…would have to be the one that found me today.  I clicked on the Google link to find out how this person found my blog and this is what it showed me:

If you’re wondering, this is the post it pointed to:  The Other F Word

Sunday was my second outing with Little.  At the end of the previous visit, I asked him if he knew what he wanted to do the next time we got together and he said he wanted “to go to the lake”.  There’s only one lake in the immediate area that I’m aware of, so I figured he must’ve meant Lake Merritt.

Lake Merritt, is a large, man made lake in the middle of Oakland with, as far as I can tell, not a whole lot to offer.  There’s a walking trail around it that if you walk the entire thing is 3.4 miles.  I walked it once… Only once…  After a really exceptionally shitty morning at work… In the wrong shoes.  It’s a long walk and I didn’t really think that was the thing for us to do.

There are boats of various types to rent by the hour, including peddle boats that may be something of interest at a later date, but to be honest, I don’t know how to swim and the idea of renting a boat scares me a little.  Plus, we’re still getting to know each other and until there’s more trust built between us, it didn’t seem like a good idea.

And then I remembered the Children’s Fairyland and I thought, “That’s perfect!”

I arrived at Little’s apartment at our usual time to pick him up.  The children were still eating so I waited a few minutes while he finished lunch before we headed out.  It was about a 15 minute drive to the park and we talked a little bit on the way.  I asked him about school, he just started the second grade last week, he said, “We learned about bees.”  (I understand the birds come later.) I asked him what he learned about bees and he said, “I don’t know.”  I asked him what else he learned and he said, “When we’re done with bees were going to learn about ants.”  OK… Not what I asked but, good for you.

We arrived at the park and I parked my SUV in the first available parking space I could find.  Neither of us had ever been to the Children’s Fairyland before but we could see it from where we parked.  There were obvious Children’s Fairyland attractions directly ahead of us… on the other side of a fence.  But the entrance was nowhere in sight.  So we walked… in the wrong direction as it turned out, but ended up accidentally circling back around and stumbled across the entrance.

I’m always amused and fascinated by how children can make a game out of just about anything.  As we walked around outside the Fairyland looking for the entrance, we saw a number of birds of various types in the grass.  We were walking on a paved path that had dark spots all over.  The spots were clearly old and not transferable and who knows what they were, but Little started chanting, “Don’t step on the poop.  Don’t step on the poop.” and skipping along on the tips of his toes.

Once inside we began seeing the sites.  I handed him the map and asked him if he saw anything he wanted to do.

The first thing he saw was a big slide that looked like a lot of fun, so we went in search of the stairs leading up to it.  It looked like great fun and I couldn’t wait to slide down it.  There was a sign that said, “No Adults”.  Damn!  I told him I’d meet him at the bottom, but since the stairs leading up to the the slide were on one side and the outlet of the slide was on the other, he was down the slide and running around to find me before I got to the bottom of the stairs.

We wandered around the park for a while looking at the sites and the animals.  We saw Donkeys,

and bunnies,

and goats.

We also saw the G-Force, but they were under cover.

There was a show.  A guy named Jean Paul Valjean who does magic tricks and juggling/balance acts.  (In his spare time, he leads french revolutions… Mmm.  That might be someone else.)  I wasn’t sure Little would be interested, but we found ourselves next to the amphitheater where Jean Paul Valjean was performing a few minutes after the show had started and I asked Little if he wanted to watch.  Before I even had the words out of my mouth he darted over and plopped right down on the ground next to all the other kids.

<– By the way, that is not a cigarette in his hand, he is holding a “magic key”.  There are little stations throughout the park with boxes.  You put your key in a slot on the front of the box and it plays a recording about the animal or site you are standing in front of.  You pay $2.00 for the key when you enter and you can use it all over the park.  I handed Little the key and said, “You hold on to this, but don’t loose it.” and he did a great job of keeping that key.  He only dropped it once and he snatched it up so fast you coulda missed it.  He used the key exactly two times and was completely disinterested in what happened.  I must say I don’t really blame him.

I must also say Jean Paul was actually pretty entertaining, even for us big kids and we all got a lot of laughs.

As I said there were balance tricks

and he did tricks with a Chinese yo yo.

For the finale he balanced a spinning bowl on a stick held in his mouth, with balls rolling around inside the spinning bowl, while he blew air into party favors on his head and juggled balls with his hands while spinning a ring around one foot.  It really was rather impressive…

When the show was over we were off and running again, there was more to see and do and we were losing light (not really it was only about 3:00, but the park closes at 4:00 so we only had so much time.)

We made our way to the back of the park where we found a miniature old timey town.

Then we saw a small train circling behind the town so, we had to go ride it!

And because nothing is ever truly virtuous, the designers of this park positioned the train “depot” next to the snack bar.  Isn’t it interesting how little boys who never mentioned food before are suddenly starving when they know there’s over priced theme park food around?

Little insisted he was starving.  I reminded him that he had just eaten, I saw him, and asked what he had for lunch and he said, “I don’t know.”  Then he remembered he had eggs.  I went along with it and bought him some ice cream… ’cause I wanted ice cream too.

Time was nearly up and we stopped off in the gift shop on the way out…  My idea…  STUPIIIIID!!!  He kept picking up stuff and talking about how cool it was.  I knew it was coming and finally it did, “Can you buy me this?”

It was a plastic sword and I could just imagine him showing up at home with this thing, whacking his brother on the arm and having his mother hate me.  I told him, no.  But I would have said no whatever it was.  I don’t want to set too high expectations too early on.  He was disappointed but he got over it pretty quickly.

We got back to his apartment shortly after, and no sooner had we walked up to the court yard then we heard his year older brother shouting, “Bang, bang.  Pow, pow.”  I looked up and saw the older brother standing on stairs that faced away from us, holding a clearly plastic, toy shot gun (looked vaguely like a sawed-off) and pointing it at Little.

Almost as quickly, Little’s younger sister, currently 5 years old, came running up to Little, clucking away in Spanish, too quickly for me to pick anything up. In her hands were a plastic knife with a theoretical sharp edge on one side and a theoretical serrated edge on the other.  It immediately evoked images of Rambo, or Harry Tasker, sneaking up behind some sort of bad-guy and slitting their throats.  She also had a toy gun, pistol, in her hand.  It was black, and for a moment, from a distance, I just wasn’t sure it wasn’t the real thing…  I hoped, but I wasn’t sure.  I approached with caution.  It was only as I got closer that I saw the plastic packaging on the ground with the fluorescent orange suction cup darts in it.  Little’s sister handed him the gun and as he was pulling on the upper casing I saw the rubber band stretched between two posts within.  It was only then that I realized, Little’s sister must have asked for some sort of assistance making the toy function properly.

What concerns me so greatly is that Little’s demeanor changed so much, so instantly.  Alone with me, he’d been a little boy.  He’d played and run around the park like a child enticed by child like-things.  The moment we entered the gate of his apartment building and his siblings had approached with these toy versions of deadly games, he was immediately enthralled.  No longer was he an innocent boy, but rather a guilty, experienced handler of such deadly devices.  I hope I’m making mountains out of mole hills, but something in me bristled in that moment.

I want to serve that little boy better.  I want to show him a world where peace and benevolence win over violence and mayhem.  I want to show him a world were guns are not toys.  Guns are weapons.  Used improperly they are offensive weapons.  Young and mislead men use guns to destroy their lives and those of other, innocent people.  Wise young men respect guns.  They’re not afraid to own guns, if they so desire, but they understand that guns are defensive weapons only and not something to be taken lightly.

“Boys will make guns out of anything,” K told me, and I know she’s right.  I played at guns when I was a boy.  Using my thumb and my index finger, I shot at many an imaginary bad guy, though to be honest, I preferred to defend the bad guys bullets with my wrist cuffs, stop the bad guys with my boomerang crown, and capture them with my lasso of truth.  As a boy, my ultimate desire was to grow up to become, Wonderman. Only I much preferred this visage, over that of the comic book era:

Anyway, the gun play disturbs me.  Perhaps I’m making too much out of a minor issue.  Perhaps I’m not.  Perhaps it’s too soon to tell, but I’d like to show him a better world.  Meanwhile, when asked what he wants to do this Sunday, he said he wants to go to the movies.  I asked him what he wanted to see and he said, “Meatballs.”  A quick search on my handy-dandy iPhone revealed that “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” won’t be out until the following Friday and when I told him that, he said, “GI Joe.”

I suppose I’m actually glad that he was more interested in seeing a childrens cartoon than he was in a “war movie”, and yet, the “war movie” was next on his mind.  I don’t know anything about GI Joe.  I’m not necessarily opposed to seeing it, thought it wasn’t a high priority to me, but now I’m more concerned about reinforcing the violence angle, than I am about the movie itself.  I told him, I’d only take him to see it if his mother said it was OK, (It is rated PG-13) but she said fine.

So Sunday, we go to GI Joe.  We shall see.  I’m deliberating if there’s a way I can have a chat with him about how guns should be handled, after we see the movie.  Anyone have any suggestions for me?

I can feel the darkness creeping in.  I’ve tried to ignore it, to deny it for a very long time.  But it’s stronger, more oppressive.  It’s wining, and I don’t know how to conquer it.  There’s a beast in the darkness.  It’s been awakened and I  can hear it breathing.  I can almost feel it’s hot, heavy breath on me and I’m  scared.  I run from it and sometimes, for a time, I gain some ground, a higher  level, giving me a false sense of security.  But I tire.  I must rest, rebuild my strength.  I can not, for it is in these moments of respite that the darkness gains.  I’ve come to feel, to fear, that this is all there is.  Can the darkness be  banished completely?  Is it possible to truly see the light?  What must one do?

The ground on which I run is soft; the path narrow.  There’s an inescapable  rock face to my left, a long drop over a sheer cliff to my right and at times I  fear I’ll fall.  Below the cliff is rolling, boiling magma: my thoughts.  There’s something more.  I catch glimpses of it from time to time, but I can’t see it  clearly.  What is it?  Salvation, perhaps?  Escape?  This is torture.

I need time to think, to examine my situation and find a way out, a new path.   I need a guide.  But there’s no time for thought, no time for examination.   There is no guide in sight. If I stand still the darkness will overtake me and the beast shall surely devour me.  If I dive over the side, destruction is  imminent.  I’m sure to be burned, consumed by the molten thought below.

I must scramble along this treacherous path; maintain my narrow, desperate lead, searching all the while for the light, the secret escape that brings rest,  the solace that finally will bring this chase to an end.

A bit of a recurring theme on this blog has been my lack of patience and how much I hate waiting.  Waiting for service, waiting in a line, waiting for results or outcomes, waiting to see what the future holds; whatever it is, I hate waiting.

This is not a new condition for me.  It’s something that’s always been an issue.  When I was younger, my mother used to tell me that I needed to have patience.  I told her, “I have patience, I’m a pediatrician.  I have little patients.”  Shockingly, she never found this particularly amusing.  So it is not without some bit of irony that I am waiting now.  Waiting to see what the next few weeks hold in store for me.  Waiting to find out what I need to do, for my mother.

I wrote yesterday that my mother had been admitted to the hospital and was scheduled for an angioplasty this morning.  I was pretty worried about this until I came home from work and took the time to look up exactly what was entailed in an angioplasty.  After realizing that this was a “non-surgical” procedure and that she would not even be put under anesthesia, I was feeling much better.  I had no idea what the outcome would be.

My Sister called me at 9:00 this morning to inform me that the angioplasty had revealed one artery that is one hundred percent blocked and one that is ninety-five percent blocked and that they would be performing a double or triple bypass, “in a couple of hours.”

They took my mother into surgery around 1:30 Central time and spent an hour “extracting” the veins they would use for the bypass.  Then they began the bypass portion.  This is open heart surgery, with general anesthetic, intubation and stopping her heart.  The surgery is expected to last four hours, until around 7:00 Central time.  After surgery she’ll be taken into recovery for two hours and then ICU overnight.  I’ll have no idea what comes next until she’s out of ICU and coherent enough to talk.

It’s becoming apparent that my mother is going to need some looking after and there is no family in Tulsa, where she lives, to do it.  I am terribly dismayed by the idea of going to Tulsa to play nurse, but it will probably be necessary.  Unfortunately, there’s no way to know until I hear how things turned out and what my mother needs/wants to have happen…

So I wait.

Wowee, what a day this has been.  If you read my recent post, Heavy, you know that things recently, for me, have been…  Well, heavy.  There are a lot of things that are weighing heavily on my mind and my heart, and I don’t have time tonight to go into all of it.

Highlights for tonight are simple.  I hate my job and the situation has become unbearable.  I know that I must get out of this job ASAP.  The day I walk into my boss’s office and turn in my resignation is going to be one of the best days of my life.  If I’m turning in my notice with the reason being that I’m going to college, it’ll be even better, but so far that issue is still very much unresolved, and I’ve become abundantly aware that I’m not going to be starting school anywhere this fall.  At this rate, I’m not even sure that spring is likely and I’ve never been good with the patience, so waiting to see how this is going to pan out is just adding pounds upon pounds of stress to my already debilitating situation.

The environment in my office is so toxic.  It’s just awful and I can’t even begin to clearly convey how bad it is.  I have lost all will to go on.  I do not care about my job.  I do not care about my co-workers. I do not care about my customers.  I just do not care.  I know that part of it is the depression that I may never truly be free of, that is taking hold to some extent as I experience these conditions, but even as I go in with the best of intentions to do my work and be productive and go about my job, before I know it, six hours have passed and I’ve done nothing more than keep current on my twitter feed, fish and read blogs.  I know I’m not being professional.  I know that my actions are shameful and yet, I can’t pull myself out of my funk long enough to do what I must.  And now after seven long years my boss has suddenly gotten the idea that he wants to have monthly one on one meetings with each of us to review our projects and their status.  I actually think this is a good thing and yet I know that he will not stick to it, something always comes up and his staff is very put-offable.  And yet, my bigger fear is that he actually will see it through and for the first time in I don’t know how long, he’ll finally realize that I AM NOT WORKING.

I have to quit this job.  I know I have to quit this job, and I’d do it tomorrow if I could only know what comes next.  I can’t rely on temp agencies to keep me working right now.  My unused vacation time will only get me so far and since I have a two week vacation planned for next month, I’m about to chop that in half anyway.  The best thing would be if I got laid off and I have no idea if there are lay-offs coming or not, let alone how to volunteer for such.

The issue of school is, in and of itself a really stressful topic because of the patience issue and the fact that ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPENS, NOW, NOW, NOW! with school.  That whole going into things, wanting to know the outcome problem is really getting in the way.  And then today.  Such a heavy, heavy day.

There was a personal situation that I’ll update about soon, but in a separate post that was weighing heavily on me.

We’ve all been hearing about Farah Fawcett for months and so it was no surprise to hear about her death this morning.  It’s sad that she died.  It’s sad that her family is left in such a state.  And what a horrible way to die.  But there is a bright side to her death.  The poor woman is released from all the pain and suffering she’s been going through all this time.  Her death is nearly tragic, but mostly a relief.

And then middle of the afternoon, I check the evil Facebook, only to see a report (my first) that Michael Jackson has been taken to the hospital in cardiac arrest.  Of course by now, everyone knows he has died.  Of course it’s sad.  It’s always sad when someone dies.  But I don’t have a whole lot of  sympathy, nor much passion on this subject.  Michael Jackson is dead.  OK.  Whatever.

TMZ, quite possibly the least reliable news source on the internet—No wait, check that, Perezhilton.com is THE LEAST reliable—reported before anyone else that Michael Jackson had died, and because TMZ is the second least reliable news source on the internet, I began searching for some corroboration from legitimate news sources.  And that’s when my phone rang.

It was my mother.  Due to the strained relationship we have, and my mother’s well known disdain for talking on the phone, my heart always skips a beat when I see her name on the screen.  I answered.

“Hello”

“Hi.   Whatcha doing?” she asked, in her usual just checkin’ in tone.

“Nothin’” I said, fairly truthfully.

“You working?” she asked.

“Sort of,” I told her.  I was just about to tell her what I was really doing when she said, as if she was telling me she was getting her car washed…

“Well, I figured I should let you know, I’m in the Hospital.”

“What?!?  Why?”

“Well, I’m going to have an angioplasty tomorrow,” she told me, again as if she was describing the Mona Lisa to me or something.

I inquired further and she informed me that she had been having “really bad indigestion” for several days.  She went to the doctor and they gave her an EKG which they told her was “abnormal” and then referred her to a Cardiologist.  She had her appointment with the Cardiologist today and by the time the appointment was over the doctor had ordered the angioplasty and admitted her to the hospital…

She told me all of this as if it were a description of the weather, or recounting the birth of a child.  When the conversation was over and we were getting off the phone she told me “don’t say anything negative.  Don’t say anything that’s not ‘Faith’.”  I have much to say about the ‘Faith’ angle, not that I’m knocking the faith angle, but we seem to have reached a contradiction here.  Nonetheless, I’ll save that for another time.

I was very worried until I came home tonight and looked up exactly what angioplasty entails on WebMD.  I’m relieved to know that it’s not as significant as I had originally thought.  She’ll be awake for the whole thing.  In fact, WebMD calls it a “non-surgical” treatment.  This is good, and yet, we’re talking about her heart!

My mother is angry.  She told me she was angry because, “typical hospitals” they’re not dealing with the “real problem”, the indigestion.

“Well, Mother,” I told her, “you know indigestion is one of the most commonly misperceived symptoms of heart problems.”

“Yes, I know,” she said.  “But it could easily be the reverse too.”

Heart problems are a misperceived diagnosis for days of indigestion?  Really? I’m afraid I haven’t heard that.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not wishing anything on my mother.  I’m not hoping she’ll die.  But this is scary.

My relationship with my mother hasn’t been great the last several years and as nice as it might be for this situation to be the catalyst to change that, it’s not.  The barriers that stand in our way aren’t going to be broken by this “close call”.

Because our relationship has been bad, I’m a little ashamed to admit that I’ve given much thought to, “how am I going to feel when/if she dies?”  Certainly a part of me would be relieved.  There would be no more physical manifestation of her judgment and disdain.  On the other hand, she’d have died without our having resolved our differences, and I’d feel some level of relief, which would be bound to carry with it a level of guilt.

I realize, now that I’ve read up on the procedure, that she’s not in any real danger tomorrow.  I’m glad to know that, though I won’t be fully relieved until I hear from her that she’s out of “the woods” and in recovery.

It’s been a really emotionally stressful day for me today, and unfortunately, I think there are more of them ahead…  Bear with me!