Dad

Dad.

It's been, what, two and a half years since the shit hit the fan?  I remember that day like it was yesterday...

I was working tech support. Not yet a team leader, let alone a manager...just a regular old tech support engineer. My phone rang and it was Mom. She said, "Dad's on his way to the hospital."

I wasn't sure what was going on. Were you hurt? Was it serious? What?

She went on to explain that you had "run away". Specifically, the two of you had been out for a ride and you had started acting strangely during the ride home. You had seemed nervous.

When you got home, Mom had gone into the bathroom and you had taken the opportunity to run out the back door and over to the neighbor's house, where you proceeded to bang on her door yelling that "she was trying to kill you; please call the police".

So she did...and when your other son answered, he knew something was up.

The police came, and they took you away in an ambulance. At which point Mom called me. I asked her where they were taking you and immediately left work. I told her I'd be right there...

...and so began the worst 26 hours of my life.

I arrived at the hospital and proceeded to the ER where they had put you. What I walked into was a world of shit.

For the next 26 hours, me, Mom and various other close family members stood by your side while you alternately knew us and didn't know us. While you alternately knew you were in the hospital and thought you were either on a ship or in a trucking depot. While we had to have Mom leave the room so that we could call her on her cell phone so you could talk to her because that was the only way you would recognize her. While you looked me directly in the eye and said "If you do nothing else for me as long as I live, get me out of here" and when I said I couldn't, replied with "You're such a disappointment." It was horrific, but I could not leave Mom there to go through this by herself; so I stayed.

After the 26 hours in the ER and Mom losing her mind on the hospital staff for leaving us there for so long, you were finally transferred to a mental health hospital. I went home, because after 26 hours of what we had just experienced, I could take no more. When I got home, I lost it like I had never lost it before. I was unintelligible and without Shannon, I may have broken. I guess 26 hours of watching your father coming in and out of awareness, recognizing and then not recognizing his wife of 30+ years, and telling you exactly how disappointed in you he is...repeatedly...tends to drain a person.

Once I surfaced from my own personal meltdown and squared things up with work, I went to visit you. You were confused. You didn't know why you were there, nor how long they were going to keep you. This was the first of two stays at the hospital.

They experimented. The goal was to find a particular drug cocktail which kept you calm and not paranoid. The big problem was that you didn't recognize Mom all the time. Every so often, you would see her as some evil woman at work as opposed to the woman who had given you her love and patience for 36 years of her life. This needed to be taken care of before you could go home.

After about a month, they thought that they had figured out the correct cocktail and they sent you home. Things were...OK for a while. We knew that they weren't going to get better, but they didn't get worse for a good amount of time.

Then you ran away again.

So...back you went. By this time, I had grow pretty familiar with the roads into and around the hospital so visiting was easy. But seeing you in that place took its toll. I think that second time in was really when it really came home that we had lost you.

Fast forward a year and several months. We've gotten into a bit of a routine. I come over every Thursday to stay with you so that Mom can go to work without having to pay someone to watch you. During the other days of the week, you go to a day program...which you believe is going to work.
Some Thursdays are pretty good...you tend to sleep a lot. Those are the easiest days.

The days when you're active and awake are the hardest...and that's one of the more depressing things about this whole situation.

We have good Thursdays and bad Thursdays. Some days you just sit on your chair and listen to music all day. Other days, you're trying to find the phantom that's trying to break into the house or your body is betraying you in the bathroom. Either way, it's difficult to watch. I can't imagine what Mom is going through every other day of the week.

I'm not sure how Mom does it, to be honest. She's got to be superhuman. She deals with this almost 24/7. I spend a day with you and I'm a wreck...and even though that's a totally human reaction...I hate myself for it. If there's one positive thing that I've taken from this entire shitty situation it's this: Mom has taught me more about love and commitment in the last two years than I had learned in my entire lifetime.

I wish I had something better to say to your many well-wishers. People ask me constantly: how's your dad doing? I have no good answer.

Saying that you're good would be a lie. Telling the actual truth would accomplish nothing more than depressing someone who was just trying to express kindness. So I try to meet in the middle. My general answer to that question is, "He's OK...not great, but eh..." or something along those lines. This usually leads to an awkward conversation about how terrible it is that something like this has happened to someone as young as you. I agree and thank them for their concern and assure them that there's nothing that anyone can do.

You have lots of friends...so I have that conversation a lot.

I don't know, Dad. There are a few things I wish we could have settled before, well, this. Plenty of people get the chance to square up with their parents before the end. Unfortunately, we were denied that...with a nice long runway to continuously remind us.

I have regrets, sure. There are things I wish we could have settled and, if circumstances were different, we may have been able to. But that ship has sailed, as they say, so there's no use dwelling on what might have been.

All I know is that we're watching you get progressively worse, and it sucks...and there's nothing that anyone can do about it. We, quite literally, have to sit here and watch you get worse until you die...and that's just not fair.

My proudest moments these days come when I watch my kids with you. They know you're sick, but they don't act like it. To them, you're still just Grampy. Sure, Grampy's pretty quiet and gets confused and needs a little more help than he used to, but you're still Grampy and they still love you. That they treat you no differently than they used to gives me immeasurable pride. And the knowledge that they will likely remember you as the playful, joyful and loving grandfather that you were gives me some peace.

Things aren't easy...but we can't pick the cards. And we all have to play the hand we're dealt.

I love you, and miss you, Dad.

Well...

...we had to remind my father tonight of who I, my wife and my daughter were.





So that happened.

Screw DRM

Lukasz Kukawski said recently that "DRM drives people to pirate games rather than prevent them from doing that." After the experience I just had with Bioshock 2, I agree completely with him...let me tell you a little story.

So, I bought Bioshock 2 today. It was on sale, I hadn't played it, so I figured what the hell. Got it online, downloaded the zip, got the e-mail with my product key. No big deal. A product key I can deal with. I get to installing and playing. It went a little something like this:

1. Unzip the downloaded game.

2. Run setup and go through the installation process...entering the product key when asked. So far so good.

3. Click Start and see Games for Windows LIVE. Figure I have to log in to that to get updates and such. Get a connection error.

4. Figured I forgot to open the firewall or something...added an exclusion for GFWL to Windows Firewall.

5. Try again...same error.

6. Hell with that, I say. I run Bioshock 2. It opens up. Cool!

7. Games for Windows LIVE drops down in front of Bioshock and asks me for my Windows LIVE logon. No problem, I put it in and tell it to log me in automatically and save my login and password.

8. GFWL asks me for my product key...again. WTF.

8. Spend the next 10 minutes trying to switch back and forth to copy the key into the GFWL box. Ultimately, I end up not being able to switch back to the game.

9. Task Manager - kill the game process.

10. Print out the product key e-mail.

11. Restart the game. Re-enter my login...which was supposed to be saved.

12. Type in the product key.

13. It starts to "download my profile"...but wait, there's an update for Windows LIVE. Exit and restart the game to apply.

14. Click OK and then I'm asked to login or I'm going to lose everything. I click Yes to login.

15. Repeat steps 13 & 14...except this time I'm wise to their game and click No.

16. Game exits, update applied. Sweet.

17. Re-run Bioshock.

18. Re-enter my fucking login. (So much for "save my login and password").

19. Downloading profile...ANOTHER LIVE UPDATE. WTF?

20. Repeat steps 13 & 14...again clicking No.

21. Apply second LIVE update...this time apparently for the LIVE Login Helper. Good...maybe it'll save my login this time.

22. Nope.

23. ANOTHER F&*KING UPDATE. This time for the game itself apparently. Exit the game...again. (That's four times so far in case you're keeping track.)

24. Apply update.

25. Game automatically restarts again. Do you think it saved my login??? Of course not.

26. Login...profile actually finishes downloading this time. Will miracles never cease?

27. Start playing the game.

So...27 steps, about 45 minutes start to finish...to play one fucking game for the first time. There is something seriously wrong with that. Now...I could have gone onto any number of torrent sites or checked on Usenet for maybe 5 minutes and had myself a DRM-free copy of the same game. I didn't. I chose to do the right thing and actually put down the cash for a copy. What was I rewarded with? Forty-five minutes of my life that I'll never get back and God knows what sort of ridiculous crapware now sitting on my machine.

Screw DRM. It's bull and it doesn't stop anyone from doing anything. It just punishes the people that actually pay for your game.

So I'ma try this again...

Seems like once every several months, I say that I'm going to reattempt the whole blogging thing for this reason or that reason. We'll see if it sticks this time.

Hopefully with the weather getting better (it couldn't get much worse, really) I'll be able to get out and think more.

Damn crazy cats

So, here's a good one...

I live on a relatively busy road. People don't generally drive too fast on it; it's just that there's usually a lot of them. Yesterday afternoon was no different.

So I'm sitting on my front porch yesterday, waiting for my son to get home from school. As I'm sitting there, cursing the rain which I had thought at the time might impact my trip to the Sox game that night, I see Steven the neighborhood stray cat come tearing across my yard from behind the house. (Note: I have no actual idea if his name is Steven...I just call cats that I don't know that...little habit I picked up from a friend.) So Steven comes flying around the side of the house like something huge is chasing him. I mean he's off. He goes straight across the yard...and right into the road.

At this point, I start making the face that most people make when they think they are about to see something horrific. You know, teeth clenched, squinted eyes, head half turned away, but not really because you want to see what the hell's going down.

So, Steven flies into the road, narrowly avoiding a car coming up the hill on the near side. Gets halfway across and seems to come to the sudden realization that he is a) running full speed across a currently busy road b) just cheated Death once and c) Death isn't happy about it and has sent a minivan down the hill to take care of that.

The minivan driver (who was making the same face I was making), sees Steven in the road and lays on the brakes. I do a little mental calculation and there's no chance of a miss here. Steven's about two feet from going right under the front tire of this van and there was no way she was stopping.

So as I mentioned, Steven seemed to grasp his impending doom at that moment as well. What does he do with this information?

He tries to jump over the minivan.

So, picture this...cat running full speed, converging on a minivan going about 35mph. They're maybe three feet apart and the cat decides, "Fuck it, I'm going over."

He doesn't make it.

This thing jumped probably four feet in the air, head-first, right into the side of a passing van. *THUD*

At this point the minivan driver is probably like, "Holy crap, I just killed that cat!"

Meanwhile, Steven is spinning in mid-air. Literally. I think he went around twice. Turns out, though, that he wasn't dead. Damn thing landed right on its feet (it stumbled for half a second, sure)...and then took off back across the road into my backyard again...totally fine.

I was in awe. I actually gave the thing a round of applause. I'm pretty sure that I heard it laughing Death right in the face as it took off.

"Went well"...really?

Here's the thing...my definition of brain surgery that "went well" is that the patient didn't fucking die.

All joking aside...all the best to Ryan Westmoreland for a full recovery.

Clearly this guy hasn't watched Alton Brown ever...

...because if he did, he'd have at least the faintest of clues as to exactly how integral salt is to cooking. With the possible exception of water, it is quite possibly the most important ingredient in any kitchen. This news story about an Assemblyman from Brooklyn who has introduced a bill to ban all salt in the preparation of any food in restaurants is beyond belief. Not only would this seriously harm the restaurant industry by making all of their food taste far worse, some foods are just not possible to make without the complex chemical reactions of which sodium is an integral member.

Simply put...it's amazing to me how dumb some elected officials can be. This is just ignorant.