No Good Deed Goes Unpunished...

An Update On My Mom...

I was reminded by several people emailing me the other day that I'd not published an update post on my mom's fight with cancer, so here goes:

My mom's cancer turned out to be in her lungs, rib and brain. The doctors went after the lung and brain first, with radiotherapy (a mix of "lite" chemo and radiation) and with the "gamma knife" for the tumor in her brain. (kinda like what Ted Kennedy had done at Duke for his cancer.) She's currently undergoing the "hard" chemo sessions at Sibley Hospital in DC and seems to be doing well. In fact, she's doing so well that her doctors can't hardly believe it. Aside from some thinning hair from the chemotherapy, she seems to be living up to her reputation for being a certifiable force of nature. She walks a few miles every day to keep from getting bored and to walk off extra energy (she's gotta be the only chemo patient I've ever heard of that has "extra energy"). I am constantly amazed at her strength through all this. My dad also ran into some medical issues once he and my mom got over here to this side of the country. He ended up having some congestive issues with his heart and now has a nifty pacemaker/difibrillator combo to keep his heart beating on track. The downside is that it looks like he's got an alien coming out of his chest right above his left pectoral.

So... I'll give more information out as it happens. So far, everything is going well, and I hope it continues to keep going that way.

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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Of late, I've come to realize that there is some truth to the saying that "No good deed goes unpunished." Just this week, I've had multiple reminders of this very phenomenon.

One of my friends, who was molested as a child, was heading home from his work and saw an elderly gentleman struggling to walk through a local strip mall in town. He stopped and asked the guy if he was OK and if he needed any assistance. The guy then proceeded to try to touch and grope my friend and made lewd suggestions as he did so. Because of his past history with this sort of thing, my friend went home, so stressed and freaked out that he was physically sick for the night and has been mentally out of whack since.

Another reminder comes from my partner, who is having a hard time recovering from cancer. Although he's been on "chemo maintenance" for a year now, he's been plagued with a variety of odd infections and sicknesses that have kept him in and out of the hospital now for the last 9 months. His boss dropped a bomb on his desk on Friday in the form of a very negative performance review letter. Usually in the review process, the boss and the employee sit down, chat and go over issues and then they go over a plan for goals for the next year and then, after all that, the boss writes up a performance review letter that details all that they discussed and gives it to the employee. The exact opposite happened this time. There was no meeting, no discussion or goals planning, just a nasty letter filled with snarky, unproven criticisms that (when one reads through the lines) is his way of saying, "You're sick too much, but I can't legally say that or you could sue the company, so I'll just throw in a lot of "out of left field" criticisms that start with the words, "Some people feel..." or "There are those that work here that feel...""

Grow some fuckin' balls! I mean... really! How chickenshit is that?!?!? Some people.... Jesus H. Christ!

Since he can't legally fire him for being sick, he's determined to write him up nebulous bad reviews and try to get him out that way. It's a sad, pathetic way to get rid of someone who's been a wonderful employee for over a decade, just to save on payroll and healthcare costs. But, you know, I'm not all that surprised. Remember... No good deed goes unpunished!


When I think of people like my partner's boss or the creepy guy that my friend tried to be a good samaritan for, I am put to mind of another saying, "Some people are like slinkies, not really good for anything, but you just can't help but smile when someone pushes one down the stairs."


Where my partner, who is an ordained minister, nightly prays to God and holds hope that all will work out for the best, I (being a catastrophically lapsed Catholic) will begin to nightly pray to the God that killed Caine and squashed Sampson that he come out of retirement and get back to work on this pair of bozos."

Surviving the Worst Days Of Your Life...

Some people think that the worst day of their lives will be the one wherein they die. I tend to disagree with that notion, since, for most people, shuffling off this mortal coil will be the easier than falling out of a boat and hitting water. This, of course, discounts those people who fall out of the boat BEFORE they get it into the water, or indeed off the highway. In nearly all of those cases, however, the people are idiots and probably deserve their impromptu meeting with the Grim Reaper.

No, the worst days of your life are the ones that you receive bad news of catastrophic illness, impending death or actual death of the people you love and hold most dear. Those are the days where the world gets pulled out from under you and you're left to twirl.

I had one of the worst days of my life today when I found out that my Mom, the rock of my family, was rushed to the hospital coughing up blood and was diagnosed with a large cancerous mass in her lung.

I got this horrible, awful news as I took the first bite of the weekly lunch special at Bandidos in Hillsborough, NC. It's amazing how "Pollo Whateverthefuckitwaso" can just turn to dust in one's mouth when paired up with news that bad. I had noted as I sat down that all three of my sisters and my mom and dad had called my cell phone multiple times before noon. The first thought to come to mind was, 'Crap! that can't be good. Something's gotta be wrong.'

I tried my eldest sister Dee with no luck, and then my middle sister Kathy, also with no luck, but then was able to get my youngest sister Shelly on her cellphone. She immediately asked me how I was doing and holding up.... and I probably ruined her day when I asked her what in the hell had happened. Shelly was audibly upset to be the one to have to tell me, as she figured that Dad or my other two sisters would have gotten hold of me already.

So, Shelly spilled the beans (honest, no mexican food pun intended!) just as the waitress plunked down my food and I began to absently cut and chew on my "Pollo Whateverthefuckitwaso" and become completely unraveled.

John, of course, quickly realized that it wasn't the food that was causing my eyes to stream and me to blubber and he began to ask what was wrong and beckon frantically for the phone to talk to my sister himself. I waved him off and finished my conversation quickly and then told him what had happened. Being a recent cancer survivor, he immediately went into "Circle the Wagons" mode, and began making plans... none of which I really heard at all because I was so "in my head" at that point that I didn't hear much of anything. I was just in total shock.

I just couldn't believe that the woman who rarely got anything worse than a cold... Janey the Mule... my mom... the woman from whom I had inherited my ever-so appealing, "You got 32 teeth, buddy.... you wanna try for 16?" temperment... the woman who once had picked a man up by his neck and held him there suspended for some long time as she explained the concept of sexual harassment in the workplace after he had smacked her on the ass....This virtual Superman of women, had been laid low by this malignant kryptonite-like growth in her lung.

I got up from the table and calmly walked to the wrong bathroom, then turned around and found the men's room and had a complete and totally silent freak-out for about two minutes. Thankfully through the years I've learned to control my freak-outs, as I'm sure if I'd put voice to my internal scream-fest in the bathroom as I used to when I was younger, the cops would have been called, along with an exorcist and probably some mental health people with a oversize straightjacket.

I got back from lunch and, after informing my coworkers of this news, tried to work through the day. As you might surmise... I didn't get shit done the rest of the day.

I called my Dad and we talked for a while, and he got pretty emotional when he confided in me that the ER doctor at Mesa View Hospital had practically pronounced my mother dead, telling him (my father, Mr. Bill 'Nuclear-sized Overreaction' Kinnik) that my mother didn't have much time left and that because of the kind of disease it was it wouldn't be all that painful. I often am thankful that no instantaneous means of travel has ever been invented because Mesa View would have been accepting applications for a new ER doctor by about 2 pm EST/ 11 am PST after I dropped his ass off one of the high desert buttes in Mesquite, NV.

What in the name of Gay Hell was he thinking?!?!?

What on Earth would possess him, an ER doctor of a diddley-shit 25-bed hospital in a teeny-tiny (albeit beautiful) town with 3 stoplights MAX... to absent-mindedly toss out a judgement call like that about the wife of a 70-plus year old man who has a heart condition and has just come through cancer treatment himself?!??!?!?!? Yeah... he really needs stress like that!

Did this doctor graduate from the Himmler School of Doctor/Patient Relations?!?
So I spent some time telling my father that the doctor was so full of shit that his eyes were brown, and that we didn't know anything til we went to see a pulmonologist and oncologist about this stuff. As I spoke these words of reassurance to my father, I surfed over to the Mesa View Hospital website and found that the president of Mesa View Hospital actually has her home and her office telephone number listed for complaints. Be sure I will avail myself of those tomorrow. Woe betide her and the ER doc after I'm done, is all I can say. It's outrageous!

My sister Kathy called after I got off the phone with my Dad and I proceeded to tell her what Dad and said to me about the doctor, and then she and I discussed Mom's condition like sane adults after we discussed disembowling techniques for stupid, mouthy ER doctors with absolutely no bedside manner.

It was at during this phone call that I realized that Battlestar Galactica is a brilliantly written show. I realize that is sort of random, but as I heard my sister's voice break and fill with emotion and I remembered how my upset my Dad sounded on the phone just moments before, I felt my own emotions begin to run high again and three words from a Battlestar Galactica episode from a few weeks ago popped into my mind completely from out of the blue:

"Sine Qua Non"

"Sine Qua Non", from the Latin, it translates to "without which not" or, as Mr. Romo Lampkin the Galactica lawyer so astutely says, "those things we deem essential, without which we cannot bear living, without which life loses its specific value, and becomes abstract." I realized then that my mother is one of those things for me, for my sisters and for my Dad, "Sine Qua Non."

After I realized that, I began to mentally make a list of the other people and things that qualify as "Sine Qua Non" at this moment in my life, and quickly realized that this makes for a completely depressing exercise that is, like a broken pencil, utterly pointless. It's also an exercise that I don't hesistate not to recommend.

I pushed out of my mind all of that maudlin crap just in time to hear my sister give her own doom and gloom prediction for our Mom's health and came to the conclusion, as I had done before when John was diagnosed with lymphoma, that all the medical statistics and studies on life expectancy in the world mean exactly jack shit to me, and though it's important to know the odds, it's just as important to know that those figures are just "odds" and that they can be beaten.

I realized that it's game-on time, and my family needs to shelve our doubts and concerns right next to the odds and the doctor's statistics and come and rally behind Mom and become her own personal cheering and motivation group. Mom needs to go into this with her head held high and her family at her back because whether she knows it or not, she's just sat down at the biggest poker game ever! And it's no time to leave her poker face at home... It's no time to play to break-even... It's time to go all-in and play to win!

Since moving to NV a few year back, my Mom has shown herself to be quite the winner when it comes to gambling and regularly cleans-up at the local casinos. Though this game isn't her usual nickel slots and has much higher stakes, I'd like to think her luck's gonna hold and that she's gonna beat the odds.

So yeah, it was one of the worst days of my life... but you know what? It's now past 12:00 am, and that day is now officially over. It's past and I think it's time to make this day a really good day... for my Mom, for my sisters, for John, and for everyone else that I deem "Sine Qua Non".

Cheers!

The First 20 Pounds...

When I was a kid, my parents and I used to go to the flea market that was held in the Latrobe Drive-In theatre. I used to go there and spend my allowance (or more) on such wonderful used treasures as old MAD, CRACKED or CRAZY magazines. On one such occasion I came across an "ancient" MAD from the 60s (yeah, that was ancient to me back then.) Inside was a poem about dieting that I can still recall perfectly, even today, some 25 plus years later. It was split into two paragraphs, both had a different shape. The first paragraph was shaped almost like an oval, and the second one was a tall, thin justified box shape, and the poem went like this:

When I started
my diet I had me a
plan, to cut down my weight
and to get me a man. So I ignored
all my cravings for ice cream and cake
and dogged through the days
when my belly would ache.


Now my
flabby
old fat
is the
thing that
I miss...
...cause I
ended up
looking
exactly
like this.

During my life, I've never not been overweight, and so reading this poem always made me laugh out loud, as the ridiculousness of someone being angry about being skinny was just too much for me, as fat kid, not to find terribly amusing. I've come to realize, especially after coming to grips with my sexuality, that being overweight sucks, it's not healthy; it can cause all sorts of other sucky things, like sleep apnea, high blood pressure, etc. And being gay and overweight, well that's almost a mortal sin in the eyes of the gay community.

Now, I'm not saying that all gay men are shallow, judgemental, body-centric piss-elegant queens, because that would be a rude generalization of my queer peers. It's more like 97.5% of them are shallow, judgemental, body-centric piss-elegant queens, in my opinion. The rest are either chubby chasers who are into chubby guys or are fat like me and so they're about as screwed as I am in these days of the Aberzombie and Felch crowd.

Since I was very young, I've always wanted to have a nice thin body. I've always wanted to be able to look down and see a flat plane from my chest to my ankles (with of course, *ahem* one somewhat large protrusion *ahem* about mid-way down.)
This dream of slimness however, was not to be. Though I spent hours of my summers swimming, playing running, jumping, climbing, and everything else that I could do in Western PA, I was always kinda chubby and the weight never came off.

When I was a senior in High School, I joined Nutri-System and lost about 65 lbs, which, although was a goodly amount of weight, was about half of what I needed to lose at the time. (and I suspect that most of the weight that I lost at that time was a combination of fat and muscle.)

After I stopped eating the food, however, the weight came back, mostly during my freshman year at college. I discovered that the "Freshman 15" was a bit of a myth, as I packed on some 30-40 lbs during my first year in college. Fifteen would have been a blessing compared to that.

During the fall of my sophmore year, my folks and I talked and we decided that perhaps I should try Jenny Craig, so for the next year, I religiously followed the Jenny Craig foodplan... and it worked well. I went from 270 lbs to 205 lbs. (I remember that I never was able to break below 200 lbs, no matter how much I tried.)

As if a life-changing diet isn't enough for a 19 year old guy, I was in the midst of discovering my sexuality, which was a bit of a trial for me, especially when my freshman year roommates decided to put a bug in my sophmore year roommate's ear that they believed I was gay. My sophomore year roommate, a redneck from Maine, who is now a redneck lawyer from Maine, processed this rather poisonous news and proceeded to make my sophmore year a living hell for me, culminating in me moving out over Christmas break. It was a sucky time for me, but, on the bright side, that kind of severe depression can sometimes lead to some RIGHTEOUS weight-loss!

After I went on maintenance with Jenny, the weight stayed off for some time, but slowly came back during my junior and senior years. After I graduated and got a job, I found that one's first job can be somewhat dietetic, as employers hire cheap and you sometimes go hungry if you want to make ends meet. I was also biking from my lovely group house on S Street to Georgetown each day to go to and from work, so I had calves like iron and was able to keep my weight down pretty well.

That all ended when my then-newish boyfriend John got a call from his previous employers asking him to come to North Carolina and work for them again. We moved down here together, him to his new job, and me to a computer services and custom printing coordinator position similar to what I left in DC with Kinko's. I tried to bike once after we moved here, biking to Franklin Street from Southern Village, and found that if the Everest-like hill between Southern Village and Franklin Street wasn't enough to kill me, the psychotic drivers that had a penchant for "nudging" unsuspecting bikers off the road as they flew by at 50 mph would certainly be happy to finish the job.

So, as my iron-like calves began to rust, and my waist size began to increase in direct proportion to my salary and love for North Carolina barbecue, John and I decided to join the local gym (which was a much nicer hell-hole than it is today, now that it's been sold twice over and has yet to be remodeled or fixed up.)

However, when my weight began to touch 300 lbs in 2000, I decided to try something else. My work was offering discounted "Weight Watchers" classes, and both my partner and I decided to put our chins (several of them) to the grindstone and start losing weight... and we did. I got back down to a 38 waist, and my partner lost so much weight that he had to jump around in the shower to get wet.

Again, this success was fleeting. By 2004, my weight had shot up to over 340 lbs, and this time, because I was no longer a spring chicken, it had brought up my blood pressure with it. They call high blood pressure the silent killer, well, it's true. I never knew my blood pressure was excessively high until I went in for a doctor's visit in 2004 and, after the nurse had to go forage for an extra large "thigh cuff" to fit around my rather huge arm, she pointed out that my blood pressure, at 160/120 was not so good. Having gotten a degree in exercise and sport science, I tried not to say, "Uhhh... DUHHHHH!", but it was something that scared me. My doctor started me on some meds to bring it down and insisted it was weight and some "white coat hypertension", meaning I am a bit anxious around doctors, so my blood pressure tends to skyrocket around them.

In 2007, I had nearly the same blood pressure and had decided that, maybe 3 years into the same meds, that he needed to try something else. Having spent some time reading up on blood pressure issues for this very reason, I suggested he try me on some ace inhibitors, as he'd only been trying beta blockers on me until that point. He was hesistant at first, but then prescribed both a cheap generic ace-inhibitor and a water pill to see what it would do for me.

I think that was the start of something. Since then, my blood pressure has been 128/84 (give or take a point or two, but not much more) and I've been feeling remarkably better. My partner and I have also decided to go back on the wagon. This time, we were lured back to NutriSystem for two good reasons... (1) It's cheaper for us to buy NS food than it is to cook or go out, and (2) We're kinda lazy, and having pre-proportioned foodstuffs in the house is really awesome!

Since joining a month ago, I've lost 24 lbs. I didn't notice that I'd lost it, actually, because let's face it, I was 365lbs when I started and 24 lbs doesn't even begin to put a dent in that amount of fat (or so I thought.)

Although NutriSystem food is pretty good, we cheat every now and again, and go off the diet and have dinner out at a restaurant. Usually it's for something we've been craving, and usually it's not anything that's really dietetically terrible for us.

Last week we had dinner out at Mami Nori's Peruvian Chicken in Durham with our former neighbor Susan. Susan is an amazing woman who unfortunately got the cold damp, fuzzy end of the lollipop in her divorce and child custody battle last year with her... uhh...ex-(I don't want upset her if she were to read this blog post by trashing that heartless, cheating *insert multiple descriptive epithets here*, who is unfortunately also the XY chromosome provider for her two absolutely wonderful boys, they got all the good genes from her, of course.) In a sad turn of events early this year, she had to move away from our neighborhood to cheaper diggs on the other side of town.

Well, Susan showed up at the restaurant and grinned at me and the first thing she said, "Wow... do you look amazing! You've lost so much weight."

*pause* *SMILE*

Yeah... Weight loss is hard and it really sucks, like the first part of that MAD poem says, but Susan's words at that restaurant made it all totally worth it!

And you know what, this is only the first 20 or so pounds so I'm just gettin' started! I am going to keep with it and see if I can get under 200 lbs this time, and you know what, if I get close, I'm going to get some nip/tucking done because I can afford it and then I won't look like someone let the air out of me like a balloon, or like Peter Griffin from that episode of Family Guy where he wishes all his bones away and becomes an amorphous blob.

This time, I'm gonna make more of an effort to keep it off because (tho I don't like to admit it) I'm not gettin' any younger and I don't want to have to go through the whole "heart attack/bypass" thing my dad went through when he was in his 40s.

But let me tell you something, if I ever get so thin that I look like that second part of the poem, I can GUARANTEE that you won't hear me bitchin' about it!

The Gay Art Monkey? What the hell is that?

"What the hell is a Gay Art Monkey?" This is probably the first question I will have to address in my blog. I heard the term "Art Monkey" applied to myself and my co-workers about 9 years ago when I started working for an adult video direct mail company. I dunno who first coined it, but it basically is any graphic designer who is part of a marketing team, but yet has little to no control over the art that he or she produces.

As a single member of a creative team, sometimes one has to bow to the wishes of the majority, and thus what a seasoned graphic artist would deem "a good design" is then sent through what the author of the book, "Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Ads, Second Edition", termed as the "Koncept Krusher 2000", wherein it is smashed and diluted and generally niggled to near death, until the resulting design is a tepid, gangly awkward abomination that bears little resemblance to the original great artistic idea that was eventually (horribly painfully) destroyed in its creation.

When I first joined my current company, this "artistic castration by committee" was a day-to-day occurrence, and I got to see some really cool ideas and concepts get beaten to death faster than a poorly performing pitbull at Michael Vick's house. Over the last few years however, either my ideas have conformed more to the box that the teams I work with like to think inside, or my intonation of "artist prerogative" in regards to drastic design changes to my art has finally landed with them, and they've realized that there's only so much "koncept krushing" I'll tolerate.

So, for the first few years, I was an Art Monkey. My parents find it greatly amusing and somewhat ironic that, as a gay man, I go to work and pour through thousands of str8 XXX movie pictures each week in my attempt to throw together catalogs, flyers, order cards and other mailing pieces to appeal to horny str8 men in their mid-20 to their mid-70s. They found the term "Gay Art Monkey" equally entertaining in its explanation.

I've come to believe my parents are finding out that kharma is a very real thing, and that all the grief and shit my three sisters and I gave them growing up is now coming back to bite us all on the ass. Two of my sisters have children, which are the living embodiment of the kharmic comeback, and my other sister has two cats and a husband that we secretly refer to as "Princess." I won't go into that much further but to say that if you knew her (and him), the kharmic smackdown she's getting would be pretty obvious.

Me? I get my kharma back by having to look at pictures of some of the worst god-awful boob jobs since women started going under the knife, gaping pussy lips, man-foam facials, girls that are more hirsute than most artists' renderings of the elusive sasquatch, and other sexual positions and variations that would make most gay men cringe and throw up into their mouths on a regular basis. Although after 9 years of somewhat desensitizing myself to most of the stuff I see, I can honestly say that I enjoy my job, though I probably could have seen the irony baseball bat swingin' at my head on my 5th day of employment, when my co-workers snapped a delightful polaroid shot of a porn star named Carly Sparks giving me a pair of "mickey mouse ears" from behind... with her boobs.

My father asked if I could send him a color copy of that picture. He believes seeing it will be the proudest moment of his life. Yeah. Kharma's a bitch.