Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

For one of the few times in my life, I find myself at a loss for words. Which, really, is kind of a scary concept for one so thoroughly Irish as I am; you know, that whole thing about Irishmen being blessed with the gift of gab and all. On the other hand, while some might view a mick being confounded on what to say as a tragedy, others might view it as a blessing.

Actually, it's not so much that I don't know what to say as it is that whatever I do say is not only not going to be appreciated, it's going to fall on deaf ears. Ah, but I've neglected to tell just what it is that gives rise to this line of thought.

Today is December 22, the "last" day, so to speak. The last day of what? Why, the last day on which my friend's ponzi scheme she's involved in was supposed to pay out, of course. You see, the individual running this little ploy very solemnly promised that everyone would be "paid out" between the 18th and 22nd of this month. Insert pained sigh here.

Naturally, as I had predicted before, no one actually got "paid" except the - and I'm being gentle here - douchebag at the top of this particular pyramid. Which, of course, is how pyramid schemes work. The immoral prey upon the gullible, and there isn't a whole lot that anybody can do about that.

I'm not sure how much money my friend threw away on this particular gambit, nor do I really care. For her "investment," she was convinced that she was going to make $100,000.00 for herself, $48,000.00 for her husband, and $12,500.00 for me. Yes, that's right, she bought into three "slots" in this scheme.

Oh, those dreams of internet wealth. To her, this wasn't a ponzi scheme doomed to see her taken to the cleaners, but an "investment opportunity." That's right folks, your $5,000.00 today could be $300,000.00 in only three months, and you don't have to do anything other than try and convince some other poor saps to fork over their cash.

Come on, I can't be the only one who sees something wrong with this. Really, it's the oldest trick in the book, the old something for (relatively) nothing scam. I still have trouble believing that people are really that gullible, even though I am living with proof of that assertion. On the one hand, I can't talk this person out of such things, and on the other, I can't shoot the people responsible. Frustrating, to say the least.

The thing is, even though I am not the one who participated in this scheme - I didn't hand over any money - I am not unaffected by the fallout. Over the past year, I've given my friend over $10,000.00 - cash I really could not afford to part with - in order to pay off her Federal income tax debt and delinquent property taxes. And why did she and her husband not have the money to take care of those debts? Because she threw it away, and keeps on throwing it away, on these asinine internet schemes that a six-year-old would know are scams.

Now, I know I'm never going to see that money again. Ten grand may not be much in the big picture, but it was all I had, almost my entire savings. Nor is it like I can make it up; I can't work, and Disability barely pays for all the medications I have to take for my various illnesses. Which is what really pisses me off: that someone would call upon the bonds of friendship to take from someone who really can't afford to give, because they can't control themselves when it comes to money. It really makes me long for the days when I had a gun and a uniform that said it was legal . . .

But what can you do with an addict? Drugs, alcohol, gambling, ponzi schemes . . . an addiction is an addiction. Tomorrow, she's going to get on the computer and find some other get-rich-quick scheme. Just more proof of my assertion that a fool and your money will soon be partners. Hell, she's still waiting for her big "investment" in Iraqi dinar to pay off. The fact that the dinar is worthless and some schmuck in Baghdad who needed a hard currency now has hers is, of course, immaterial. The e-mail said she would get rich by buying the currency, so it must be so.

Which begs the question of just how many times someone needs a rock to fall on their head before they start getting the idea that not all is as it is promised, but . . . See the earlier point about addictions. Now, I've been around the block enough times to know that if someone really wants to ride the express elevator to hell, I'm not going to get in their way. I just really resent it, though, when they want to take the rest of us along for the ride.

So, what can I say? "I told you so" is right up there; short, to the point, but somehow so crude. "Just what did you think would happen?" is also a contender, except that it verges on being a rhetorical question. I mean, I already know what she expected to happen, regardless of the fact that a blind man could see it wouldn't. Therein lies the conundrum: there just isn't really anything I can say, and certainly nothing that is going to make any impact. But I do wonder what is going to happen the next time she finds she doesn't have the money to pay things like taxes, because she's thrown it all away on these bogus schemes. Because the next time, there won't be anyone to bail her out.

A Nice Dinner Might Have Helped . . .

Oh, the indignities just continue to pile up, one after another. I never used to believe in reincarnation, but now I do. And I am convinved that, in my last life, I was a Brooklyn cab driver, and am being punished for that in this life.

If you don't know why I am picking on cab drivers from Brooklyn, specifically, or New York City, in general, then you need to get out more.

Anyway, last night I showed up at the medical arts building for the long-awaited "sleep study" that my doctors wanted me to take. In the middle of a blizzard. Where the local authorities were doing the kind of street plowing that got Mayor Bilandic fired in Chicago back in 1978. After getting caught behind an 18-wheeler that had gotten stuck in the middle of the road - and no, don't ask me how something that big and that heavy can get stuck in two inches of snow. Maybe after you add in the other five inches that fell while I was not sleeping in the sleep centre, but I digress.

Now, if you've never had to undergo one of these "sleep studies" - an exercise in a self-fulfilling prophecy designed to tell you that you suffer from sleep apnea - then you have missed out on a truly joyful experience. Really. It's a lot like spending a night in a budget motel, onl without any of the amenities.

Okay, first of all, they make you go in the back door of the building, presumably because they tell you to show up at 8:30 PM, and the main entrance is closed. Or, perhaps, it's because they just make the Irish use the back door - some people are just funny that way.

Actually, the room they put you in is fairly nice - if, of course, you can ignore all the chain-saw snoring emanating from the other rooms. There's a nice leather chair, a queen-size bed, a nice armoire to stash your belongings in, and a 50-inch flat-panel LCD TV mounted on the wall, complete with satellite access and, erm, the porn channels. Quite aside from the, ah, adult selections available, such a nice TV set does seem to be a bit of a waste, since you're not actually given an opportunity to watch anything. You are, after all, there to sleep.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about the ceiling-mounted IR camera, so the nurses can watch you. Note to self: don't pick your nose or play with yourself.

So, after you change into whatever it is you like to sleep in - and for God's sake, let's hope that camera is off while you're changing - the nurse comes in to hook you up to what you can only presume are some very expensive machines. And, yes, while we're at it, I did toy with the idea of telling them that I slept in the nude, but I actually don't advise doing that. You never can tell what might show up on YouTube.

They get the ball rolling, so to speak, with something that felt very much like a phrenological exam (oh, go look it up). The nurse had me sit in a chair, and then she broke out a tape measure and started measuring my head. She said it was so she would know where to put the EEG leads, but I would have thought they'd have a standardized chart for that. Oh, well. Then, she started drawing dots and lines all over my skull and forehead with a red magic marker. Again, she said, so she would know where to place the leads, but it did kind of feel like she was just playing tic-tac-toe, though I could just be reading things into it.

Then came the goop. Like she dumped an industrial-sized jar of K-Y Jelly on my head. A nice, big, heaping dollop for every lead. And by "dollop," I mean that when she was done, I looked like the victim of a bukkake party. Once again, if you don't know what a bukkake party is, you need to get out more. All I know is that two showers later, I've still got this gunk in my hair.

Once she got done spewing my head, the Great Electrode Placement occurred. This was really fun, because it took about ten minutes to get all the leads placed - head, chest, back, arms and legs. During this process, I somehow felt compelled to ask if the Governor had called yet to commute my sentence. All of these leads, of course, are connected to a set of machines on a night table so, after you're wired, if you have to do something like, oh, go to the bathroom, they have to come in and disconnect you and plug you into a box you can walk around with. Trust me, not a process for those of you who are weak of bladder . . .

When they've finally gotten you all hooked up, it's time for bed. The mattress, of course, is like a slab of cement. Sleep-number, my ass. What I discovered is that you can pick up the controller for the mattress, pick the firmness number you want, and all the bed does is, well, fart. And the mattress remains just as firm as ever. Look, I set the damned thing all the way down to 50, and it was still like lying on a slab of concrete, no matter how many times I made the mattress fart.

Oh, by the way, that's something else you probably don't want to do. They are listening to you, remember.

Then there are the pillows, which are so good it's like sleeping with no pillows at all. I had two of them, and those suckers must have compressed completely flat as soon as my head hit them. Or, perhaps, with all the petroleum jelly on my head, I just kept slipping off them. I suppose that's a possibility, too. All I know for sure is that I haven't seen that much grease on a pillow case since I was a teenager. Ah, memories . . . The good news is that once you are finally all settled in bed, the nurse tucks you in, which no one has done for me since I was about six.

Note to Centegra Health Systems, Inc.: if you actually wanted me to sleep, you shouldn't have given me a cute nurse with large breasts who was willing to crawl into bed with me.

Not that I actually did much sleeping, but at one point it seems that one of the leads came off my back, and I was rather pleasantly awakened - or unpleasantly, depending on personal preference or embarrassment factor - to my nurse crawling under the covers and looking for it. When she asked if there was anything else I could think of to ask for, I was truly at a loss for words. Okay, maybe not so much as at a loss for words, but the classic problem of which voice to listen to, the angel on my right shoulder or the devil on my left. But I did periodically make sure to knock a lead loose here and there . . .

But as I said, at least for me, there really wasn't a whole lot of sleeping involved in this "sleep study." Look, I got there at 8:30 PM and, by the time all the preliminaries were over and they made me look like an x-rated movie actor ready for execution, it was 11:30 PM. By the time I was stretched out on the flatulent cement slab, it was midnight and I still wasn't tired. So, they gave me a sleeping pill . . . which didn't work. Which kind of defeats the point of a sleeping pill, but what do I know? Between midnight and about 4:00 AM, all I did was kind of drift in and out of a sort of half-sleep. You know, that really restful kind where you sleep for a couple of minutes before waking up, all the time aware of everything that's going on around you. Rinse and repeat as often as necessary.

Finally, at about four in the morning, I finally fell into what you can properly classify as "sleep." The problem being that they wake you up at 5:00 AM and kick you out. Surprise! The. Most. Miserable. Night. Ever. And then, on basically one hour's sleep, I got to drive home in the same freaking blizzard that had plagued me the night before. Note to Chevy: the HHR is really not designed to be driven in the snow.

And you know what? I'm going to get to do this all over again, because according to the nurse, I have severe sleep apnea. Which means that they're going to make me do another "sleep study" so they can either fit me with one of those funky masks they use to treat apnea at home, or decide if maybe I should have the "corrective" surgery. Of course, my failure to sleep adequately could have nothing to do with the rock-hard mattress or, perhaps, that same nurse causing random erections by getting into bed with me, but that just shows my failure to understand the problem. I mean, I'm not the one who spent four years in medical school and three years in residency so I could watch tapes of people sleeping, right?

Really, now, the only thing I learned from this experience is that I really want a 50-inch flat-panel LCD TV, and a bed that doesn't fart . . .

A Life More Ordinary

This must be what Custer felt like towards the very end, as he stood on that hilltop at the Little Big Horn, looking around and realizing that there was no help coming. That sinking feeling of knowing that everything was drawing inexorably to an end, that awesome loneliness of knowing that there were no more choices to be made, no way to retrieve the situation or to redeem himself. Surely a situation to try even those with the strongest of faith.

When I look back, I'm not sure what it is that I see. Meaning seems to merge into futility until the identity of each is lost as they merge into something else, something I just can't really come to grips with. Perhaps I am just to close to the events in question, or perhaps I am just unwilling to admit to what is right there in front of me, that there is, in the end, no meaning and everything is just a lesson in futility.

For fifteen years, I ran a group home for a social services agency that put such an emphasis on living up to those goals that they fired me when I had a heart attack. The ugly truth of that place was that the people running it were far more interested in preserving their own positions than they were in anything so mundane as actually taking care of the kids they were in charge of. Ostensibly a 501(c) organization, the administration was always after those of us who were actually running the day-to-day operations to find ways to save money and keep expenses down. Now, while that may make sense for a company that's supposed to turn a profit, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense for a company that is a non-profit organization. As an example, every time money was tight, the push was to cut back on what was being spent on the kids living in the group homes, including the clothing budget and what was being spent to feed them; at the same time, the senior administration gave themselves a 22% pay raise. And those of us who would be considered the "middle-managers," when we pointed out that perhaps the priorities were a little misguided, well, we were labelled the "trouble-makers."

Kids and adolescents living in group homes can be quite a creative bunch. In my time as a unit supervisor, I was confronted not only by children wielding knives, but by just about anything else you can think of that can be used as a weapon. Chairs were always fun, as several of my broken ribs can attest to, as were things like pool balls stuffed into socks.

One afternoon, I walked into the house I supervised to find that one of the 18-year-old residents had discovered a roofing shovel somewhere, and was using it to threaten the other residents and the staff. When I came in, as a matter of fact, one of my staff was in the dining room, wrestling with this kid and trying to get that shovel away from him. I just walked past those two, made sure that everyone else got out of the house, then went into my office and called the police. That kid followed me, all the time swinging the shovel around and, while I was speaking to the 911 operator, pulled the phone cord out of the wall. I'm not entirely sure what he was thinking, if he believed that by disconnecting the phone the cops wouldn't know where to go, but I have been around long enough to know that when a 911 operator is told that an armed assault is going on, they tend to get a bit concerned when the call is suddenly cut off.

I obviously don't know what that operator said when she put the call out, but she must have made it sound like everybody in the house was being murdered. Frankly, when that kid yanked the phone cord out of the wall, I just left. No point in sticking around and winding up as a blood splash on the wall, right? But before I had taken two steps out the front door, it was like I was suddenly in The Blues Brothers. Every squad car on the west side of town that day must have responded to that call; I counted at least ten by the time I was done, all with lights and sirens. I remember two of them charging right across the curb and across the front lawn while a third pulled a violent u-turn in front of the house, as well as the ones that screamed up the driveway and the ones that came in through the back drive. Needless to say, after the police were done, we never saw that kid again . . .

I remember the day I got crunched in a restraint, where one of my more unreasonable kids decided to lose his mind and come after me with a chair. It didn't hurt nearly as much when he broke one of my ribs with that chair as it did when two of my staff tackled the kid, with me unfortunately still on the bottom of that particular pile. By the time they managed to extricate me from that scrum, I was having trouble breathing and couldn't move my left arm. Still, being the guy in charge, I somehow felt the need to help my remaining staff keep control over the house while that particular situation was resolved, despite the other kids pleading with me to go to the hospital.

By the time I finally did go, that kid was calm again and the other kids, having had no interest in involving themselves in his malfunction, had gone back to more important things to them, like watching TV. And the punchline to this particular story is that, while I was in the Emergency Room listening to the doctor tell me something I already knew - namely, that I had a broken rib - my boss called me to say that I was in trouble because I hadn't asked for her permission to go to the hospital. I've often wondered what the people in charge of enforcing the Worker's Compensation laws would have had to say about that, had I bothered to inform them . . .

Before I went to work for that agency, I spent five years or so as an indpendent contractor to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, meeting and greeting every schizo in the fifty wards of Chicago. I spent part of that magical, mystery tour doing psych evals and profiles of DCFS clients, and part of it investigating charges of abuse and neglect. If I wasn't a cynic before I did those things, I certainly was after.

I could tell you about the eleven-year-old girl who was in a group home in the city that I profiled, who tried to seduce me during the interview. She was, shall we say, a well-developed child which, I came to find out, was one of the results of sexual abuse. It seems that that tends to stimulate the hormones in charge of sexual development. Anyway, it turned out that, as she coyly unbuttoned the top few buttons of her blouse, that her main ambition in life was to be a Playboy playmate and have lots of sex . . . In order to finish that interview, I had to call in one of that agencey's child care workers and have her sit in as a witness.

God, are you out there?

I could tell you about the sixteen-year-old girl I profiled, who was six months pregnant and refused to acknowledge that little fact. She had all the affect of a rock, and the reason I was testing her was because she had taken a five inch bite out of her mother's shoulder. By the time I was done with the interview, my skin was literally crawling, and I knew with the certainty of the tomb that if she were allowed to give birth and keep her child, that child was as good as dead. And there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it.

God, are you listening?

Or I could tell you about the parents I interviewed, who had beaten one of their toddlers to death with a baseball bat. They had completed their court-ordered parenting classes and the judge, it seemed, was considering returning their other children to them. You know, the ones who had been starved, used as ashtrays, beaten with extension cords, all those normal things that parents do. All of the screening I did on them pointed to the fact that they had learned nothing from all the court-ordered intervention, but what do I know?

God, are you there?

One day, I walked into an apartment in the Robert Taylor Homes, your basic urban demilitarized zone, to inestigate a charge of possible abuse. The place, I must say, was kept very neat, and came complete with hot- and cold-running roaches. The father was an assistant chef at a very well-known Chicago restaurant, favourite of yuppies everywhere, and the mother was a very pleasant woman who apparently collected Government money for having children. It was an exceptionally beautiful day, with brilliant sunlight pouring through the windows . . . and there, lying curled up in a frying pan on the stove, was the infant who had been the cause of the abuse charge. I never even conducted the interview. There was no reason to. I turned right around, left, and called the police.

God, do you even care?

I look back, and I can't help wondering what it was all for. All I can see is the blood and the wreckage and the tears, a trail of small horrors that merge into a kind of meta-tragedy that has no beginning and no end. There was a time in my life when I would receive letters from former clients of mine, all of them reducable to the same, depressing message: if I had only listened to you, things would be different. A few, here and there, who actually did make it, the one who found a foster family he fit in with, and who later on became a police officer. The girl who went on to join the National Guard, and leveraged that into going to college. But balanced against all the others who just continued to spiral on down into the darkness . . .

What was it all for? All the time and effort, and the dismal banality of it all just rolls right along without interruption. Perhaps that is just the greatest practical joke of all, the illusion that we can make a difference, that we can change things. For in the end, there is only what there is.

More Change We Can Believe In

The President addressed the nation this evening, unveiling his new "plan" for prosecuting the war in Afghanistan. I didn't bother to watch, because I already knew what he was going to say, which was, basically, nothing. Just another case of meet the new boss, same as the old boss. And when I went and checked on what the President had to say, my heart kind of sank, even though it shouldn't have, as I knew better.

First of all, an additional thirty thousand troops is not going to significantly impact events on the ground in Afghanistan. Look, that sounds like a big number, but it is also a deceiving one. The question that should really be asked is just how many of those troops are going to be trigger-pullers? Given the typical tooth-to-tail ratio in the U.S. military - that is, the actual number of soldiers who do the fighting versus the number of soldiers who support the shooters - I'm betting that of that thirty thousand, less than five thousand will actually be putting steel on target.

If you think of Afghanistan as a house on fire, then sending in thirty thousand troops is a lot like trying to fight that fire with a garden hose. Minimal as it may be, those troops will have an impact at the tactical level, but none at all on the strategic level, and that is what we should be concerned with. It takes an enormous effort to project a force that far, and into a place as primitive as Afghanistan; for every shooter we send in, there are another three or four soldiers that have to follow him in order to provide logistical support. After all, a soldier on the sharp end is kind of useless if he doesn't have the "beans, bullets and bandages" to do his job.

To a large extent, the problems of Afghanistan don't exist within that country, but are a product of people and forces outside of the country. Iran, for example, is an irritant, but a minor one in the grand scheme of things. Yes, to make us uncomfortable, they will continue to ship weapons and "trainers" into Afghanistan, but Teheran lacks both the traction and the audience to ever be anything more than a bit player. Pakistan, on the other hand, is a different story entirely.

If we were capable of thinking in anything other than sound bites and could remember our history, we would recall that the Taliban, as an organized political force, was largely a creation of the Pakistani ISI - their military intelligence service - following the Soviet withdrawal in 1988. Pakistan had always had an interest in controlling events within Afghanistan; considering their "real" enemy to be India, they have always wanted a "stable" government in Kabul - or, at least, as stable as any Afghan government can be, but more on that in a bit - and one that they could control. And make no mistake about this, the Pakistani ISI bankrolled the Taliban, and to an extent far larger than anyone wants to admit, still does. Always remember the basic fact that he who controls the purse strings controls everything.

The real area of concern in the region is the so-called "tribal" areas that span the Afghan-Pakistan border. The various tribes that inhabit that zone are, for all intents and purposes, autonomous from any central authority. The central government is largely irrelevant to them, and within their respective tribal zones, they police and regulate themselves. That area has long been known to be a breeding ground of fundamentalism, and a major problem has been that the Pashtun tribe - the majority tribe within Afghanistan and the tribe from which the Taliban sprung - crosses over into Pakistan.

We've known since the beginning of our war in Afghanistan that the Afghan-Pakistan border has been exceedingly porous, and that the tribal lands on the Pakistani side of the border have functioned in the same manner as Cambodia and Laos in the Vietnam War, a safe haven in which the Taliban can regroup, train and resupply. Aside from maintaining a loose watch over the border from a handful of isolated garrisons, Pakistani authorities don't even try to enter the tribal zones, much less administer them. Itself a fairly radicalized institution, the only agency that does, in fact, have any traction in that area is, unsurprisingly, the ISI.

The moral of this lesson is that if you truly want to "stabilize" the situation inside Afghanistan - which is something of an impossible task to begin with, but we'll get to that - then you must first have the ability to seal off the border with Pakistan, cutting off the hostile forces from their safe havens on the other side of that line. Just given the terrain in that region, thirty thousand troops aren't going to be enough to do that. Look at it this way: one hundred and fifty thousand troops in Iraq weren't enough to seal that country's borders and prevent the flow of fighters from Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other countries and, by comparison, Iraq is a sandbox with infrastructure. All-weather paved roads, electricity and basic utilities are all few and far between inside Afghanistan.

Second of all, the President's so-called "new strategy" depends, in his own words, on "cooperating with those institutions in Afghanistan that are fighting corruption" and strengthening the central government in Kabul, as well as the government's security forces. In other words, we are to continue engaging in efforts directed towards "nation building."

There are, unfortunately, a couple of problems with that goal. The first being that, aside from Germany and Japan following the Second World War, there has never been a successful case of "nation building." Further, one could argue that we only succeeded with Germany and Japan because we first basically reduced those countries to rubble and eliminated their ability to resist us. Folks, those two countries were at our whim after 1945, and we occupied them for almost sixty years. In other words, they had no choice but to act as we dictated. That is hardly the case with Afghanistan.

Now, fighting corruption is a noble idea, but one that is ultimately doomed to failure and which betrays our fundamental misunderstanding of the culture in that region of the world. Indeed, in many areas of our unhappy globe. In what we like to call the industrialized, or First, world, corruption is a phenomenon in which someone decides to play the system in order for personal gain. In the way in which our institutions are set up, corruption is the exception and not the rule. But because we are raised in a society where we view that phenomenon as an aberration, we tend to believe that everyone, everywhere, holds that same view. And they do not.

Afghanistan, Pakistan and much of sub-Saharan Africa are tribal societies, where an individual's primary loyalty are toward clan and tribe, and not to something as vague and distant as nation and government. Corruption is endemic to those societies precisely because of their tribal nature. Poitical power and jobs are not meted out due to ability, but rather due to who is related to who. At one point or another, every society that has ever existed has operated on that basis and, while some have "evolved" to a point where that kind of activity is frowned upon, most have not. Corruption, as we term it, in a tribalized society is a cultural phenomenon, not a political or legal one. Rather than compete with someone outside of the tribe for a job based on merit or ability, it is far easier - and certainly more profitable for the tribe - to keep such things "in the family" as it were, especially if there are few jobs to begin with. Furthermore, in a society where opportunities are limited to begin with, it is also far easier to pick up a gun and protect what the tribe already has than it is to go and dig ditches for a living. And in a society where the warrior figure is venerated as an ideal, such as in Afghanistan, it is also certainly more prestigious than digging a ditch.

Nation building, as a concept, is further doomed in a place like Afghanistan because there is really nothing there on which to base those efforts. The very concept of a "Nation-State," as we understand the concept, is very much a product of liberal Western thought dating back to Classical Greece. In much of the world, what we call "nations" are really nothing more than the product of a few European colonial powers arbitrarily drawing lines on a map. In much of sub-Saharan Africa and southwest Asia, "nations" are really nothing more than collections of tribes who shouldn't be living together and who have no real interest in doing so. The former nation of Yugoslavia is a great example of that. As long as the strong man lived and was in charge, so did the pantomine of a functioning state. But as soon as Tito was gone, that state fractured along its ethnic - or tribal, if you prefer - lines and descended into blood conflicts. That same phenomenon is always present in African countries that periodically convulse in an orgy of genocide; those countries always fracture along tribal lines.

Afghanistan has never existed as a nation, at least as we understand that term. There has never been a strong, central government that exercised sovereignty over the country, even when there was a king who sat on a throne in Kabul. The closest Afghanistan ever came to being a nation as we understand it was when the Communists were in control, and we all know how that one turned out. The brutal truth of the matter is that Afghanistan has always consisted of a relatively weak central government in Kabul, who's control was pretty much limited to that city and the areas immediately surrounding it. The real political power in Afghanistan has always been wielded by the tribal leaders controlling the provinces, and "national" government was always characterized by the weak central government bribing the Provincial leaders when they could, and by playing them off against each other when necessary. It has been that way since before Ghengis Khan and the Golden Horde overran Afghanistan, and even the Mongols didn't try to bring the Provincial Warlords under control. And it isn't like the Great Khan is exactly known for his gentle diplomacy.

Finally, the President promised in his speech that we would begin withdrawing from Afghanistan by the summer of 2011. The problem with that is by doing so, he told the Taliban that all they have to do is hang on for eighteen more months, and then they'll win. Again, we betray our fundamental misunderstanding of why things are happening over there. The Taliban is very much a product of Pashtun society and, for as long as the Pashtuns exist, there will always be a constituency for them. The Taliban was a cultural phenomenon among that tribe long before the Pakistani ISI turned it into a political force, and it is the height of folly to believe that can be changed. Victory, such as it is, will never be defined in terms of defeating the Taliban and eliminating them as a force within Pashtun or Afghan society. Unless you are prepared to eliminate the Pashtun entirely, that is an impossibility. Rather, victory will be defined by somehow convincing the Pashtun themselves to marginalize the Taliban as a cultural, religious and political force, and that, too, may prove to be an impossibility. Success then lies in convincing the various tribes in Afghanistan to cooperate with each other, which inevitably leads us back to the model of patronage, bribes and, yes, coercion in getting the provincial leaders to cooperate with whoever controls Kabul.

The real problem with our approach to Afghanistan - and any other global "hot spot" you care to mention - is that there aren't any real strategists left in Washington, and probably haven't been any there since George Kennan sent his long telegram. Nobody in Washington seems able to think beyond the next election cycle, and make no mistake about this. Even though he used the word tonight, the President wasn't talking about strategy, or even the Operational art; he was talking about a tactical response to a strategic problem. Strategy involves thinking about the second, third and fourth-order effects of the things you do, and beyond. Yet the people involved in developing our so-called strategies seem to give up after considering the second-order effects in passing. To be brutally honest, the President's "strategy" in Afghanistan is not only going to fail, it is going to fail dismally. And, for so long as we continue to focus on tactical responses and call that strategy, anything we try to do is going to fail.

Epitaphs

There is, I suppose, a good side and a bad side to suffering from insomnia. The good news is that it allows you to see more of the world than you normally would; the bad news is that it gives that many more hours in which to think. When you get tired enough, when you fall into that zone where your mind fogs with fatigue but the body just refuses to stop moving, those things that you keep so carefully boxed away have an annoying habit of breaking free of their hiding places, dreary ghosts rising from drearier graves.

Momentous events have a unique way of searing themselves into the brain in a way that the moment is forever preserved in amber in a startling clarity. An older generation than mine, for example, can vividly recall where they were and what they were doing when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. An even older generation can recall, in minute detail, the same thing about Pearl Harbour. For ourselves, we have 9/11. And I can recall the exact moment at which my life changed course, when the person I was meant to be quitely slipped off the stage to be replaced by the man I became.

But while that instant in time is preserved in my memory, unchangeable, other things, equally important to me, have perversely become faded with the passage of time, somehow unclear. Bits and pieces that lie just beyond touch, will'o'wisps that dart from your grasp even as you reach out for them, that lose their meaning the harder you try to make sense of them. I remember my father precisly because I can't remember him, at least not in the details rather than the kind of distant comfort he has become. It has been thirty-three years since he died and, the farther removed from that day I have become, the farther removed he has likewise become from me. His face, his voice, the man he was have all quietly faded from what was a living, breathing, feeling reality to a kind of warm, distant sense of ill-defined warmth, more of a gestalt than anything else. Perhaps that is just the way of these sorts of things, or perhaps it is more the result of some shortcoming of mine as a human being; after all, they say that Time wounds all heels.

Yet there are memories that remain, and that is perhaps the cruellest thing of all. My father may have been consigned to oblivion, but he has not quite crossed over, in my mind, to obscurity. Not yet, at least, not until I pass from this world myself into the darkness waiting beyond. That, I think, will be the day that my father truly dies indeed, and may he finally find peace at last.

My father was a large man, built like a Sherman tank, and he really did bear more than a passing resemblance to that venerable vehicle. He was a man of infinite patience and infinite kindness, perpetually surrounded by a cloud of sweet-smelling pipe smoke. I can remember how safe I felt when I was a toddler and he picked me up in his arms, knowing with the certainty of a child that as long as he was there, no harm could ever come to me. In the apartment we lived in then, there was a cartoon map of Paris hung on one wall of the kitchen, and every morning before he left for work my father would pick me up in front of that map, point out the landmarks, and have me repeat the names in French after him. At night, when he was home early enough, he would read Winnie the Pooh or The Wind in the Willows to me until I fell asleep.

Down the street from that apartment, right next to where The Water Tower Place now stands, there was a playground surrounded by a tall, cedar fence. I can remember warm, sunny Sunday afternoons running and skipping down the sidewalk to that playground as my father followed behind, whistling Lili Marlene as we walked, a haunting melody for what is now a haunted time.

My father was a psychologist, catering to both the rich and poitically powerful and to anyone else who walked through his door. Part of the week, he practiced his art in Indiana, and the rest of the week in his office on Michigan Avenue. It seems to me that the older I got, the less I actually saw of him, for a typical work day for him began at 9 AM and ended somewhere around 11 PM. When I was younger, before my parents started exiling me to summer camp in Michigan, there were times when I would accompany him to his office in Hammond, Indiana. Those were days where I would be ensconced in a back room of his suite, loaded down with plastic models and a TV to keep me busy, his secretary checking in on me every once in a while. He and I would have lunch at the local lunch counter, and there was a really good Chinese restaurant where we would have dinner. At night, after he'd seen the last patient of the day, we would return to the hotel where we would have late-night sandwiches and I would fall asleep, finally, to re-runs of old Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials.

To say that I was spoiled as a child would be a vast understatement, but to truly describe it would make spoiled children everywhere green with envy. My father doted on his children and, I suppose, as a way of making up for all the hours he spent at work, he was always buying my brother and I toys. Every time he came back from his office in Indiana, he had gifts for us. Some of my earliest memories are of models that he somehow found the time to build and meticulously detail and paint, that I would find placed on my dresser when I woke up in the morning. Every birthday and Christmas, I could depend on getting, among all the other presents, an electric train set. Of course, I never got to play with those electric trains because my father was busy playing with them, always with the excuse that he and his architect friend were going to build a really neat layout for me to play with. Oh, well, it's the thought that counts, right?

Between about 1965 and 1972, we lived in a large house in the Lincoln Park area that had a coach house out back. When we moved out of that house, my parents had to hire a dump truck to haul away all the old toys my brother and I no longer played with and that had been stored there. Viewed in retrospect, Christmas for my brother and I was something of an obscenity. My parents would have us come up with a list of what we wanted, and then they would go out and buy those things. Then, usually on Christmas Eve, they would take us out to our favourite stores and turn us loose. When I think about that now, I am staggered.

My father had a love affair with cars. He was one of those people who traded in the "old" car and bought a new one every year. Cadillac made a mint off him, as did Mercedes, which was my mother's car of choice. He also had a 1933 and a 1936 Jaguar touring coupes, and Sunday afternoons he could be found tinkering with them, taking parts from the engine of one to get the other one running. Being a good city boy, I have memories of the family piling into one of those cars and taking long drives out into the counrtyside in the Fall, going apple-picking and antique hunting and just looking at the riot of colours as the trees changed.

At some point, I don't remember exactly when, we stopped taking vacations as a family, and Spring Break became the province of my mother, who would haul my brother and I off to West Palm Beach to rub shoulders with the likes of the Kennedys. But Christmas break belonged to my father. The day after Christmas, until my brother was old enough to go off to Aspen on his own, my father would take he and I and our best friends off to Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for an eight-day skiing trip. As his life ran swiftly on towards its end, those are the only vacations I can remember him taking.

My father was also something of a football fan. He had season tickets to both the Bears and to Northwestern, always enough for him and my brother and I and our best friends. In the Fall, when my brother was playing high school football, my father would take those Saturday mornings off from work to go and watch. I remember how pround he was of my brother, and I remember how proud he was of me when I started playing football, too. He always made it a point to take off from work to watch my football, basketball and baseball games. I wish he had been able to see more of them.

He may have worked six days a week, but Sundays always belonged to the family, as did Wednesday evenings and Friday nights. My father would cook a Sunday brunch fit to literally feed an army. I'd wake up in the mid-morning to the smells of bacon, eggs, pancakes, waffles and French toast, and there was always fresh-squeezed orange juice for us and coffee for them. Then he'd tinker with his cars for a bit and, in the afternoon, he'd gently call for me, and take me out to a hobby shop.

Wednesday nights, he would always come home for a sit-down family dinner. On Friday nights, he would take me and my best friend out to dinner, and then to a movie. He never missed one of those nights, ever. Something that I took for granted, never realizing how much it would hurt when it was lost.

By 1972, we lived about a block and a half from my school. Every morning, my father would wake me up, then cook breakfast and walk me to school. I remember one day, shortly before he died, when we stood in front of the school building and he looked at me and said, "I suppose you're getting too old to kiss your father goodbye." I remember being shocked by that, or, rather, that he might think that, because I couldn't ever imagine a time when I would be embarrassed to give my father a peck on the cheek. Sometimes, I think, he may have known something that I did not. Or, perhaps, he was just acknowledging the possible end of an era as I embarked on those truly awkward teenage years.

I spoke to my father every night on the phone, just before I went to bed. That last conversation I had with him haunts me to this day, the words as clear as the moment at which they were spoken. There was a heaviness in his voice that night, a weight that transcended fatigue and elevated itself to something else, and when I asked him what was wrong, the words sounded like they were coming from the grave. "I'm just tired, bone tired." Such an innocuous phrase, but when I hung up, I knew with a certainty I can't explain that I would never talk to him again.

The next morning, my life changed, unalterably and forever.

Thirty-three years, and the details fade and blur. If he were still alive today, he would be 90 years old and, while I'm certain he wouldn't possibly have been able to keep the same schedule, I also don't doubt for a moment that he would still be practicing. That was just the kind of man he was. Nor do I doubt for a moment that I would not be the same man I am now.

I sometimes wonder what my father would think of me, of what I have done. We were not a military clan but every male member of my family - with the exception of my brother - has served this country in uniform. From my nihilistic teenage years I grew to do the same thing, the first of my family to be an Officer and, like my father, I have seen the randomness of Fate claim life even as I hung my own in the balance. I have spent a lifetime wading through the blood and wreckage of others' lives, ignoring my own, because I saw broken people and knew that I could put them back together. I have tried to do the right things not because I expected any reward or gain from doing that, but simply because they were the right things to do. As one friend of mine once described me, "He's honest to a fault," and yet I fail to see how honesty can be a fault. Better by far a bad truth than a good lie.

And I wonder what he would say, were he able to see my life. Would he be proud of his youngest son, or bewildered by the sense of promise lost? Or, perhaps, it is just a vanity to believe that one generation actually learns from the mistakes of the previous one. I remember my father but, in some fundamental ways, I don't remember him, at least not as a person instead of a concept. He always used to say that the past should not dominate the present but that one day, out of so many days, has done exactly that. I don't know what he would say to that, but I do know I would be willing to pay any price to hear it.

Questions

The most irksome thing about unanswered questions is that they tend to remain unanswered, particularly when only one side who was party to the events that gave rise to the questions is still around. My father always said that you can not live in the past, that you can not let your present be dominated by the dead hand of what was, lest you wind up sacrificing your future over events that can't be changed. My greatest failing, perhaps, is that I never really took those words to heart, and perhaps I have mortgaged what future I had to things that are forever unalterable. But there are some things that also demand answers, though the time to obtain them is short and, once the window closes, lost.

I remember a conversation I once had with my mother, during the summer before my Senior year in high school. Not too surprisingly, we had once again been more-or-less at each other's throats, locked in a deadly embrace who's sole purpose, it seems, was to see who could do the most damage to the other. Call it the devolution of an American family, that kind of thing had been going on for years, ever since my father died, the kind of in-fighting that can only happen among families and that put the fun in dysfunction.

This particular time, however, there was a twist, for it was at least a refereed fight. One of my father's old patients and something of a family friend, an ex-Naval officer turned family therapist, was on hand to at least try and limit the amount of psychic blood spilled. Call that one a case of caveat emptor: at one point, I remember being encouraged to "focus" my "rage" by beating the snot out of a sofa cushion, which I thought was the stupidest damned thing I'd ever heard. Always beware of the former psych patient turned practitioner.

From my admittedly biased memory - and how could it be otherwise? - the whole point of that conversation was how I just didn't measure up to my mother's expectations, of what a great disappointment I was to her. Which, frankly, confused me, because I didn't know then and still to this day don't really know what else I could have done. I mean, I was a good student in school, my lowest grade being a B+. I had extra-curriculars out my ass, and I played every sport I could as well. I had an after-school job, the same one I'd had for several years, and while I'll be the first to admit that my friends and I drank too much and did drugs - this was the 1970s, remember - it was out of sight, out of mind. Hell, at least I didn't do it in my house, like my brother did, nor did I try to grow, shall we say, illicit plants in my bedroom, again like my brother did. But, apparently, none of that was good enough for my mother, nor was I. What, exactly, would have been good enough remained conveniently elusive, but I do clearly remember her answer to a rather pointed question our friend asked: "I love him, but I don't like him."

Sometimes, I wonder if, somehow, she didn't blame me for what happened to my father. I was, after all, the one who found his body. Perhaps, in her own grief and loss, she had concluded that if I hadn't done that, he wouldn't have died. Or, maybe, she believed that if only I had gotten up earlier that morning, he could have been saved. Either way, I'll never know, because I never asked those questions and now it's too late, though they're still there, half-remembered, nagging at the back of my mind.

Of course, it's more likely that I had become the convenient target for her own guilt over that day, and the days that came after. Yes, I found my father's body, but I was also the one who had to call the paramedics, who had to call the school and explain why I wasn't going to be there that day, who had to start calling my parents' friends to let them know. I remember waking my mother up and, after she saw the body, her going into a kind of psychic fugue, collapsing into the safety of an unresponsive numbness born of denial.

It took her years to come out of that, and in some ways I don't believe she ever did. I can understand that, but it doesn't erase the memories of all those nights when the screaming would stop and she would retreat into a catatonic shell, unaware of anything as she stared blindly at the ceiling. Yet how often can an adolescent be expected to pick up the pieces, put the psyche back together, at least for a little while, and then carry on as if everything were normal? No child should ever be asked to do that, should be forced to grow from boy to man in the space of an hour. In what world is it normal that a teenager should inherit the mantle of the parent? It wasn't surprising that I drank and took drugs in those days; what was surprising is that I just didn't crawl up into a bottle until it killed me.

In those days, I remember my mother telling me that it just wasn't fair that everyone expected her to be the strong one, to hold things together in the face of my father's loss. About how it just wasn't fair that her friends offered words of sympathy and support to her face while, as she put it, all the time thinking to themselves "Better her than me." Which, to me, was a shocking revelation; perhaps I should know better, but I always thought better of my friends than that. But she was right in that someone had to be strong, or at least strong enough to give the appearance of "holding things together." Yet in abdicating that to her own grief, by default that role fell onto me, putting my own grief into abeyance to haunt me later.

And still I don't know just what it was I could have done at that time to gain her approval. Maybe nothing, maybe something, again maybe I was just the convenient target for her own guilt. Just not being my brother, I thought, would have been a good start, but in that it seems I was mistaken. My mother had a marvellous ability to ignore things that happened within the family, just as long as those things didn't become "public." Something about not airing the dirty laundry, as I recall . . .

It really is amazing just how dysfunctional a family can be when both of the parents are psychologists. Exactly when my brother turned on me is somewhat fuzzy, but it seems to me that it was about when I was six, which would have made him twelve. By the accounts of my parents, when I was an infant, my brother was a devoted sibling. He would, it seems, always want to play with me, carry me around; somewhere, I have photos from an old photo booth of my brother holding me in his arms, a look of absolute pride on his face.

Which at some point turned into something else, something ugly, something that proper families just didn't talk about. Yet . . . I have memories, too many memories, of him sneaking into my room at night when my parents were out, of punches to the stomach and to the back of the head. Memories of being pinned to the floor with a pillow over my face or his hands locked around my throat, of not being able to breathe, as he whispered in my ear that he could kill me, should kill me, and that our parents would never notice I was gone, that they would thank him for doing it. Memories of my head being slammed into the wall over and over, until all I could see were flashes of electric-white light, and if I dared to tell, the next nocturnal visit would be the worse for it.

It's a terrible thing to live in fear, to dread the coming of the night while pretending by day that nothing is wrong, like having an itch that you just can't scratch. To know that when your parents are gone, you are at the whim of someone else's inadequacies, that the protection of your parents is nothing but a lie, dependent on their own blindness to what is happening in front of them.

Oh, they knew something was going on, though their appreciation of its extent remains, and will forever remain, open to question. "Sibling rivalry" is what they called it, if that term can truly be stretched to fit the horrors by brother chose to visit upon me. I was a chubby child - hell, I'm a chubby man, now - but I can remember many a night when my brother would come to choke me, to taunt me that I was so fat I was going to die of a heart attack. To the point that, one night when I was nine or ten, I was out having dinner with my father and I truly thought that I was having a heart attack. And when my father asked what was wrong, I had a fit of stupidity and told him, the result of which was a near-concussion a few nights later when my brother came to play handball with my head.

My father, I think, was just incapable of really understanding what was going on. He was the closest thing to a saint that I have ever encountered, and he was devoted to his sons. He could, in truth, just not conceive of the idea that his sons would act that way towards one another. In the end, my father believed in reason, and that he could in fact reason with the unreasonable. He may not have appreciated the extent, but I know he talked to my brother about his behaviour, and that he believed his explicit disapproval would succeed in changing my brother's behaviour. My father attempted to reason, and I suffered the consequences. I remember one day, when I was twelve, after one of their talks, my brother came into my room and, after throwing me into a wall, he destroyed every toy and plastic model I had, poured bleach into my fishtank and reduced my acoustic quitar to firewood, just because he could.

I'm not sure exactly what my father said to him, but it seems that it somehow became my responsibility to mend the proverbial fences. I do have memories of my father talking to me about what was going on, the words always tinged with a profound sadness and the weariness of the grave. "I won't be here forever" and "All I want is for my sons to get along," as if I could change things, as if I were somehow responsible for what my brother was doing to me. Which wasn't what my father meant to say, and I think he would have been appalled by that interpretation, but that message was there nonetheless. By uttering those words, he charged me with a duty, and I failed him in that. God forgives, I do not, and perhaps I am a lesser man because of that.

My mother, on the other hand . . . I've always wondered just how aware of what was going on she was. It goes back to that whole not airing dirty laundry in public thing. But then there came a day when my brother went just a bit too far, lost too much control, and I went to school with a black eye and a split, swollen lip. Oh, yes, the proverbial cat was well and truly out of the bag then, and something had to be done if only for appearance's sake.

Her answer was to throw my brother out of the house. I remember her words well: "I don't care if he winds up living at the YMCA, but he won't be living here." My father, of course, could not abide the thought of one of his sons, no matter what they had done, living as a vagabond, so his answer was to rent an apartment a few blocks from our house for my brother and him. My brother may have beaten me into a bloody pulp, but may father would not abandon him. Again, call it the devolution of an American family.

I remember the Sunday when my father and brother moved out of the house. I remember them loading the truck up with their possessions, and my father looking at me. "Last weekend, everything was normal," he said to me, a look of infinite sadness on his face and infinite weariness in his voice. And there I stood, unable to say anything in return, for his idea of normal had been my nightmare for years, culminating in that event. Words spoken in remorse and disbelief, and they struck me as an accusation, as if all of it were, indeed, my fault. Twelve years old going on eternity, I had destroyed my family and the only words of comfort anyone could come up with was my mother telling me "At least this way, your father will have to see you more."

And perhaps that was why, years later, she could say "I love him, but I don't like him." Our family life was far from Mayberry RFD, but appearances can be a fine substitute for ugly reality. Resentment is a funny thing, and it would seem I was the focal point for more than my fair share of that. If, perhaps, I could have only done things differently, been a better son . . . but what can a child do other than what a child does? I wish I could forgive my brother, as I wish I could have lived up to the expectations of my parents. But as much as I have tried to be a good man - and whether I have succeeded in that or not is not for me to judge - as uncertain as I remain of just how much my parents really knew of what was happening, I am just as certain that there are some lines that should not be crossed, that there are some things that just can not be forgiven. We remember Caesar crossing the Rubicon precisely because it was such an unforgiveable event.

So in the end, all that remains are the questions, unanswerable, lost to time and fate. And, really, who is to say that is truly a bad thing? Some answers come at too high a price, some questions just aren't worth the asking. Better the possibility than the reality, for in the absence of the definite all is possible, while reality merely is. Still, the voices of the past whisper in the darkness, asking that which can't be answered.

Ho Ho Ho de Har Har Har

Well, it seems like we are yet again are rapidly approaching that time of the year when, in a fit of self-judgemental pique, we make promises to ourselves for things to do in the new year that we have no intention of keeping. That is, of course, after we manage to survive the enforced happiness and cheer of Thanksgiving and Christmas, where your toleration for time spent with your relatives is determined by the amount of alcohol in the house. Yeah, family is a wonderful thing . . . and, generally, the farther away they live from you, the more wonderful they are.

Anyway, as I sit here, the lower half of my left hand completely numb from a cortisone injection - which, it turns out, wasn't all it was cracked up to be because, aside from being numb, the problem that provoked the injection still hurts like hell, and I'm sure that tonight I shall have disturbing dreams of the harpoon they used to stick me. No, really, I'm sure that Moby Dick would have fled in fright at the sight of that thing, but I digress. With yet one more chapter of this sad comic-opera I laughingly call me life drawing to a close, I find myself wondering what I can do to at least add a little variety to the coming year. So, a few resolutions I've been kicking around . . .

1) Resist the urge to resume smoking, because everyone has to have a smoking-related resolution, right? Okay, so I've been smoke-free for a while, and you'd think I'd be over it by now. But my friend's husband smokes, which is actually a poor way to describe it. There aren't, however, really any words that would accurately describe it. To say that he smokes in much the same way a US Steel plant smokes is merely a poor reflection of the reality of it. As he sits in the living room after coming home from work, I often wonder how it is that he sees the television through the blue fog of smoke, which also seems to be something of a waste of an HDTV set. The Allies didn't produce this much smoke when they were hiding their movements prior to crossing the Rhine River.

So, you can see the temptation for an ex-smoker, right? It's kind of like putting a recovering alcoholic in charge of quality control in a distillery. I mean, they're right there, beckoning seductively . . . c'mon, just one, for old time's sake . . . What's the worst that could possibly happen? Aside from another heart attack, I mean. Then again, that's what they make transplant lists for, right?

2) Stop obeying the dogs. All you pet owners out there, you know what I mean. Or, depending on your level of training and indoctrination, perhaps you don't. But let's just say that the dogs have me excpetionally well-trained. I mean, off-hand, I really can't think of any other canines I know who get pancakes every morning just because they like their light, fluffy taste. Mmm-mmm, buttery with a dab of mapleness.

Of course, the fuzzy little girl Westie-Boston mix is the ringleader in all of this. She just has this really unnerving way of making herself look completely broken-hearted and miserable when she gets disappointed. Now, some of you may just say that is anthropomorphism run wild, but I'm betting that's just because you've never met a Terrier with ambition. There's a reason why I call her the Anti-Christ - but not to her face, naturally - and she knows where I sleep. So it actually kind of pays off, in terms of self-survival, to keep her happy.

3) Stop losing my mind every time my friend stumbles across another get-rich-quick ponzi scheme. I mean, it's only money, right? They say that you can't take it with you but, having always belonged to the school of thought that holds he who dies with the most toys wins, I was looking forward to the chance of actually trying to take it with me. But, in the long run, stressing myself out over the issue just isn't good for what little health I have left.

Besides, what can you actually say when someone informs you that they just "bought" $25,000.00 in Iraqi dinar because "something big is going to happen"? Yes, I know, doing that is kind of like buying $25,000.00 worth of Reichsmarks in the Spring of 1945 because "something big" was going to happen with it, but why let logic enter into it? After all, I've been informed that you just have to have faith and believe it will happen. Of course, I'd be more tempted to believe if we were talking about a stable currency in a country that actually had a functioning economy, but that's just me . . .

4) Masturbate more. Or less. I haven't really decided on this one yet. Though I never developed the furry palms that I was promised - yes, I'm bisexual, I use both hands - my vision has definitely become fuzzier over the years. There is, of course, no luvin' like the luvin' you give yourself and, hey, a date with myself is always a sure thing. But will I still respect myself in the morning? Who the hell cares? Really, I am the best I've ever had . . .

5) Finally locate that horde of nymphomaniac 18-year-old cheerleaders. And while that may mean having to move to Utah, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make . . .

6) Go for at least one month without seeing a doctor of medical professional of any kind . . . Excuse me while I laugh myself silly, but a guy can dream, can't he?

And there you have it. Six resolutions for the new year that, much like the proverbial snowball in hell, have no chance. Now all I have to do is make it to 2011, so I can do this all over again . . .

A Minor Crisis of Conscience

For better or worse, these apparently really are the times that try my soul. I suppose that I should be getting used to it by now, but, somehow, I keep getting surprised every time the rug is yanked out from under my feet. And the bitch of it is, it happens with such regularity that I have no excuse for being so surprised when it happens.

I have a friend who, if I were going to be most charitable in my description of her, I would say never met a ponzi scheme she didn't like. In other words, living proof of the axiom that a fool and your money will soon be partners. Although absolutely none of the schemes she's gotten involved in have, to date, paid off - a fact that is hardly surprising - she continues to fork out thousands of dollars and fervently believes that is she only works the internet hard enough, all of her something for nothing dreams will come true. Boundless riches wait just around the corner, ripe for the taking.

Of course, if that were indeed true, everybody in the country would be a millionaire, living it up in Beverly Hills with a cee-ment pond out back. On the other hand, there is a kernel of truth behind her something for nothing dreams: she is, indeed, giving up something for nothing.

Now, being a good shrink, I know this already: addictive personalities will always find something to be addicted to. In her case, having given up both smoking and drinking, she has replaced them with oyramid schemes. In point of fact, there isn't really any difference between that and being addicted to gambling. And, like any other addiction, the fallout isn't just limited to the individual engaged in the activity, but to everyone around them as well.

Heartless as it may sound, if it were just her involved, the best prescription would be to just leave the whole thing alone until she hit rock bottom. You can't reason with an addict - I know, I've tried - nor will an addict change their behaviour until circumstances force them to, and even then it's an iffy proposition. After all, addicts revert to their previous behaviours with frightening regularity, despite what Betty Ford and the other fine people at Trembling Hills would have you believe.

Which brings us to my current crisis of conscience.

My friend approached me this evening with a truly heart-breaking story. She and her husband are currently $8,000 dollars in arrears on their property taxes and, if those taxes are not paid by December 2nd, their home will be seized and auctioned off in a Sheriff's sale. Of course, if we connect the dots, it's kind of easy to see that they're $8k behind in their property tax because that money was forked over to someone else in one of the many get-rich-quick schemes my friend has gotten herself involved in. And now, her problem has become my problem because she has asked me to loan her the money to pay off their tax.

You know, not to put too fine a point on it, but I am poorer than a churchmouse. I am on Disability, which totals a whopping twelve hundred a month, and almost all of the money that I did manage to salt away while I was still working is almost all gone. Do I have enough money to loan her to make up her tax arrears? Yeah, I do. But in doing that, I will become almost completely broke, and my savings account not so much that as just a collection of spare change.

The thing is, I've been down this road before. Almost a year ago, my friend had approached me because they were almost $15,000 dollars in arrears in their Federal income tax. Why? You guessed it, because she had been handing money out hand over fist to internet assholes who promised her fantastic returns on her "investments" for little or no effort on her part. At the time, I gave her $10,000 dollars to help pay that particular debt off.

I say "gave" because I do not loan people money. Loaning implies that the money will actually be paid back, something that, frankly, is unlikely to happen. If you don't expect to be paid back, then you can't be disappointed and there won't be any hard feelings involved. Right?

Which again brings us back to my crisis of conscience. No matter how much I may want to deny this fact, it is very unlikely that I will ever be able to go back to work. Physically, there are just too many things going wrong all at the same time. I can go through mental gymnastics with the best of them, but the reality of it is that I am most likely going to be consigned to living off Disability for the rest of my life. Until it all started getting siphoned off into the black hole of my friend's current addiction, what I had in my savings account was a hedge against that future, a small cushion that I could have used as leverage against a future of abject poverty.

Which is now gone, because I already know what I'm going to do in regard to her current request. Rather than see them go homeless - and myself, too, since I live with them - I'll give her the money, and try to ignore the fact that my savings have gone from $20,000 dollars to almost nothing in just about a year. But it does beg the question of just how far the bonds of friendship extend. The fact that I will never see that money again doesn't bother me nearly as much as the fact that, knowing the circumstances I am in, I was asked for it in the first place. And now that this tap is dry, just what happens the next time? See my earlier point about fools, money and partners.

So, perhaps this isn't really a crisis of conscience, but a crisis of faith. Which, these days, is decidedly lacking. And I have no one to blame, really, but myself.

This Isn't Exactly What I Had in Mind . . .

Hmm. Seems I've been neglecting this for a while. Not that anyone really notices, mind you, and no, I'm not that conceited that I believe people are hanging on my every word. Anyway, aside from pure laziness, I could say that there are some very good reasons as to why I haven't written anything for a while but, of course, that is the same excuse I use on myself when I neglect my real writing - you know, the stuff that is intended to make some money. Oh, well, the road to Hell is paved with good excuses.

At the moment, my groin is the most amazing shade of purple I've ever seen.

Now, if you haven't fled screaming after reading that, you may be asking yourself why you should care what colour my groin is. After all, I doubt very much that you have any kind of emotional attachment to that part of my anatomy. On the other hand, that statement is not exactly a common way to open a conversation, so there may be, indeed, a kind of perverse curiousity involved.

Okay, some background. Those who know me will recall that, unsure of what to give myself for my 42nd birthday, I finally decided on a heart attack and a quad by-pass. I mean, why not? Think of it as my very own reality-survival show. The fact that it has left me permanently disabled was something I wasn't counting on but, hey, no plan is perfect, right? So let's not quibble about the small things.

Since then, my heart has been ticking away almost like it did before, and after being roto-rootered my total cholesterol was less than 110. So perhaps I can be forgiven for thinking, aside from the diabetes and the kidney disease, that things were proceeding more-or-less alright.

Boy, was I wrong.

The cardiologist I had been seeing decided to up and leave the practice without explanation in between my six-month checkups, so I was assigned to one of the others in the office for my last checkup at the beginning of October. So I go in to see this doctor, and the first thing he does is listen to my chest and my neck with his little stethoscope, and tell me that I have a blockage in my carotid artery. You know, sort of a good news, bad news type of thing - "You don't have to worry about your heart, you just have to worry about stroking out." Oh, joy. Anyway, he writes up an order for a doppler study of my carotid, to determine the extent of the blockage, and also one for my legs (swelling and bad circulation there, too), that he wants done within one week.

Right, so off to the hospital I go to get these dopplers done. Since, between those and the next time I saw the caediologist, a couple of days later, no one called up hysterically screaming that I shouldn't be making any long-term plans, my level of panic had started to ebb, and I was thinking that they couldn't have found anything too serious or I'd have heard about it. Of course, that was before I went back for the follow-up visit.

At which point the doctor gives me another good news, bad news scenario. Right off the bat, he tells me that the doppler study didn't find any blockage in my carotid artery at all, so I can stop worrying about a stroke and shopping for a drool cup. But, he insisted, there must be a blockage somewhere because, after all, he determined that there was one, and the only other place it could be is in my heart. Now, if he were trying to induce a heart attack in me, I can't really think of a better way to go about doing that. But, no, he says, it isn't that bad. He can fix me. He is, after all, a cardiac surgeon. So he schedules me for an angioplast and tells me that he can open any blockages by putting in some cardiac stents. And, hey, how bad can it be? It's an out-patient procedure.

So, last week, after the requisite chest x-ray and labs, I show up at the hospital's out-patient surgery wing, with my little just-in-case overnight bag - meaning my old rucksack from the Navy, since that's the only luggage I own these days - while somehow wishing that I was anywhere else doing anything else.

Now, I have to say that the two nurses assigned to my care - the surgical nurse and the ward nurse - were wonderful. I also feel compelled to say that, while it has always been a fantasy of mine to be lying naked on a bed and surrounded by hot women, that wasn't exactly what I had in mind. And was it really necessary for them to take turns shaving my groin? But I digress.

The upshot of this whole thing is that I spent twelve hours - two in pre-op, one on the table, and nine in recovery - in the hospital for . . . nothing. That's right. They snaked that camera in through my crotch, up through my body and into my heart, and found nothing. No blockages. Zip. Nada. Nothing.

And now my groin is the most interesting shade of purple I have ever seen.

Perhaps I can be forgiven for feeling just a little pissed off over this whole affair. Yes, I know, not finding any blockages is a good thing, and I suppose it is better to know than not to know, but . . . Aside from the complete indignity involved in having a rather personal part of my anatomy examined and shaved by complete strangers, then being tossed naked on a table in a cold room - the shrinkage! The shrinkage! - in front of yet another group of complete strangers and having a foreign body inserted, I went through about a week of panic over whether or not my heart was blinking out on me again. All for, as it turned out, nothing.

And guess what? I have to go through it all again in three more weeks, when they do the same procedure on my legs. I tell you, it just doesn't get much better than this. I have this theory, you see, that doctors would probably have more success if they just stopped pretending and just painted their faces white and waved chicken feathers at the rest of us. But that could just be me being cynical again . . .

Look, I'm well aware of the fact that we're all in a game we ultimately can't win, and that we have to play the hand we're dealt. But I'm getting awfully tired of feeling like I'm bluffing while God is drawing to an inside straight with the deck stacked. Enough is, as they say, enough. Of course, the fact that this doctor is, so far, batting 0 for 2 doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence either. But what the Hell, it's not like I've got anything better to do at the moment . . .

I just wonder if they're going to have to shave me again . . . and if they do, if I can ask them to turn off that funky 1970s-era bad movie music. Not to mention the question of just how much more purple can my groin get?

Watersheds

Someone asked me a while ago, as he was looking to resolve a dilemma of his own, if I had ever been in love. Well, actually, what he asked was if I had ever been in love with more than one woman at once, to which I must confess that I have never been that ambitious. Or suicidal, for that matter.

Yet the basic question itself intrigues me and, the closer I am drawn to my own mortality, the greater the compulsion I feel to examine it. Like iron filings pulled inexorably to a magnet, I find myself pulled, in some ways unwillingly, back to the notion. I have, I suppose, been in love many times in my life; certainly, at the time I was with them, I have loved every woman I have dated. Yet I can not say that any of them was the one. If I were going to be completely honest, I would have to admit that, in the truest sense of being in love, of two individuals forming a complete whole in a union of two souls, I have only really been in love once.

Her name is unimportant. She was who she was, and to me she was my first love, the first girl I ever dated seriously. It would be easy, I suppose, to dismiss the whole thing as an idealization, as all first loves are idealized. But I know myself well enough, and I knew her well enough, to realize that wasn't the case, that there was a connection that can only truly be made once in a lifetime.

They say that intense circumstances can forge equally intense connections between people, and the circumstances under which she and I were dating were nothing if not intense. Perhaps that is why I find myself drawn back to this, even though it has long been over and I know that it can never be again. I suppose, in its own way, that is an idealization, but the truth of what was remains nonetheless.

When we first met, we were both in the 8th Grade and, yes, I know, but this isn't a story about puppy love. She had hair the colour of summer wheat and, despite the old saw about boys never making passes at girls who wear glasses, she was beautiful, sculpted by the finest artist who ever lived. She was new to the school and, at first, it really was an example of the awkward, self-conscious flirting that thirteen-year-olds go through. I was the football jock and she was the cheerleader and, by late Fall when football season had ended and basketball season had begun, we were past the tentative hesitancy and considered a pair by ourselves and our peers. Little did we know, at the time, what the rest of the year held in store for us.

For a lot of reasons, a few good and many not, I always carried myself as if I were older than I was. She, too, had a self-possession that was beyond her years, and perhaps that was a part of the attraction. There was an inner peace and strength about her that defied description, that even allowed her to survive unscathed that embarrassing moment when my parents met her and my mother informed her that her breasts were too large and her butt was too big. Mom certainly had a way with words, but she managed to brush that off with no more than a laugh about it later. And perhaps that, too, was also part of the attraction.

All things considered, the 8th Grade was not a good year. My 14th birthday coincided with our Spring Break, which meant the annual pilgrimage to Palm Beach with my mother and brother. I will never forget, near the end of the break, receiving that phone call at the hotel informing me that two of my friends had been killed in a stupid accident. Both of them were two classes ahead of me, and they and a third kid had been drag racing on the Outer Drive. The kid driving had lost control of the car, bounced off the car he'd been racing, jumped the median and slammed head-on into a third car. Not only was the entire family in that car wiped out, but my two friends had been ejected from their car and into the pavement. The only survivor was the kid who had been driving.

Aside from the deaths of my uncle and my grandparents, which I had been too young to understand at the time, this was my first experience with death, not to mention violent death. Unfortunately, though I was yet to know it, it would be far from my last. But she was there for me when I rushed home, to comfort me, hold me, tell me it would be okay. It wouldn't be, but neither of us knew that yet. It was only the end of March; there were two more whole months for disaster to strike.

In April, my father and I were in a car accident in Ohio, on our way to visit my brother in college. I was very nearly thrown through the windshield - which was when I learned the very important lesson of always wearing your seatbelt - and my father, attempting to cover my body with his, broke his knee on the dashboard. A minor injury that would prove to have consequences far out of proportion to the damage inflicted.

She didn't come to my house that May morning when my father died, even though I lived two bocks from the school. Unlike my best friend, who did ditch school the moment he heard, that was something she just wouldn't do. She was a good girl, and she wouldn't leave school before the day was over. But it didn't matter. In my haze and, finally, unable to stay any longer in that house on that day, I left. And, in my aimless wandering, driven by something I still have no words for, my best friend and I found ourselves at the school, just as classes were letting out for the day.

And she was there. I caught her as she was leaving the building, finally heading for my house. She was halfway down the entranceway stairs when I saw her and she saw me, and it was like the world stopped. The throng of people on the stairs parted, like a curtain drawn back by invisible hands, and she was there, a shining beacon in the afternoon Sun. Suddenly, I found that I could not move, could not speak, that I had become as immobile and mute as the bricks of the building. But it didn't matter, there were no words needed at all, and she came to me, a study of effortless grace in motion. She put her arms around me, drew my head to her chest, saying nothing at all but freely giving me everything she had, and the more I cried, finally, the harder she held on to me. Among all those silent, hushed people standing around us, we were alone, just the two of us in a world to ourselves. She took my pain onto herself and, while she couldn't bear the unbearable for me, she could share it, and she never even hesitated.

I can say, truthfully, that she saved me, and she did it willingly and without complaint. In all honesty, I became something of a son-of-a-bitch in the next two years, and beyond. Not that I was mean, but I learned a lesson that morning that no child should ever have to face, and it resulted in my pushing the limits to test my own mortality. I had been quiet and moody before, but I was moreso after. All teenagers, I suppose, are rebellious to one degree or another, but to say that I would find situations in which to push things to an extreme would be an understatement. Not all the time, mind you, but there would come the day where I would just kind of snap and give in to the blackness that always lurked in the back of my mind since that day.

And she would always pull me out of it, would snatch me back from the abyss I wanted to hurl myself into. She was, in truth, the only one who could, who could dispell the night and calm the storm with a word or the touch of her hand. She was the sunlight that follows the tempest, my anchor and sanctuary and the promise that there were still good things in a world that cared nothing for nor particularly noted anyone. Her love was unconditional and she freely gave to me the strength I did not have, and the only thing she asked for in return was me. I know it now and I knew it then, but I owe her a debt I can never repay and that, too, is perhaps why her memory still casts such a spell on me.

We were inseparable for the next two years, to the point that our friends would joke that we should just exchange rings and get it over with. In retrospect, because of her, some of the worst years of my life were also some of the best. I would be a lesser man had she never been in my life. But all good things inevitably come to an end, and no good deed ever goes unpunished. Because of her father's career, she and her family moved to southern California just before the start of our Junior year.

That last Summer we spent together was bittersweet beyond measure. As much as we tried to pretend that the inevitable wasn't looming closer with every day, the more we became aware of it. I'd say that she didn't want to go, but that would be a conceit and untrue; rather, she didn't want to leave me behind. She was fully aware of what my home life was like. After all, she'd picked up the pieces, put me back together, and insisted that I stay at her house often enough. There were plenty of times that Summer that she would plead with me, tears in her eyes, to break my ties to Chicago and go with her to California. But that was just a fantasy, a pleasant one, to be sure, because no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn't. Whatever held me here then holds me here to this day, a sense of unfinished business and, no matter where I have roamed since, I always find myself drawn back here.

And that, too, is perhaps why she is still such a siren's call for me, the idea of what could have been but was not, an ending that came before it was meant to be. Except for one brief moment years later, something else that was unexpected and ended all too soon, that Summer was the last time I saw her. I have no idea what happened to her in the decades since, but to me she will always remain as she was in those years we were together. While I grow old and wither, she shall always be in the flower of youth, wise and strong beyond her years, the woman who saved me from myself. She was, in truth, magic in the purest sense of that word, and I can not ever forget her. If there is, indeed, a God and if He is just, then I can only hope that He has seen fit to reward her with the kind of life she tried to give to me. I certainly know that the world is a better place for her having been in it, and that my own life has been lessened without her.

Promises to Keep

My mother and I had, if I were being charitable about it, what could be described as a strange relationship.

Granted that the Cleaver family only ever existed on television, I would be hard pressed to find exactly where my relationship with my mother fit on the spectrum covering the normal to the abnormal. Really, my only frame of reference is my own experience, which hardly makes for an objective analysis. It has, in fact, taken me a lifetime to reach the realizations that I have, and still there are things that elude me. Perhaps those things I still don't understand, or only understand dimly, will always remain as they are, unaswered mysteries. Yet I still feel compelled to examine those things, to try and impose some sense of meaning, for there is nothing quite as sad as questions without answers.

Like my father, my mother was a psychologist, which perhaps explains some, if not all, of my own quirks. Trust me on this one, there's no education quite like being raised by two shrinks. There's psychology, and then there's psychology as practiced on one's children.

My mother didn't work when I was growing up, her time being occupied with the important duties of being a socialite. In a very real way, I was raised in my formative years by a succession of maids, nannies and au pairs. But even that admission is a distorted view, for it wasn't like either of my mother or my father were absentee parents; they were both there when I needed them, for the important things and for the milestones.

Yet, more often than not, my mother was far more distant than my father was. I'm not sure, exactly, when that happened, but memory seems to fix that at some time between my being six or seven. There developed a routine where, when I returned from school, I would be greeted at the front door by the family dog, who would escort me to my parents' bedroom and a report on my day would be given to my mother. Other than that, however, our interactions were limited pretty much to Wednesday and Sunday family dinners.

Well . . . sort of. Every Spring, there was the obligatory two-week trip with my mother and my brother to Palm Beach. Before that, before her brother died, it was a family trip to Los Angeles. I still remember the night my Uncle Mike died, my mother wailing inconsolably in my parents' room as my father futilely tried to comfort her. We lived, at the time, in a Victorian brownstone, and there was a tree in the front yard who's branches brushed up against the windows of my bedroom. That night, as my mother gave vent to a breaking heart, the wind outside played among those branches and they tap-tap-tapped against the panes. For some reason, as I huddled under my blankets in child-like fear at my mother's pain, I made the connection between those branches and my uncle, not really old enough to understand the concept of death and convinced that he was tapping on my windows, trying to reach out to me. If I had been more self-aware, I would have remembered the lesson of that night years later.

My mother was never one to praise me, at least not when I was present, at any rate. Nothing I ever did was apparently good enough for her, and any success I had was almost invariably greeted with the admonition that I could have, should have, done better. The first story I ever wrote, when I was in the 4th Grade, which was endorsed with enthusiastic praise by my teachers, was critiqued by my mother with the comment "Who did you copy this from?" When I was a Senior in high school, and took Third Place in the National Merit Scholars in the Arts for creative writing, that achievement was greeted with complete silence.

And yet, to her friends, to other people, my mother did nothing but brag about me. What she could say to others about me she would not say to me, and it took me years to realize the purpose behind that. It wasn't that she was disinterested, that she didn't care; she did care, and very deeply. But the things she didn't say to me, as well as the things she did, were designed to challenge me, to force me to exceed what I saw as my own limits. A form of "tough love," if you will, and it worked. Still, it would have been nice to occasionally hear those things first-hand rather than second-hand. But if wishes were fishes, as they say, I'd be hip-deep in trout.

The years between when my father died and I left for college were the worst years in my relationship with her. At the time I most needed my mother to be an adult, to be a parent, she failed to be there. Everyone has their own tragedies, and mine was to grow from a child to a man in the space of an hour. Fate dictated that I would be the one to discover my father's body. My mother's collapse that morning dictated that I would have to be the one to call the paramedics, to call my school to excuse myself for the day, to make the other calls that would start the chain of notification for family and friends. No fourteen-year-old should ever have to bear that burden, should ever be thrust into a situation in which the role of child and parent are reversed, but what can you do? It was what it was.

Life became a brittle pretense of normalcy, and again it took me years to understand just how much my parents loved each other, just how devastating my father's loss was to my mother. Nor, in truth, did I help matters much. Driven by my own demons, I had little time or consideration for hers.

Of all the things my mother was afraid of, her greatest terror was reserved for being alone. She was supposed to grow old with my father, to have his comfort and presence as the years drew on and they passed into oblivion together. But she was cheated out of that and instead faced a future in which her oldest son had already left and her youngest son was on the verge of leaving. On the one hand, she had a sense of pride and accomplishment that I was going to college in California, but it was tempered by the knowledge that I was not only leaving, but moving all the way across the country, leaving her all alone. Not only that, but I was going to college on an NROTC scholarship which, to her, was perhaps the most frightening thing of all. My mother had always said that the worst thing that could happen to a parent was to outlive their child, and my decision to take a commission raised that as a very real possibility in her mind. That last Summer I spent at home before leaving for college and the Navy was the worst Summer of my life, and it took me years to realize that the root cause was her fear that I was leaving for good, that she would, indeed, be all alone.

There were those things that she could never say to me; maybe they should have been assumed, maybe they shouldn't have been. But Fate is a funny thing, and a few years later her fear of outliving me almost came true and, next to my father's death, must have been shattering for her. My separation from the service, though, at the time neither desired by myself nor by the Navy, is really a mundane tale, but it came at what would turn out to be a fortuitous time for her.

Rocky relationship or not, that old saw about Irish sons and their mothers is true. I was released from the service at a time when my mother's life entered a downward turn, an event that would, in the end, prove to be fatal. I came back home intending to be there only until I got my feet back under me, until I could make the transition from military life to civilian life, but whatever powers that be had other plans. Diabetic since shortly after I was born, that disease and it's complications attacked her with a vengeance, and her health quickly deteriorated to the point that it became obvious she could not care for herself on her own.

As far as my brother was concerned, he would have been happy enough to pack her off into a nursing home and not be bothered, but I couldn't do that to her. Whatever else she was, my mother was a beautiful, proud, independent woman, and I couldn't, wouldn't, take that away from her. After all that had happened, she deserved her own home, some measure of her old life and happiness, even if it were just an echo of what once was. So I stayed at home to take care of her and, yes, bowed to the inevitable and took up the family biz, becoming a shrink just like her and my father, helping her run her practice. And as she became sicker, child once again became parent an care-taker, but what else is a son supposed to do? She was my mother. I could not, would not, abandon her.

I know for a fact that my mother felt a tremendous sense of guilt, that she felt I was putting my own life on hold because of her. I wasn't, of course, I was still doing all the things that someone in their twenties was supposed to be doing, but still she felt like she was being a burden, like she was somehow holding me back. Yet the alternative was unacceptable. As I tried to explain to her, it hadn't even been ten years since I lost my father, I wasn't about to lose my mother while I had the ability to prevent that.

Perhaps that was pure selfishness, perhaps it was merely the due a child owes the parent, I know what her answer to that was. So many things that were never said, so many promises to keep that, in the end, were all in vain. Actions, they say, speak louder than words, but I never told my mother that I loved her. As sick as she got, I was always there to pick up the pieces, to try and make her as comfortable as I could, to make her life as normal as I could, but those words just never would come.

That last weekend she was alive, I think she knew that time was running out. She'd had another TIA the week before, a kind of mini-stroke, one of many that she'd been experiencing, and a friend and I had once again packed her off to the hospital. The day before I brought her home for the last time, we'd had a long talk, a good talk, and she finally told me how proud she was of me, that she loved me. And all I could say was that I knew, had, in fact, always known, even as she tried to apologize for all those things that had gone wrong. But those words themselves would not come to me, I could not tell her that I loved her. She knew, of course, but in the end I cheated my mother out of hearing me say them just one last time.

I couldn't save her, not when it counted, and that, perhaps, is the worst kind of hell to consign yourself to. My mother died of a massive G-I bleed, a rupture of an artery in her gastro-intestinal tract. It would have been like popping a balloon, one moment she was there and the next she was not, and even if she had been on an operating table with the finest surgeon in the world attending her, he could not have saved her. Intellectually, I know that, but crisis has always spurred me into action and, ever since I was in the Navy, at such times I have found it impossible to separate myself from the Officer they trained me to be. For every problem there is always an answer, and if solution A doesn't work you move on to solution B, or solution C, and so on until the crisis is resolved.

And I couldn't save her, no matter what I tried. That the paramedics couldn't save her, or the doctors in the Emergency Room, doesn't matter. I had a duty and an obligation, and I failed. Not just as a man, but as a son, and while she may have known, she died without hearing me say that I loved her as my mother. The crisis came and I failed the ultimate test. That may be a fair burden to bear, or it may not be, but it is mine to bear. And, again, I know what her answer to that would be; my mother always said that you shouldn't die with any regrets. But living with regrets is another proposition entirely. I could have been a better son, I should have been a better son, but what now is lies beyond my power to change.

"The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep."