newsornotnews (noticiaononoticia)

It’s 2:30am on my third night home from the hospital. Adjusting to survival is turning out to be a challenge. The struggle of my life has always been struggling with my life or, perhaps my more generous friends would say, getting out of my own way or maybe they’d just say that I’ve been nuts. I don’t know what I’m being shy about. The hardest part of my life up until now has been depression. I spent more than thirty years in therapy with the same psychiatrist [BTW, if any reader is familiar with what’s doing with Dr. Lawrence Bloom in Montclair, NJ, I’m very curious about how he and his family are doing]. Depression feels like a funny name for the emotional cocoon I was wrapped in for all those years, out of date, like referring to Klaatu’s ship as the cutting edge of space travel. A lot that has changed over time would have changed without my doing. I had a very disapproving father who passed a few years ago, taking much of his disapproval with him and leaving a very generous estate in its place. It was a lucky exchange. The antidepressant medications available now make the tricyclates I started off with years ago feel like a boilermaker with a pickled egg on the side. I’m in a very happy marriage and my mother is alive and my daughter is doing well. What could be depressing? Yet Sunday, following a visit from the Grubmans and from Birdie, I exploded into hysterical tears like I can not remember occurring after boyhood. [I of course was undyingly sad after Dorit’s death but I was too much the manager, too much in the center of things to give in to bawling – the one time I remember I gave up to sobbing uncontrollably was when I received a malpractice award concerning her medical miscare and the injustice of me being the surviving one was too overwhelming too move on]. And there on the 17th floor of NYU, I couldn’t stop weeping. I had come so close. It was so frightening. I looked down and saw the scars, the trail of my disease made flesh. So that’s how it started Sunday. Monday, around midday at the hospital, I was waiting for my turn to go back into the endoscopy lab when one of the GI residents came in and told me they had decided I didn’t need anything else before being discharged, that I could get ready to leave. I thought about the many nights many years ago I had kept my father company at the hospital, bringing in Chinese food to share as he slid from aphasia to full dementia, my uncle Bill, who was on NYU’s architectural review board, managing his care and I thought of Bill’s own final visits to the hospital, events I was protected from knowledge of as I was recovering from my lymphoma at the time and I thought “I’m the only one who gets to walk out. In the only one who healed.” And again, I could not control my tears. And as I waited to leave, I read a FB post by Marc Nathan lamenting his distance, in Nashville, from friends who needed him and I had the hubris to think I was one of them and that, yes, it would have been better if he was around. You can see, I’m very tender at this point but I’m also completely alive. I’m letting my yea be yea. It’s all coming through to me in a way that’s inconsistent with being depressed and though I was celebrating, you couldn’t call it happy. So Jolean and I get a cab home. We make camp in the bedroom and I start posting favorite songs on FB, each a tearjerker, or at least designed to jerk my tears. And as I’m doing this, I discover something – just about every Bruce Springsteen concert I attended from 1974 until 1980 is available for streaming online. I think about this. 42 years of me and Bruce, sharing our eyes, our thoughts, our changes and favorite covers. And I think about Jeff Peters, Shelley Abramowitz’s friend when Shelley, Ken, Larry and I were roommates on Cummings Road in Boston. Jeff pulled us to that first show Springsteen show at the Academy, he begged us to go, we had to see this guy. Of course I still remember the show, the still unreleased “Jungleland”with the violin, the cover of “Cupid”. Of course, I remember Jeff who Shelley told me, when I saw him two years ago, is also gone. I’m not sure I can quite describe the insight I’m going for here. Yes, it’s a wonderful world. Yes, there’s beauty and sweetness and tragedy to be sifted from the ether, to be netted like a butterfly and then released to fly again. That’s not what I mean. I mean the miasma these all float in, the stuff of perception itself, is a kind of madness. Or maybe I mean there’s all kinds of madness and sometimes it blinds you and sometimes it’s as essential as clarity in mediating the world. Our maybe it’s just thrilling to survive. I don’t think I can continue to live on this edge I’m on right now too much longer but there’s nothing you can do that’ll make me willingly step back.

I wrote this post, or, at least, began writing this post, about a week ago.  As I feared, my ordeal was not over and, in fact, would become substantially worse. I wish I could lay it out in detail but I can only remember drips and drabs – vomiting congealed blood like pieces of liver stands out. Apparently, somewhere along the line, I was transferred to NYU Hospital where the ulceration was found and clipped. We think. I’m being scoped again in the morning and that should confirm the success. Or not. As I reread what I had written, I’m struck by the triviality of what I cared about so maybe that’s the payoff here – Maybe you need to be smacked real hard to get to the next level where jello and duvets and chicken soup don’t mean as much as just staying alive. I really want to stay alive. I love being alive. I’ll try to make sense of it in the next few days but here’s a little missive from what now feels like a very naive moment. This weekend was my first at home after two weeks in the hospital and I feel like crying with gratitude for having had it and I feel very afraid about needing to go back since, after 14 days, the blood leak that caused my anemia wasn’t found, never mind treated. The only thing I came home with that I didn’t have when I left was a surgical wound on my belly. It’s grotesque. I’m also afraid of the anemia returning. The last time I had it, the incident that provoked the hospital visit, I didn’t have the strength necessary to get off the bed. I went to the emergency clinic by ambulance. The worse things about being in the hospital are the loss of autonomy, the pain of the many, many needles you must endure, nurses and doctors are free to come and go at any moment and the ugliness of your surroundings. When I arrived home, the bed was covered by a duvet we had just bought, kind of a deep Mandarin red with gold paisley, and it looked so comforting and inviting and big, big enough to lie down next to my wife, which reminds me of something of another effect of the hospital – the loneliness, because even if you are, like me, lucky enough to have your best friends and closest relatives visiting you at all hours, they’re leaving and you cannot leave with them and just that fact reminds you of your isolation. All you seem to talk about is your illness, which is really all you’re thinking about because, what else is there, and that makes the visit bittersweet. So does the knowledge that they’re there for you, to help take care of you and you hate to do that to them. Or you’re thinking about food, where will the next meal come from or even whether you’ll be allowed a next meal, since, for the bulk of my time there I was limited to clear liquids. I would eat the hospital’s jello and Jolean would go down to The Pastrami Queen and bring back quarts of chicken soup. Missing your wife at night and knowing that, when she arrives, you will have a list of foraging for her (which she will cheerfully take care of) as opposed to home, where you can hold her and love her and for a while forget that you’re the one being taken care of. All your stuff is home and the anchoring quality of being among your stuff is not to be undervalued. There’s my guitar. There is a pile of books. There is the footboard of the big brass bed.

Paul Ryan has an envelope. It sits atop his desk. He likes to sit and look at it. Inside it are all the laws he wants to pass, laws he has always, always wished for. It has his budget. It has a plan to privatize Social Security. It has low, low, low taxes and it has a repeal of Obamacare. Paul’s been waiting a long time, eight years at least, for a call to come to open the envelope. On TV is Donald Trump. Paul hates Donald.Donald says stupid things. He is stupid. Not like Paul. And yet, Paul wants Donald to be president because maybe, just maybe, if Donald is president, he’ll call up Paul and say, “Now. Now’s the time. I don’t know how to govern and I need you to open your envelope.”  Paul knows he will never ever get that that call if Hillary is president. So he sits and watches Donald on TV and waits and waits. He hates him so much.

Considering what a miserable time I had in my Boston University days, I sure like music that takes me back there. This was the big 70’s set this morning: “Come Monday'” Jimmy Buffett (this one takes me closer to Max’s than Kenmore Square); “So Fine (It’s Frightening),” Andy Pratt; “Avenging Annie,” Andy Pratt; “Dream On,” Aerosmith; “Please Please,” Stories; “Do Ya,” The Move. I also liked the smell of burning hair very much. Any songs that fit that anyone would like to add?

Now that a week has passed, it’s time to think about whether and how we are complicit in the Orlando killings or, rather, what opportunities to reduce gun violence have we missed that would have made the massacre much less likely? Let’s start with the two bills currently pending before the US Senate. Neither would have prevented the Orlando shooter from obtaining the arms he used. One limits the ability of persons on the no-fly list from purchasing a firearm, which is a feel-good but minimal extension of current restrictions, and one is eliminating the private sale exception to the due diligence requirements imposed on commercial sellers, which would be a significant change in the law. Neither is likely to be passed. So, if we are powerless to reduce the availability of guns through our representatives legislating, what leverage do we have to make an impact at all? Electing a president who will appoint Supreme Court justices likely to overturn District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) is a good idea [Brief review – For 200 years the Supreme Court ruled that the right to own weapons granted by the Second Amendment (“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”) attached to the militia, not to the individual, which is to say, there had to be some nexus between militia use and personal use for an individual to assert his Second Amendment right. The Heller decision, in complete contravention of earlier precedent, just sort of ignored the “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State” clause in order to bestow a constitutional right to own firearms to the individual].

Here’s an article from the nyt:

Pretty awful, huh? The gun trade is very profitable and it’s fair to assume that if we can make the sale of weapons less lucrative, then we can compel manufacturers to modify the device or it’s marketing in order to avoid liability and protect profitability. And it’s not so crazy an assumption. I can think of two products where the producers significantly changed the design and availability of their inherently dangerous products initially in response to nongovernmental actions – cars and cigarettes. Both are much safer than they used to be, both are marketed very differently than they were in the past, both were initially (and remain) resistant to legislative curtailment. The first strategy was for consumers to sue the crap out of the unsafe cars and cigarette producers – impose liability based on the producers foreknowledge and failure to act upon the inherent dangers of their products. And those suits were fantastically productive. Once plaintiffs got access to the manufacturers files through discovery in the actions, all hell broke loose. There was so much research they chose to ignore. Now, there are two factors in the case of guns that make such a course of action much more difficult, maybe impossible. In the cases of cars and cigarettes, the Surgeons General and the CDC had collected reams of analysis on just how hazardous the products were (thank you, Dr. C. Everett Koop) which were essential in proving damages (not just the quantum, but that there actually were damages) in the civil litigation. In the case of firearms, the Surgeon General and the CDC are, by act of Congress, not permitted to spend a single penny on researching guns as a health hazard. Accordingly, there are no good numbers out there as to who and how many people are being injured in gun violence. There’s been some journalism that attempts to compile local statistics but there is no central repository of information concerning the damage that guns do. The second factor is that Congress has granted the firearms business immunity from liability actions arising from the misuse of their products (you should still be able to collect damages if your pistol blows up in your hand). Think of those class action suits brought against tobacco’s producers and think of all corporate secrets that came out. Think of Russell Crowe. So unless that law is changed by the congress or struck down by the courts, those kind of litigations are impossible against the gun companies. Overturning those laws is a better goal for the Senate than the ones they’re currently pursuing. There’s another way to tame gunmaker corporations and that’s to go directly at their source of funding, their stock price. That happened with the tobacco industry (and, of course, the famous example of South Africa). Shareholders, pensioners, municipal funds didn’t like holding interests in corporations like Lorillard or Phillip Morris or Reynolds in their portfolios. It became, somehow, sordid. It wasn’t good for their reputations. Today, some of those corporations have dissolved or consolidated or, at the very least, changed their names. And also they started changing their wicked ways, complying with new industry guidelines in order to halt further erosion of their bottom lines. By divestiture, we can punish the gun producers where it hurts most –  in the bottom line. The “Campaign to Unload”, an organization dedicated to divestiture of gunmaker stock, puts it like this: “to encourage the gun industry to adopt common-sense, publicly-backed reforms, such as universal background checks and smart gun technology.” So, if you own gun stock, sell it. If you have a 401k or shares in a stock fund, contact your fund manager and tell them you don’t want to hold any firearms stock. And if you’re not sure whether you do now or not, here is a list of publicly traded gun producer stocks:

Vista Outdoor Inc. (VSTO) (Sporting ammunition and firearms; outdoor accessories; golf rangefinders, performance eyewear)

National Presto Industries, Inc. (NPK) (Housewares; ammunition)

Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation (SWHC) (Firearms and related products)

Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc. (RGR) (Commercial sporting market)

TASER International, Inc. (TASR)

You’ll feel good for doing it, I promise. You’ll feel like you’ve done something and you will have.

That’s right, it’s our friend, the small bowel. I know what you’re thinking but no, despite the slight resemblance, it’s not me (even with almost daily requests, I’ve never done any modelling). Bringing you up to date, last Friday I collapsed from weakness brought on by a recurrence of anemia which was, in turn, caused by an occasional bleed of unknown origin, and only occasionally, coming out of my ass. Jolean called 911, the ambulance took me to the Lenox Hill emergency clinic at the site of the old Saint Vincent’s, the Lenox Hill ambulance took us uptown to the mothership where I was admitted and transfused and waited until Tuesday upon which day i received a “push” colonoscopy (which goes four inches or so further than the typical) with the hope it would reach an ulceration that had been spotted the previous week by the pillcam. Still with me? The push detected nothing but, then again, it really didn’t provide high resolution of the target area. Accordingly, surgery was indicated.

I was initially informed we were on for  Wednesday but tight scheduling resulted in a delay until Thursday afternoon, though not before I had stopped eating Tuesday night (Pig Heaven: superior dumplings). So Dr. Sergei and his team sliced me the hell open and I’m sure you can all guess what they found: gornischt (bupkis, nada, nischt, rien, zippity doo-dah and the rest). After some time, I woke up in the recovery room with a painful bandaged wound and a catheter in my winkie.

That was last night. I didn’t sleep. This morning they removed the catheter and every four hours the inject me with one of those fashionable opioids everybody seems to be doing. It still hurts. Pretty bad too.

They tell me I’ll be up on my feet by end of day and that I’ll be fit enough to go home in a couple of days. But I won’t. I’ll transfer to NYU Hospital where there is a gastrointerologist who is trained to perform the nouveau procedure, Double Balloon Endoscopy, which will give us a good look at the upper portion of the small bowel which is still unseen through this date, and the opportunity to correct it right then and there and which may be as unsuccessful as everything else has been so far. And, of course, “the pain, the pain.”

Is it a bad idea? Minnesota is a solidly blue state in national elections so he doesn’t have the advantage of bringing a contested state with him. He’s old – at 64, you’re not creating a path for the next generation of democratic leader. He’s not black or Spanish, two constituencies you’d like to motivate to turn out in big numbers. He’s not Elizabeth Warren. Is it a good idea? Minnesota went strongly for Bernie. Franken won Minnesota by a wide margin – he assures the Bros will come out for Hillary. The election is likely to be fought in the rustbelt states and Franken comes from one – he knows those issues. Minnesota has a Democratic governor and will appoint a Democratic senator to replace Franken. He would be an effective attack dog – subtle, pointed and deadly. He would be the first Jewish vice president which doesn’t necessarily add a voting constituency but might attract contributions from the AIPAC wing not lined up with the Adelson-type Israel supporters. Franken has strong progressive support. He’s funny – it’ll definitely liven up the election. He’s good enough, he’s smart enough and, doggone it, people like him.

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“I’m not going to tell you what this is. It’s crazy how, some teachers and i’m not saying who but I’ve heard about some teachers and i saw them on TV, they tell you the Three Master Secrets right away and then everybody knows what they are. They’re giving away the whole thing! I’m not going to do that. I’m going to keep the secrets and when its the time, the right time, then i’m going to use those secrets to surprise everyone. Until then, everything’s on the table”.

No posters, no lunchboxes, no trading cards – that’s not the kind of Monkees fan I was. I don’t think I’ve ever owned a Monkees LP.  I watched the show at it’s September ’66 beginning but by the summer of ’68 I was gone, one of those snotballs who said, “But they don’t write their music, they don’t play their instruments,” but in fairness, I was 12 years old – I didn’t know Brill Building, I didn’t know Gold Star and the Wrecking Crew, I didn’t know the L.A. scene and that half of the more “authentic” records I was listening to had the same musicians on them as the Monkees records. I didn’t know “Headquarters.” Soon “Back to Mono” and Harry and Todd and Brian and Eric and Wally and even Ray Davies would show me the transcendent virtue of pure pop confection but I wasn’t there yet. I didn’t get that a commercial intent could lead to something magic. There was plenty of commercial intent on display at Town Hall last night but not too much magic. I’m not sure if I was too late or too early but the only tickets I could get were the very highly priced “Merch Package” ones which got me some good seats and a truly craptastic book of gig dates authored by Andrew Sandoval who, as Andrew, used to put out his own highly worthwhile albums.

So, if I was to learn that art can bloom from commerce, last night I learned that sometimes it’s just commerce. Mickey was fine, Peter seems like a nice fellow, the back-up was sharp (Adam Schlesinger showed up for Stepping Stone) and they did all your favorite numbers but the whole thing felt like a day in the office. Michael (an absolute pill at City Winery a couple of years ago) actually had the temerity to perform a single song from some remote location by Skype. Otherwise, the screen behind the band showed clips from the TV show all night – an annoying nuisance except for appearances by Julie Newmar and Hans Conreid. Remember when Brian came back in ’98 with Foskett and The Wondermints and the rest of that great band, how juicy with emotion that was? This wasn’t that.

1. Listen to the Band
2. Last Train to Clarksvill
3. Saturday’s Child
4. Your Auntie Grizelda
5. She
6. She Makes Me Laugh
7. A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You
8. The Girl I Knew Somewhere
9. Steam Engine
10. Shades of Gray
    (Davy Jones pre-recorded vocals)
11. Papa Gene’s Blues
    (with Michael Nesmith via Skype)
12. Randy Scouse Git
13. For Pete’s Sake
14. Don’t Do It
    (Micky Dolenz song) (Micky Dolenz)
15. (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher
    (Jackie Wilson cover) (Peter Tork)
16. Let’s Dance On

    Set 2:

17. Mary, Mary
18. Circle Sky
19. Porpoise Song (Theme From “Head”)
20. Long Title: Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?
21. I Was There (And I’m Told I Had A Good Time)
    (with Adam Schlesinger – keyboards)
22. (I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone
    (Paul Revere and The Raiders cover) (with Adam Schlesinger – keyboards)
23. Words
24. Goin’ Down
25. D.W. Washburn
    
26. What Am I Doin’ Hangin’ ’round?
    (Michael Martin Murphey cover)
27. Daydream Believer
    (John Stewart cover) (Davy Jones pre-recorded vocals)
28. Pleasant Valley Sunday
    (Carole King cover)

    Encore:

29. That Was Then, This Is Now
    (The Mosquitos cover) (with Vance Brescia of The… more )
30. I’m a Believer
    (Neil Diamond cover)