beautiful, funny, sad & true

My closest friend tried to kill herself last night. I was the one who found her and called for help.

She told me two days ago that she’d be going into the hospital, and asked if I could come pick up her cat. When my calls and text messages and e-mails got no response, I thought she was at a doctor visit, or more likely in the hospital already.

I went to her apartment office after work yesterday, to get the keys and explain the situation. I’m her emergency contact person, so that was a simple enough process. I took the elevator upstairs to the fourth floor. When I put the key in and turned it, I found that the door was already unlocked. That was odd. She’s always very concerned about her home and her car being locked. I walked in and immediately noticed that her apartment was in complete disarray. There was a huge pile of clothes on the floor of the bathroom, including a bunch of shirts and a belt hanging from the bent shower rod. The kitchen was full of dirty dishes and fresh fruit. It looked like she’d just come back from the grocery store.

I walked into the living room and saw a person lying on the floor. It couldn’t be her, I thought. She’s at the hospital. After a dumbfounded second I realized that it was her, and feared the worst. She was lying on her side, with her legs on the blanket and her shoulder on the floor. The arm that was trapped underneath her was blue. Her hair was covering her face, and when I pushed it back, her skin looked waxy, and her eyes and lips were extremely dry. Tears came to my eyes as I said her name, told her it was me, told her she was safe. I touched her back and hip to gently shake her. There was no movement or sound. I shook her a little bit harder. Nothing. I felt her neck for a pulse. It was there, and very fast. THANK GOD. I tried to roll her over, and she moaned quietly. THANK GOD. Her eyes opened slightly, then closed again. I called 9-1-1.

They asked if there was any evidence of pills or drugs. I looked around and found some on the counter in the kitchen; two empty bottles, one Ambien and the other Seraquil. She’d mixed them together in a wine glass with some water and drunk some of the cloudy white mixture. The glass was on the counter, still half full.

After hanging up the phone, I went over to kneel beside her. I stroked her back and hair, and said things I hoped would be reassuring, while I waited for the paramedics to arrive. Her cat saw us both on the floor and thought it was cuddle time. She walked over to me, brushed her body against me, and laid on her side by my knee, purring and exposing her belly so that I could pet her. That made me cry even harder.

A few minutes later, the three paramedics arrived. They instantly knew what to do, and were absolute professionals. They asked for her name, and asked what happened. I showed them the empty pill containers and the half-full wine glass. They asked if I knew how long she had been there. I did not, but I guessed maybe an hour or so. They took charge, telling her in loud voices what they were going to do. “[Friend's name]? I need you to keep your arm relaxed, okay? You might feel a little pin prick, okay? You’re gonna be fine. Just relax, okay [friend's name]? You’re doing great.” The two firefighters and two policemen arrived soon after. They put on blue latex gloves and inspected the small apartment. I sat against the wall and stayed out of the way. The cat was terrified, and curled up underneath a chair. The policeman picked up the wine glass, held it aloft for a second, and then said to everyone and no one, “Heh. Looks like she made herself a little cocktail.” The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Then the person with the stretcher arrived, and she moaned loudly as the paramedics easily lifted her limp, frail body onto the stretcher and wheeled her out. I stayed behind for about half an hour after that, not knowing what to do or think, crying and trying to comfort the cat at the same time.

I got in my car and drove home with a lump in my throat to e-mail her family. Her sister wrote back right away, asking for more information, and then she wrote back later in the evening to tell me more and more harrowing details. I called a handful friends of mine who know her to tell them what had happened.

She’s alive, and slowly but surely stabilizing, as I’m writing this. She can’t talk yet. She can’t breathe on her own yet, but apparently that’s normal after someone takes that much Ambien. She may have to be on the ventilator for a few days until the drugs run their course. No friend visits for a while. Her vital signs are good. I think she’s going to pull through.

I cried myself to sleep last night, and stayed home from work today, crying and lying in my bed in a state of shock. I backed out of my gig last night, and backed out of the one tonight too. I have to go to her place today to take care of the cat and get her to a pet sitter. It’s going to be very hard to go into that apartment again.

I hope this is something that you never have to deal with.

Way too busy to write; I can’t believe it’s been almost a week since I wrote last.  This may be the longest stretch of silence on my part since I started this blog.  Sorry for that.  I know, I know. . .part of having a blog is actually writing in it.

I will this weekend.

Last weekend was great.  Two great movies, a hilarious play, and a really fun house concert, and an attempted tram ride.  And I rearranged the furniture in my apartment.

Yesterday, I got some really sad news and then some not-very-good news right after that.  Kind of bummed about it all.  Some of it involves my friend’s cat, and the fact that I’ll be keeping her here for a while again.  That in itself doesn’t bother me, but the reason that it’s necessary for me to watch her does bother me, very much.

That’s all I have time for at the moment.  I’ll be around, in the meantime.

[EDIT, 6/7/08: For some reason, I've suddenly gotten a bunch of referrals from AOL to this particular entry, which is quite possibly the lamest throw-away entry in this entire blog. I'd like to invite you to the top of the blog, where you can read some real entries. Thank you.]

I just have time for a quick entry right now. I know you’ll be excited to know that my tag cloud over there is all up-to-date now; all entries are accounted for.

While I was at work yesterday afternoon, as if on cue, I got a text message from A that said, “How about a movie? My treat!” And yes, she’s also a beautiful girl. So although she didn’t read it, it’s as if my blog entry from yesterday came true. We went to see Persepolis, which was beautiful, and funny, and sad and true. We were completely enthralled by it.

Today I slept until 12:30 in the afternoon. Sheesh. I must have been even more run down this week than I realized.

Tonight is a house concert that my friend John is hosting, featuring John Vecchiarelli and Kristi Martel. It promises to be a blast. I was going to go and just listen, but I just now found out that I’ve been invited to bring my accordion and play with John V. on a song or two, which I’m totally looking forward to.

I’d better clean up and go, but I’m glad we had time for this little chat.

It’s been kind of a rough week.

Work has been super stressful this week, because one of the people in my department has been on vacation, and we’re pretty much down to a skeleton crew anyway, times being what they are.  I’m also pretty much broke from an expensive car repair and a high phone bill.   When I get stressed out and exhausted like I have been, the answer to every question is ‘No!’, even if the question is, ‘Hi, I’m a beautiful girl.  You look like you could use a hug.  Would you like to go out on a date?  My treat.’

On my way home for lunch today, I had six different cars pull in front of me, or run a stop sign, or box me in on the road, or something.  All in half an hour.  AND I still have to drive back.  Yeesh.  My nerves are kinda shot.

Luckily last night’s rehearsal with Lara was a blast.  We learned a Beatles song; one of their trickiest, in fact.  We got it sounding pretty good last night, but we each need to woodshed and tighten it up a bit on our own, and then we’ll rehearse again right before the show next Friday night.  The show with Susie on Wednesday was also a blast; I’d go so far as to say that it was one of our best shows.

There’s a story I’m working on that is an extremely rare subject for me to write about.  I had an experience about ten years ago that I’ve been trying to think of a way to tell here.  I was inspired by one of Tossed In’s latest entries, but I’m not quite sure how to frame it, or how to put it all into just the right words.  It’ll come, but it’s gonna be tricky.

And now it’s time to brave the traffic and head back out into the world again, after a much-too-short respite.  This month can not be over with soon enough, as far as I’m concerned.  Thank gawd for the three-day weekend.

OneYearAgo

Spent the weekend in Port Townsend, Washington playing with IrishBand, which was a total blast, as usual. We all stayed at the home of Violinist’s parents, which is about seven miles outside of PT. They were GraciousInvitingOpenAndFriendly, and their house – which they pretty much built themselves – was beautiful.

We arrived in PT at around two-thirty in the afternoon, just in time to set up and play an acoustic gig at the Boiler Room, which was really more of a promotion stunt to get people to come see us at Sirens later that night. I took the opportunity to walk down the street and take a few pics. Here’s one that’s okay:

While we were setting up, there was an attempted robbery at the store across the street, and when the police car pulled up and parked, I thought (before we knew what was happening) that perhaps a parking ticket or something was in my immediate future, because that’s my red Honda, snookered in by the police car.

Turns out that my fears were unfounded.

We tried to take pictures, but we couldn’t see any of the action, and before too long, the street was pretty well filled with rubberneckers anyway. After our gig was over, we packed up and headed to Violinist’s parents’ house for dinner, by way of Fort Worden and all of the abandoned military bunkers that line the hillsides along the coast. We hiked through a few of them, and even walked through some of the pitch-black tunnels that connect them. I took a few pictures, because the light and the angles were so interesting from room to room.

The homemade dinner we were served was amazing, and the show was amazing. I didn’t realize there was such a sizable Brazilian contingent in PT, but there were quite a few in attendance that night. They were right up front, dancing up a storm, which always makes for a more enjoyable show.

Afterwards, BassPlayer and BanjoPlayer went off with a couple of rockabilly girls (for the record, only BassPlayer was interested in the girls; BanjoPlayer has a great girlfriend, and he knows it) most of us went to a ‘condo’ party. I don’t know whose condo it was, but it seems to be quite the party place. The party wasn’t too much fun, actually. Violinist and Singer used to live in Port Townsend, and they knew lots of the people there, but the other three of us were a bit out of the loop. There’s a notoriously obnoxious guy who actually called Singer’s girlfriend a bitch (Twice!), so she and Singer left really early. Drummer, Violinist, Violinist’s girlfriend and I tried gamely to stick around for a while, but after we overheard a few more weird comments, we decided it was time to leave. One guy, when his Asian female friend respectfully declined to join him on an outing he invited her to, actually asked her, “Why do you have to be such a Jew?” Violinist’s girlfriend and I looked at each other in a what-planet-are-we-on-again way. Then, as we were making our way to the door to leave, overheard a conversation between Obnoxious Guy and some random guy he didn’t know. Obnoxious Guy told Random Guy, “You’re acting just like a French Canadian. I HATE French Canadians.” (Drummer said the next morning that the ultimate revenge for a guy like that would be if he met and fell in love with a nice French-Canadian girl. I thought that was hilarious.)

It was about one in the morning when we all met back up again, and caravaned back to our home base. BassPlayer left the girls at the bar, and we asked him, “Why didn’t you go home with them? It seemed like one of them was kinda into you.” He replied, in a really low drunken slur, while putting two oranges into the pocket of his hooded sweatshirt, “I woulda had a much better time. . .lying on my stomach. . .pooping.” We all cracked up laughing with surprise, and Violinist said, “What’s that from? That’s really funny.” BassPlayer replied, in the same low slur, “My diary,” which made us laugh even harder.

I slept on the sofa in the living room, in my sleeping bag, and Drummer slept on the other side of the room divider, on an air mattress on the floor. Drummer snores. A lot. He started in almost immediately, and he didn’t respond to my shaking, so I put in my ear buds and turned on my iPod just loud enough to drown him out. I can’t usually sleep to music, but I really can’t sleep to loud snoring, and the iPod did the trick.

I was the first one awake, around eight-thirty the next morning, since I hadn’t had very much to drink the night before, so I got up, took a shower, and went for a hike through the wooded five-acre property.

While I was hiking, there were homemade SausageVeggieEgg frittatas, homemade bread, homemade applesauce with mixed berries, and homemade apple juice all being born at the same time. Once they were ready, we all ate and talked and laughed outside in the morning sunshine, and then gradually packed up and made our separate ways back to Portland. Drummer and I drove along the eastern edge of the Washington peninsula, down Highway 101 until it turned inland at Olympia. We stopped along the way to take some pictures, but none of them really came out the way we had hoped. This one was probably the best, but I still don’t find it particularly compelling.

After a while, we just wanted to get home. We listened to a whole bunch of CD’s, but my favorite by far was a new band called Low Vs. Diamond. They’re really great, and we listened to their album three or four times. Listening to the songs now at that link, I was transported back to the trip, talking and laughing and eating ice cream with Drummer.

At one point, we pulled into a rest stop to get some coffee and cookies, and when we went to leave, my car refused to start. It does that occasionally, so we let it cool off for a while, but it still balked when we tried it a second time. Drummer taught me the push-start technique, and there were two guys watching and laughing at us while we pushed the car down the hill toward the on-ramp. When Drummer told me to pop the clutch, and the car started right up, he yelled triumphantly to the two guys, “That’s how you do it, boys!” and we were back on the road.

We got to Portland around six-thirty, and after dropping off Drummer, I came home to find that there was a house party in my building, planned for eight o’clock, which gave me just enough time to shower and change my sweaty clothes. The party was fun, and the festivities lasted until one a.m., when it seemed to be over, but I found out tonight that there were still people who straggled in as late as two-thirty. The party spilled over into today, in a way, because when I came walking home from work, two of my neighbor friends were sitting outside eating some of the leftover homemade salsa from last night. “Help,” they said, “we need to get rid of this.” I laughed and replied, “You don’t have to tell me twice; I’ll be right back!”

So yeah. Good times all around. It was quite the weekend. Tonight my plan is to watch a DVD (“Heathers”, a brilliant and very dark comedy starring Winona Ryder) and go to bed relatively early, to try and catch up on some well-deserved sleep.

When I was seventeen/eighteen/nineteen, I was in a band called Iron Horse. I’ve written about them before. Making videos and TV shows was among our favorite hobbies, and since one of the members of the band and one of our close friends worked at various television stations, that was a pretty easy itch to scratch.

Our friend would film us at shows, at rehearsals, out on the town, anything we wanted. He was very good at what he did (he’s even better now, by the way), and he was always up for trying new ideas, or coming up with his own too.

One of the ideas we dreamed up was to make a spoof of all the action-packed sports drink commercials that were all over TV at the time. We thought it would be funny if there was a drink that not only looked like urine, but actually tasted like it as well. And so, Tinkle was born.

The Tinkle commercial starts in slow motion black-and-white, with two guys sweeping a driveway with large push brooms, and the caption “Manual Labor” appears at the bottom of the screen. The guys wipe the sweat from their respective brows and walk toward the cooler, whereupon they find themselves both reaching for the single remaining bottle of a sports drink. The camera pans in tight, and moves from person to person:

Guy 1: “Only one Tinkle left.”

Guy 2: “Play you for it?”

Guy 1: “You’re on!”

Cue music: It’s the strummy guitar part from the Rush song “YYZ.” (It’s the part that starts at 1:42. . .) The scene cuts to the two guys playing maniacal one-on-one basketball, for about twenty seconds, with one of the guys sinking the winning lay-up, punctuated by the last four notes of the song. The voice-over says, “He shoots, he scores!”

The jubilant victor runs over and reaches into the cooler for the bottle of Tinkle and takes a huge swig, only to spit it out in disgust. “This stuff tastes like PISS” is what was actually said, but once we started writing this little scene, we decided that our families would probably see this, and the public, and it also might be funnier if we actually didn’t say ‘piss’. So we came up with the idea that the winner would say the word ‘piss’, but the voice-over would say something different. The catch was that the winner would keep trying to say the word ‘piss’, but he would always be foiled by the voice-over, no matter how many times he tried. So the word we ended up substituting was “WEE WEE.”

Incidentally, that was another huge discussion we had; what to substitute for the word ‘piss’. We came up with all the usual euphemisms, and I even recall the phrase ‘yellow liquid bodily excretion’ (or something similar) being bandied about too. Luckily they were all vetoed, because ‘wee wee’ is really childish and funny.

So here’s the result:

“This stuff tastes like (WEE WEE).” The winner is surprised that his word is censored; he tries saying ‘piss’ again, but ‘WEE WEE’ is what is heard. He tries again. His mouth is clearly visible, saying the word ‘piss’, but ‘WEE WEE’ is heard again. He looks around for the source of the overwhelming voice, and tries again, in vain: ‘(WEE WEE). . .(WEE WEE)’. . .aaaaaand, fade to black.

Caption, in yellow: “TINKLE: For athletes who can’t afford to lose those precious body fluids.”

You see, this is high comedy.

Why did it occur to me to share this?  Well, because the phrase ‘This stuff tastes like (WEE WEE)” randomly popped into my head the other day, and just thinking about it made me laugh hard enough that I sent a text message to Blaine to remind him about it. He laughed hard enough that I thought it was worth noting and sharing here as well.

Ah, if only I had the technology to upload the actual video (which is trapped on antiquated VHS) up here into my blog. I know that it exists, I just don’t own it yet. It will be a good day when I do, however, because it means you’ll get to experience all of this flotsam and jetsam first-hand, without me having to write it all out in script form.

OneYearAgo

I’m in Yakima, walking on Browne Avenue, about a block away my old apartment. Two guys, approximately ten years older than I, are standing next to the wall of an industrial-looking building that does not really exist in that location. One guy is high. He’s got his ten-speed bicycle leaning against his hip. The other guy is waiting for someone to walk by, and this time that someone is me.

“Hey, man,” he says, walking toward me. “I want to give you something.”

“Thanks, but you don’t have to do that,” I reply.

“No, man, yeah I do.” He puts his entire wallet in my hand. It looks like the black leather one I have in real life, except his is much more beat up, and is even more stuffed full of receipts, bills, and cash. Even though the wallet is in my hand, I leave my hand flat, to show that I have no intention of taking it.

“Really, that’s okay. You need your wallet.”

“Look at this,” he says, a bit incredulously. He shows me a wad of fake-looking cash that he pulls from behind his real wad of cash. “You’re crazy.”

“You need your money, I’m doing okay.” I turn to walk away.

He pulls out a six-hundred-dollar bill, and holds it in front of my face. “Then just take this.” He puts it in my hand, but again I leave my palm open. Our hands are pressed together with the bill between them.

“Really, I don’t need it. You keep it.”

Now he thinks he’s being clever. As if to entice me to stop him from doing something bad with it, he says, “I’m just gonna go buy a piece with it.” I know he’s lying.

“Keep your money. See you around.” I walk away quickly. He becomes angry, but drops his wallet at taht moment, so he can’t do anything to chase me. High Guy tries to get onto his bike to come after me, but he isn’t capable of walking, so the bike tips over, and the guy falls on his face. When he looks up after me and tries to yell something, his face is bloody on one side.

There is a woman walking past all of us, giving us wide berth as she walks quickly to her black four-door Audi and gets in. I walk down to my apartment, but I go in the side entrance, just in case the guys are still watching me, which I don’t think they are. When I get inside, I see a large group of children filing past my window, screaming loudly. My blond wife (not someone I know in real life, and I’m not married) enters the room and starts to loudly sing a nonsensical song. She looks very strange, and her face actually changes shape and become slightly disfigured as I stand there looking at her. I try to get her to stop singing by kissing her, which works somewhat, but she still continues humming while we’re kissing.

That’s when my alarm went off and I woke up.

I never felt threatened, or out of control of the situation. I was very calm, and somehow knew just the right way to interact with this guy.

Very strange morning for dreams. I was only asleep for 45 minutes, but during that time I had an uncountable number of short dreams of all types. Some were ads, for a refrigerator, and for some sort of new Google service (?), and for a couple of other things that are eluding me at the moment. Two were extremely fast-paced cartoons, one of which was about a little Peruvian donkey named Mayaya. (It makes me laugh just to write that sentence, because I know how weird it must sound.) I don’t remember the other cartoon. Out of all those dreams, the only one that had any kind of narrative that I could write out was the one about the two guys and the humming wife.

OneYearAgo

Tonight was the best play-reading group night ever.

The play we read tonight was the one about Leon Theremin, written by one of the members of the group, and I got to play a real theremin. The music and sound effects were very much scripted into this play, in a way that they have not been in the other plays we’ve read. Not in the notation sense, but there were cues like, “Tuning” or “Ether”, or the actors will say, “What’s that sound?” or “Dance, and your body will control the instrument,” and that was my cue to make an appropriate sound happen. Total blast.  I also got the opportunity to read the part of a Soviet bureaucrat, which I’ve said a million times is fun to do.

Saussha came to the reading with me, and she expected to just sit and watch the proceedings, but instead she got asked to read the part of Theremin’s (second?) wife Lavinia, a Jamaican socialite and professional dancer who lived in Russia and New York. Talk about a challenge!  But she pulled it off adeptly, like the total professional that she is.

A good time was had by all.  I know I’ve already mentioned how much I love this group. . .but tonight was the most fun I’ve had yet.