resuming

another in the Sunday Seven Series

It’s post-surgery day T+24. My recovery continues more or less without issue. My right hand and arm continue to improve slowly, and I’m still not seeing much of an uptick in my left hand. I’m only wearing the cone of shame when I’m out of the house, and the swelling continues to abate around the incision site. Given the doctor’s position that it could be 3-6 months before the damaged nerve roots heal up completely, I can’t be too unhappy with where I am. Or maybe I should say I shouldn’t be.

Despite the restrictions, I’ve still managed to get out and about a little bit. A couple of weeks ago we went to Cedar Rapids to watch Danny’s team play for the NAIA volleyball national championship.¹ Unfortunately, the Cougars lost in the finals to a team from California, but that final match was close, there to be won. That other team hadn’t faced any real competition on their side of the bracket, and you could see in their eyes during the first set that they expected to cruise. Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the mouth, as Mike Tyson famously said. Despite finishing second, it’s really hard to complain about the season. A 31-1 record isn’t too shabby. Coincidentally, Danny turned 21 the day of the championship, and his friends on the team took him to a lovely bar called “Hazzard County” that night to celebrate him and drown their sorrows a bit.

Also in offspring news, this is prom weekend for Leah. The logistics of this project were staggering; D-Day required less planning, less movement of personnel and materiel. It may have cost less. But it all came together just fine, and the girls looked beautiful.² Like so much else of the high school experience, the ritual around prom is essentially unrecognizable from what it was forty years ago when I lived it. The biggest change, and I think this is an unqualified improvement over the old days, is that it’s fine to go without a date. A lot of kids do pair off, of course, but it seems to me the majority now just go with their friends. Even the kids who do have boyfriends/girlfriends seem happy to meet them there, doing all the pre-game stuff with their besties, focused on having a good time with them as the clock runs out on this era of their lives. Way more inclusive. I love it.

I rarely see the far northeastern corner of our house. There’s a scrubby little area on the north side where the air conditioning compressors sit, and an awkward little section of my neighbor’s fence makes it hard to get all the way back there. Daylilies and hostas grow thick back there and it’s hard to navigate on foot. While I was gardening in the main part of the back yard this week (collar on for safety), I saw it. Ivy. Fucking ivy had shown itself, peeking around the corner from that north wall. I walked around the house to that far side and found that the foul, vile weed had reestablished itself at the base of the limestone wall in that spot I couldn’t see. I ripped it out with a violence and rage that would surely have had my neurosurgeon screaming. I’ll be back out there weekly, all summer and fall, to kill any rhizomes I didn’t get. I’ll salt the soil if I have to. Begone, thou disgusting, noxious, heinous, satanic shitplant. Not on my house. Not now. Not ever.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, I bought a Ukrainian flag and flew it out in front of the house in support. I never took it down, just left it out there every day. After two winters, it was in pretty bad shape, so out of respect I took it down and disposed of it appropriately. I bought a “We Support Ukraine” coroplast yard sign to replace it, and stuck that in the ground in front of my hedges. That sign, too, has now been through enough weather (and some deer abuse) that it fell apart. I’ll figure something else out. Probably going to have to keep figuring it out for a while.

Speaking of those coroplast signs, we also bought one that says “Hate Has No Home Here” during the first reign of terror, and while it’s fairly beat up, it’s still hanging in there. I put it out there at some point in 2017, and decided to leave it up in 2021. Because while the sign was initially in response to Version 1.0 of the regime, I felt the sentiment should apply generally. Seems uncontroversial! But I had a former neighbor whose brain was so poisoned that she felt that sign was a personal attack on her. She went on and on and on about it on Facebook, calling out people with these signs as hypocrites because we obviously hated her. Projection, maybe? She came completely unglued, even with her team in full political control at that time. Eventually, unable to cope with all the hatred she imagined people like us pouring down on her, she moved her family to Florida. I hope she’s happier now, though I’d bet against it.

Robbie Fulks has a brilliant song called “Waiting On These New Things To Go.”³ The narrator is a simple man, living in a mountain cabin without access to the internet or even cable TV. He’s confused about the music the kids listen to these days, and the crazes that the city folk get involved in. But he’s not bothered by any of it, because he’s not participating. He’s just waiting on these new things to go. It’s not an especially flattering portrait of this Luddite up in the hills, afraid of progress, mystified by the current state of technology and culture to the point that he just checks out completely. I feel very much like this guy lately as the waves of “artificial intelligence” mania are now lapping at my own shores. I need to tread a little carefully here, but to say I’m uncomfortable with the cost-benefit ratio of this technology would be one understated way to put it. There’s much more I’d say after a couple of drinks. I’d been hoping I could just ride it out, career-wise—wait on this new thing to go—but I don’t see how that’s going to be possible now. I’ll try to navigate this as ethically as I can. One promise I’m making everyone is that when this whole thing ends up as I believe it inevitably must, I will not be gracious in victory.