Mr Patel works at the hotel’s front desk (I don’t think the hotel has a back desk). His son helps out a lot, and Mrs Patel does more than her share of the work, too. Every other afternoon, one of the Patels vacuums the hall, and someone tends to the toilets and showers daily. They run a tidy place, for what it is.

Except for the past few days, when I haven’t seen anyone cleaning the place. Maybe they’re sick, or on strike or something.

Mr Patel is still at the front desk, but there’s yick in the hallway, and this morning when I stepped into the common john to take a shower, the tile was coated with soapy, slippery grime. Some small roaches were crawling in the corner of the shower. I also saw roaches on the wall and one on the shower curtain. All through my shower, I wondered at the science, because you wouldn’t think roaches would be attracted to soap scum, but apparently they are.

Most of the roaches were quite small, so I thought I’d watch ’em swirl down the drain as I lathered my pits and groin and scalp, but the pipes were sluggish. By the time I’d finished my short shower, I was standing in dirty water up to my ankles, with roach corpses floating in it.

Someone ought to complain to Mr Patel, and I hope someone does.

♦ ♦ ♦  

BARTed to Berkeley to be Judith’s maid again, but you don’t need to skip ahead to the next entry — I’m not going to write about washing her dishes. Not today. That story’s been told too many times.

There was something worth telling in the BART station, though. There’s plenty of wind in a subway station, as the trains push air through the tunnels. That wind was blowing papers everywhere — 8½x11 papers, hundreds of them, and as I was waiting for the train home, a man was wailing, just crying out in agony, scrambling around and picking up papers.

“Oh, holy Christ, no,” the man was sometimes hollering, sometimes muttering, snatching up what pages as he could, but he couldn’t snatch many, and what’s the point anyway? He could never get all the pages back.

It was his thesis, I’m guessing, just because he was young, well-dressed, and looked like a college kid. Or it might’ve been a novel he’d written, or a huge report for work. I, uh, didn’t ask. Also, I didn’t help.

I felt for the guy, though. Doing zines, everything’s vulnerable as you go to the copy shop, and you know it. I always put my master copies in a sealed folder, so they can’t blow away if I drop ’em.

But also — it’s 1996. Don’t you have a copy on a disk at home, subway dude? Jeez, even twenty years ago, I typed everything with a carbon copy underneath, just in case.

The tragedy, the agony on that man’s face, as hundreds of pages blew in every direction — pages down the tubeways, pages on the ledge above the tracks, pages on the floor being walked on, pages riding the escalators, pages on the tracks, many pages always in the air, and a page slapped against the windshield of my train, as it arrived at the station…

Stepping aboard, a page blew in through the door with me. I scooped it up and tossed it back onto the platform before the door whooshed shut, so maybe I rescued page 244, but the guy never said thank you.

“Ah, jesus, jesus, jesus,” was all we heard from him, and then my train headed west.

Pathetic Life
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our 80th weekly open mike

Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.

5/16/2026

Anything goes

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Since Mom’s amnesia and inability to walk, I’ve visited nearly every day, first in the hospital, then in the nursing home, now at the house she shares with my sister, Katrina.

On the bus it’s an hour and a half each way, minimum, and between the bus rides I spend several hours with Mom. We do not discuss philosophy. Our most interesting conversations wouldn’t interest you at all, dear reader, as I ask about her childhood memories and such, hoping to rebuild the damage in her head, and we exercise, hoping to repair the damage to her legs.

Mostly, though, Mom sleeps, or sings hymns. Sometimes I sleep, too. Sometimes I sing along. “And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own…”

I low-key enjoy these days with Mom, but it’s exhausting, and leaves me mentally empty by the time I get home. Every day.

When I’m tempted to feel sorry for myself, I remember that Katrina has it far worse. Living with Mom, she tends to her all the time I’m not there. Getting Mom off the couch and onto the commode is more difficult for Katrina than for me, and often she can’t do it. When that happens, Mom sits in her soiled diapers until Doug gets there.

Of course, it’s most difficult for Mom herself.

Slowed by her age and recent health issues, she rarely gets on my nerves like she used to, but after spending hours with her every day for two months, and all those tedious butt-numbing bus rides, I’m low on energy, with no interest in writing. That’s why this blog is basically dead, or pretty close.

Things will pick up again — fresh posts, maybe even several days a week — once Mom’s recovered enough that Katrina can care for her without my daily help. But I’ve been more and more pessimistic about when that might be.

Several days ago, Katrina went kerplop and broke her arm, which makes things even worse. Wearing a cast, her just-barely ability to hoist Mom to her feet has been cut in half. She simply can’t do it, so Mom is stuck in whatever chair she’s in, until I get there.

If I’m hours away, Katrina calls a friend of Mom’s, who can be there in half an hour, unless she’s out of town. On Wednesday, after I’d gone home, Katrina knocked on a neighbor’s door, and two strangers (a mother and her pimply teenage son, as Katrina told it) came over and pulled Mom off the couch and into her walker.

During my visit the next day, Katrina & I brainstormed how to get Mom standing when I’m not there. We’ve been exercising with her, and Mom gets physical therapy (one damned day a week), and she is getting stronger, but not strong enough. We’ve tried very thick cushions to get her sitting an inch or two higher, because sitting higher makes standing easier, but none of these tactics seemed to be helping.

Our bright idea on Thursday was to put risers under the couch — it already had three-inch legs, and now they’re on four-inch risers. But still, when Katrina & I tried helping Mom off the raised-up couch, we couldn’t do it unless I lifted Mom.

But here’s where some sunshine bursts through.

During my long bus ride home, Katrina texted that Mom had gotten herself off the couch — without any help at all. Who knows how and why? Katrina hadn’t even been watching when it happened.

Whatever’s the why, Mom’s success standing is huge news. She hadn’t stood without help since before her surgery in March, when Mom’s health went to hell.

Good news continued through the evening, with texts telling that Mom had gotten up again, to switch from the couch to a chair, and then stood from the chair and walked to her bed. This, after several nights when Mom slept on the couch, because when I wasn’t there, nobody could get her standing to walk to her bedroom.

This morning, Mom got herself off her bed, walked into the bathroom, and took a shit. Seriously, alert the media. It’s the first time she’d used a toilet in two months — everything since March has been in diapers, or on a portable commode.

For a week, we’d planned that today would be the re-launch of our twice-monthly family breakfasts at Mrs Rigby’s Diner, but all three of us — Katrina, me, and Mom — knew that the risk factor was not zero. Getting Mom into her wheelchair, rolling her out to the car, getting her up from the chair and into the car, then back in the wheelchair for the restaurant, then into the car again, then into the wheelchair again at home and up the (new) ramp into their living room — at every transition, there’s the possibility that something could go wrong, and Mom could land in a crumpled, painful heap on the ground.

I cannot stress enough that neither Katrina nor I know what we’re doing, helping a disabled woman to stand. There’s been no training. We’re making this up as we go.

But Mom’s pretty stable when she’s walking, and I’d be there to help her through all the ups and downs, and I haven’t dropped her yet, so we did it. Or rather, Mom did it. For each and all her transitions, she stood with either no help, or minimal help from me — so little help that I’m sure Katrina could’ve managed it without me.

Breakfast was great, spirits were high, because Mom can now get herself standing, provided she’s on a tall enough chair, and/or there’s someone to help yank her up. Her head is still foggy, but that’s recovering too — she’s more lucid than a week ago, which was more lucid than the week before that.

Which means, Mom is borderline back.

I’m still going to be at their house, helping any way I can, for several hours daily. That won’t stop until I’m not needed. If you’d asked on Wednesday, I might’ve guessed that would be August, or September, October… This afternoon, it feels like “not needed” might be mere days away.

And jeez, I would love to have my lazy, good-for-nothing, plenty-of-time-for-so-so-writing-life back.

5/15/2026

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