The Empirical Manifesto

Intelligence is a relatively small field; "incestuous" as photogoot once so aptly put it (where all applicable definitions most certainly applied), and as there are only so few places one can be stationed, those of us who served, often ran into each other time and again. It was during one of these random assignments photogoot and I shared a townhouse in Hampton Roads, VA. On display in our foyer was my grandmother's cabinet, which held our collective military-brandished coffee mugs, unique beer and wine glasses from numerous continents, and our not insignificant German stein collection, the centerpiece of which was my father's old stein when he was stationed at Sembach Air Base outside Kaiserslaughtern in the early 60s, and photogoot's dad's old stein from the same era. That's just how we were.

Both our fathers are now deceased, but both men had their impact upon me. One of his dad's most prominent, was introducing me to fine cigars. In that same vein, I had recently pulled out my Duca Carlo pipe and photographed it, enjoying a bowl on the front porch as the weather started warming. This got me reminiscing, and when I called photogoot to ask about one of his father's Meerschaum pipes (he had two, both displayed with the steins), I didn't even get to finish my query as he had seen the picture of the Duca Carlo and jumped to the same conclusion. Of course he did.

I don't know that I deserve such an heirloom, but it was generously gifted to me nonetheless, and his father's memory lives on just a little longer, in me.

Mom has been bedridden for over three years with both the autoimmune hidradenitis suppurativa, and dementia, and she has been rapidly declining for a number of reasons since dad passed away nearly a month ago. First and foremost, he was feeding her pain medication above and beyond what the nursing home was supplying because (and I know this sounds completely asinine) even with dementia she had to request them. Which, as you may be able to imagine, someone with dementia doesn't actually do. So when he passed, she was on her own, and in increasingly greater amounts of pain.

Additionally, dad was shipping her off to surgery once a month to keep her with him - he had all the hospice and DNR paperwork filled out, but hadn't signed any of it, choosing, at the last minute each time, to rush her to surgery. After discussing everything with my brother, I signed those papers when he passed away, and we placed her on hospice Thursday evening.

It was a relief to finally see her pain-free.

Monday morning I saw I had a voice mail from Shelly at the nursing home, who asked me to return her call. I did, but discovered she was in a meeting. "May I perhaps speak to another nurse?" I was told Shelly is the nursing home Administrator, and if she needed to speak to me, none of the nurses would know what it was about. Fine. I drove up there instead.

Imagine now my surprise when I found my mother absent. Additionally, there are two Shelly's (who apparently don't disambiguate themselves from one another and it was nurse Shelly as opposed to Administrator Shelly who'd called) and they'd shipped mom off to the ER on the authority of the hospice nurse who was now in charge of mom's care. I talked to mom's primary nurse (not nurse Shelly who was off-shift) who couldn't understand why a hospice nurse would take that action, and to get to the bottom of it was going to have a member of the hospice team contact me. When that finally happened, and I explained the situation, the hospice team member couldn't understand either, so wanted to contact mom's primary nurse, who I'd just spoken to, to see if she could figure out why her hospice nurse rushed mom to the emergency room once again.

The saga continues.



Hospice nurse said that mom's feeding tube was blocked with fecal matter, and they consider feeding tubes comfort care, which is why she was sent to have that corrected.

October 13, 1943 - December 19, 2016
We had, this past November, what most people probably consider a stereotypical Family Thanksgiving. We had the leaf in the table, the giant turkey, homemade pumpkin pies, fancy beer and wine, and a seven course meal. With my new lens, I finally got some fantastic portraits of Dad, and some excellent, excellent shots of Dad and the kids together. We went to the theater (something he enjoyed doing every time he came down) and watched Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them on the big screen. He enjoyed watching Hello Dolly with his grandson in high-def late at night the next day, and he got to share one of his all time favorite movies with Dorian, Les Misérables, again in high-definition, with the subwoofer thunderously announcing each musical number. God we had fun.

And we talked, often. Every other day or so since I got back stateside from overseas deployment. We never left anything unsaid, nor took offense at one another, and could share our sometimes very different opinions with one another openly and without repercussion. We never harbored hidden agendas or attempted to gain the advantage over each other, rather sought to fully understand the other's perspective. Often we would call one another just to ask the actor we'd forgotten in a movie, or an ingredient in an upcoming recipe we wanted to make. And my son shares the same love for filmscore my father passed on to me.

I miss the shit out of him already, but am relieved beyond words that I have no regrets, no guilt, and had no missed opportunities to tell him how much I loved him and how much I appreciated him. Everything that is happening now is exactly the kind of thing I would be sharing with him, were I able. He passed away quickly and quietly in his easy chair Monday night.

Dorian and I will be spending Christmas in a hotel in Decatur, TX, just like Sam and Dean Winchester.

Mom arrived home after 12-months in various care facilities. First thing my father does is drive down to the local Wal-Mart pharmacy to get her 21 prescriptions filled.

"Do you want all these filled now?"

"No, just pick out a couple at random to fill. I'll come back again tomorrow and you can pick out a few more."

...

"Yes, please."

HAPPY 70th BIRTHDAY DAD! With only a day's notice, my father drove up from Texas for a surprise visit. My boss in turn let me take a couple of short-notice vacation days for a long-weekend and I sprung into action. You know all those little things you sometimes let go thinking you'll get to them later - like cleaning out the inside of of the microwave oven or wiping down the baseboards? Yeah so I did those things. It was a veritable Spring Cleaning from 0600-1100 and the house looked fantastic - like one of those model homes of a house you can't afford. Dad was surprised at the open floor-plan and vocally pleased with the spaciousness which aided him greatly in feeling welcome and comfortable.

His big thing has always been music and movies & television, and while I have plenty of the former, I'm not really active on the latter. But thanks to Vudu and Netflix, it all turned out just fine. He has this story he tells that I don't recollect about my time in England. While its true that I was snapping up music at an alarming rate there and sending him audio cassettes I recorded on the Teac V3000 (I couldn't afford the Nakamichi Dragon at the time), what I don't recall is the specific tape I sent him which changed his life - the one which included four songs from Les Misérables.

Though he'd seen the new movie twice in theaters, he was quite anxious for me to see it as well. Not wanting to be outdone by a theater, I'd already purchased Vudu's HDX (read 1080p) version, so we began with that. The passive subwoofer never disappoints. And if seeing his grandkids wasn't the highlight of his visit, the movie surely was. But I had far more in store. I'd picked up two, 2-lbs. top sirloin steaks, a dozen ground sirloin patties, and with a head's up from co-worker Westminister Abbey, a bag of Pecan smoking pellets. While all of that was certainly noteworthy, the look on his face when I presented him with a perfect pineapple-upside down cake right from the oven made everything worthwhile. He couldn't stop talking about it.

He also admitted to sleeping better than he had anytime in the past two years. I overheard him telling one of his friends I'd put him in a hyperbaric sleep chamber. While he was here I pulled out my sleeping kit from Saudi Arabia and made up in the office, turning over the master bedroom. The one with the embarrassingly expensive mattress, 600-thread count sheets, dark-painted walls, and blacked out windows. Its also the coolest room in the house when the central air is on, and it has two box fans and a large ceiling fan for white noise generation and air movement. The second night he slept 14-hours.

The next three days were filled with fun, food, music and movies. It was nice visiting with him and enjoying things together. I was so glad he was able to drive up and that he had such a great time. I was also so glad he left the following Monday morning - making everything look easy and effortless is usually anything but. That said, I greatly look forward to his next trip. Perhaps next time with a little more notice :)

The day before I was to visit my folks enroute to a week-long onsite disaster recovery exercise I got the news that my father had fallen and broken his arm. As he required surgery, I postponed my trip for a day. Saturday morning I loaded up the kids in the Land Yacht and we made our way due South. Nearing Texas, I got word that my father's surgery had been postponed due to renal failure - his kidney's had stopped working, and also he'd had a heart attack.

Suffice it to say I was bit unnerved as I texted work that I may have to juggle my professional responsibilities with personal responsibilities if he were to pass away during our disaster recovery exercise - and as our schedule has us on 18-hour days, I let them know that the physical stress of those hours would eventually emotionally compromise me.

When we arrived in Texas I stopped at the hotel across the street and got their largest suite, picked up my mother, took her and the kids to lunch then dropped them off at the hotel so the kids could swim and my mother could sleep - she'd been at it two full days. I drove to the Cardiac ICU and visited with my father for several hours, long enough to get the report that his kidney's were at least functioning again and that after the cath to peek at his arteries the next day they would look at finally setting the radial fracture in his humerus - four days after he broke it. The morphine drip he was on was only enough to keep the edge off. I texted work that my father seemed stable and to disregard my previous text.

I drove back to the hotel where I left the kids in the room to escort my mother back to her car at the hospital. Rather than walk her all the way across the parking lot I told her, "I'll bring the car to you." About ten steps away she asked, "Is GBZ waving from the hotel window?" I looked up and sure enough there was my son, waving. I waved back and yelled to my mother over my shoulder. She took two steps forward while simultaneously craning her head up and to the left, and lost her balance - even with the cane - on the "slight downgrade" carriage entrance of the hotel. I turned just in time to watch my mom faceplant right into the bricks. I had never seen so much blood so fast.

Not only was she just laying there, unmoving, she was moaning terribly. I got her rolled over and was shocked to see that her face was woefully misshapen - as if it were permanently frozen from the disfiguring fall; think Secundus from Stardust. I looked up to see if my son had witnessed it - he had, and now both my kids were in the window, gaping, as was a couple next door to my kids? I ran into the hotel and asked them to dial 911 - I was going to need an ambulance. I ran back out with a handful of paper napkins to clean the blood from her face - it was just a small gash on her chin which had caused it all, and now my mother was talking: She was ready to go home. She wanted me to get her in my car and just take her home. She wanted to go to sleep in her own bed. She was, quite obviously, in no condition to do so. The ambulance arrived approximately sixty seconds later, but not before the window-couple came down with a pillow for my mother's head and an ice-wrapped towel to place around her neck - two things which were quite helpful but which also didn't even cross my mind.

After the paramedics took over (assisted by the Decatur police) I ran upstairs to check on my kids. My daughter had been pretty freaked out over the whole ordeal and had called my wife who, knowing what I was going through with my father, was aghast at how stunningly horrific things were turning out. I took them with me to the ER at the same hospital across the street in which my father was in ICU. My son thought it might be a good idea to bring Grammie's purse - which we did - and which allowed us to register her into ER what with having all her insurance cards and ID contained within. It also seemed to help that I was already in the system as "Next of Kin."

We spent the next several hours traversing between ICU and ER. My father was not pleased with the news, and he knew that my brother was the last capable adult given my work schedule. I texted work that my mother was in ER and would update them later, but that so far I should still be able to make work Monday morning. This was before the CAT scan which revealed my mother's brain was bleeding and that they were ill-equipped for that injury at the small regional facility. They transported her to downtown Fort Worth and my next text to work was equally as ambiguous as to my involvement in Monday's activities.

We went back to the hotel, my kids passed out, and I set aside my two-months of non-drinking to consume six Shiners in short-order to finally calm my raw nerves at the end of that long, long day. I texted work the update on my mother and went to bed not knowing if she were going to even be alive by morning - a very different scenario than the one I had prepared myself for as I neared Texas earlier in the day.

I slept seven hours and remembered I had a Sunday Maintenance Migration twenty minutes before I got the call. A shower, two ibuprofen, two aspirin, and a MONSTER PROTEIN REHAB and I was on top of my game. The nurse at the downtown hospital confirmed my mother was alive and I completed the migration within an hour, woke the kids - they cleaned the entire hotel room of their own accord and without any prompting from me - we ate our complimentary breakfast and checked out, texting work that both my parents were now stable and I would see them Monday.

Straight to ICU where my father had gone to sleep wondering the same thing I did. He was happy about the news and they were prepping him for his cath when we left to see my mother. Downtown Fort Worth was an easy drive from Decatur. She was in Neurological ICU and the kids and I dressed in disposable paper gowns and green latex gloves - I wanted to snap a pic of of us but they frowned on cell phone use. Mom looked FANTASTIC and was lucid. She was mom again and that made everything better. They may release her tomorrow. I passed the reins to my younger brother who will handle all the transportation this week.

The drive to Anna was longer from the other side of the Metroplex but we made it and dropped off my excited kids at their excited friend's house. I hope their enjoyment eclipses the equally stressful couple of days they'd endured with me.

So I'm back in my old stomping grounds, at a hotel behind Chipotle which provided me a quite satisfactory dinner. I am magnificent at compartmentalization, but it too, has a cost - one of which I plan to pay in full right now. And since my day begins onsite at 0600, I'm going to attempt to slumber, and allow my body ample opportunity to shed itself of the stress of this weekend before the stress of the 18-hour days, which may seem like a vacation compared to the last 48 hours. I am certainly looking forward to it at this point.

I've been pondering grief lately, and trying to figure it all out. More specifically, why it occurs.

I understand that grief is the process in which resolution of death occurs, but I'm more interested in the purpose behind why a process is necessary - why can we seemingly not resolve loss without it, and perhaps more importantly, why does it trigger grief?

I can know someone close to me is going to die, but until they do, my grief isn't triggered. I know that I will grieve only after they pass. Why? What has changed? And what is trigged at the act of death which differs from its foreknowledge? This I do not know.

My childhood sweetheart and long-time girlfriend broke up with me once I arrived in Korea for a locked-in, 12-month tour and there was nothing I could do about it. I was devastated, and went through a grieving process despite the fact that she was still alive. And while other friends and family around me have perished since that time, I didn't grieve again at that depth until I lost Daisy.

Daisy was a surprise - I knew she was sick, but I was expecting her to make a full recovery. Recently, in conversations with my clone (who, by definition thinks identically to myself - it really is quite narcissisticly fulfillingly engaging oneself in discussion) I've argued against the unexpectedness of versus the finality of loss. And as my clone (closer in thinking than identical twins) who's experiences differ than my own, I am able to see the future by knowing in advance how I'm going to react to things which haven't occurred in my own life yet. They say no one should know too much about their own future, but I think that's bullshit and in fact have learned that most of what I hear about what one should or should not do usually doesn't apply to me.

Recently, I confided in my father that I was at a time and place in my life where I could spend more time with him, but found myself not doing so, even though I was quite aware I would regret the decision later in life. He nodded in understanding and explained this was life's way of preparing me for death, that spending time in pursuit of my own family has supplanted him and this was how it was supposed to be. While I appreciated his comforting words, it didn't change the fact that I know I will regret not having enjoyed his company to the fullest extent before its too late, nor grieving once he's gone.

Which is what I'd like to avoid.

Knowledge of such a thing in the case of anticipatory loss however, is not a suitable replacement for grief, nor can the trigger for grief be dismantled through logic, and frankly this pisses me off. I'd just as soon not grieve, yet I can't find a way around it. I am after all, despite rumors to the contrary, only human.

But as far as I'm concerned, that's just a crutch, and won't stop me from trying.

Ever vigilant.

I was at my folks this weekend and my mother ran across this picture my father had taken for her in his dorm in 1964 while he was stationed at Sembach Air Base, West Germany (yes, that's her in the frame atop the right speaker). He still has all those same tapes, and they all still sound as if they were recorded yesterday (despite the fact that there were no consumer digital recording devices in 1964) though he now sports a TEAC player run through his Bose Acoustic Wave Machine. My father has always been a music lover, and this was the first home audio equipment I remember growing up. I've posted about the reel-to-reel several times before, and was thrilled to find this picture.

I'd never heard of Michael Giacchino prior to The Incredibles and my hands-down favorite Pixar movie came with an incredible and unexpected gift: A score unlike anything I'd heard in many years. A sound which not only fit the movie perfectly, but was able to capture the spirit of spy films with a fresh, updated sound. Nothing I've heard of his since has touched me the way this score has. When the album was released I'd read how Pixar had tried to get John Barry to score it, and that Michael had simply borrowed from the genre to create his sound.

But how do we really validate that it was a success?

Growing up my father had this double-album by Roland Shaw and His Orchestra - The Return of James Bond in "Diamonds are Forever" and other Secret Agent Themes that I enjoyed throughout every level of my musical development, as it never went out of style (though it does admittedly sound *slightly* dated now). That big band jazz sound playing a plethora of secret agent themes from not only the James Bond movies, but also the popular television shows during the spy heyday never really gets old does it? Knowing my love for this particular album, about a year ago, my father had it converted to MP3:




( Track Listing )

Driving to my folks this weekend for Mother's Day, I slipped the disc in the player. My son asked, "Is this fireplace music?"
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"Fireplace music." He repeated. I was perplexed, so started down my normal path (schpydurx is intimately familiar with this routine...)
"We have a fireplace, son, but there's no music involved." I offered.
"No, is this music for fireplaces?" My eight-year old tries to clarify.
"What makes you ask?"
"It sounds like when you make a fire in the fireplace."

I finally get it. You see, the first track is the worst for the pops associated with needles and records - after that, it smoothes out considerably. His age does not include any information whatsoever about LP's pressed on vinyl; the nearest association was the crackling of wood on the fireplace when I build a fire.

My father played a variety of music while I was growing up, but the majority of it was classical, broadway, and scores. I am no different. We were about halfway through the album when my son asks, "Dad, is this The Incredibles?"

Well done, Mr, Giacchino.

You have been validated.

My father started collecting film music a long time ago. Most of it on 4-track and LP's. The 4-tracks still sound new. When he was serving in Germany, he was excited to have found a record of "Foreign Film Scores" as he could finally broaden his horizons. He eagerly purchased it and brought it back to base. Turns out, because he was in Germany, the "foreign" films turned out to be American films, thus scores he already had.

I grew up with classical, musicals, operas, soundtracks, and scores playing all the time. When I was in grade school, we were allowed to bring in music to share with the class on Friday. My classmates all brought in AC/DC, and KISS. I didn't even know what that was. It all sounded like crap to me. I would bring in something from Rogers & Hammerstein, or the Sherman Brothers. Of course I was also the only one in my class who knew what the William Tell Overture was, and who composed it while my classmates were still referring to it as, "The Lone Ranger."

When I myself was in Germany (building the beginnings of the Tower of Power) I picked up a nice TEAC tape deck for two reasons. One, I couldn't afford the Nakamichi "Dragon" and two, my father's 4-track was a TEAC. (How's that for brand recognition?) CD's were new and I subscribed to a fascinating magazine, "CD Review." This old dude - the editor - was one lively writer, and he loved music. He loved the medium. Every month I would get a 'sampler' CD and voraciously tear into that magazine, reading it from cover to cover. Then I would pull out a good, solid metal-particle tape, and record my father the CD's with Dolby "C" and mail them stateside.

Today, while dropping my kids off there for the weekend, and after my father went to bed (he still works 12-hours a day, 6-days a week) I was pulling some linen down from the closet for my children, when I found his cassettes. They were there with his other media, the records and 4-track tapes, but I don't remember seeing the cassettes there. I started going through them - impressed at the good quality tapes I'd used (anyone remember those hissy 120minute tapes sold in a three-pack at the corner drug store for $.99? Yeah, NOT those) and surprised to find some of my old early 80's tapes as well (I looked for the soundtrack to Ghostbusters but couldn't find it). Anyway, good memories.

Then I remember the Tiburon had a cassette deck in it I've never used.

Dad, I borrowed your Moon Over Parador score (On cassette!) to listen to on the drive home.

Good night and I love you.