Mom’s doing a bit better, in her recovery from complications after surgery. On Thursday, she walked 74 steps, with physical therapists holding on in case she toppled, but Mom supporting her own weight. It’s the longest she’s walked since before all this mess.

Most of the time Mom’s mostly cognizant and only partly cloudy, so we’re cautiously optimistic that she might be able to return to her ordinary life, sharing a house with my sister Katrina.

Katrina continues spending almost all her waking hours at Mom’s rehab dump. I continue visiting for a few hours daily. United Health Care continues announcing random dates when Mom’s rehab coverage ends.

They sent Katrina an email on Friday saying Mom would have to go home on Monday (today), but Katrina successfully ‘appealed’ it, and the rat bastards are allowing Mom to continue her rehab, until their next deadly email.

UHC issues these end-of-coverage edicts without consulting family, the rehab center, or Mom’s doctor.

This is the second time they’ve tried killing Mom, and our second successful appeal. For the first appeal, Katrina spent 5-10 minutes answering questions in a conversation with the rat bastards’ AI, then waited sleeplessly for a response.

For this second end-of-rehab-coverage, the appeal was again via phone, but this time Katrina was connected to a human, who demanded much more detailed answers to extremely basic questions. He needed Mom’s mailing address, with zip code please, though it hasn’t changed in years. He needed the name of Mom’s primary doctor, as if UHC has no record of Mom’s existence, the surgery they’d approved, the premiums she’s been paying for decades, etc.

The man on the phone typed everything into a computer, so there were looong pauses, and Katrina said the call took nearly an hour. When she asked the man on the phone why this second call was taking so much longer than the first, he explained that after the first appeal, subsequent appeals involve progressively more questions and investigations.

Of course, very nearly nothing about Mom’s case had changed between the first appeal and the second appeal, so the part where every question must be re-asked and answered at length — as if United Health Care doesn’t have CTRL-C and CTRL-V technology — is intended to be frustrating for frustration’s sake, in hopes of discouraging the next appeal.

I am such a fan of Luigi Mangioni.

♦ ♦ ♦

Maybe it’s the worries about Mom, or the anger about her insurance, or the frustrations with her rehab center, or maybe it’s just me getting older and less healthy, but the visits and especially the daily bus rides (90 minutes to two hours, each way) leave me truly exhausted.

A few years ago, I was commuting to work via public transit and putting in five 8-hour days every week — far more taxing than these daily visits to Mom — while still publishing a blog with fresh material daily. Can’t do that any more. Most nights I’m just too damned tuckered.

Best I can do is, ancient Pathetic Life reprints and whatever news pisses me off, because news surfing requires fewer brain cells than writing. Maybe some movie reviews now and then. And occasional diary entries like today, where I don’t have much to say and don’t bother saying it well.

If I can muster the gumption, there might be some bus tales soon, and I really oughtta tell you how Dean is making me mental, but not today.

♦ ♦ ♦

I don’t remember who or how it happened, but at some point yesterday I must’ve had dratted human contact, for my hands stank of some gawdawful parfum when I got home.

Whomever’s scent was on me … fuck you.

♦ ♦ ♦

Before meals are served in the dining room at Mom’s rehab dump, a staffer ties a bib onto most patients. They’re fairly nice bibs, adult-size of course, and Mom sure needs ’em. Splash and splatter, as veggies fall from her fork and pudding slips from her spoon.

Hmmmm. Most of my shirts have stains from long-ago mustard drips or soda spills, so somehow one of the rehab dump’s bibs ended up in my backpack. Used it for the first time yesterday at Mrs Rigby’s Diner before visiting Mom, and it caught scrambled eggs and fake-maple syrup and basically rescued a new blue shirt.

♦ ♦ ♦

Also on the general topic of hygiene, the best toothpick isn’t a toothpick. It’s the top of any thin-plastic krinkly bag, like potato chips or wet wipes. The plastic is hard enough to easily force it into the gaps between my teeth, and it nudges out whatever’s lodged there. Then that trusty piece of plastic goes back in my wallet for future use.

Follow me for more cost-saving tips!

4/13/2026

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Once again against my will, I worked too close to Jasper today. There was noplace else on the block to set up the fish shop. I’m weary of hearing him scream, and screaming is basically how he talks. I know his crazy past and bizarre tendencies, because they’re obvious, and anyway he never stops talking/screaming about them. He’s loud and in-your-face with his preaching of anarchy, and I don’t like preachers, even without god.

That said, he hasn’t done anything that specifically annoyed me since December, and weirdly he’s been kind of friendly of late. He even says (or screams) good morning at me. Sometimes he suckers me in, and I say good morning back.

I hate the guy, though, and not because he’s the putz who ratted out Jay & I for violating an obscure city regulation. I’ve never been a tattletale, but I’m a putz in other ways, as are we all, so I could eventually forgive and forget. But I ain’t forgiving or forgetting a damned thing, not so long as he hasn’t asked me to.

To stop hating Jasper that’s what I’d need — an apology. “I’m a hypocritical anarchist, out here preaching anarchy on the Ave all the time, and then turning your name over to the authorities. Sorry about that.”

If he can’t find the courage to say he’s sorry about that, it means he isn’t, and if he isn’t sorry then he’s an ass. ‘Good morning’ is the best he’ll get from me, and I regret even that.

♦ ♦ ♦  

Barnes is one of the bums of Berkeley. Sometimes we talk a little, sometimes we nod. He’s hairy, dirty, smelly, and wears rags, a description that fits fifty people on the Ave.

He knows I’m Doug, but nobody knows Barnes’ first name. I asked him once, and he said, “Barnes is enough.”

Today he sat on the sidewalk not far from my table and started begging, but with a pitch I hadn’t heard before. “Poetry for a dollar,” he said. Nobody was interested in poetry — imagine that — but some people dropped coin in his can to avoid hearing poetry.

It was a clever shtick, I thought, but I was curious to see what he might come up with if someone wanted a poem, so when nobody was buying fish for a while, I strolled over and handed him a dollar. “Poem me,” I said.

He reached into his pocket and handed me half an 8½x11, neatly ripped, then folded — a disappointment before even glancing at it.

“Cripes, Barnes,” I said, “I thought you’d write or recite something on the spot, just for me.” And I regretted saying it. Probably hurt his feelings.

“Oh no, man,” Barnes said. “True poetry can’t be rushed like that. It takes work.”

I said thanks, read the poem, and said, “Nice, man.” At my table, I taped it into my notebook, and now I’ll share it with you, dear reader:

Pathetic Life
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As I was setting up the fish-table, I was also watching a well-dressed middle-aged white woman casually tear fliers and posters off the ugly metallic cages surrounding the tiny trees on Telegraph Ave. None of them were my posters, but still it’s offensive, isn’t it?

Posters on public infrastructure — tree cages and telephone poles — is how people get their message out, if they can’t afford paid advertising. She was ripping down posters for cheap concerts, lost cats, political rallies. Postering is how I find work, so I feel a kinship with the punks and radicals and everyone else with posters on that tree cage. So…

I strolled over casually and opened with, “Is it your job to tear down the posters?”

“It is today,” she said, the way you’d say “Isn’t it a wonderful day” if you’re one of those people who believe in wonderful days. And then she added with a smile, “I’m on clean-up duty!”

She must work at one of the many yuppie restaurants in the neighborhood, I figured, and her boss sent her out to ‘beautify’ the neighborhood. “Seems mighty mean,” I said, low-key and non-confrontational, not like yesterday. “Not everyone can afford an ad on TV or in the paper.”

“Oh well,” she said, in that cliché way that means whatever you’ve just said doesn’t matter.

Having mostly stripped the tree cage, she walked some slight distance to the next tree cage and started ripping down more posters. Adios to somebody’s dog-walking business. Rip! Next weekend’s rally against whatever they’re rallying against — gone. And so much for that upcoming concert by the Bloody Menstrual Pads.

It’s an argument I couldn’t win, so I decided not to argue, and went back to my fish-stand instead. From there, I watched her continue ripping posters down — silencing people. She wouldn’t have said that’s what she was doing, but that’s what she was doing. Rip rip rip, stuffing people’s messages into the trash cans.

I jotted our brief conversation into my notebook, unsure whether it would make it into the zine. Depends on how boring the day goes, I figured, and I circled her “Oh well” because her raging indifference was what bugged me the most.

Finally she rounded a corner, a customer started asking about fish, and that woman silencing Berkeley disappeared from my consciousness. I didn’t know Round Two was coming up.

♦ ♦ ♦  

Taking some boxes into a store, some guy illegally idled his Volvo near my table, which put his smog and bumper stickers in my face. “I believe you, Anita,” said one of the stickers. “Keep abortion safe and legal,” said another. Between them, another sticker said, “It is never OK to hit a woman or child,” and I agree with the other two stickers but I’m a stickler for common sense, so I’m not sure about that third platitude.

We’re all opposed, of course, to the battering of women and brutality toward children, but is it never OK to hit a woman or child? If a woman attacked me, I wouldn’t hesitate to hit her, and might hit her hard. And kids? Almost any time I ride a bus there’s at least one teenager who could’ve turned out better with more frequent paddling.

It would be more accurate and honest for the sticker to say, “It’s almost never OK to hit a woman or child.”

♦ ♦ ♦  

An hour after she’d gone, the well-dressed white woman came walking back, still wearing her oversized smile, and I wondered what was behind that smile, and why she derives joy from obliterating other people’s messages?

As she approached my spot on the sidewalk, I was feeling more argumentative than earlier, so I said, “Hey, lady,” and she turned her smile at me. “Are you against free speech in general, or only when you’re on ‘clean-up duty’?”

She replied with no hesitation: “Do you have a license to be selling?”

What kinda response is that? “Who are you to be asking?”

“I’m Carla Woodworth, City Councilmember. Who are you?”

City Council, eh?

“Somehow I’m not surprised. So again, are you always against free speech, or only free speech by poor people?”

I was ready to argue, but she quickly assessed me as nobody so she was gone before I’d finished re-asking the question. I wrote our second brief conversation into my notebook.

All of it had been politely spoken, by the way. I hadn’t raised my voice, and neither had she. She was very “City Council” about it. She heard a question she didn’t want to answer, so she inquired about my vendor’s license. I don’t have one any more, but the table has a “free speech permit” that’ll probably be revoked, by order of City Councilmember Carla Woodworth.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

When Corina, a zine reader from Sacramento, chatted me up a month ago, she mentioned that I should see Spike & Mike’s Festival of Animation, an annual collection of cartoon shorts that comes ’round every summer.

I’ve never gone to Spike & Mike, because I refuse to spend seven dang dollars for an hour and a half’s entertainment, and their shows never come into the second-run discount theaters. But I could make an exception.

Reading the Chronicle, though, between customers at the fish-stand, it says this year’s Spike & Mike opens tonight. So I used the cartoonery as a lure, and wrote a note inviting Corina to Spike & Mike with me.

It’s a short note, not much more than “I’ll spring for tickets and popcorn, but you’ll have to pay the Amtrak fare from Sacramento.” I’ll mail it tonight, if I don’t lose my limited courage before licking a stamp.

♦ ♦ ♦  

A few hours later, pushing the fish-cart toward its overnight storage at Jay’s house, a strange piece of urban blight stared up at me from a patch of yellowed grass beside the sidewalk. It was a folded, kinda crumpled poster, featuring the smiling face of that same woman I’d talked to twice this morning.

I paused, picked it up, unfolded it, and it said, “Carla Woodworth for State Assembly.” Had to smile back at her picture, because she lost that election. She’s still just a Berkeley City Councilwoman.

What’s most annoying is, she’s not a Republican. She’s probably the most liberal member of the Council — the only one whose name and reputation I sorta knew before today. But like almost every politician left or right, big-time or local, she has power so she’s happy to abuse it.

When she said to me, “Do you have a license to be selling?” she was basically asking, “Are you sure you want to tangle with me?” Or, “Are your papers in order?” She’s a liberal leader whose first response to disagreement was an attempt at intimidation.

Pathetic Life
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