohead album, thirty bucks on dinner and drinks — and this is so much more important than pretty much anything we could spend money on. I’ve seen users on Reddit buy thousands of dollars worth of flowers for Helen Thomas, seen the Web bail a woman out of credit card debt and help a guy trade a paper clip up to a brand new house. Those are cute stories, and they say something important about the power of crowds and commerce online. But this is a grieving, devastated family that needs real help.
If you’re reading this at work, you can afford to double what you spent on lunch and drop it into the family’s Paypal account. If you’re reading this in a coffee shop, double your check and donate it. Don’t let me stop you from dropping in more, all I’m saying is that doesn’t need to be much — and please pass this on.
Link to this post if you want, or write me through the “Contact Us” page up there and I’ll send you the code for the donations button above. The Web’s an incredible, weird place that can really do some good. If you don’t do it for them, do it for me. And if you have a problem with me, fine, whatever, just please do your part to help this family out.
Jose’s family will be accepting donations through Darling Andrade’s (Jose’s sister) PayPal Account. We chose this method because it is safe, secure, and makes the funds be available to the family immediately. To make a donation, click this button:
Paypal online isn’t comfortable for everyone, and that’s fine. If you would prefer to make your donation in cash or by check — or just want to send a card to express condolences — mail to:
YARG
Attn: Jose Andrade
1419 V St NW
Washington, DC 20009
The family would also be grateful for donations of food. Please the executive director of YARG at danielle@yargdc.org if you are able to prepare food for Jose and his family. She’ll help you coordinate the best way to deliver food to the family, as they will be in different locations throughout the week. Meals are best if they require as little preparation as possible, i.e. meals that can just be reheated or eaten cold.
Jose left this in the comments, and it really sums it up for me:
My family is going through a very difficult time.. and has it becomes clear whose responsible for this hideous act.. strange feelings arise and we have to deal with them in a peaceful and intelligent ways.
I lay in bed in Brooklyn yesterday afternoon, staring up at the ceiling and watching the sunlight fade from the room. I couldn’t nap, couldn’t rest. A creature had taken up residence in my throat and chest. I imagined it to be black and very hairy, with large leathery wings. It wasn’t quite a bird and wasn’t quite a mammal, just this hairy winged thing, like a shaggy, greasy bat.
It moved around, pacing between my uvula and heart, shuffling and trying to stretch its wings. I imagined what it would feel like when the shaggy bat burst past my lips and lifted off, cutting ragged figure-8s around the paper lamps hanging from my ceiling.
Smithfield Ham is a meat like no other. A close cousin to Italian prosciutto, Smithfield ham is the meat of peanut-fed hogs, salt-cured and hickory smoked for a minimum of six months in the corporate limits of Smithfield, Virginia — home to my grandparents, aunt and uncle. Smithfield ham is drier and more thickly cut than supple, subtle prosciutto. Compared to Smithfield ham, prosciutto is the damp rag used to wipe a hog farmer’s work boots.
In a purely physical sense, Smithfield ham is terrible for you. The only way it could harm your heart more from a medical perspective would be if a surgeon were to slice your chest open and manually pack your arteries with wads of the stuff. From an emotional perspective, it is Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, love and forgiveness and bedtime stories all in one salty, fat-filled bite. Draped over a handmade biscuit with butter, it is also Prozac, Lithium and THC.
The bat flapped tireless, frustrated laps up and down my throat all last night, all this morning, in the cab to La Guardia, on the plane and all the way through the airport. It wouldn’t come out, and it was getting hairier by the hour, so hairy it got heavy when it settled on my chest to tongue its wet wings clean.
I keep waiting for the real grief to happen, but I just feel numb. I feel like I’m made out of balsa wood or something — soft and flexible, but easily shattered. All I want to do is read. I am an Easy Reader of epic proportions on a normal day, but now I am positively EATING words. I finished “Bonfire of the Vanities” on the plane and started right in on Haruki Murakami’s “Dance Dance Dance.” I was able to take a break from reading and joke around with my dad and sister while we shopped for funeral suits this afternoon, but after reading Pop-Pop’s obituary in the local paper, I couldn’t stop. It was all I could do not to wad the newspaper up and stuff it in my mouth — knocked out the front page, local section, comics and started in on the classifieds by the time we pulled up to my aunt and uncle’s house.
I just got off the phone with my mother, who reports that my grandfather died this morning quickly and painlessly. She’s in the middle of funeral arrangements right now and will tell me when to get on the train to Virginia sometime tonight. Right now everyone’s moving too much to grieve and I can’t think about a damn thing.
Everything’s unwrapped, the champagne’s gone flat, and even the hangovers are over. While my holidays were full of warmth and good cheer and that uniquely Simmermon brand of stressed-out love, I’m glad to be entering that great grey yawn of real winter. Running around outside SUCKS until mid-April and when I have my daily panic that my life is slipping past, I can look out the window and feel fine about having a laptop strapped to my face. In the factory-blended oatmeal that is an East Coast winter, every numbing day that ends like all the rest is at least one day closer to spring.
My New Years’ was spent having cocktails and a home-cooked meal with my girlfriend, best friend, his wife, and their new baby. My New Years’ celebrations in years past have also involved copious amounts of booze, screaming and vomiting, but this years’ was different.
While the first decade or so of David Allen Browne’s life is going to be happy and full of love, he’s going to have no choice but to become grim, selfish and willfully ignorant in order to rebel against his hilarious, brilliant and loving parents once he hits puberty. Hopefully he’ll snap out of it before it’s time to take the SATs.
Christmas was different, too. I brought my girlfriend home, for one thing. It’s a big deal for me to bring somebody home for a number of reasons:
My sister and I have pretty well inoculated our parents against cultural/racial hangups, accidental profanity, body art and punk-influenced fashion choices … all known causes of heart failure to conservative parents. My mom can even say “fuck” without making a face now. But my family can smell a bullshit heart from a running mile, and the false politeness that ensues is deeply embarrassing. Nobody makes it across the threshold of the Simmermon unless they’re top shelf for real.
Also, my grandmother kind of hates anyone that me and my uncle have ever dated. She comes around eventually, but I can take no responsibility for any eye-rolling, interrupting, or ignoring until she does. Folks that can’t handle it don’t make the cut.
The relationship must be about much more than the physical. As I mentioned before, my family can sniff out a bullshit heart. In a small house with two parents, a sister, two lively and curious dogs and a “no ring, no shared bedroom” policy, that physical side is going to have to take a little holiday of its own.
My glasses are broken and it’s time to get new ones.
I don’t give things up very easily — never really bought into the “get the next and newest” craze that’s swept the nation. I use things ’til I just can’t anymore, and also have the unfortunate habit of developing an emotional attachment to inanimate objects.
My glasses have been there for me, right there on my face for three years, and I’ve seen a lot with them. And they were pretty tough, too. I only take them off when I’m sleeping or showering.
I was hiking to Uluwatu, a temple in Bali located on the edge of a cliff high above the ocean when a monkey leapt from the trees and ran laps around my face and shoulders. He knocked my glasses off and onto the crumbling, moss-covered pathway. They teetered over the edge, flirting with a dive down into the churning blue ocean as I threw the monkey deep into the forest like a furry soccer ball. I put them back on, unharmed.
I swam with stingrays in the cloudy surf where the Southern and Indian Oceans collide, my glasses folded carefully against my palm with one stiff, cramping thumb.
I used that same thumb to hold the same glasses against my palm when leaping from a giant boulder into a deliciously freezing swimming hole in the mountains near West Virginia, jamming the glasses back onto my face as I dog-paddled to the rocky shore. I gulped hot, humid air through suddenly stiff white lips, smelling trees, tobacco and Budweiser as my body heat fogged my newly cooled lenses.
I biked 30 miles each way to and from work for a while. While the rest of co-workers saw traffic jams and Support The Troops stickers on the back of SUVs in Ashburn traffic, I saw hawks, deer and the occasional blacksnake.
I was in the hot room at the Russian-Turkish Baths last March — it was 180 degrees in there and the metal arms of my specs stung my face. I left the room when I couldn’t take it anymore and dove into a 40 degree pool, crinkling the coating on my lenses and covering them with hairline fractures. I still wore them for months.
I took a hit or two in the face at my completely candy-assed boxing class in DC. This wasn’t even supposed to happen, though — the puncher was daydreaming about the instructor, I think, and I was thinking about pummeling the puncher.
The glasses gave it up completely last week in the lamest glasses-breaking story ever: I accidentally walked right into the edge of my bedroom door, totally sober. Then it was really like getting punched in the face. The frames shattered, lenses went spiralling across the floor. Now my eyes are limping around, frames scotch-taped together. the new ones should be ready tomorrow. I look weird, no getting around that.
Sometimes I get really bored and angsty. I think that my life’s being wasted, just plopped in front of a screen while everything drains out of me one pixel at a time. But just now, right this minute, when I use my smashed, taped glasses to look back at that life … parts of it look really, really good.
Behind that adorable black face, behind those sweet mournful eyes lies the soul of an unapologetic shit-eater.
For real.
That is not a metaphor. She’s gone from stealing fruitcake and puking it under the tree last Christmas to full-blown coprophagia, gobbling it right up from between dead leaves on the ground at night. Cold and hard or piping hot and still steaming, she doesn’t care and she does it quick, too, too quick to catch sometimes. She just can’t help herself.
Layla’s my sister Jess’s dog, half-beagle and half lab with incurable separation anxiety. She was taken from her mother too young, and consequently has massive incurable anxiety. Jess has tried training camps, reading dog books, everything. Nothing works. Every time Jess is gone for a little while, Layla overindulges in something she shouldn’t: fruitcake, shoes, a purse, now fecal matter.
All training methods exhausted, my sister now just spoils the dog completely rotten, talking to her in a high, squealing voice, carrying her in her arms like a large infant and allowing the dog to “kiss” her directly on the lips.
A few weeks ago, Layla vomited a five-inch turd onto my parents’ living room carpet. My mom called Jess up immediately to report the news, saying only
“Your dog has vomited a massive turd onto the carpet. Yes, a turd. Go ahead and let her lick your lips again. As a concerned mother, I hope you’ve got good health insurance,”
and hung up.
Such was the climate of the household this Thanksgiving. Everyone was exhausted and frustrated with this new habit, this repugnant fetish for a newly repulsive creature that’s far too cute to kick.
Jess and I spent Thanksgiving day over at my aunt and uncle’s taking care of my grandparents. They moved in sometime last summer for a few weeks while my grandpa recuperated from an operation, and it’s become clear that they’re in no shape to live independently. My grandpa’s 88 years old with congestive heart failure, kidney failure and diabetes. He needs a walker to get around now and can’t lift his legs by himself.
