Physically, Mom’s legs are too weak to stand or walk, and if she can’t stand, can’t walk even a few steps, the house she shares with my sister Katrina won’t be feasible. Mom will have to be at a nursing home for the rest of her life. To address this, her “skilled nursing and rehabilitation center” provides 15 (fifteen) minutes of physical therapy daily, with weekends off.
Mentally, Mom knows the very basics of who she is, but a conversation is like slurping soup with a fork with the lights out at midnight. It takes ten seconds for Mom to begin answering a question, and if she’s saying something unprompted, her sentences sometimes get lost on the way. To address this, the facility provides group games and conversations with other patients and a facilitator in the games room — an hour at a time, seven days a week. The exercises are designed to stimulate the mind in some way, so it’s not just games, it’s therapy.
Family and visitors are welcome to sit in on the both physical and mental sessions, and I’ve been there for several. I don’t have any complaints about the physical therapy, except that 15 minutes is far too little. And I like the idea of the group talk-and-play sessions to build mental acuity, but there’s a problem.
Of the six group talk-and-play sessions I’ve sat in on, two were run by Anita, whose badge says she’s the assistant activities director. She talks with patients, asks questions, listens to their answers, and subtly nudges them to think more clearly. Anita herself is mildly disabled, walking with a permanent limp, which maybe gives her extra empathy. She’s quite good at her job, and seems to give a damn about the patients.
Most sessions are run by Mehar, though. She’s the activities director, Anita’s boss. Mehar is not good at her job, and seems to give no damns at all. When Mehar facilitates a session, she’s looking at her phone all the time, reading instructions or playing audio that’s clearly lifted from a website for nursing home workers.
I don’t object to the cribbing, but it’s obvious during Mehar’s sessions that it’s the first time she’s read the material. She struggles with longer words, like ‘appropriate’. “Oh,” she’ll say, talking to the website, “I don’t know what that word means,” and then she’ll use her finger to flick to a different section of whatever instructions she’s reading on her phone. When the questions are designed to trigger patients’ memories, Mehar always says ‘rememories’ instead of ‘memories’, like, “What is your favorite rememory from childhood?”
Like a lot of workers in nursing homes, Mehar is an immigrant. Usually I’d say an accent doesn’t matter, but her job is helping people recover their cognizance, and she mostly adds to the confusion. The most commonly-asked question in any of Mehar’s sessions is, “What?” after she’s said something. The patients are all foggy-headed to some extent, but even for me it’s a struggle to understand what she says. “What?”
What I’m starting to understand about Mehar has little to do with language, though. She’s simply shitty at her job. I’m not sure there’s anything else to understand.
♦ ♦ ♦
After meals, Mom likes playing the piano in the dining room. I push her wheelchair up to the keyboard, she plays hymns, and we sing together. It’s good for Mom, and her face is at its brightest while she plays, but the second day she was at the piano after lunch, Mehar came over and slowly pulled the keyboard cover closed while Mom was playing.
She gave Mom time enough to get her fingers out of the way, then announced as the lid came down, “No piano today. We be play Bingo at 2:00!” She said it cheerfully, and invited Mom to stay for the bingo session. It was 1:55.
“I can’t play the piano?” Mom asked. Mehar answered, but I honestly couldn’t understand what she said.
“Not today,” I said. “You can play the piano tomorrow.” I was slightly seething inside, but I didn’t snap at Mehar. Even asked Mom if she wanted to play bingo.
“I guess,” she said, so I wheeled Mom to a table, and we waited and waited for bingo at 2:00.
Mehar’s “No piano today” announcement irked me, and still irks me. If they need the dining & piano room for bingo, that’s cool, and sure, we’ll quit the piano — but it’s tacky to just pull the cover closed in the middle of Mom banging out “How Great Thou Art.”
A dozen patients were in the dining room, seated at tables waiting for bingo, along with half a dozen visitors like me. Little seemed to be happening, though. No bingo, no pre-bingo, and more patients weren’t coming into the room. A few patients talked with each other, but most just sat there, bored and waiting for something to happen.
Mehar looked at her phone until about 2:10, when she walked around to all the occupied tables and gave a bingo sheet to every patient.
The sheets were 8½x11, with one large-print bingo game on the sheet, poorly photocopied, like the image at the top of this page, only with smudges all along the ‘G’ and especially the ‘O’ columns. You could read the numbers, but it was ugly.
I asked for a better copy — asked nicely! — and Mehar smiled, shook her head no, and showed me her stack of bingo sheets. “They all dark,” I think she said, and she was right. Every bingo sheet was yucky.
After passing out the sheets, Mehar sat down again, and resumed scrolling her phone. She scrolled through her phone for ten more minutes, while Mom and I talked about other things. She said again that she wanted to play the piano, and I re-explained that we were supposed to play bingo instead.
Mom said, “What are we waiting for?”
“We’re waiting for bingo at 2:00,” I said.
“It’s 2:20,” Mom said, looking at the clock. Maybe Mehar’s bingo-without-bingo session was a shrewd test to make sure patients could read clocks. “Could I play the piano while we’re waiting?”
Being a rebel I replied, “Sure,” and wheeled Mom to the piano again, but no tunes were tinkled. Lifting the keyboard cover was all it took to get Mehar to stop looking at her phone.
“No, no piano please! We playing bingo!”
“When?” I asked, still keeping my voice low and trying for pleasant.
“2:30,” Mehar said.
“You said 2:00 when you shut down my mom’s piano playing.” My volume was inching up.
“Bingo at 2:30.”
“Fuck you,” I didn’t say, but to Mom I said, “Do you want to wait ten more minutes for bingo?”
“I want to play the piano,” Mom said.
“Mehar won’t let you,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Then can you take me to my room please?”
As I pushed Mom’s wheelchair across the dining room toward the exit, I said to Mehar, loudly as we passed, “Nothing clears my mom’s head like playing the piano, but there must be half an hour of silence before bingo…”
It was a pleasant enough day on the Avenue, and I brought home a page of notes but only one story that perhaps approaches interesting.
From Pathetic Life #23 Sunday, April 7, 1996
It was early when I got there, and lucked into a pretty good spot, where I’d be working next to Umberto. Him I like, not like yesterday’s Jasper.
There was one annoyance in the way, though — a street waif sitting on the curb. Vendors have dibs on the curb, and usually the street waifs, stoners, beggars, winos, high school punks, and other assorted losers respect that, and sit on the sidewalk. Like I said, though, this bozo was on the curb. Vendor turf.
He was blocking me out, so I couldn’t set up my table, and he was potential trouble. I’ve seen him go ’round with other people, and once he went ’round with me. He’s not major league obnoxious, but he’s in the upper minors — a feisty, argumentative dickhead.
If I’d asked him nicely to relocate off the curb, odds are 50/50 he’d have refused to budge all day. So I leaned on a wall where I wished he was sitting, and pondered my strategy. What I came up with was…
“Happy Easter!” I said, a little too loud but not at all in his face. “Do you love Jesus with all your heart, all your soul, and all that’s left of your mind?”
“Yeah, I do,” he said, “Of course I do.” Well, fuckall, I hadn’t expected that.
“I don’t,” I said truthfully, and then abandoned the truth. “I hate that lying bastard.” Said blandly but sincerely, it made his eyebrows briefly squiggle, like maybe I’d caught him off-guard, so… “We went bowling once, me and Jesus. He was keeping score, but he’s such a bastard, literally, whatever he rolled, always he marked it as a strike. By the third frame, I knew something was up—”
“Wait,” the kid said. “He said he was Jesus?”
“No, man, he didn’t say it, he was Jesus. His palms were bleeding all over his bowling ball.”
The guy stared at me blankly, and I couldn’t tell whether anything was happening behind his eyes. “He was Jesus,” he said, monotone.
“Definitely. The beard, the flowing robes, bunch of damned apostles following him around, the whole deal.” I was winging it — doing improv, basically. No punchline was planned, no idea where we were going with this, but they say you’re supposed to stick with whatever you’ve started, so I stuck. “And ‘son of God’, my ass,” I said. “That sanctimonious fucker was rolling gutter balls and marking ’em as strikes. Said he was rolling a perfect game.”
“And he said he was Jesus,” the kid on the curb said again.
“No, he was Jesus, man. They carded him when he bought a beer, and it was right on his license: Christ, Jesus H.”
He looked at me like a doubting Thomas. “And where was this?”
“At the bowling alley in Fruitvale,” I explained.
He said, “Dude, you’re nuts,” and gathered his stuff and walked away. And after that, I had an OK day selling fish on the Ave.
This is an entry retyped from an on-paper zine I wrote many years ago, called Pathetic Life. The opinions stated were my opinions then, but might not be my opinions now. Also, I said and did some disgusting things, so parental guidance is advised.
Oh, am I supposed to say “allegedly”? Fuck that. Nobody involved in this war of terror against immigrants deserves any whisper of the presumption of innocence they so reliably deny others.
Excerpt: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
The American President is so obviously out of his mind there’s no knowing what he’ll do next, but nuking Iran is certainly a possibility, and there’s nobody left in the military who’d hesitate to follow that order.
This is Trump-class stupid. The walls at Alcatraz are like graham crackers. Turning the island into a prison again would require all-new water and plumbing and electricity — and all-new buildings — and of course, eliminate one of San Francisco’s most popular and worthwhile attractions, which is probably the main intent.
Excerpt: Shastoni Burge has worked for a decade as a Waffle House server in Rome, Ga., much of it on the night shift. She said she was once punched in the face by a customer. She saw someone overdose in the bathroom. One night, a man took all the steak knives and threatened the staff with them.
But she has never seen anyone teleport to the place. “I’ve seen it all,” said Ms. Burge, 38. “But I’ve never seen that.”
Excerpt: Almost every president since Ronald Reagan has said that the government should create a simple electronic system for filing federal income taxes. The necessary technology has existed for decades. Many developed nations operate such tax filing systems. In countries including Japan and the Netherlands, the government handles the paperwork and then provides most taxpayers with a statement for review and approval.
Americans, by contrast, spend an average of 13 hours and $290 to file.
Why? Because tax preparation companies and Republican lawmakers have a shared interest in torturing taxpayers. The companies want to ensure that Americans remain dependent on their services. The Republicans want people to hate paying taxes.
Excerpt: Several federal agencies, including the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Trade Commission, have recommended that consumers use VPNs to protect their privacy. But following that advice may inadvertently cost Americans the very protections they’re seeking.
Excerpt: The video, recorded in January by an employee of the bar, showed Agostina Páez imitating a monkey and uttering a racist slur as she walked away.
In Brazil, the backlash was swift. Ms. Páez, a lawyer, was arrested and charged with making a racist insult, a crime under Brazilian law. Now, Ms. Páez, 29, faces a possible prison sentence of two to five years and hefty fines, in a case that has kindled fierce debate in Brazil and Argentina.
A court in Rio de Janeiro began hearing evidence last month, and will issue a verdict in the coming weeks. Ms. Páez has apologized for the gesture, but said she was provoked.
Me again: In the 1980s I would’ve said free speech is paramount, this law is unjust. In the 2020s I’m older, maybe wiser, definitely crankier, and I’d say this law and this prosecution kinda rocks.
Excerpt: A.I. being A.I., things occasionally go haywire. Sometimes when Claude misbehaves and fails to test the code, Ebert scolds the agent: Claude, you really do have to run all the tests.
To avoid repeating these sorts of errors, Ebert has added some stern warnings to his prompt file, the list of instructions — a stern Ten Commandments — that his agents must follow before they do anything. When you behold the prompt file of a coder using A.I., you are viewing a record of the developer’s attempts to restrain the agents’ generally competent, but unpredictably deviant, actions.
Excerpt: The new terms and conditions say that if a customer authorizes an AI shopping agent to act on their behalf, those purchases and transactions would be “considered transactions authorized by you.”
In other words, the customer would still have to pay, even if, let’s say, the bot ordered the wrong item. The policy also notes that Target does not guarantee that third-party AI tools “will act exactly as you intend in all circumstances.”
Excerpt: He wanted it big. He wanted lots of gold, lots of marble. He wanted visitors awestruck by his architectural expansion of the country’s symbolic seat of power. “They should sense the strength and grandeur of the German Reich as they walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Adolf Hitler told his chief architect, Albert Speer, outlining his plans for an extension to the old Reich chancellery, at Wilhelmstrasse 77 in Berlin.
The new annex, connected to the chancellery by a marble corridor hung with crystal chandeliers, was part of Hitler’s ambitious plans to align the Berlin cityscape with his vision for the future of the country. Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He wanted an “Avenue of Splendor” for military parades. “The Champs-Élysées is a hundred meters wide,” Hitler told Speer. “We will make our avenue twenty meters wider.” A planned Volkshalle was to accommodate 180,000. The Eiffel Tower could fit beneath its cupola. This “Hall of the People” was to be topped by the largest swastika on Earth. Berlin itself was to be rechristened as Weltstadt Germania, “Capital of the World.”
Speer embellished these extravagantly outsized “Hitler branded designs”—Entwürfe Hitlerscher Prägung—with fascistic flourishes: bundled reeds, or fasces; spread-winged eagles; and enormous twisted crosses. In 1938, when André François Poncet, the French ambassador to Berlin, visited Hitler at the Berghof, the Nazi leader’s Alpine retreat outside Berchtesgaden, he was led through a “gallery of Roman pillars” to an “immense glassed-in rotunda” with a dramatic view that gave one the impression of being suspended in the air. “Was this edifice the work of a normal mind,” François-Poncet wondered in his memoirs, “or of one tormented by megalomania and haunted by visions of domination?”
Excerpt: I get poorer and poorer no matter who runs the show. I don’t give a shit about the cultural stuff, LOL! I don’t find it remotely difficult to not be bothered by other orientations. Immigrants don’t bother me. I like the Palestinian who changes my oil. He does a better job and is faster and cheaper than these fucking chain oil change shops. I like the Asians at the Chinese place I go get my foreign food from. We got Mexicans who cut the grass at our council flat. They do fine. White folk don’t want those jobs. I’m tired of all the white folk complaining about jobs they don’t even want. SHUT UP, ALREADY!
Special thanks to Linden Arden, Becky Jo, Joey Jo Jo & John the Basketemeritus, Jeff Meyer, Dave S, Name Withheld, and always extra special thanks to my lovely late Stephanie, who gave me 21 years and proved that the world isn’t always shitty.
News always and only from reliable sources, and I decide what’s reliable — no right-wing bullshit, no Substack because fuck Nazis, and no RawStory, Newsweek, or other clickbait sites. Written news is preferred; video links will be rare, and damned near never to videos where a reporter or podcaster simply reads a script or does improv — that’s show biz, not news.
If a paywall, forced registration for spam, or any website’s anti-reading layout keeps you from accessing an article linked here, simply let me know and I’ll reply with the article’s complete text.
