Jay Furr's Dreamwidth Blog

Happy birthday, Flit

2025-11-26T15:56:14Z

Happy birthday, flit

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Y2K, 25 Years Later

2025-01-01T01:37:25Z

Twenty-five years ago tonight. Y2K. I was working as a technical trainer at a software company (the same one I’m working for today, in fact, just under another name). Our workforce had been divided into four groups — people who would work 8 pm to 8 am Tuesday through Thursday, people who would work 8 pm to 8 am Friday through Monday, and two more groups who would do the daytime equivalents. I asked to be on the group that would be on duty at midnight on Y2K proper because I wanted to be able to say “I was there when…”

However, I was the only person on duty in my building; most of the programming engineers and analysts were in the main building or the other satellite building and I was based in the building that was shared with accounting and other ancillary services. The accountants and such were all home in bed since they really couldn’t contribute anything if Y2K problems actually did occur.

Amusingly, the company did a test startup of our emergency generator at the main building on the afternoon of December 31 — and it blew up/caught on fire. So much for preparedness.

Carole was on duty at the Vermont Symphony Orchestra operations at First Night Burlington until 10 or 11 pm or so, but she came down to visit me as midnight approached. We shared a bottle of sparkling cider and did our own little countdown, wondering if the lights were suddenly going to go out or, well, SOMETHING.

Nothing did happen.

At all.

She went home and I spent the rest of the night web surfing and periodically standing up to restore circulation to my butt and otherwise contributing absolutely nothing to the wellbeing of humanity.

As it all turned out, maybe one or two of our customers had issues that night, and all of said issues were in third party software that interfaced with ours; our software had no issues whatsoever.

After about three days of 12-on/12-off shifts with nothing happening, the company quietly said “Never mind, go back to doing what you were doing” and we all returned to normal shifts.

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Join me in the fight against breast cancer!

2024-05-16T19:09:52Z

Dear Friends,

I am thrilled to share with you my commitment to once again participate in the New England Susan G Komen 3-Day walk (August 23-25) in 2023, embarking on a journey of sixty miles over three days to support the fight against breast cancer. For me, this isn’t just another walk; it’s a heartfelt mission that I’ve been dedicated to since 2008.

Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of participating in 37 Komen 3-Day walks, standing in solidarity with those affected by breast cancer. From being a part of the support crew 14 times to walking 23 times, every step has been fueled by the hope for a future free from this disease.

Together, we’ve accomplished so much. Through your generosity and support, I’ve been able to raise a lifetime total of $65,500.11 towards breast cancer research, education, and patient support. But our journey doesn’t end here. There’s still much more work to be done, and I need your help to make an even greater impact.

Your contribution, no matter the size, can make a difference. It can fund critical research breakthroughs, provide support to those battling breast cancer, and spread awareness about early detection and prevention. With your support, we can bring hope to countless lives and move one step closer to a world without breast cancer.

Will you join me in this important cause? Together, let’s walk towards a future where breast cancer is no longer a threat. Your support means the world to me and to everyone affected by this disease.

Thank you for standing by my side in this fight.

With gratitude,

Jay Furr

You can donate here: https://www.the3day.org/goto/jayfurr

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Frontiers of Medicine, Part 728

2024-05-15T17:56:34Z

I’m 56 — but yesterday a dental technician from Russia told me I looked MUCH younger and didn’t believe me until I showed her my drivers license.

I took that with a massive grain of salt inasmuch as she also shared with me that two standard Russian cures for anemia are:

drive a rusty nail into an apple and let the apple “suck up” all the iron, then eat the apple

drink ox’s blood

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jayfurr @ 2024-05-10T19:38:00

2024-05-10T19:38:57Z

I’m a town delegate to the Vermont Democratic Convention next weekend. We will be, among other things, electing our delegates to the national convention. People have to file to be state delegate candidates and we vote next weekend. (Regardless of how the votes come out, the slate must be gender-balanced and so on, so it’s possible for someone to not finish in the top X and still wind up a delegate.) I was warned that I’d be getting emails from delegate candidates in advance of the event and the tidal wave is beginning to commence.

I’m reasonably pleased that so far no one who’s written me has come across as deranged. It’s more boring that way, but the reason I post is because I’m quite sure that were I a delegate to the state Republican convention there’d be a race to the bottom to see just how deranged each candidate emailing could be.

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The Sorry State of Sex Education in the USA

2024-04-22T18:34:31Z

When I was 22 or so, my mother noted reddened areas on the backs of my arms which I explained were rug burns (the result of extensive fooling around in my girlfriend’s individual office) and looked at me and said “Joel, do you know how to get a girl pregnant?”

I said “Yes.”

She said “Don’t.”

And that was the entirety of my “birds and bees” lecture.

In my school system — in a college town located in a rural area — only female students got sex ed. Males did not. My mother, in fact, paid for my sisters to take a private sex ed course offered through an external organization, probably because what little the school system proper offered was hopelessly out of date. My school health textbooks had been published during the Eisenhower administration and we were using them in 1983.

And even with such a minimal exposure to biological reproductive concepts, I was probably still better off than most students who are home schooled or who attend school in states whose education systems are controlled by the local theocracy. In many cases, what is taught is blatantly wrong (“Birth control causes cancer”, and so on).

Did you know that only *18* states actually require sex ed to be medically accurate?

https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/sex-and-hiv-education

From time to time I find myself thinking how grateful I am that Carole and I don’t have children. We are rapidly heading toward the world depicted in Idiocracy.

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Hot Tubbing With The Russians

2024-04-17T20:28:11Z

Little things that pop into one’s head unbidden department: the heavyset Russian guy with the diamond pinky rings who wound up sharing a hot tub with us on our first (Western Caribbean) cruise in 2004. He did not appear to speak any English and we certainly didn’t speak Russian and we didn’t know him from Adam’s off ox, but he pointed at another guy standing attentively nearby (we thought of him as “the minion”) and made a circling motion in the air taking in everyone in the hot tub, and sent the guy off for drinks. I don’t recall what the drinks turned out to be; I mean, classically one would have expected double shots of vodka but it was probably something more Caribbean-y.

Neither Carole nor I had any idea if we were supposed to return the favor and get the next round, so we didn’t, and that appears to have been the correct course of action. Perhaps he would have been insulted if we’d tried to match his largesse. In any event, we raised our glasses to him and smiled appreciatively and he nodded back at us, and that was the extent of it.

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17 years. I remember.

2024-04-16T20:20:21Z

Feeling rather somber today. 17 years ago today a severely mentally ill Virginia Tech student murdered 28 students and four instructors, to say nothing of wounding many more. At the time, this captured the nation’s attention and indeed the attention of the world. All the major networks sent their anchors to Blacksburg to report. Universities across the country sent giant condolence cards. The New York Yankees, of all people, came to Blacksburg to play a charity game against the Virginia Tech baseball team. President George W. Bush came to the memorial ceremony which was broadcast live.

And yet today, hardly anyone remembers unless they’re somehow associated with the Virginia Tech community. We’ve become so inured to constant mass murder that nothing fazes us anymore.

Many of us, including me, hoped that the lives of the murdered 32 would not have been in vain, that we would learn from what happened and take steps that it never happen again.

It appears that no one learned a thing… except for the sobering fact that at the end of the day, lives simply don’t matter to a huge percentage of our society.

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Major depression update, March 2024

2024-03-25T23:41:54Z

Random thoughts about depression:

I suffer from major depression. I have for most of my life, dating back to middle school at the very least.

Depression causes me to have difficulty doing things I need to do. I procrastinate significantly more and I don’t have the energy to do things I enjoy.

Something a lot of people don’t understand about depression — it’s not necessarily (or at all) linked to “feeling bad about something”, though one hallmark of major depression is that one’s brain goes looking for things to be depressed about and then points to those things as the “cause” du jour. Depression is an expression of biochemistry, life experience, stress, and so on.

I imagine that I would probably have been very depressed even if I had led the absolute perfect life. My father had undiagnosed major depression. My mom’s mom was institutionalized for most of her life due to symptoms that sound an awful lot like major depression. (The state of medical care in rural Florida was not always what one would have liked it to have been.) You can’t ignore the role genetics plays in mental health.

What helps? Talk therapy (working with counselors) does not really help me. Medicine helps somewhat, but is not helping much with my latest bout of black moods. I’ve gone through extensive DBT (dialectial behavior therapy) training and am familiar with skills like radical acceptance, distress tolerance, and emotion regulation. It’s just that sometimes those skills can only do so much.

I would probably feel better if I started getting intense regular exercise. I’ve been pretty sessile for the last year — partly because of my having been chair of my local Selectboard and always had things to do (and had a lot of stress as well), partly because it rained nonstop last summer, and partly because I made a ton of excuses all fall and winter. I have hopes that as the weather continues to warm I’ll find it easier to get outdoors and get going for walks again.

I’m heading to Bermuda on Saturday for a week’s vacation and am, unfortunately, stressing about that. Our flight leaves BTV at 5:20 am — that’s leaves, not boards. Carole is not a morning person to begin with and will probably have been up late Friday night packing (she has depression too and she’s terrible at tasks that require organizational skills like, oh, packing). Once we’re actually on the plane and in the air heading to our connection in Charlotte, I expect I’ll feel better.

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STOP

2024-03-04T14:20:39Z

At some point, in a bout of what turned out to be utter foolishness, I gave my cell phone number to ActBlue, which promptly resold it or shared it with every Democratic candidate from the candidate for the Billings, Montana dog-catcher race to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. I get at least one text every day asking for donations from various candidates (or, to put it another way, from whichever fundraising firm they’ve hired), and some days it’s more on the order of four or five.

I reflexively type “STOP” and send it off every time, and these do get acknowledged — that particular campaign won’t text me again. But it has no effect on the glut of other texts from other campaigns.

(I looked on the ActBlue site to see if there was an option to turn off the flood and other than deleting my account, there wasn’t — and deleting my account had no effect whatsoever on the volume.)

Until now, the texts have always been from moderate-to-liberal candidates. However, this weekend I got a text from the Nikki Haley campaign, formatted and styled just like all the texts from the Democrats.

I think it’s about to be time to change phone numbers. Imagine the hell I’d wind up in if the number finds its way next to Donald Trump.

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Talking To Myself

2024-02-08T22:22:42Z

People are complicated.

People do stupid things.

People do mean, hurtful things, often without meaning to.

Sometimes people do mean, hurtful things … and meant to. But later on, realize how mean their actions were, and either feel shame, or claim they didn’t do any such thing, or both.

I don’t know that anyone in particular will want to read what I have to say here, but I’m going to say it anyway, mostly for the sake of getting my feelings out in an organized fashion. Should you happen to read on, have a little pity on me. I know I’m an asshole.

Carole and I have been together for a long time. Since late 1995, in fact.

In all that time, we’ve had our share of fights. Sometimes they’ve been pretty bad. Sometimes they’ve been amazingly bad.

A lot of the time our fights are sparked by Carole doing something just plain unbelievably petty and then doubling down on it rather than admitting that her actions might have been hurtful.

Yes, that sounds awfully self-serving of me to say that, right? Everything’s the other person’s fault.

I have many flaws. I can be very needy for attention (in fact, that’s almost my defining characteristic), I’ve got a truly annoying sense of humor, and I can sometimes say and do things that aren’t, um, well thought out … and that I’d almost immediately like to have back.

But on the other hand, I think I’m pretty damn good at saying “I was wrong.” And I like to think that I’m a helpful, supportive person who does try to treat other people the way I’d like to be treated.

So when I say that most of our fights are the result of Carole being over-the-top nasty and then refusing to back down, say she was sorry, or, well, do anything to indicate regret, I’m not actually kidding or exaggerrating.

Carole has a problem with narcissism.

She’s not hyper-narcissistic like your acquaintance with the perm and the flashy clothes and the me-me-me attitude.

She’s narcissistic like the person you know who wants an elaborate birthday party every year, but never buys anyone else a gift. She’s narcissistic like the person you know who absolutely flips out when they think someone’s criticizing them. She’s narcissistic like the person who wouldn’t think twice about hogging more than her share of a plate of cookies even if it meant that someone else didn’t get any. She simply doesn’t seem to understand that other people have feelings and rights too.

Cases in point:

Carole insisted on buying me an ice cream cake for my birthday one year, even though ice cream cakes aren’t something I look forward to and don’t generally want. I went out of town for work the day after my birthday, having gotten to have one piece of said ice cream cake. When I returned four days later, the cake was gone. Carole’d eaten the whole thing and justified it by saying “Jay doesn’t really appreciate ice cream cakes, and I do, I’ll enjoy it much more than he would, that makes it okay.”

On Christmas Day 1996, when we’d been together about a year and were living together in an apartment in Durham, NC, Carole looked up after we’d gotten done exchanging gifts and asked me if I wouldn’t mind just going out and driving around for a few hours so she could have the apartment to herself. Our two-bedroom apartment. That I needed to vacate entirely so she could have it to herself. On Christmas.

We used to have to drive to the library to look words up in the unabridged dictionary (this was before we owned one, and before the Internet made owning one more or less unnecessary) because Carole would insist that a word I’d used in a particular context didn’t mean “that” at all, and that her preferred definition of the word was the “true” definition. Yes, that sounds batshit insane, doesn’t it? But it happened. We’d go to the library, look the word up, and every single time my definition would be the first or second listed and hers, if it was listed at all, was well down on the list. And even then she’d double down and say that the dictionary was not up to date with current usage. She simply could not be wrong.

Carole always wants a ton of gifts for Christmas and her birthday and so on. She sees no need to get me anything at all. Most years, if I get a birthday cake, it’s because I ordered it myself or basically walked her to the keyboard and brought up the website where she could order a cake from the local bakery. I came to accept this pretty early on — birthdays were pretty grim in my family of origin as well (I’d get gifts, but then I’d get the same emotional browbeating from my father that I got the other 364 days of the year), and so it really wasn’t that weird for the birthdays-don’t-mean-anything thing to continue into my married life.But for my fiftieth birthday, in 2017, I told her “just this once, it’d be nice to actually celebrate my birthday and get to feel special somehow.” And she told me over and over as the summer wore on that she had all kinds of plans and that she knew how important the occasion was to me. And I told her “thanks. I just wanted to make sure that you knew that this really is important to me, just this one time, that I get to have a real birthday.” And she’d say “I know, I know, I’m so sorry for all the years I did nothing, this year will be different. I promise.” Come the day — I got: a cake she ordered at the last minute. And nothing else.

Carole is almost always late to things. And the reason she gives for being late is that she doesn’t want to have to wait for other people to get there; it would be wrong if Carole were there ten minutes early, or even on time, if other people are going to be late arriving. Waiting is for other people. They can wait for her.

Carole grew up smart as a whip, but with very poor social skills. Unfortunately, rather than learning how to get along with other kids, Carole took the attitude that they were just mean and nasty and selfish and so on and so on, and that her failure to fit in was their fault… a belief encouraged by her mother, who told Carole the other kids were just “envious”. Carole didn’t really date until college because, even though she was very pretty, no one in her school could stand her. She started dating at Harvard, but did some flat out appalling things, like stringing a guy along so he’d take her out for her birthday and then, immediately afterwards, breaking up with him. She had one long-term boyfriend but fucked that up by demanding an open relationship so she could, um, “enjoy” more guys, believing that his grudging consent meant there wouldn’t be any negative consequences. There were: she lost him for good.

Going to Harvard was, in a sense, part of the problem. It was very important to her that she was smarter than other people… that she’d gone to Harvard and they hadn’t. She had a bad grandiosity complex: she could disregard the thoughts and opinions of other people because they hadn’t gone to Harvard.

She liked to rub my nose in the fact that I’d gone to a “cow college” — the University of Georgia. (Which, frankly, wasn’t that awesome a school when I went there; it became much more selective after my time.) There was one absolutely hilarious (in hindsight) episode that happened after we’d been together a few months — she referenced the “chocolate cream soldier” from Shaw’s Arms and the Man and told me that the fact that I wasn’t familiar with it meant that I was a cultural lowbrow and not in her league. I simply hadn’t read that play, but I’d read plenty of others that she hadn’t. Somehow, though, that got me no credit.

But over time, it slowly dawned on Carole that I wasn’t a lowbrow, that I was actually pretty damn smart. And had a very wide “net” and knew a lot about a lot of things. And this all led to one of the core problems in our marriage: Carole eventually realized that I’m at least as smart as she is, and a hell of a lot smarter in certain areas… and she’s never forgiven me for that.

She’s smarter than I am in certain areas and she’s certainly more talented than me at applied math, music, mechanical aptitude (she’s the one who performs household repairs; I cook). But her whole self-image and concept of self worth was based for a long time (and to a large extent still is) on her being smarter/better than everyone else. And she hates to the nth degree — I mean hates hates hates — that she can’t be superior to me.

For my part, I’ve never sought to be superior to my spouse. I just want to get along and have each person contribute what they can to the success of the marriage. Marriage isn’t supposed to be some weird zero-sum game where one person’s gain is the other person’s loss. My being smart doesn’t mean Carole’s dumb.

But Carole doesn’t see it that way. She has an unfortunate need to tear me down, to humiliate me, to embarrass me, to deflate me. And she likes to do this in public when she’s got an audience and she’s, therefore, safe from anything I might do back, like angrily retorting or losing my temper.

Yes, yes, I know. Why the hell do you stay married to someone like that?

Yes, this is the woman I’m married to that I’m talking about. Yes, we have a very dysfunctional marriage. Yes, I know it seems very very weird for a husband to spend this much time cataloging his spouse’s deficiencies. Humor me.

Carole has a second problem on top of the narcissism: disassociation. I’m not saying that she has multiple personalities, but she definitely has multiple ego states. When she is tired, low on caffeine, overstimulated, overheated, or otherwise having to dedicate a significant amount of her CPU to physical, external factors, she can be mean, nasty, and spiteful as the day is long. When Carole is not tired/overstimulated/overheated/cranky/etcetera, she can be very good company and that’s when I enjoy being with her. And she’s that person enough of the time that I stay married to her.

But it is like being married to Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde.

Carole can absolutely forget something bastardly that she did in her Cranky Bitch ego state; it may take an hour, it may take a day, but before you know it, references to the unfortunate incident will be met with “that never happened”. Sometimes it doesn’t even take an hour: if something had really severe, sudden, hugely embarrassing consequences she can blank it out within a few minutes or at the very least rewrite the scenario so she was utterly blameless and the other person was completely at fault.

Her emotional memory is tied to the ego state she was in, e.g. “things done while cranky are not remembered when one is not cranky.”

Is Carole aware of all this? Or is this just all in my head?

Carole does know that she’s got a bad narcissistic streak.

Carole does know that she disassociates.

Carole does know that she absolutely flips out when someone, especially me, criticizes her.

Carole does know that she has tremendous problems with empathy, with being able to see her actions from another person’s point of view, with being able to understand/care about someone else’s feelings.

The problem is that thinking about her flaws leaves her feeling shamed and devastated and basically in a mental fetal position… so she tries to avoid that by never thinking about them.

She sees a therapist regularly — but to the best of my knowledge, never discusses her narcissism and disassociation. In theory, she sees him to try to get help with her obsessive tendency to play computer games at work (Sudoku, KenKen, crosswords, 2048, that kind of thing), but in practice, it sounds like a lot of her sessions consist of her irritably venting about whatever I’ve done lately. She can tell me “I really need to work with therapist on actual problem” and if I casually ask, later on, if she did bring that topic up, the answer is almost without exception, “no.”

She can’t bear the shame of admitting flaws.

We’ve tried couples counseling a few times over the years. It never, ever works. Sessions will start off agreeably enough, it’s true, but as soon as an actual topic of conflict comes up and we each share our points of view on the topic, Carole gets hyperdefensive. She starts saying that she flat out doesn’t remember doing whatever it is I’m trying to discuss that week. And the therapist will assume it’s a typical matter of he-said/she-said and that we’re both somewhat wrong… but I’ll keep going, citing more and more details, until suddenly, Carole goes “oh, fuck, yes. Now I remember what you’re talking about. Yes, I did that.” And then the tears start to flow, and she essentially curls up into a ball. One of our therapists, seeing this week after week, suggested she get some sort of neurological workup done — it was that out there.

Disassociation.

And that’s why things never get better. Carole simply can’t bear the shame of having flaws, of being “guilty”, so she just scrubs her negative acts and behavior out of her mind, and focuses instead on tearing me down to make herself feel better.

There was a period a few years ago when Carole’s addictive behavior (yes, there actually is such a thing as computer gaming addiction) was really out of control. She’d lost yet another job (Carole has had a lot of jobs over the years and has lost most of them by just being staggeringly unproductive due to her addiction) and spent her time sitting around all day at the house doing crossword puzzles and basically no household chores, leaving those for me to do when I came back each weekend from whichever work trip I’d been away on. I would express disappointment with how little she’d done and how she hadn’t applied for jobs, hadn’t done any chores, hadn’t done pretty much anything while I’d been gone. This led to a lot of arguments and shouting matches.

And so Carole decided the best way to handle this was to go to church each Sunday and spend twenty minutes (or more) standing in the back of the sanctuary after the service was over, telling some sympathetic acquaintances of how awful and horrible I’d been that week.

Addicts do that kind of thing. Blaming others, refusing to take any responsibility for their own actions. Add in a solid dose of I’m-perfect-and-you’re-trying-to-tear-me-down narcissism, and on top of that add disassociative thinking that literally blocks out anything Carole might have done, and she was able to, week after week, essentially depict me as the Antichrist.

That period of our marriage really sucked.

Because, think about it: what could I do? Storm in while she was in mid-rant and tell her to stop lying and to come on and get in the car? That certainly wouldn’t have led her audience to believe all her stories about how controlling and mean and nasty and awful I was.

I did the only thing I could do: I sat on a bench in the narthex, outside the sanctuary, and gave her her space, even though I knew what she was doing. And I’d wait and wait and eventually realize she wasn’t going to stop of her own accord — so I’d drift back into the sanctuary and sit on the other side of the room, visible, but not in her immediate proximity, just calmly waiting. And even then she usually wouldn’t wind down. I got to hear all sorts of stuff about how awful I was, got to hear her absolutely tearing strips off me, while basically not having any opportunity to defend myself.

(I eventually came to refer to these sessions as the “Five Minute Hate”, having forgotten that in 1984 they were actually Two Minute Hates. But they had as much connection with reality — as in, “We have always been at war with Eastasia” — as the ones in the book.)

This eventually led to me being kicked out of said church when one particular Sunday I did go over to say “Okay, come on, stop, enough” and another woman — one of Carole’s regular confidants — flipped out, assumed that Mister Abusive Husband was storming over to do some more Abusing, and started shouting for others to come help, to call the police, etcetera.

I retreated, dumbfounded. Carole eventually came out to the car and said that she hadn’t asked her to do that.

But over the next week said confidant ranted extensively on Facebook about how horrible I was and how I had to be expelled from the church. This led to the pastor and a senior lay member asking to meet with me offsite, and wanted me to agree to a covenant on my actions where I was not to sit with Carole at church, and so on, and various other weird things that probably all made sense if you believed the crazy-ass stuff Carole was sharing each week. Or I could, well, leave the church.

Humiliated, I wrote a letter and formally left the church.

I could go on and on. Carole has had so many angry meltdowns and temper tantrums over the years that I could write for hours and not run out of material.

But here’s the thing: I know she’s mentally ill. This sort of behavior — extreme how-dare-you-criticize-me narcissism, disassociation, temper, anger, and so forth — is not that of someone with a healthy mind. And I understand that to a certain extent, you have to give someone who is mentally ill a bit of latitude and a lot of understanding. You don’t have to stop loving someone just because they’re mentally ill.

But it sure as hell would be nice if Carole would seek competent help and stop going to a therapist who can’t/won’t read between the lines and give Carole the help she actually needs. But I guess the average therapist isn’t going to demand a client work on a topic they don’t want to work on. If you go to a therapist to get help quitting smoking the therapist isn’t on their own accord going to insist you also work on your anger management problems. Or your depression. Or any other topic you didn’t explicitly ask to work on.

As I said above, Carole knows she has these problems. Intellectually, she knows she has these problems.

But emotionally, she can’t accept that she’s not perfect, that she bears responsibility for the harm she causes me and other people.

This all came to a head this weekend when a bunch of Carole’s relatives came up here to Vermont to hold a family reunion in a rented vacation house about half an hour from our home. Some of her relatives are pleasant people and nice to be around, and some are … well, a bit frustrating. Pretty much like anyone’s family is. Everyone’s got their share of characters in their extended family.

I expected to come along to the reunion, take along my tablet with a few books loaded, and be present but have something to go off and do if things got boring or unpleasant.

But so far, that all sounds fine, right?

Well — let me add in two key bits of data:

Carole’s birthday is Tuesday and I know she loves to have a big fuss made of her on her birthday. So, about a week ago I ordered a big-ass cake, enough for 12+ people, from my preferred local bakery, planning on surprising her with it on Saturday when all her relatives were there to celebrate with us. It was scheduled to be ready on Friday, the day the reunion was scheduled to commence. I figured I’d go pick it up, take it to the vacation house while Carole was still at work, and hide it in one of the refrigerators, to be brought out at the appropriate time the following day.

Carole informed me on Thursday that she didn’t actually want me to attend the reunion. She made it clear that she definitely didn’t want me there on Saturday when the more, um, challenging relatives would be there, but then she went so far as to tell me, in no uncertain terms, that she didn’t want me to come on Friday either. Why not? Because first, she can be more “herself” when I’m not around, and second, when I am around she finds that she “has” to keep explaining my stupid sense of humor to people, and she’s sick of having to do that. (This is, in my opinion, part of the chronic-need-to-tear-Jay-down thing she’s got going on. Other people don’t seem to mind my silly sense of humor, but one of Carole’s ego states seems to think my jokes are intolerably dumb and infuriating.)

Er.

So there I was with this huge cake on order, all set for a family reunion that I was now officially persona non grata at.

Fuck.

There was nothing I could do, really, other than proceed with the original plan — picking up the cake, buying some candles and little festive plates, and dropping it all off at the vacation house while Carole was at work. We hid the cake in a refrigerator in the house’s basement and I took pains to show the candles, matches, and plates to Carole’s dad — which might have tipped him off that I didn’t expect to be there when the cake was served. But I said nothing to anyone about “have a great time, too bad I can’t be here” … and just waved and got the heck out of Dodge.

Carole started to feel guilty about having disinvited me — and the guilt led to the usual editing-of-reality where she hadn’t said that I wasn’t welcome and if she had, it was only for my protection since her relatives are the annoying ones, and so on and so on, contradicting herself from one sentence to the next. For my part, I didn’t grump and piss and moan about it; I knew it would accomplish nothing. I told her that, change of mind or not, I didn’t want to go, because I knew that her first instinct had been “no way do I want Jay there” … and that I knew that if I did go she would find herself resenting me, if not actually doing the normal tearing-Jay-down thing she does in company. So she went without me, which was fine, and I did chores and things at home.

As for the cake — well, she glimpsed the cake in the fridge early on Saturday afternoon when she went down with a relative to get something else out of the basement, but had no idea that it was from me. When they brought the cake out, candles and everything, and said it was from me, it suddenly hit her how awkward the situation was. I’d delivered a big birthday cake for her and then been told to stay the hell away.

Oops.

When Carole came back home last night, around midnight, she was feeling very sad and guilty about what she’d done and what had happened as a result. Her brain went around in circles, unable to grasp that she had told me to stay away and trying to make it come out that it was all my choice and blah blah blah and it was for my own good since I wouldn’t have to deal with her family, and so on.

I didn’t scream and rant and cuss. I actually never did throughout the weekend. It would have accomplished nothing. It wasn’t as though I’d been told I wasn’t welcome at some awesome party where they were going to be giving out a free car to every guest and where there’d be champagne fountains and stuff. It was just a family reunion with my wife’s in-laws. If I missed out on that, the world would go on turning.

I just asked her to understand how utterly screwed up her world-view really is. She has managed to create, in her mind, a Jay that can’t possibly actually exist. A Jay who:

is a complete total bastard

is constantly doing incredibly nice and sweet things

Between sobs, she admitted that this did in fact make no sense whatsoever. But that she couldn’t control her desperate need to bring me down, to beat me … and yet, at the same time, be so dependent on me for so much: for tasty home-cooked meals, nice vacations, surprise birthday celebrations, emotional support, picking her up when she’s down, and all that other stuff that I do out of a sense that I should treat her the way I’d like to be treated.

Intellectually, she knows this behavior is wrong. That the way she treats me and the way she thinks about me is wrong.

But emotionally, she just can’t handle it. The shame of how badly she treats me overwhelms her. And consequently, she just blocks it out and reverts to the Jay-is-the-devil mindset. And that’s the mindset she was in when she told me she didn’t want me at the reunion. And it’s the mindset she was in when she ranted to people at church all those Sundays. And it’s the mindset she’s in far too much of the time.

The mindset that life is easier if you can just blame all your problems on someone else.

I would like to get Carole help. But I don’t know how. I can’t walk in to a session with a therapist — even if she got a new one with whom she could start fresh — and say “here’s the thing you have to understand about Carole: she’s gonna lie to you a lot. Read between the lines.” There’s no therapist on Earth who wouldn’t find that alarming.

Sigh.

Life is too short to spend it caught up in demons of one’s own invention. I have a ton of sympathy for Carole, but at the same time, I have a ton of frustration. It’s like loving an alcoholic who just can’t and won’t get help. You can’t make them want to change. That has to come from inside — and for a lot of people, the desire to change never comes.

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RIP Mojo Nixon

2024-02-08T18:02:14Z

From today’s “I Has A Sad” Department: Mojo Nixon has passed away at the age of 66. Mojo, real name Neill Kirby McMillan Jr., died of a cardiac event on February 7 while on an Outlaw Country cruise where he was a featured performer and entertainer. Mojo is survived by his wife Adaire and their two sons, Ruben and Rafe, as well as a granddaughter. My condolences to his family. He will be missed.

When I was in college at the University of Georgia (1985-1988) Mojo got a decent amount of airplay on WUOG 90.5 FM and showed up late at night on MTV in strange commercials with his bandmate Skid Roper. He was known for songs such as “Elvis is Everywhere“, “Don Henley Must Die” and “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child.” All are worth a listen, and FWIW, the video for “Debbie Gibson” starred the actual Winona Ryder playing Debbie Gibson.

My favorite bit of Mojo trivia: he was performing “Don Henley Must Die” in 1992 in a small club in Austin, Texas called the “Hole In The Wall” when Don Henley himself jumped onstage and sang along with him. Mojo, stunned, said “Is Debbie Gibson here too?” Henley was a very good sport about the whole thing — props to him.

My favorite memory of him is from a time (circa 1994 or 1995) I went to see him perform at a club on Hillsborough St in Raleigh near NCSU. I forget which club it was, but that’s not important. It wasn’t the best show — he played a lot of stuff off his not-so-good later albums and, other than Elvis is Everywhere, didn’t play much from my college years. Also, he and his backup musicians were drinking Jägermeister shots between every song.

By the break, he was three sheets to the wind. When they did take a break, he leapt off the stage and headed toward what I assume he thought was the door to the men’s room, or backstage, or something. What he actually did was run straight into me, started to fall down, grabbed at my jacket and clothing to hold himself up, and scrabbled at my chest gibbering something incoherent. Then he got his balance back and headed off in another equally random direction, ping-ponging his way through the audience. (The second half of the show was blessedly short; I’m not 100% sure he knew which end of a guitar to hold by that point.)

I told people later that I would never wash the clothes I had on again; they were wet with Mojo’s sweat and I considered them a holy relic.

Rolling Stone’s obituary: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/mojo-nixon-dead-obituary-1234964257/

LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2024-02-08/mojo-nixon-obit

NPR: https://www.npr.org/2024/02/08/1229964967/one-of-the-wild-men-of-rock-n-roll-has-died-mojo-nixon-was-66

Rest in peace, Mojo. Or give them hell. Whichever suits your fancy. Say “Hi” to Elvis up there in heaven for us all.

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Back from Europe

2023-10-10T18:50:52Z

We just got back from a two and a half week trip to Europe. We flew to Bilbao, Spain and hung out there for two days, then boarded the Norwegian Gem for an 11-stop cruise that began in Bilbao and ended in Rome. After three days in Rome we flew home. A kind fellow tourist (identity unknown) managed to give us both Covid-19 toward the end of the trip -- our last full day in Rome and our travel day home were both miserable, and we tested positive as soon as we got to our house. (We did wear masks the whole way home, our diagnoses unconfirmed but strongly suspected.)

Other than one "sea day" as we sailed from Bilbao to our first stop in Lisbon, Portugal, we had a different stop in a different city every day, winding up visiting a total of six countries:

Lisbon, Portugal

Portimao, Portugal

Cadiz, Spain

Gibraltar, UK

Motril, Spain (jumping off point for a bus trip north to Granada)

Ibiza, Spain

Palma, Spain

Barcelona, Spain

St. Tropez, France

La Spezia, Italy (jumping off point for a bus trip inland to Florence)

Rome, Italy (we also visited Vatican City)

We are not inveterate cruisers -- this is our fifth cruise, ever:

2004 Western Caribbean -- Royal Caribbean

2007 Alaska -- Royal Caribbean

2017 Hawaii -- Norwegian Cruise Line

2018 Baltic Sea -- Norwegian Cruise Line

2023 Spain/Portugal/Gibraltar/France/Italy -- Norwegian Cruise Line

What made this one different, other than the length (the others were not as long) was that I bid for a room upgrade weeks prior to embarkation, not knowing if my bid amount would be enough to beat out others bidding for the same upgrades. Apparently it was, because we were did get upgraded; it was to a two-bedroom (a master bedroom and a smaller kids' bedroom) "penthouse" suite that was the size of two regular staterooms and which came with butler service -- daily treats and fresh ice deliveries multiple times per day, stuff like that, with our morning scheduled room service delivered *exactly* at the specified time each day, and other little lagniappes of elegance. We were also entitled to priority debarkation each day and we got to have breakfast each day in one of the specialty restaurants rather than fending for ourselves in the main buffet. It was nice. It will be hard to go back to a regular sized stateroom if we cruise again in the future. (Note: it was not a "Haven" suite -- NCL has a whole deck at the very top of the ship for the people who really want to lay out some cash; you can't even get to that floor without a special keycard. We did not spend that much.)

Would we do it again? Yes. It was fun. But as I said, we are not inveterate cruisers; we're averaging one every 5.2 years.

What was our favorite part? Carole really liked Granada and the forests around the Alhambra. I liked Cadiz a lot -- it was a bustling small city with lots of color and life and beautiful views. We both would have enjoyed having much more time in Barcelona, but that stop was annoyingly short. We were allowed off the ship at 9 am or so after arriving from Palma in the Balearic Islands and we had to be back on the ship at 4:30 pm so we could sail on to St. Tropez in France. We saw Park Guell and the Sagrada Familia in a whirlwind of rush-rush-rush... and that was it.

Least favorite? Well, other than the stop where we caught Covid ... 🤒 The one stop neither of us much good to say about was Lisbon, as we found it a somewhat shabby, rundown city with uncollected trash everywhere -- everywhere we were taken on our two-hour "Panoramic Drive through Lisbon" tour took us past slums and rundown buildings. I'm sure there are nice areas, but we didn't see them on what meant to be a quick trip to the really cool stuff. (Our Baltic trip taught us the folly of booking nine-hour "See Every Damn Thing There Is To See" city tours; they left us exhausted and mentally wiped out.)

We'll be sharing some photos and anecdotes, but please don't feel compelled to pay any attention to them whatsoever. Other than being made to look at someone else's baby photos (and I grant you that there are even people who enjoy doing that) I think having someone else show you endless snaps of fun places they went while you were at home punching a timeclock is at the top of a lot of people's "No, thanks" lists. 🌍

P.S. Do not touch the apes.

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Not too late to sponsor me in this weekend's 2023 Chicago Susan G Komen 3-Day

2023-09-07T14:59:07Z

Important update:

Tomorrow (Friday, September 8, 2023) I will start my journey on the 2023 Chicago Susan G Komen 3-Day. I will walk around 20 miles on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I am doing this because I care very much about breast cancer and the mortality rate that is still far too high and the effect that fighting the disease has on women and men everywhere, to say nothing of their families.

But the important point is that my walking accomplishes virtually nothing, except in that it contributes to the overall visibility of the cause; once upon a time (and more recently than one would think) it was considered rude and shameful to admit publicly that you had breast cancer. Only by being publicly and conspicuously OUT THERE have we managed to change that.

But other than that — not one woman will become magically healthy because I put sixty miles’ worth of wear on my shoes. The important impact from events like these is the money they raise. In the 20 years that these events have been held by Komen, they’ve raised over $693,000,000. Since Komen’s founding thirty years ago, the mortality rate has dropped by 43%. There is an impact.

Even though I made my fundraising minimum of $2300 months ago and am eligibile to take part, it is not too late to sponsor me. If you would like to contribute to the cause and help bring about a world without breast cancer, please click http://www.the3day.org/goto/jayfurrchicago and donate there.

I would greatly appreciate it.

As an aside, should you be so inclined, you can follow me on the event this weekend at https://www.facebook.com/jayfurrvt — I will be posting photos as I go. You should not have to log in to see them.

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Demo Dashboard

2023-08-07T20:57:18Z

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Susan G Komen 3-Day Walks This Summer

2023-06-01T18:59:34Z

I will be participating in the 2023 Susan G Komen Denver and Chicago “3-Day” walks. They’re 60 mile walks that take place over three days. Each walker is required to raise $2300 per city in order to take part. (This is my 15th year walking.)

The Denver walk is August 25-27. The Chicago walk is September 8-10. (I am also serving as support crew for the Boston event which takes place August 18-20, but I’ve raised the $100 I need for that event.) Essentially, I’m taking about half of my six-week work sabbatical to travel to and from these things! 🙂

My donation links are http://www.the3day.org/goto/jayfurrdenver and http://www.the3day.org/goto/jayfurrchicago.

I have raised $401 out of $2300 for the Denver event and I have raised $1511 out of $2300 for the Chicago event. I would be really, really grateful if any of you would be willing to sponsor me.

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Susan G Komen 3-Day walks this summer

2023-06-01T18:55:00Z

I will be participating in the 2023 Susan G Komen Denver and Chicago "3-Day" walks. They're 60 mile walks that take place over three days. Each walker is required to raise $2300 per city in order to take part. (This is my 15th year walking.)

The Denver walk is August 25-27. The Chicago walk is September 8-10. (I am also serving as support crew for the Boston event which takes place August 18-20, but I've raised the $100 I need for that event.) Essentially, I'm taking about half of my six-week work sabbatical to travel to and from these things! :)

My donation links are http://www.the3day.org/goto/jayfurrdenver and http://www.the3day.org/goto/jayfurrchicago.

I have raised $401 out of $2300 for the Denver event and I have raised $1511 out of $2300 for the Chicago event. I would be really, really grateful if any of you would be willing to sponsor me.

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Lived Experience

2022-12-18T20:42:33Z

Two random thoughts that popped into my head today at almost the same time:

1) I have never had to sleep in a bathtub. In movies and sitcoms this sort of thing seems to happen all the time; you have one more person than you have beds and couches and next thing you know the person whose house or apartment it actually IS is bunking down in the bathtub with a throw pillow and an afghan. I feel like I’m missing out.

2) I have had a presumed child molester or serial killer try to lure me into his car. I was walking down Main Street near the Virginia Tech Mall in Blacksburg, Virginia on a sunny afternoon when I was a sophomore in high school. Guy in a sedan pulled up next to me and asked me for directions to something that was literally a mile or two down the street east of us. I informed him of this. He told me he’d gotten lost twice trying to find the place and would I please get into his car and show him? I said “No, I’ve got places to be.” He kept on wheedling, wouldn’t I please get into his car? I said “No” and walked off. To this day, I look back and think — first, I should have gotten his license plate, second, I sort of wonder what he’d have said if I asked “So, quick question — you got a knife in there or a gun?” and third, what if I’d asked “You try this on a lot of kids?” And of course I wonder what did happen subsequently — did he abduct some other kid that day? Had he abducted others, etc.?

Hmm.

I guess, of the two, I’d rather have slept in a bathtub.

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Farewell and goodbye, sister

2022-10-16T23:11:51Z

I always feel as though I should start every blog entry with "I know hardly anyone will read this and it'll probably come across as self-indulgent navel-lint-picking, but I'm posting it ANYWAY." So, that said, if you're still reading this, I apologize in advance for what will probably be a real downer of an entry.

My sister Elizabeth passed away on August 16 or 17, 2022. Due to the circumstances of her passing, it's impossible to say exactly when.

She was my oldest sibling, three and a half years my senior. She and I were not especially close, not by a conscious decision on either of our parts. She lived in Florida and I live in Vermont and we only spoke a few times a year.

See, Elizabeth was on disability, suffering from schizophrenia and related disorders as well as the effects of a lifetime of doctors saying "Let's take you off THAT drug and try you on THIS one." She was quiet and calm and never seemed to have anything to say. "Hi, Elizabeth, it's Jay, how are you?" "Oh, I'm fine." "You doing anything interesting lately?" "I'm taking some art classes." "Everything going okay?" "Yes." Etcetera. There was never any news to report, never any questions from her about how I was doing, her statements were responses to my direct questions, offered without elaboration. Every call was like that, try as I might to draw her out and get her to show something other than just blank, flat affect.

I felt guilty as heck for not calling much more often, but each time I did call, no matter what I said or asked or did, the answers were pretty much the same. I am certain that she was more outgoing in person with people she was taking art classes with, or with my cousins who she had dinner with a couple of times a week, or with people from church. I don't feel like I really knew her any longer -- I only knew what I could deduce or infer or see from my calls and occasional face to face encounters. Perhaps she just didn't feel like opening up to me. I'll never know.

Elizabeth was adopted. My parents had been married for several years and had tried without success to have children. They adopted Elizabeth in 1964 and, as so often happens, then things started happening. My sister Julie was born a year after Elizabeth, then I was born two and a half years after that, and then finally my brother Rob was born three years after that. Elizabeth got good grades in school, was a Girl Scout, took piano lessons and dance lessons, had friends -- an absolutely typical childhood. Then, at some point in late in her high school years, schizophrenia symptoms set in hard. She became a very different person very quickly, not by choice but because her brain was all of a sudden betraying her. I remember many bad nights when Elizabeth was completely out of control, upset and raging, detached from reality and mired in incredibly dark black depression.

Photo of the first time Elizabeth and I met

It did not help that the state of mental health care and treatment in the early 1980s in the state of Virginia was not at all what one would have liked it to be. I made reference above to doctors changing her medications frequently; that's not an exaggeration. Each time she was passed on to another psychiatrist for a medication evaluation she would come home with a completely new set of prescriptions having been told "I don't know why they had you on THAT and THAT". Six months later, she'd get switched again. Over time, she became quieter and quieter and more just sort of ... there.

The medications and care helped somewhat, but all thought of her heading off to college (she did graduate from high school) were pretty much abandoned. She had a few boyfriends who were of the "skeevy, no-count" variety. There were at least two times that Dad and I had to drive up to wherever she was currently living and rescue her from whichever abusive boyfriend she was sharing a mobile home with. One time we got a call from her informing us that she and her current guy were in Melbourne, Florida and she needed our help to come home because he'd wrecked her car. And so forth. It was no kind of life and I would give anything to be able to go back and somehow stop all that from happening, somehow. To bring her previous self back and to set her back on the course to have a happy and full life.

Eventually she wound up just living with my mother and father at the house we all grew up in, then at the house in Florida that they retired to in the mid-1990s. Mom and Dad retired to the town Mom grew up in: Brooksville, Florida, a relatively sleepy little town a couple of counties north of Tampa. Elizabeth qualified for Florida Medicaid and continued to get Social Security disability payments. She did take a lot of art classes -- she was very fond of painting plates and bowls. She did watercolors and colored pencil drawings and all manner of other things.

And so things went for sixteen years or so. Then Mom passed in 2011 and it was just her and Dad in the house, with my wonderful cousin Anne living across the street and looking in on them and helping out and doing endless errands and meals. Unfortunately for Elizabeth, Dad was a very short-tempered man and had very little patience, empathy, or tact. He endlessly bullied Elizabeth and hectored her every chance he got. "You didn't go for a walk? Why not?" "When you go for a walk, you need to do more than just walk halfway down the street and back, Elizabeth!" I'll spare you the whole litany, but essentially, Elizabeth couldn't do anything right in Dad's eyes.

When Dad passed in 2016 the house was sold (thanks to an enormous amount of work by Anne to get the place emptied out and cleaned and into shape where we could actually sell it) and his estate divided among the four kids with a chunk going to Anne. Elizabeth moved to a subsidized apartment and for the first time in decades, was in a position to really make her own decisions. She could drive, she had a car, she had money inherited from Dad (although, to avoid making her ineligible for Medicaid and disability, it was put into a trust and disbursed by a trustee as needed). She continued to take her art classes, had dinner twice a week with Anne and her sisters Cathy and Mary and our aunt Esther, and as far as I knew was doing more or less okay.

I hate that "as far as I knew". I never once in the six years between Dad's passing and Elizabeth's passing went down to Brooksville just to visit her and see how she was doing. I did make at least one trip down after Dad's death to do a few things relating to the house. That's something else I feel very guilty about, by the way. I guess at the time I kind of justified leaving a lot of the grunt work of getting the house cleaned and repaired and sold to my cousin Anne because a) she's such a good soul that she was willing to do it, and b) well, she was right there. (I'm an ass.) I should have done much more.

I do know for a fact that I did not show enough gratitude to Anne for all that, by the way.

At that point in my life I was traveling for work 40+ weeks a year... and had my own major depression to cope with ... and kept thinking "I should go down and visit" but years went by and I never did. Those periodic "How are you?" calls were about the extent of things.

Elizabeth and Sarah

Then I got a call from Anne on Wednesday, August 17, out of the blue. She was the bearer of bad news. Elizabeth had passed away.

Elizabeth hadn't shown up the previous evening for dinner at Anne's house and, worried, Anne had gone over to check on her. If I understand it correctly, Anne didn't have a key to get in, and Elizabeth did not answer the door. The police were called to do a health check and the apartment manager had a key so they could get in -- and upon entering, they found her on the floor.

There was no sign of foul play. There had been no prior indications that Elizabeth was at risk; everyone knew that Elizabeth had high cholesterol and high blood pressure and rarely exercised and, as we found out subsequently, seemed to live off ice cream and diet soda, but there had been nothing especially unusual in previous weeks that would have made Anne and Mary and Cathy say "Elizabeth, you should see a doctor". (No autopsy was performed; I believe the coroner's verdict was a heart attack.)

I flew down to Tampa first thing the following morning and Julie drove down from North Carolina. My brother Rob lives in western Canada and was not in a position to come down. Julie and I met with a funeral director to arrange Elizabeth's cremation, and then we went to close out Elizabeth's apartment, clean it up, figure out what could be donated and what would just be tossed out, etcetera. And that's when I really wanted to cry. Elizabeth's apartment was an absolute nightmare. Literal mounds of unwashed clothing. Trash everywhere. The apartment was almost impassable. It was, frankly, like one of the episodes of that TV show about hoarders. Elizabeth had been living in absolutely squalid conditions and even now, sitting here two months later in Vermont, I still want to cry just thinking about it. Her dying was bad; her dying without my having seen her in six years because I was always "too busy" was worse, but worst of all was knowing that she'd been living in that state.

I should have been coming down at least once a year to check in on her and see how she was doing and not just rely on her saying "I'm fine" and figuring that if she wasn't fine someone would tell me. I don't know how long things had been like that but I hated the thought of her living like that for even a day -- and it could have been and probably was years. My cousins are terrific people but they had respected Elizabeth enough to let her make her own choices -- I certainly don't fault them or think that they should have been inspecting Elizabeth's apartment on a regular basis. I should have been checking in on her. Not just calling, but being there in person like a decent person would have done. I know I couldn't have been there to clean her apartment for her once a month or something, but I have to think there would have been some way to keep things from getting to that state.

If only I hadn't been so good at making excuses. Yes, I'm mentally ill. Yes, I've got terrible depression that incapacitates me from time to time. Yes, I have a demanding job. Yes, I've got my own life to lead. That's all a bunch of B.S. She was my sister, and I let her down.

The one comforting thing about that trip to Florida to excavate and clean Elizabeth's apartment (which took days of Julie and me working together and making trip after trip to the nearby dumpster) was that the memorial service we held at Cathy's house the following Monday was well attended.

Julie and I had tried to reach out to as many people Elizabeth knew as we could; folks from her church, people she'd been in art classes with, people from a few groups she'd belonged to, hoping that word would get around to the people we didn't know to invite, and that somehow we'd get a respectable showing. On Sunday morning, we'd gone to the First United Methodist Church of Brooksville; she'd been a member for many years and had sung in their choir. People there were very sad to hear of her passing. We asked the new pastor at the church, who'd never had an opportunity to meet Elizabeth, if he could come and lead prayers at the memorial service and he was happy to agree. Next thing we knew, it seemed the whole choir was making plans to attend, with an electronic keyboard and everything.

Cathy's house was absolutely packed and person after person shared stories about their time knowing Elizabeth and saying how much she'd meant to them and how much they would miss her. Some of her favorite songs were sung. The minister led prayers and said a few words. There was plenty of food there as well -- no one left hungry. All in all, the memorial really was everything we'd hoped it would be, and more. We hoped that somewhere, Elizabeth was watching.

But that's the other thing that really saddened me: I'd never seen the side of Elizabeth that everyone talked about. I had tried on so many occasions, while my parents were still alive, and via phone after they were both gone, to draw her out, to get her to really open up to me, and I'd never succeeded. Perhaps I was too much like my father in her eyes. I can understand her not wanting to share with me if I reminded her of the man who had hounded her all those years.

But in the end I'll never know. All I know is that there was far more to Elizabeth than I was aware of... and that I let her down in so many ways.

In closing, I'm reminded of a quote from Bret Harte:

If, of all words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are, “It might have been,”

More sad are these we daily see:
“It is, but hadn’t ought to be.”

Farewell and goodbye, sister. I'm sorry you're gone.

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Farewell and goodbye, sister

2022-10-15T14:15:01Z

I always feel as though I should start every blog entry with “I know hardly anyone will read this and it’ll probably come across as self-indulgent navel-lint-picking, but I’m posting it ANYWAY.” So, that said, if you’re still reading this, I apologize in advance for what will probably be a real downer of an entry.

My sister Elizabeth passed away on August 16 or 17, 2022. Due to the circumstances of her passing, it’s impossible to say exactly when.

She was my oldest sibling, three and a half years my senior. She and I were not especially close, not by a conscious decision on either of our parts. She lived in Florida and I live in Vermont and we only spoke a few times a year.

See, Elizabeth was on disability, suffering from schizophrenia and related disorders as well as the effects of a lifetime of doctors saying “Let’s take you off THAT drug and try you on THIS one.” She was quiet and calm and never seemed to have anything to say. “Hi, Elizabeth, it’s Jay, how are you?” “Oh, I’m fine.” “You doing anything interesting lately?” “I’m taking some art classes.” “Everything going okay?” “Yes.” Etcetera. There was never any news to report, never any questions from her about how I was doing, her statements were responses to my direct questions, offered without elaboration. Every call was like that, try as I might to draw her out and get her to show something other than just blank, flat affect.

I felt guilty as heck for not calling much more often, but each time I did call, no matter what I said or asked or did, the answers were pretty much the same. I am certain that she was more outgoing in person with people she was taking art classes with, or with my cousins who she had dinner with a couple of times a week, or with people from church. I don’t feel like I really knew her any longer — I only knew what I could deduce or infer or see from my calls and occasional face to face encounters. Perhaps she just didn’t feel like opening up to me. I’ll never know.

Elizabeth was adopted. My parents had been married for several years and had tried without success to have children. They adopted Elizabeth in 1964 and, as so often happens, then things started happening. My sister Julie was born a year after Elizabeth, then I was born two and a half years after that, and then finally my brother Rob was born three years after that. Elizabeth got good grades in school, was a Girl Scout, took piano lessons and dance lessons, had friends — an absolutely typical childhood. Then, at some point in late in her high school years, schizophrenia symptoms set in hard. She became a very different person very quickly, not by choice but because her brain was all of a sudden betraying her. I remember many bad nights when Elizabeth was completely out of control, upset and raging, detached from reality and mired in incredibly dark black depression.

Photo of the first time Elizabeth and I met

It did not help that the state of mental health care and treatment in the early 1980s in the state of Virginia was not at all what one would have liked it to be. I made reference above to doctors changing her medications frequently; that’s not an exaggeration. Each time she was passed on to another psychiatrist for a medication evaluation she would come home with a completely new set of prescriptions having been told “I don’t know why they had you on THAT and THAT”. Six months later, she’d get switched again. Over time, she became quieter and quieter and more just sort of … there.

The medications and care helped somewhat, but all thought of her heading off to college (she did graduate from high school) were pretty much abandoned. She had a few boyfriends who were of the “skeevy, no-count” variety. There were at least two times that Dad and I had to drive up to wherever she was currently living and rescue her from whichever abusive boyfriend she was sharing a mobile home with. One time we got a call from her informing us that she and her current guy were in Melbourne, Florida and she needed our help to come home because he’d wrecked her car. And so forth. It was no kind of life and I would give anything to be able to go back and somehow stop all that from happening, somehow. To bring her previous self back and to set her back on the course to have a happy and full life.

Eventually she wound up just living with my mother and father at the house we all grew up in, then at the house in Florida that they retired to in the mid-1990s. Mom and Dad retired to the town Mom grew up in: Brooksville, Florida, a relatively sleepy little town a couple of counties north of Tampa. Elizabeth qualified for Florida Medicaid and continued to get Social Security disability payments. She did take a lot of art classes — she was very fond of painting plates and bowls. She did watercolors and colored pencil drawings and all manner of other things.

When Dad passed in 2016 the house was sold (thanks to an enormous amount of work by Anne to get the place emptied out and cleaned and into shape where we could actually sell it) and his estate divided among the four kids with a chunk going to Anne. Elizabeth moved to a subsidized apartment and for the first time in decades, was in a position to really make her own decisions. She could drive, she had a car, she had money inherited from Dad (although, to avoid making her ineligible for Medicaid and disability, it was put into a trust and disbursed by a trustee as needed). She continued to take her art classes, had dinner twice a week with Anne and her sisters Cathy and Mary and our aunt Esther, and as far as I knew was doing more or less okay.

I hate that “as far as I knew”. I never once in the six years between Dad’s passing and Elizabeth’s passing went down to Brooksville just to visit her and see how she was doing. I did make at least one trip down after Dad’s death to do a few things relating to the house. That’s something else I feel very guilty about, by the way. I guess at the time I kind of justified leaving a lot of the grunt work of getting the house cleaned and repaired and sold to my cousin Anne because a) she’s such a good soul that she was willing to do it, and b) well, she was right there. (I’m an ass.) I should have done much more.

I do know for a fact that I did not show enough gratitude to Anne for all that, by the way.

At that point in my life I was traveling for work 40+ weeks a year… and had my own major depression to cope with … and kept thinking “I should go down and visit” but years went by and I never did. Those periodic “How are you?” calls were about the extent of things.

Elizabeth and Sarah

Then I got a call from Anne on Wednesday, August 17, out of the blue. She was the bearer of bad news. Elizabeth had passed away.

Elizabeth hadn’t shown up the previous evening for dinner at Anne’s house and, worried, Anne had gone over to check on her. If I understand it correctly, Anne didn’t have a key to get in, and Elizabeth did not answer the door. The police were called to do a health check and the apartment manager had a key so they could get in — and upon entering, they found her on the floor.

There was no sign of foul play. There had been no prior indications that Elizabeth was at risk; everyone knew that Elizabeth had high cholesterol and high blood pressure and rarely exercised and, as we found out subsequently, seemed to live off ice cream and diet soda, but there had been nothing especially unusual in previous weeks that would have made Anne and Mary and Cathy say “Elizabeth, you should see a doctor”. (No autopsy was performed; I believe the coroner’s verdict was a heart attack.)

I flew down to Tampa first thing the following morning and Julie drove down from North Carolina. My brother Rob lives in western Canada and was not in a position to come down. Julie and I met with a funeral director to arrange Elizabeth’s cremation, and then we went to close out Elizabeth’s apartment, clean it up, figure out what could be donated and what would just be tossed out, etcetera. And that’s when I really wanted to cry. Elizabeth’s apartment was an absolute nightmare. Literal mounds of unwashed clothing. Trash everywhere. The apartment was almost impassable. It was, frankly, like one of the episodes of that TV show about hoarders. Elizabeth had been living in absolutely squalid conditions and even now, sitting here two months later in Vermont, I still want to cry just thinking about it. Her dying was bad; her dying without my having seen her in six years because I was always “too busy” was worse, but worst of all was knowing that she’d been living in that state.

I should have been coming down at least once a year to check in on her and see how she was doing and not just rely on her saying “I’m fine” and figuring that if she wasn’t fine someone would tell me. I don’t know how long things had been like that but I hated the thought of her living like that for even a day — and it could have been and probably was years. My cousins are terrific people but they had respected Elizabeth enough to let her make her own choices — I certainly don’t fault them or think that they should have been inspecting Elizabeth’s apartment on a regular basis. I should have been checking in on her. Not just calling, but being there in person like a decent person would have done. I know I couldn’t have been there to clean her apartment for her once a month or something, but I have to think there would have been some way to keep things from getting to that state.

If only I hadn’t been so good at making excuses. Yes, I’m mentally ill. Yes, I’ve got terrible depression that incapacitates me from time to time. Yes, I have a demanding job. Yes, I’ve got my own life to lead. That’s all a bunch of B.S. She was my sister, and I let her down.

The one comforting thing about that trip to Florida to excavate and clean Elizabeth’s apartment (which took days of Julie and me working together and making trip after trip to the nearby dumpster) was that the memorial service we held at Cathy’s house the following Monday was well attended.

Julie and I had tried to reach out to as many people Elizabeth knew as we could; folks from her church, people she’d been in art classes with, people from a few groups she’d belonged to, hoping that word would get around to the people we didn’t know to invite, and that somehow we’d get a respectable showing. On Sunday morning, we’d gone to the First United Methodist Church of Brooksville; she’d been a member for many years and had sung in their choir. People there were very sad to hear of her passing. We asked the new pastor at the church, who’d never had an opportunity to meet Elizabeth, if he could come and lead prayers at the memorial service and he was happy to agree. Next thing we knew, it seemed the whole choir was making plans to attend, with an electronic keyboard and everything.

Cathy’s house was absolutely packed and person after person shared stories about their time knowing Elizabeth and saying how much she’d meant to them and how much they would miss her. Some of her favorite songs were sung. The minister led prayers and said a few words. There was plenty of food there as well — no one left hungry. All in all, the memorial really was everything we’d hoped it would be, and more. We hoped that somewhere, Elizabeth was watching.

But that’s the other thing that really saddened me: I’d never seen the side of Elizabeth that everyone talked about. I had tried on so many occasions, while my parents were still alive, and via phone after they were both gone, to draw her out, to get her to really open up to me, and I’d never succeeded. Perhaps I was too much like my father in her eyes. I can understand her not wanting to share with me if I reminded her of the man who had hounded her all those years.

But in the end I’ll never know. All I know is that there was far more to Elizabeth than I was aware of… and that I let her down in so many ways.

In closing, I’m reminded of a quote from Bret Harte:

If, of all words of tongue and pen,

The saddest are, “It might have been,”

More sad are these we daily see:

“It is, but hadn’t ought to be.”

Farewell and goodbye, sister. I’m sorry you’re gone.

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Green Black Walnuts

2022-10-05T20:45:58Z

When I was a kid growing up in the mountains of Virginia, there was a large black walnut tree directly behind our house, close enough that on windy days you would hear thump! thump! thump! as green walnuts dropped from the tree and onto the flat roof of our house, especially over the room I slept in. Dozens more walnuts could be found on the grass around the tree.

Well, a decade ago I decided that I missed that experience, so I planted some black walnut trees along the edge of our back yard, close enough to the house that in theory they could land on our sloping metal roof or the steps outside the living room and give me that "thunk!" I was longing for.

I've never seen any green black walnuts lying around back there, though, and the trees are so tall that it's not really easy to see if there are lots up there in the branches. I wondered if for some pollination-related reason we just weren't getting any.

Well, just now I heard that "thunk!" I knew so well. Right on the wooden steps outside the living room, where I happened to be sitting. I looked out the door and sure enough! A green black walnut, right there at the top of the steps. I ran to get my cell phone to snap a photo to commemorate the happy moment and ... when I got back that walnut was GONE.

I think I know why we're not seeing green black walnuts all over our back yard. Our local squirrels don't get caught napping.

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Test Post from Furrs.org

2022-09-27T02:14:11Z

Test Post from Furrs.org
https://furrs.org

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Updates That No One Will Actually Read, Part 1

2022-09-27T00:39:33Z

There is nothing more futile than the maintainer of a personal blog that no one ever read in the first place suddenly deciding that it’s time to post a bunch of catch-up entries.

But anyway…

The last thing I posted here was a furious rant aimed at Google for taking my smartphone for warranty repair (the screen was black and wouldn’t turn on, but the phone was otherwise okay) and flat-out losing it.

After three and a half weeks of my loudly complaining and being told dozens of times over that I just had to be patient and that they would have an update in “2-3 days”, my repaired phone suddenly showed up on Friday, June 10. I checked the IMEI — it was the same phone I’d sent out.

By the time the phone finally did return to me, I had adopted a working theory that my original phone, the one sent in for repair, had been flat out lost … and that Google had sent out a replacement, and then that replacement got lost in shipping, and thus the long delay was due to trying to track down THAT phone before they sent out a third. I guess we’ll never know. But regardless of what was really going on after all that time, they finally DID locate my original phone and get it working and got it sent back to me.

I am still bothered by the casual “be patient, dude, be patient, dude” attitude that the support folks endlessly plied me with. At no point did a supervisor or manager or anyone who actually might know what was going on reply. I am also bothered by the irritated go-fuck-yourself responses I got at the beginning of the whole process; they swore the original phone had been returned and delivered and were closing out the case. It took many, MANY calls and emails to even get them to acknowledge that maybe something had gone wrong.

In this day and age, not having the phone that you receive all your business texts and calls on isn’t just an inconvenience — it’s an absolute disaster. When I did finally get the phone back and popped the SIM card back in and powered it up, I had a lot of texts and missed calls that all things considered, I really wish I hadn’t missed.

Long story short, the phone only showed up when a ) I posted a rather lengthy complaining blog entry and b) a journalist friend of mine contacted Google PR. I don’t know if either or both of those affected things, but either way, two days later I had my phone.

I will go to my grave wondering where it was for all those weeks.

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Google warranty repair flat-out lost my phone three weeks ago and refuses to do anything about it

2022-06-07T19:20:42Z

Three and a half weeks ago the screen on my Google Pixel 5a phone conked out — I could call my phone and it would ring and I could even get in my car and make calls using my car’s dash screen and my previously paired phone. After lengthy calls with Google product support, they eventually decided that I should send it in for warranty repair. Google sent me an RMA shipping label and form and I promptly sent it off.

It was received three weeks ago. Google’s tracking page showed it being received, inspected, and returned all on the same day, and I was watching the tracking site — it went from “on the way to Google” to “received, inspected, and shipped back” all in under an hour. It doesn’t take rocket science to realize that there must have been some kind of glitch on their end… first, because there’s no way it could have been received at their loading dock, opened and routed to a technician for an inspection, inspected, and returned in that short an amount of time, and second, if they actually had inspected it, they would have noticed the screen wasn’t working at all.

I never did get a tracking number for the allegedly on-its-way-back-to-me package. I wrote Google and asked “what’s going on” and for three weeks now I’ve been getting one email after another saying “we’re investigating, please be patient, we’re closely monitoring this, we’ve escalated it to a dedicated team, we’re closely monitoring this, we understand that this is frustrating, please give us 2-3 more days, please give us 2-3 more days, please give us 2-3 more days” ad nauseam.

If Google product support had determined that my phone was hopelessly bricked they’d have had me send it in and they’d just have sent me a replacement phone. But because the phone is lost in their system and from all evidence they’re never going to find it, I am out one phone and am continuing to pay Verizon for service I can’t use. One would think they’d just close out the case and send me a replacement phone, but apparently they’re happier endlessly stalling me and making excuses and doing absolutely nothing at all.

I had been dutifully buying a new Google Pixel phone every two or three years and had been generally happy… but now I’m seeing the legendary “other side of Google” — the part that ignores the old “don’t be evil” mandate Google used to follow. There’s no way in hell that I’m ever buying another Google product.

Does anyone reading this have any advice about how to light a fire under them? I could try taking them to small claims court but that would drag on for quite a while. Are there websites or publications that investigate stuff like this for hapless consumers like me — the kind that the manufacturer knuckles under to in order to avoid bad publicity?

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"I Could Feel His Hand On My Shoulder..." and All That

2022-05-18T16:08:14Z

I had a thought this morning:

Let’s say that I happened to wind up in an active shooter/hostage situation of some kind and somehow managed to tackle and disarm the gunman. Unfortunately, in this hypothetical scenario, I do get shot multiple times and wind up clinging to life in the ICU.

I am a white male who attends church on a more-or-less weekly basis. It goes without saying that the conservative/Christian radical right would try to co-opt me as a sign that God is watching His children and keeping them safe and so on — never mind all the times that gunmen killed dozens of people, many of whom also attended church regularly.

If I were prepared to be an absolute cad (and assuming I did survive my wounds), I could probably make a lot of money on the inspirational-speaker circuit, to say nothing of getting invited to be on all the conservative/radical right talk shows and so on. All I’d have to do is say “Jesus saved me, I could feel Jesus by my side while I was tackling that naughty shooter”. Instant $$$.

I grant you that this whole scenario is unlikely to take place, but this morning, I figured out what I should do in the event that it does. The moment I first have a microphone of some kind thrust in my direction — as I leave the hospital, or as I give a press conference from my hospital room, or, you know, whatever — and someone asks me what I credit my heroic measures and my survival to, I’m going to blink, try to look surprised that they even have to ask that question, and then I’m going to say:

“I prayed to Elvis. Elvis saved me.”

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