SOML

President Obama is about to deliver his first speech to Congress, an appearance they’re not calling a State of the Union address -- or SOTU, as headline writers sometimes abbreviate it -- but that will feel like one. Last month, here in Washington state, Gov. Christine Gregoire gave the first State of the State (SOTS) of her second term, and a week ago today Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels offered his own State of the City (SOTC) address.

It’s that time of year. So, in the spirit of the season I’m pausing a minute for a personal assessment: the SOML, or State of My Life. Ahem. Lapel pin adjusted. Ready the teleprompters!

Although the SOTUs themselves can drone on, presidential speechwriters often include one line that cuts to the chase. Something like: Tonight, the state of the union is ... sound, challenged, hopeful, whatever the case may be.

Tonight, the state of my life is ... a mix of chaos and stasis. Staos?

In some senses very little has changed, or changes. Approaching two and a half years now since I left work to deal with my health, I remain unemployed, on medical disability, seeing doctors, popping pills, checking months off my chemo calendar. At the same time life feels like it’s changing crazily. The Seattle P-I, where I used to work and Michelle still does, is likely to close in a few weeks. But we have no official word about whether an online version of the paper will survive as rumored or, if so, whether Michelle will grab one of the few musical-chair jobs left to be had.

It’s impossible to say with any certainty what we’ll be doing three months from now or even where we’ll be living. We’re both looking for work here in Seattle, where I have family and prefer to stay, but we agree that this is no time to insist on a specific job in a specific city. As cool as the Excellent Element is, neither of us wants to live in it. So we’re looking elsewhere as well. Turbulence creates downdrafts, and I wouldn’t be surprised if M&M winds up relocating, maybe back to Los Angeles, as early as this summer.

All that’s enough to give a guy a case of the chaotics.

Partly to brace for the financial hit, and in recognition that the various federal bailouts will bail out every sector except that of dopes like us who bought a house we could afford on a loan we were qualified to receive, Michelle and I have reassessed our household budget and made significant cuts in our lifestyle. Again stupidly responsible, no doubt. To be clear, I don’t mean to whine, as we’ve merely ratcheted down to moderately conservative from comfortably affluent. I mean, we are the rock’n’rollers who spent two Pie in the Sky months on the road last year, just a couple of months after spending two weeks in Paris and Rome. We’ve had it pretty good. Ew, did you drop your caviar in my champagne? But we have made adjustments. We’re not taking any trips this year that weren’t already planned, like the April pilgrimage to New Orleans for Freda’s 70th birthday. We’re limiting ourselves to one movie outing a month. We cut back to basic cable. We’ve stopped dining out. We’re making each gin bottle last twice as long (ouch). And I’ve stopped playing poker, on the theory that you should never bet what you can’t afford to lose. That one really hurts.

In support of the new budget plan we’ve combined finances more fully than ever before. That’s a net financial gain for me but a change that makes me cringe. I’ve been financially independent now for more than 30 years and hate to surrender the feeling. Ving Rhames tells Bruce Willis in “Pulp Fiction,” “That’s pride fuckin’ with ya,” and I know that’s true. Still.

I could go on. There are indignities on the job-search front, worries on the family front, frustrations on the medical front.

A friend asked the other day about my health, and I described how at this point the effects of brain cancer feel less physical and more psychological and emotional. I struggle sometimes to think of myself as the same capable, confident person who 17 months ago spazzed out of one familiar life and into this new weird one.

Even so, as I’m sure the president is saying right about now (we’re Tivo’ing the non-SOTU), out of hardship comes opportunity. Hope and recovery are ahead. Trite as these pat lines are, I believe there is truth in them, for the individual as well as the nation.

Personally, I have much to give me strength and hope. Despite some growing pains of adolescence Gina and Franny are awesome, inspiring kids and actually fun to be around. Lovergirl Michelle and I remain totally solid, in spite of the understandable stress we both face.

I don’t know where we’ll be this time next year -- or next month for that matter. But we’ll be here. M&M abides, and the SOML is, staotic though it may be, still pretty good.

OK. Off to watch the speech. Good night, and God bless America! Please comment on Obama’s address here.

Photo credit: Top photo via whitehouse.gov on Creative Commons license.

Humor. It's all relative.

One of the fun aspects of surfing the health-care industry is switching to a new insurer when the old work-based health insurance runs out. That's especially true when the new individual health plan includes a drug "benefit" that uses the word as loosely as my new provider, Group Health Cooperative, does.

I can't say I was surprised at the expense today when, credit card in hand, I ventured out onto the snowy roads to pick up my monthly round of chemotherapy. I had researched all this a month ago before I switched insurers. Even laid it out in a spreadsheet to suss the damage. And reconfirmed it on the phone earlier this week. But still, when they say the words, the copayment of $865 kinda bites. Catches you up short.

At the Group Health pharmacy in Burien it took three stops at three adjacent windows to complete the transaction. At Window 1, I gave the grim old clerk my ID number and she tapped her keyboard. "OK," she said, "I see this is a new order. Did they tell you about the copyament on this?" She had a sick, worried look on her face.

"Yes," I said. "They said it would be 20 bucks."

To me this is hilarious, just to watch the lady's face contort as she prepares to break the news about the actual price.

"Well, no," she said, wincing. "I'm afraid it's a bit more. It's going to be, um, eight hundred sixty-four dollars and ninety cents."

Yeah, I know, I said, I'm just kidding around. Haha. But she wasn't amused. She glared at me and told me to sit down and wait for my name to be called, since the pharmacist would want to discuss my prescription with me.

Ten minutes later someone called me to the next window and the young woman, all business, asked if my doctor had explained to me the procedure for taking the chemo. (It's a ballet of timing, waiting a certain period after eating, popping some nausea drugs at another certain time, downing the chemo and then hoping you can get to sleep before ralphing. So far, most months, I've been pretty lucky on that count.)

Oh sure, I said, I've been taking this for a year and a half (actually longer). No sweat.

The druggist looked annoyed, and groused a bit about preparing all the explanatory material for nothing. To give her something to do, I offered that although I was experienced with the chemo it was my first time paying this much for it, so I could maybe use a little counseling on that score. Always thinking of others, that's me.

"I'm sorry, honey, I wish I could help," she said. She directed me to Window 3, next door, to pay my bill.

When yet another woman appeared to ring me up she did an actual double-take at the invoice printout. "Wow, I can go home early today," she said brightly. "I think I've met my sales quota for the day."

Now this, to me, is not funny. More like rubbing it in. Some people have no sense of humor.

Gamely, I asked her how my total compared with other pharmacy sales. She did a little whistle through her teeth. Sometimes at the end of the year people on Medicare will exhaust their benefits and have to pay as much as $200 or $250 for their medication, she said.

My chemo, I was given to understand, was a record in her experience.

So, Merry Christmas, Group Health Pharmacy. And bah, humbug, with an extra lump of coal, to your stupid copayments.

Not for the first time ...

As regular M&M readers know, "unprecedented" is one of those words that drives me crazy. I've managed to read right over it nearly every day for the past year or so, since I last registered my gripe, without complaint.

But my kettle boils over. After finding two instances of "unprecedented" today in the same story -- an otherwise excellent essay by Time's Joe Klein about Barack Obama -- I've decided to start a new M&M category -- unprecedented -- to track appearances of this misused word.

The rules: I won't go looking for "unprecedented" but if I run across it I'll note it here.

That's some stare decisis shit right there, so other writers should get with the program. You might have to go back to Marbury v. Madison to find a decision of such significance.

So with that, I present Exhibit A, from Klein's "Why Obama is Winning":

But the Senator from Illinois had laid down his marker: if elected President, he would be in charge. Unlike George W. Bush, who had given Petraeus complete authority over the war — an unprecedented abdication of presidential responsibility (and unlike John McCain, whose hero worship of Petraeus bordered on the unseemly) — Obama would insist on a rigorous chain of command.

And Exhibit B:

But one of the more remarkable spectacles of the 2008 election — unprecedented in my time as a journalist — was the unanimity among Democrats on matters of policy once the personality clash between Obama and Hillary Clinton was set aside.

Two unprecedenteds in one story. Not unprecedented, but not a good example.

More to come, usage geeks and fellow crabs.

Promotion

One of the nice things about returning home earlier than planned was that we got to attend Franny's eighth-grade graduation ceremony last week, celebrating promotion from Madison Middle School to high school.


In a way it seems silly to me that the school makes such a big deal about passing the eighth grade, but on the other hand going to high school is a big deal, and the kids all get into it. The girls dress up, some of the boys put on a shirt with buttons, a few of the class leaders and teachers make short little speeches, the school jazz band plays a couple of tunes, everyone gets called up to the stage to receive a certificate (that's Fran getting hers, in the fuzzy photo above), and academic achievers get called out for special attention.

That's where I ended up getting a little annoyed though. Franny's best friend Lacaia (below, with Fran) was one of 27 kids who managed to get through the three years of middle school with a perfect record of straight A's. Quite an achievement, I think, and nice that she and the others were called up to the stage individually to receive a little trophy. But when the stupid principal, Ms. Hudson (who insists on being called Dr. Hudson), got to Lacaia, she bungled her name: "La ... La ... LaCalla?" It's La-cay-a. She messed up Lacaia's last name too, which is even easier.

That made me so mad. Come on, lady! After all the platitudinous speeches about preparation and taking care of the details, you can't take the time to learn the names of 27 outstanding students? Sheesh. What does a kid have to do to get your attention around here, shoot up in the hallway?

Really, I was so bugged I almost walked up to the "doctor" after the ceremony and chewed her out.

Even so, it was a fun night. Frank looked happy and proud. Gina and Greta sat with Michelle and me in the grandstand, and we all mingled afterward in the courtyard, where we ran into Mich and Gabby (she's in Fran's class).

The ceremony was at West Seattle High School, where most of the Madison promotees will attend next year. Gina went there for freshman year but didn't really like it; she and Fran are both moving in the fall to the Center School, which is a smaller arts-oriented school downtown.

Here are Frank and Gina goofing off:


Gabby and a group of her friends. Gab's third from the right, in the blue floral dress:


Franny and her buds:

No senior discount

Yesterday, hot to press my 2008-long winning streak at the tables, I drove down to the Muck for some afternoon poker action. I've been building big chip stacks lately and so playing with a lot of confidence -- the winning and the confidence can multiply each other -- and this looked like a juicy game: a couple of tight old farts (usually a sign they can be pushed off a pot) and a bunch of overeager youngsters, including several I've played with before and knew to be beatable (wait for a hand and let them overplay their cards).

But from the beginning my session didn't go well. The kids were hitting their unlikely draws, the old guys were standing firm to notch me with a better kicker, and my cards were going dead when I needed help. Losing, like winning, can build on itself, and it wasn't long before I needed to rebuy. It was a good game, I still thought, but it was slowly dawning on me that I was the player making it good ... for everyone else.

In one hand I flopped four cards to a flush. Normally I might bet out, hoping to pick up the pot right then or, even if I were called, expecting to collect even more when my strong draw came through on the turn or river. I was feeling cautious, though, afraid my bet might be raised by one of the young aggressives, so I just checked, hoping to get a free card.

"No way," said the punk in Seat 8, flipping out four white chips, "no senior discount."

Ouch. Ow.

So I'm not a young gun, or even a savvy middle-aged player to be reckoned with. I'm another pathetic pensioner bleeding off chips.

The old guys at the table looked at me with ... not sympathy exactly, more like camaraderie. Yeah, it's annoying, isn't it, they seemed to be saying. Not bad enough that we're old guys, but these damn whippersnappers have to dangle it right here in our wrinkled old faces. Welcome to our world.

Needless to say, my draw failed to come in, again, and I had to put two more bets into Seat 8's pot.

Here's where a wise old man might have sussed out the situation with its dwindling prospects and called it a day. Me, stubborn beyond my years, I ran through another rack of chips looking for a chance to wipe the smirks off all that peach fuzz. Never happened. No senior discount, or comeback either.


All the major food groups

Tonight we get another chance, and with like-aged pals and the friendly setting of a reporter's home game. Michelle and I are invited to play at Jack Broom's house with a couple of old Times colleagues, including my friend Jim Simon, and Michelle's boss from the P-I, David McCumber. It's a reprise of a game we had a few months back at Simon's house, and I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone and trading stories over a deck of cards.

Jack's a great guy and was the first member of Team Mark, my financial backers and rooting section last summer for the World Series of Poker. We've been playing cards together, off and on, for 20 years.

I asked him what we could bring tonight and he said he's already covered on cards, poker chips and drinks. So I walked up to the Junction just now and bought a can of nuts and a bag of chips. Then, as I was walking past the donut case I noticed a chocolate raised calling out to me. I decided to break my weeks-long donut fast, what the heck, and take it home to have with a cup of coffee.

When I got to the counter the checkout lady rang up my order and half-smiled at me: "This is a healthy-looking meal if I've ever seen one."

Man, you'd think they'd train the employees not to mock the customers. Yeah, I said, you gotta take care of yourself.

When she asked for my Safeway Club Card I half expected her to offer a senior discount too. But no. Healthy eating is its own reward, I guess.

"Have a nice day, sir," she said. Close enough.

As if there's not enough to worry about

Just when you thought it was safe to raise your head and look around at the sorry state of the devastation -- global warming, identity theft, online sex predators, tailspinning global stock markets, bickering presidential candidates, tone-deaf "American Idol" contestants -- here comes another big problem:

"Our dirt is disappearing," screams the Seattle P-I headline this morning.

Seems, according to the story, that the Earth's thin layer of topsoil is slowly eroding due to ... farming, really? ... and nobody's doing anything about it. Well, except for the P-I, that is, and some guy who wrote a book.

It's "another global crisis quietly taking place under our feet," the reporter tells us.

Barf. I'm so sick of these alarmist reports masquerading as journalism. They might be even worse than the poor-Gloria hearts and flowers pieces that I hate so much.

We wonder why the news business is in trouble. Wake me up when the last paper folds.

I don't know where we're headed with the topsoil crisis -- I had to stop reading after four paragraphs -- but I know that you could solve the problem, no matter how much dirt we're missing, by tilling all this wasted newsprint into the ground and letting it mulch.

Promises, unrealized

Last week, in my blog tease after a couple of postless weeks, I said I felt refreshed and ready to return in the new year to the M&M fold. It hasn't exactly turned out that way.

Not only haven't I been blogging but, I'll confess, I haven't really been feeling refreshed either. After my monthly oncology appointment yesterday I drove to University Village to meet Michelle for lunch and ran into a guy from work. He asked me how I was doing. I gave him my pat answer, usually true, about how I always know it's time for another round of chemo because I notice I'm feeling so good. But when Mich e-mailed me this morning asking how I'm doing I gave her the more honest answer: up and down -- not so great, really -- especially emotionally.

Part of that is cyclical; although I usually feel good physically at this point in my monthly treatment, I always get crabby and anxious about the start of a new chemo round. But I feel more down and irritable lately than usual. I hear myself snapping at the girls or Michelle, which embarrasses me and bums me out, to say nothing of the effect on them. Also I can't seem to get up for anything. I sit around, accomplishing nothing.

This surprises me. It shouldn't maybe, being that I'm sick and everything, but so far throughout this ordeal I've mostly managed to be Mr. Cool. I like that; I don't want or expect to morph into Mr. Malaise. Even as the new year approached, without resolving to run more, as Michelle did, or freeze the butter like Kaye, I felt optimistic about the future. The past year, I figured, was all about physically recovering from surgery and dealing with chemo, which I've mostly done pretty well; now I could focus on relighting my creative pilot.

Weirdly, though, as the holidays passed and Michelle went back to work and the girls returned to school, I've felt less energetic or optimistic than I can remember.

At the doctor's appointment yesterday, Jennifer ticked through her checklist of symptoms, part of our monthly ritual, halfway paying attention as I answered: seizures, no; nausea, some; blurry vision, no; depression, yeah ... kinda.

Michelle asks me about depression once in a while too, and I'm never quite sure how to answer. It sounds like a question about direct cancer-related depression, and I never sit around thinking: man, I have cancer, what a drag. But I also know that these symptoms and feelings I'm describing add up to something that sounds a lot like depression. And I do in fact have cancer, and so maybe, yeah, all this stuff is related.

I hesitate to write about this here. It feels maudlin and like a total buzzkill on the awesome M&M vibe. But, you know, I've written about other aspects of the illness experience, like fond memories of surgery or the funny and inappropriate feelings of superiority while observing the health profession's idiocy, or even the thrill of a good blood draw. And I gather from comments and conversations that one of the things people like about this stupid blog is its occasional, unexpected moments of honesty amid all the goofy banter.

So there you have it. Plus it's another excuse for my failure to post lately. Sorry to be such a drag. I'll snap out of it one of these days; maybe a good movie or afternoon poker session would help.

'A diver, huh?'

That quote, from one stop in my three-part hospital visit today, reminded me of my famous first attempt at skydiving. When we landed that day, my instructor and tandem jumper unhooked our parachutes and safety straps then looked at me and said, "Screamer, huh?" It wasn't until that point that I realized I'd been screaming for our entire 12,000-foot fall.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Today is my monthly oncologist appointment and bimonthly MRI scan, and also time to stop at the hospital lab for my weekly blood draw. It's a time of month that always makes me cranky, mainly because it means I'm about to start another round of chemo. On top of that, today's appointments were annoyingly split between early this morning and this afternoon, meaning two trips back and forth between West Seattle and the University of Washington across town. I had decided to avoid that by hanging out for several hours at the University Village shopping center, but after a stop at the Starbucks and quick tours through the bookstore and Apple store I got bored and tired and came back home instead.

Anyway, when I showed up for my MRI this morning the tech lady whose job was to hook up an IV for the contrast dye greeted me with a cheery, "Did you bring your veins with you today?"

I hoped so, remembering my last visit here when the rookie tech stabbed my arm five times and spilled blood all over the chair and my arm before getting a vein. This time, no problem, and the MRI was its loud but normal no-sweat self; half an hour later I was out of there.

So I stopped by the lab to get the blood draw. What would make sense, it seems to me, would be if they could use the same IV to draw the blood that they had just used for the contrast, but no, it was sort-of explained to me, that was against procedures. So the lab lady tapped my right arm and whipped out her needle.

Poke. Nothing. Poke. Nothing.

That's when she said, "Oh, you've got a diver, huh?"

Turns out that's her term, or maybe it's blood-industry jargon, for a vein that seems to dive below the surface out of the way of the incoming needle. So I guess I didn't bring my veins with me today after all, at least not all of them.

No problem, my new friend reassured me, we'll just find another spot. She went on to tell some horror tales of patients, mostly heroin abusers who had ruined all their veins and had to be poked behind the knee or between the toes. One guy, she heard, had so abused his veins but was so desperate for a fix that he was found in a bathroom with a needle stuck in his eyeball.

I could feel little beads of sweat starting to form on my forehead about that time, but she found a non-diver in my right hand and that was that.

Now I'm heading back for a consultation with Dr. Spence or his able nurse practitioner, Jennifer. Update to come.

On the skydiving, by the way: I didn't want my legacy to be "screamer," so I went again a couple of months later. No screaming. Just pure, silent, terror.

Evening update: This afternoon's appointment was no biggie. Dr. Spence seemed pleased by the new scan; no new growth equals good news, he said. We did our little routine -- squeeze my finger, look at my nose -- and then he locked and loaded for another round, still at the reduced dosage that I've been on for the past two cycles. That'll start on Monday.

God Bless Pitch

Man. We're watching the World Series, and tragically Fenway Park has adopted the Post-9/11 custom of having someone sing "God Bless America" during the seventh-inning stretch.

Tonight's perps: Boys II Men. Michelle astutely pointed out that they should change their name by now to Men II Old Guys -- and that was before hearing them sing.

That must've been the worst wiggly-voiced rendition of that tired song I've ever heard. Somebody buy those dudes a pitch pipe.

Close call for Tall's

After lunch with Mich yesterday I had to drive up to University Village to return a camera battery I bought a couple of weeks ago, right before we left for L.A. I told Mich I had a bad feeling about the pending transaction, and she contributed her own little misanthrope stories about annoying sales clerks and rotten return policies.

Sure enough, when I got to Tall's Cameras I could tell right away that it wasn't going to be easy, even though I had the original packaging and receipt. I explained to the sales dude that I had charged the battery at home, but that when I put it in the camera I got no power. I even told him that I appreciated how the original clerk had tried to save me money by suggesting I buy this generic replacement for $40, rather than the $60 Canon version. Maybe that had something to do with why it didn't work?

No, he said, that shouldn't matter, the batteries are identical. He examined it and pronounced that it was "damaged," and sure enough you could see a little bubble along one edge. Well, OK, I said, if I can just get a refund I'll be on my way.

"No," he said, "I can't take back a damaged battery without my manager's approval. Also, this was purchased more than seven days ago so that's going to be an issue."

I could feel my blood getting that medium-chemo-simmer feeling. Cool as I could muster, I asked to speak with the manager. Oh, the clerk said, he's not here right now.

Man.

Turned out the boss was only on his lunch break, not off for a month in Europe, so I decided to walk around U Village for an hour -- dangerous, because with the Apple store right there I could easily blow several hundred bucks trying to recover 40. Plus I'd had to drive across town, in traffic, and burn a couple hours of my day. Not that I had anything else to do, but still.

After a while I walked back to the camera place. While I was waiting for the manager I noticed some more fine print on the return policy -- absoultely no refunds after seven days; batteries will not be accepted for refund or return if the package has been opened (hmm, how else would you know it doesn't work?). So I was all prepared to go postal and then slunk back to the car $40 to the bad.

But, miracle! The manager barely glanced at the battery or the receipt. OK, that's fine, he said, and he credited my debit card.

I was so pleasantly surprised I almost made the mistake of buying another battery there.

You're under no obligation to read this

To begin this morning's news meeting, I'd like to call attention to Roy Peter Clark's ridiculous essay at Poynter Online, "Your Duty to Read the Paper."

As Michelle would say, puh-leez.

Clark, who always struck me as a pompous windbag, begins by confessing that he hasn't read the newspaper much lately (on paper) and vowing to renew his morning paper habit. Okeydoke, good for him. But then he elevates his own decision to a moral imperative:

I'm making a promise to myself, and now to you, to reverse this trend. The future of journalism, not just newspapers, depends upon such loyalty. And now I pose this challenge to you: It is your duty as a journalist and a citizen to read the newspaper -- emphasis on paper, not pixels.

Clark's argument is that while online journalism shows some promise financially, for now all the money to be made in this business -- and therefore to pay reporters, editors and, presumably, washed-up "senior scholars" at a "teaching foundation for journalists" -- is in the print edition of the daily newspaper. Someone's got to buy the damn things! And if we're not going to do it, he says, addressing himself to working news types, how can we expect the public to?

Well, give me a break. Did early commuters have a "duty" to buy buggy whips? Were music producers compelled by duty to keep purchasing 8-tracks? If so, a lot of good it did 'em.

Says the indispensable (and digital only) Wikipedia: "When someone recognizes a duty, they commit themselves to the cause involved without considering the self-interested courses of actions that may have been relevant previously."

Zactly.

I love the news business as much as anybody, and until the last few months I've read an actual newspaper, the paper kind, almost every day of my life. Most days more than one of them. I literally learned to read with the Oakland Tribune. But turn it into a duty, a religious requirement, and you're going to lose me faster than you can say "Hail Mary."

Next, somebody will tell me I have to play poker and ruin that too.

If "we" (and I use the term loosely now, being semi-retired) have a duty, it's to find and report the news, to tell people something they don't know and probably can't find out otherwise, and to do it with writing that's as sharp, concise and entertaining as we can make it.

Markets clear, is what I say. If people, including reporters and editors, would rather get their information from their computers, their cell phones or their Tivo'd Jon Stewart shows, that's the breaks. Figure out a better way to deliver the news or shut up and get out of the way. Go join the senior VHS scholars in dead-delivery-system nirvana.

In other news today ... I have no idea. I don't get a newspaper.

Drug Update: The debates

The debates make me want to take drugs. Or maybe, the debates make me feel like I'm on drugs already, and I just didn't know it.

"This guy's been in congress 30 years, and he's talking about what congress ought to do," Mark says of McCain.

Why do so many politicians seem so ludicrous and full of crap?

"Second citation for level playing field so far," Mark reports.

"Pimps and prostitutes," Huckabee says.

"The people who handle the bags and make the beds ... not able to afford health insurance ... a fair tax really lifts up everybody ..." Huckabee says.

"I'm a sponsor of the fair tax," says Duncan Hunter.

"Duncan Hunter? I've never even heard of him," Mark says. "He's probably some Orange County dude."

"More and more of those have gone offshore," Duncan says. "A bomber every 60 minutes ... fractured the industrial base ... most favored nation trading status ... 1.8 million high paying manufacturing jobs moved offshore ... countervailing duties. ..."

Brownback looks like he's had cosmetic surgery.

"Clearly ... we're taxed to the max! I'm not going to raise taxes ... the current tax code really is an abomination. Optional Flat Tax!" Brownback says.

I think he's dying his hair.

"They've got to weed out the losers," Mark says.

I agree.

30 second answers, says Matthews. Guiliani vs Romney.

"I cut the income tax," Guiliani says. "It's something I believe in."

Romney: "If you want to cut taxes you have to cut spending ... I'm in favor of the line item veto, I exercised it 844 times."

Giuliani: "The line item veto is unconstitutional. It's unconstitutional. What the heck can you do about that if you're a strict constructionist?"

"It's Baloney!" Romney says. Repeats some other stuff he already said.

"Bang your head against a stone wall all you want," Giuliani says. "I took President Clinton to court and I beat him."

"Giuliani cleaned his clock on that exchange," Mark says. "Coffee is what I'm thinking."

"50,000 Americans now make their living off Ebay!" McCain says. "My friend."

"Do something about illegal immigration!" Tancredo says.

His eyes are kind of buggy. He'll never make it.

Mark shows up with the coffee. Tasty.

Drug update, or: The nurse did it, in the lab room, with a fax machine!

After my rant yesterday about the headache getting my chemotherapy drugs, I talked to my "case manager" at the UW. Her explanation: "It's possible the wrong fax number got used."

Jeez. What a tell. Here's a tip to would-be detectives or couch potatoes watching a police procedural on TV: If they slip into the passive voice, they did it. It's possible the trigger got pulled while the gun was pointed at my husband's head.

Hey, that's an idea! A reality show with contestants competing to solve a murder!

Each season could be a different classic-TV setup -- one year could turn on forensic evidence, another on penetrating, confession-inducing interviews of suspects. Contestants could dress in one season as frumpy guys in trench coats, or as a prim old British lady, or a little French guy in a mustache ... the possibilities could keep the show going for years.

Man, I'm wasting my time here. I should be in Hollywood, lunching at Farmer's Market and coffeeing at the Melrose Starbucks.

Anyway, my stupid drugs came today. So tonight I begin my cycle.

Thumbs Down for Two New Shows

Tonite we watched two new shows opening this season: Five Days and Pushing Daisies. They're both a little too self-aware, in my not so humble opinion. My short review for Pushing Daisies (it just popped out when Mark asked me what I thought): "It's suck."

I mean really, a voice over nosing in every minute and a half, a baloney story line about a guy who bakes pies at a place called The Pie Hole, who brings people back to life by touching them, then kills them by touching them again, and who uses this weird skill to become a private detective who solves murders by bringing the victims back to life for one minute to ask them who did it -- and who falls in love with a cute beekeeper oh-too-charmingly named Chuck? Oh pu-leeze. I mean, as Seth Meyer and Amy Pohler would say -- Really.

And Five Days: Day one. Lady abducted while buying flowers, snapshots into the lives of all the people who don't know each other yet but will become more and more intertwined over the next four days as we figure out what happened to her, and to her daughter who was separately abducted on the same day by a different guy. Dum Dum DUM! Lordy.

I'm dialed out on both of these. Pretty pictures, trying too hard. Next.

So ... tell us what cool new shows you like so we can TIVO them an try them out.

Thank you for the 'opportunity'

It's chemotherapy time again so I'm already in a bad mood, but today I'm doubly aggravated because once again I need to hold the hands of the stupid health-care industry to make sure I get my stupid drugs.

Before we left for LA I met with my oncologist (actually the nurse practitioner, Jennifer) and was cleared for another month of chemotherapy. The new cycle would have started on that Saturday or the following Monday, which would have been a week ago today. But since we were going to be out of town Jennifer said it was cool for me to delay it a week. OK, so far so good.

The way this routine works, or is supposed to, is that Jennifer calls my prescription in to Caremark, the big mail-order pharmacy that my insurance company insists on using for this very expensive drug. Caremark then calls me to confirm and set up a delivery time, and then a day or two later I get the drugs.

Except for three months running now I've never received the confirmation call, and I've had to track down the order, wade through phone jail, wait on hold, get the offending parties to talk to each other and then wait, again, for a confirmation call and eventually the drugs. Both the pharmacy and the University of Washington neurology clinic have denied responsibility and blamed the other party for the communication breakdown. It's like having third-graders for brain surgeons.

If it didn't have the one mitigating benefit of postponing the noxious treatment slightly this monthly song and dance would be a total pain in my ass.

When we left off, Jennifer was to call in my new order to Caremark, with instructions to deliver to my house, same address, and to leave it on the porch without me signing for it. That way, when we returned from Los Angeles I could start the cycle, on Sunday (last night) I was figuring. But we got back to a week's worth of mail, a couple of stray newspapers, Michelle's macro lens from Amazon, but no drugs.

So I just called Caremark (which is on speed dial, by now). Yes, the woman said, our records show we made a delivery to you on August 29th. Right, I said, that was last month's cycle. No, she said, we haven't received a new order, but you can call your doctor and talk to them.

I explained how the system has worked in the past and complained that I've had to call Caremark for three months running now, instead of the other way around.

"Well, sir," the phone woman said, "we have a lot of patients and unfortunately we don't always have time to call each and every one of them. You always have the option of calling us a week before your prescription runs out and we can get a head-start on refilling it."

Right, I said, except it's not a prescription that "runs out," it's a monthly cycle that requires a monthly visit to my doctor to determine whether it's going to be renewed and, if so, at what dosage.

I'm not nearly as cool as Michelle during these annoying phone confrontations. She gets the scary calm voice. Me, I get sarcastic. Look, I said, I'm over here with brain cancer ingesting poison pills every month and paying you guys a lot of money for the pleasure of doing it. It doesn't seem like I should be the one calling everyone to make sure they can do their jobs.

"Yes," she said, "but we have a lot of patients and unfortunately we don't always have time to call each and every one of them. In my experience it's best that you as the patient have the opportunity to call us a week ahead of time."

Argh!

On the other hand, who am I to judge? Maybe she had a brainectomy herself, and she had to take this stupid job because she was about to lose her disability insurance. It's enough to make you want to marry some Canadian dude, Jeanne Sather-style, and leave this ridiculous system behind.

The I.R.S. is stalking me again

Dang. Nothing like sorting through the mail the day you get home from a great trip and finding an indecipherable letter from the IRS in there, saying you owe them a thousand smackers.

I got a letter like this from them last year, right around the time Mark went flippy floppy. I blew all the deadlines for responding of course, seeing as how we were busy doing the brain cancer thing. But it all worked out in the end. They were pretty nice about it, actually. (They needed docs to prove that the 10,000 smacks I took out of the 401k actually went to the first purchase of a home).

This year it's another documentation thing again, I think. I put 3,000 smacks into an IRA thinking I'd be able to get a tax deduction on it, but it turns out that because of some rule I didn't know about, the fact that I'd had the option of using the USC retirement plan for the 1 month of that year meant that I didn't qualify for the deduction. So I took the 3,000 smacks back out of the IRA -- I think the very same night. Anyways, I did 'splain all that in the return for that year, and hopefully, if I 'splain it again I can dodge the thousand dollar blood suck the IRS is trying to pull off here.

It's amazing to me how much time they spend nickel and diming someone like me who has paid and paid a huge percentage of my income without complaint all these years. I wish instead of spending their staff time on a small timer like me, they'd figure out a way to tax rich people who get away with paying almost nothing. Then they wouldn't have to try to keep the fire trucks running off finding crumbs in the crevices of the returns of average blokes like me.

Late-night news meeting, special cancer edition

After ranting several times lately about the Seattle Times' maudlin, over-the-top writing about Gloria, the poor little girl who recently died of brain cancer, I was chagrined to see today that my erstwhile paper, the Seattle P-I, was pimping its own cancer case on the front page.

Sadder still, for me (journalistically as well as personally), because I know the story's subject.

She is Jeanne Sather, a writer I hired for a temp gig while at the Times years ago and who returned the favor by helping hook me up with a part-time editing job at OnHealth.com when I was freelancing and starting my own web busness. Shortly after I met Jeanne she discovered she had breast cancer, and she wrote an affecting and popular first-person series about it for OnHealth.

Since then, I believe much of her work has concerned her own health issues, including a blog, "The Assertive Cancer Patient: Living With Cancer -- and an Attitude." In a recent post, riffing on the Michael Moore movie "Sicko"'s affection for the Canadian health program, Jeanne "advertised" herself as available for marriage to a Canadian man who wanted a woman and would give her, in return, de facto free health care. Ho ho ho.

Now I don't begrudge anyone writing about their own health problems; I may want to do it myself someday. And Jeanne's offer -- sincere or not, I'm still not sure -- certainly made its point. Of course the idea was media-friendly as it could be. It just sounds like a story, and so naturally it was picked up by the TV news.

Still (sorry, Jeanne), I hated to see it show up today on the front page of the P-I. Maybe I'm a one-man crab on this issue, but to me these stories are manipulative, leering, derivative and almost always a cliche. I just don't like them. I hope Jeanne's health stabilizes and improves. And if she really wants a Canadian husband, and if that would help, I even want that for her. I'm just not sure I want to read about it on Page A-1 of the newspaper.

I'm more impressed, reporting-wise, by a P-I story posted tonight, a folo on the lady-stuck-eight-days-in-a-ditch story. Her husband's been dissing the sheriff's office for not finding her wrecked car sooner, but it turns out now, the P-I tells us, that investigators were thrown off by bad information provided by ... the husband.

...

In other news news, Michelle gave her presentation tonight and hosted the panel discussion. I wasn't there and she's always humble about such things, but I can tell from careful cross-examination and clue-culling that she rocked the house -- surprising absolutely no one, I'm sure.

I've very proud of her.

I'm gonna take your wheels off

The biggest difference between flying to Los Angeles and flying to, say, Las Vegas, New York or San Francisco -- our last three trips -- is all the damn kids. Especially flying on a weekend. There must be some kind of Disneyland special going or something.

When we were standing in line to board at Sea-Tac yesterday morning, some little menace ran into me from behind, nearly knocking me down. The dumbass parents didn't apologize exactly, but the mom did say his name semi-sternly -- Austin! -- and the dad issued a threat:

"I'm gonna take your wheels off!"

I turned around, and little Austin, all of about 6, was riding around on those sneakers with mini-skates built into the bottom of the shoes. He wasn't buying the dad's line. You can't, he said. How can you do that?

To which the dad replied, "I have the tool right in my pocket."

That struck me as a pretty good comeback, but I figured it for a further bluff, since any tool that could disassemble shoe skates would probably be classified a security risk. And security seemed particularly tight yesterday. I got pulled over and wanded down several times, busted for a pack of Orbit gum in my pocket with its freedom-threatening foil wrapping.

Anyway, even the modest level of parenting being attempted by Austin's folks was nowhere evident on the plane. Kids, toddlers and babies were screaming and chatting away all around us, in quardrophonic sound, with an especially annoying precocious brat right behind me:

"We're flying! We're up! We're in the air!"

The plane hadn't even pulled back from the gate yet. As soon as we were airborne I put on my noise-canceling headphones, cranked up the tunes and fell asleep. Finally, when we began our descent, the flight attendant told us to shut down the electronics, and I was met immediately with more play-by-play.

"We're in Los Angeles! We're landing! This is Los Angeles! We're down!"

God.

Being a parent is great and all, and my own daughters I love. And I recognize that children are important to the future of mankind. But as a species, kids are a bit overrated. At least that's what I was thinking yesterday.

When we got off the plane Michelle marveled that not one stupid parent asked a child to use an inside voice. Man, they were loud. I wanted to explain nicely to the little Austins of the flight that if they can use their inside-the-plane voice I won't need to use my I'm-about-to-throw-you-in-the-Pacific-Ocean voice.

Where have all the seen-and-not-heard disciplinarians gone?

Facts are like glasses of water

Last month after my visit to the doctor we got into a discussion here one weekend night about MRI scans, blood counts, prescription dosage and the general unreliability of medical prognoses. I've developed less patience for all this stuff over the months and at some point I blurted out, "Facts are like glasses of water."

Gina and Franny cracked up. What crazy nonsense is this goofy old person blathering about now?

I may have been a little drunk at the time; it doesn't sound like a very cogent statement, of anything. But I know what I meant. Get a bunch of these doctors in a room -- or better yet, talk to them separately, over many months -- and they're all capable of using the same information to reach different conclusions. Or different information to reach the same conclusion.

Facts, I was thinking, become interchangeable, like glasses of water. Blindfolded you wouldn't know one from another. Your tumor is shrinking or it's unchanged; either way that's good. Your blood counts are low, but we expect that. You seem to be tolerating the chemo pretty well, but we're going to lower your dosage.

Michelle, unreformed medical reporter, can't help cross-examining whoever's available to answer questions. She always seems (to me) to know at least as much as the people she's interviewing, and I sometimes think she actually helps them reach conclusions.

Me, I'm more of the here's-my-arm-poke-it, here's-my-head-scan-it school, and then I just do what they say. I can't tell much difference in their glasses of water, and it could all change by the next visit anyway.

So today, as she has reported, Michelle didn't make it to the appointment, which somehow began early. Mich, an occasional guest at these meetings, is out of town for work so she wasn't there either. I was flying solo at the doctor's office, for the first time since this ride began.

I tried to whip up the enthusiasm to ask some questions but my heart wasn't in it.

Jennifer Wulff, the nurse practitioner who sees me in lieu of my oncologist, Dr. Spence, said she looked at my scans "and they're fine." She looked at my blood work, "it looks good." We did the rest of our little ritual -- touch your nose, squeeze my finger, which finger am I wiggling -- and that was pretty much that.

I took some karma-depleting pleasure last month, I'll admit it, in mocking Jennifer (behind her back) when she had some math trouble. She had decided to lower my Temodar dose, the chemotherapy drug, by 20 percent. I was taking 400 mg a day at the time, so I said OK, down to 320 then? She got a kind of spooked look on her face and said she'd have to compute it. Then she left the exam room, came back five minutes later and announced, as if she'd discovered a new prime number, than the new dose would be 320 mg.

Now, if you know me you know I don't mind feeling superior to people, even on such a meager little level ... but that doesn't include the people treating me for a freaking fatal disease! Christ, I'm ingesting poison every month over here on your say-so, and you can't figure 20 percent in your head?

Today I had to resist the urge to help with the math. OK, we're not making a change. ... Let's see, we're at 320 now. Times nothing percent. That's ... duh da-duh da-duh, carry the zero, bring down the three ... 320!

The other weird thing was: Dr. Spence himself poked his head into the room at the end of the meeting. He agreed the scans look good, everything looks fine. "So if you're up to another month," he said, "I think we should continue with the treatment."

"Hey man," I said, "I'm a professional pill-popper. Bring it on."

But what the heck? There's an option? Maybe one of these months we won't continue with the treatment? Or if I'm not up to it I can take a couple of months off?

Who knows. We're going to L.A. for a week and then I'll start the next round when I get back. With big glasses of water.

Reach out ...

We had a good time last night with our reporter friends at the Beveridge. A couple of people there I'd seen recently but it had been a while for most of them so it was fun to catch up.

One reporter told a long and very funny story dissing another reporter who is famous in the newsroom for promising to "reach out" to this or that secret source whom he's never at liberty to disclose, even to his editors, and who weirdly never seems to know anything worth putting in the paper. This all came to a head recently on a very big story -- the kind for which you'd be happy to call in your markers with all these long-protected sources -- that broke on a weekend. The reaching-out reporter wouldn't help, even though this big breaking news was on his beat; didn't even reach out to a source. The reporter telling the story last night was still hot, weeks later, and told the story in hilarious, profane, violence-threatening detail. It was worth the price of a pitcher of beer right there.

Thankfully, little of the talk concerned my stupid health. We talked about movies, gossiped and kvetched about journalism. I did my little riff about how annoyed I get when people pray for me and how I don't want a miracle like Gloria. Everyone laughed, but then I felt bad almost immediately when I remembered that one of the reporters and her husband (who was also there, and who is also the son of a minister), just lost a baby not that long ago. Who knows, maybe their faith got them through that ordeal and I offended them. I hope not.

Maybe I'll reach out to her, pray for forgiveness, something like that.