Almost Another Ghost Bike

Last Monday, my daughter Lydia needed to see her allergist, who was located in Corporate Woods, same area as my office, so I didn’t take my bike to work. In small recompense for that, I decided to ride to the local CVS drug store to drop off her prescriptions, then after dinner to ride back and pick them up.

I’m on West Lawrence Street at Madison Avenue, heading south, when I hit a red light. So I opted to turn left into the Mobil station. Suddenly, I see a car bearing down on me; the driver must have gotten his or her license from the Starman* school of automobile operation, as it had crossed Madison actually on the red light. I scream the s-word, one of those times that I think cursing is definitely appropriate. (Another time was getting a nail in my foot in 2000.)

I brake, of course, but I’m already over the center lines, so I also lean to my right and back. Somehow, I end up on the ground. Did the driver stop? No, but then he or she didn’t hit me, only almost did so.

When I catch my breath, I realize that I’m really sore on my left side. I drag my bike and myself to the grassy area in front of a theater, #10 Steamer Company, and just sit there for a few minutes. An EMT is stopped at the light, talking on a phone; I almost try to signal him, but choose not to. A couple minutes later, a woman drives by to see if I’m OK. I lie and say I’m fine. Finally, I get up, walk to the CVS, drop off the scripts, and ride home on the sidewalks. (Yes, I know I know I’m not supposed to, but I was feeling a little shaky, and walking was taking too long for the pain I was in.)

I tell the tale to my wife Carol, and she agrees to drive me to the urgent care place on Patroon Creek, parallel to Washington Avenue, after dinner. We figure that this is probably a better choice than the ER of a hospital. Of course, Lydia has to come too.

It is a bit surreal. I walk into the place, and I see a TV showing an episode of Seinfeld, with Jerry, George, and Elayne waiting in a hospital waiting room. This episode also features Jerry, Newman and Kramer waiting at a bedside of someone, George forgoing a trip to the Cayman Islands, and Drake coffee cakes. The next show, some CW soap with Blake Lively and Kelly Rutherford, I was trying to distract the four-year old daughter from watching.

Finally – and it was less than a half hour – I get taken into a room, and have my vitals taken. It was peculiar that I was feeling both hot and cold. Then I was examined by the doctor. Somehow, old Bill Cosby routines came rushing into my head. “Doctors are wonderful people, but they’re always touching something. ‘Does that hurt?’ YEOW! Does that hurt! Does that hurt!'” He asks me where I’m in pain, and I’m trying to use my right hand to show him where on my left side I’m bothered. Then he starts poking around. YEOW! Does that hurt! Does that hurt!

I go to get x-rays. Like Cosby’s doctor’s stethoscope, the x-ray machine felt as though they stored it in the refrigerator. Diagnosis: broken 6th rib on the left side, under my armpit, possibly from the handlebars, but I don’t know for sure. Treatment: rest; they don’t tape you up for this anymore. Also, be sure to breathe deeply and cough regularly, lest I develop pneumonia.

My wife takes the daughter and me home, then gets my pain reliever prescription filled at an all-night CVS; the one I dropped the daughter’s Rx is closed. Carol’s sleeping pattern skews early, so for her to go out at 10:30 pm to take a 15-minute ride to Colonie, wait 30 minutes for it to be filled, then drive the 15 minutes home is quite remarkable.

Unfortunately, my daughter became very wary of me ever since she jumped on me that night, and I screamed, “Lydia, no!” I apologized the next day. She will play Candyland with me, but there was definitely arm’s-length tension there until Saturday.

I’ve been sleeping in the recliner ever since, with a sofa pillow next to my left side because I can’t find anywhere else to sleep without tremendous pain. Other things that cause discomfort:
*the recommended deep breathing
*the recommended coughing
*laughing
*burping
*hiccuping
*bending over
*reaching with my left arm
*lifting things too heavy, even with my right arm
*walking down stairs (up is not so bad, though for the first couple days, I had to stop ever other step to catch my breath)

Also, the medicine can make one constipated. Gotta love those dried apricots.

The bad news is that I find it difficult to focus on reading or writing, and sleep is intermittent throughout the day, though the reading became easier as the week progressed. The good news is that I’ve caught up on watching JEOPARDY! Hey, there was a winner from East Greenbush, Pat Roche, a couple weeks ago!

The better news is that I did not end up being commemorated with a ghost bike, as a number of folks in this area have recently. A single broken bone and a couple bruises is a far better outcome than I quite literally feared.

* Jenny allows the alien to drive the car when he peels out. Jenny screams at the Starman that she thought he said he could drive. Starman replies: “I watched you very carefully. Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go very fast.”
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I figure I’d been watching Jim McKay from the time I was 8 or 9, usually watching ABC’s Wide World of Sports with my grandfather, through dozens of different sporting events, including the 1972 Munich Olympics, until I saw him anchor football game coverage only a few seasons back. So we’re talking well over 40 years of “the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.” CBS News had a nice piece on him here, not that surprising since 1) he started on CBS, and 2) his son, Sean McManus is the head of CBS Sports. Here’s an extensive, 2 1/2 hour interview with McKay in six parts. I particularly recommend the last segment, only 10 minutes long, where he talks about others.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

ROG

ROG

A gay pride march

Back on March 9 of this year, there was this story in the Times Union by Jennifer Gish titled “Humanity in ‘Laramie’: High school actors project offers lesson on more than gay tolerance”. It was about Bill Ziskin, a teacher at Schenectady High, directing his young actors in Moises Kaufman’s “The Laramie Project.” Gish writes: The play is based on interviews conducted by New York theater students with the townspeople of Laramie, Wyo., after the 1998 ultimately fatal beating of gay college student Matthew Shepard. Because of its mature nature and strong language, Ziskin did
run the idea by school administrators before going ahead with it… Today, it’s hard for some of the kids to imagine that kind of brutality. One of the actors was quoted as saying, “When they told us about it I thought it was something that happened a while ago, like the ’70s or the ’80s.”

Ah, the optimism of youth. Earlier this year, though the stories I read were about a month after the fact, a Gay California student’s slaying sparks outcry, and “Activists demand that middle schools do more to teach tolerance.” Lawrence King — Student Who Was Murdered For Being Gay — To Be Honored With National Day Of Silence. I heard there was a similar case in Florida recently like the California case cited.

As for that day of silence, in some places such Mount Si High School in Snoqualmie, WA, it was anything but, as I read this Seattle Times account Lynn Thompson. Unfortunately, I actually sort of know one of the people protesting against gay acceptance.

As New Yorkers almost surely know, the governor of the state has ordered government agencies to recognize gay marriages that were performed in states and countries where they are legal. While, for at least one of my gay blogging colleagues, marriage is not such an overriding issue, for others ,it is of paramount importance.

I note all of this as my church plans once again to participate in the gay pride parade next Sunday. that same gay blogger I know opined that the idea of a march might have been diluted by corporate interests. I think we agreed that MAYBE in locations with a large gay population, such as New York City and San Francisco, it has lost its urgency. I’m convinced, however, that it still has meaning and efficacy in places like Albany, NY.

ROG

ROG

The Sexiest Vegetarian

First, I MUST recommend Steve Bissette’s recollection of FantaCo’s horror publication Gore Shriek. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2, with more parts promised. I’m particularly interested in the future installments since they took place after I left FantaCo in November of 1988. Even if you’re not into horror, it is an interesting tale about artists, editors and publishing.
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Also, Librarian 2008 responds to my tag.
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I did not known until recently that June is Black Music History Month. Once upon a time, there were no black people on MTV videos. Hard to believe now, but the company thought their audience would shy away if certain performers showed up. After SONY forced MTV’s hand and got Michael Jackson on the network, one of the ubiquitous performers was Prince Nelson Rogers.

It’s peculiar that Prince is lashing out at YouTube, eBay and The Pirate Bay, as I think those videos are keeping him in the mindset of folks. Even funnier is this story where a Mother protects YouTube clip by suing Prince.

Prince turns 50 today. At least his name is pronounceable now. Who knows how long these clips will be available?

From my two favorite Prince albums:

Purple Rain

and Sign O’ the Times

I also own Dirty Mind, Controversy, 1999, Around the World in a Day. The Black Album, Batman, and a 2 CD greatest hits. I also have a 12-inch, 7-minute version of Let’s Go Crazy.

Here’s a song, like the Sinead O’Connor tune i posted on Wednesday, written by Prince:

Finally, a George Harrison tribute I remember watching at the time it first aired. His Purpleness really kicks about three minutes in:

ROG

My Ambivalence About Bobby Kennedy


I first realized that I didn’t much like Robert F. Kennedy when he decided to run for the U.S. Senate from the state of New York in 1964. There were three overriding factors:
1. I had heard that the FBI was bugging Martin Luther King, Jr., and I felt that as U.S. Attorney General, he was responsible.
2. We had a perfectly good moderate Republican senator in Kenneth Keating, in the Jacob Javits tradition. I know some of you are too young to remember moderate Republicans. They existed. Really.
3. I had read a syndicated column in the morning newspaper in Binghamton, the Sun-Bulletin, where William F. Buckley compared RFK to a “carpetbagger”. Of course, his own brother, James, would move into New York, to run for and win a Senate seat in 1970; the tradition continued with Hillary Clinton in 2000.

BTW, I was 11 at the time. I was a political junkie, even then.

As it turned out, Bobby Kennedy won the Senate seat. Satirist Tom Lehrer quipped that Massachusetts then had three senators. Ken Keating ended up on the state Court of Appeals, which, despite its name, is New York’s highest court. (Whereas the Supreme Court is a trial court; go figure.) He then served as a US Ambassador, first to India, then to Israel.

Move to 1968. Eugene McCarthy runs against an incumbent President and gets 42% of the vote versus 49% for LBJ in the New Hampshire primary on March 12. It’s only then that Bobby Kennedy gets into the race. Commentators at the time declared that Kennedy used McCarthy as a “stalking horse” against Johnson, and I tended to agree. LBJ’s declaration that he would not run came at the end of March. This was followed on April 4 by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., which ultimately had a profoundly moderating effect on my world view.

I stayed up to see the results of the California primary on June 5, only to see RFK’s shooting in Los Angeles; “seeing” would be overstating, since I heard the shots and chaos ensued. He died the next day. I knew many people who were deeply affected by his loss. I too was at a loss, though. While I certainly didn’t wish him ill, I wasn’t having the same sensation, and I was feeling pretty guilty about it. Yet, as I watched the days of coverage, seeing people lined the railroad tracks as the train carrying his body went by, somehow I started to emphasize with what those folks felt.

A few years later, Tom Clay, a radio disc jockey, born in Binghamton, but by then working out of Los Angeles’ KGBS, put together this very odd song, melding the Bacharach-David song “What the World Needs Now” with the Dion hit “Abraham, Martin and John.” I’ve written about this record before, even putting it on as the last song on a mixed CD. The song starts off rather cloyingly, with Clay asking children about prejudice and segregation, and them having no idea, then segues into soldiers preparing for the Viet Nam war. Next, reports of JFK’s and MLK’s death, with this comment by Bobby Kennedy about the latter: “No one can be certain who next will suffer, from some senseless act of bloodshed.”

Then the record uses what I believe to be the audio tape of reporter Andrew West of KRKD, a Mutual Broadcasting System radio affiliate in Los Angeles, who also provided a blow-by-blow account of the struggle with the shooter Sirhan Sirhan in the hotel kitchen pantry, shouting at Olympian Rafer Johnson to “Get the gun, Rafer, get the gun!” and telling others to “get a hold of his thumb and break it, if you have to! Get his thumb! We don’t want another Oswald!” (Not so incidentally, I was watching the television 4 1/2 years earlier when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot.)

The next thing heard is Senator Edward Kennedy, eulogizing Bobby: “My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.” Ted Kennedy’s voice cracks during that section, and my own pain, largely missing at the time, except as a supporter of others who mourned, came into fruition; it gets to me every time I hear it. The remaining Kennedy brother concluded his eulogy, by quoting George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not?'”

In retrospect, I think that Bobby Kennedy was transforming from a cool, calculating politician to a more truly compassionate man, and I mourn his death now far more than I did at the time.

Here are the lyrics to the song.

The YouTube video may not be historically accurate. I swear I hear David Brinkley’s voice when Walter Cronkite is on the screen.

Oh, and like so much in this campaign, I thought the Hillary Clinton “gaffe” re: RFK’s assassination was a non-issue.

Interconnectedness

I got one of those invitations to be LinkedIn to a social networking page. I recognized the person, so I said yes. Later that morning, that same guy, who is a sales rep for a database service we use at work called to see how we were doing with the service. (I had previously spoken to him and complained about the interface of the database.) This led me to ask him, “what’s the benefit of the social network?” I can if he can just call me up, I don’t need to be “connected” to him. He explained that people that one of us is linked to is vetted, in a way. I scratched my head, knowing some people with hundreds of MySpace “friends”,e.g., are no more connected than people one night see at a bus stop.

I’ve gone to parties, and because I tend to be the one who tends more to Lydia than her mother on those occasions, I’ll not have a substantial conversation with anyone. I’ve gone to these father/child breakfast things at Lydia’s day care, and except for a couple dads I’d talk with previously, I didn’t really get to know any of them. We are in the same room, but there’s no real connection.

So how does one get to “know” people? I’m on a couple listservs at work, and just by people asking questions and answering them, I get a feel for the way their minds work. Certainly, I’ve got a sense for people via their blogs, but especially when I’ve exchanged music with them. I was reorganizing my music over the weekend – using drawers I bought at a library auction – and the mixed CDs of Green and Dymowski and Burgas and Brown (come back, Kelly!) and Brown and Bacardi all show up in the same drawer. I’ve never met any of them (well, except for Green), but I feel that I know them better than people I’ve seen face to face recently. That’s both kinda weird and kinda nice.
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I’m enjoying listening to discs from Thom (two discs) and Tosy. ROG

ROG
Ramblin' with Roger
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