Several OS members have inquired about my whereabouts for the past few weeks. 

Well, I haven’t run out of things to say.  On the contrary, I’ve been quite distraught about various events in the world, the erosion of our civil liberties in the guise of fighting terrorism, the poisoning of our environment by duplicitous corporations, murder and mayhem committed by nation-states that should have known better, continuing economic dislocation, and spreading intellectual dysfunction….

Yesterday, for example, my best friend, a retired Marine Corps general, told me that he believes Barak Obama is a member of the Taliban and that he was behind the explosion on the BP oil rig….and I didn’t even tell him that his opinion is based on nothing more than racism because I have already lost too many other friends by arguing with them over Obama’s citizenship….

Lately, however, my real life has intruded upon my intellectual fancies.  It’s not that I am no longer getting poetical insights….I just haven’t been getting many poetical insights of late because the intrusions of real life have overwhelmed my ability to capture whatever insights I get as they occur.

For the past three years, I’ve been confronting the reality of the medical-care complex into which America has developed, first with my father and now with my mother, but that’s a chronic issue.  For the past two months, however, I’ve been in hand-to-hand combat in an ongoing battle with the medical-care complex, the many-headed hydra that lays in wait for each and every one of us, reinforcing my belief that medical care in America is still in critical condition despite the limp-wristed efforts of the Obama Administration.

My mother broke her forearm for the second time in two years, necessitating a two month stay in a rehabilitation facility, but that doesn’t begin to tell the story.  (I will tell that story later at great length, when I have the strength to relive the events.)

In the end, everything that we do in life is aimed toward the goal of increasing our own longevity and the longevity of our loved ones, always at great expense, and often with unconscionable results.

The short story is that I am finally putting my mother into an assisted living facility, which is rather like a Ramada Inn with medical supervision.  (In fact, it’s exactly like a Ramada Inn because the facility I chose for her was a Ramada Inn before it became an assisted living facility.)

In making the decision about where to place her, the only differentiating factor was cost.  All assisted living facilities provide approximately the same services and are approximately equal in the quality of the services they deliver.  The marketplace assures this: people talk and the word gets around, with the result that substandard facilities do not survive.

I looked at three places for her:  the one with the worst reputation was also the most expensive at $3,200 a month.  The second place winner came in at $2,200.   The grand prize winner came in at $1,200 a month for a basic studio and $1,400 for the deluxe studio I selected, making it far and away the best choice of the three, regardless of price.

The real issue, for those facing this situation, is the idea of putting away a beloved parent (or even a not-so-beloved one; my mother has been a life-long pain in the ass) and the sense of failure implicit in that decision….but there comes a time when you have to admit to yourself that you can’t provide the kind of 24 hour coverage that an elderly, infirm parent requires…and that your efforts to do so are actually causing more harm than good.

During her two month stay in the rehabilitation facility, my mother realized that she doesn’t want to sit home alone for the rest of her life when she can live with other elders, where she can annoy them with her stories instead of repeatedly inflicting them on me, so it was ultimately her own decision to go into assisted living…all I have to do is pay for it.

So, later today, I will be installing her in a two room apartment already furnished with her own things, hoping against hope that this will be her last stop in her life’s journey.

It will take some weeks before she is well-settled into her new situation, during which time I will continue to stew over current events until I can restart my poetical engines and get back to my real work.

So, no, I haven’t died, nor have I found regular employment.  I will be back soon enough.