Drawing Blood

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Looking Back on the First Time

As I recall, I was about ten years old when I first had to give a blood sample from the crook of my elbow. My mother drove me to Saint Luke’s Hospital close by the old Buckeye Road Hungarian neighborhood where we had lived until 1951. When I found out that a nurse wanted to stick a needle in my arm, I took the only reasonable course. I bolted down the corridor until a couple of orderlies deputed to drag me back got hold of me.

I thought it hurt like hell. And ever since, it has not been easy to draw my blood. The veins around my elbow run deep and are not terribly visible. The person drawing my blood has to be very experienced with patients who veins like to hide. There have been times when I was punctured three or four times before a big enough vein was found. Sometimes, they just stuck the needle in the back of my hand, where my veins are more prominent.

Saint Luke’s Hospital from an Old Postcard

The only thing that’s changed is that I no longer resist getting by needles. In fact, I have to administer an insulin shot into my abdomen or thigh four times a day. Even when there is some pain, I know that it won’t be long-lasting. It’s one of those things you get used to as you age.

The Saddest City

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Bucharest in Winter

I am reading a great Romanian novel by Mircea Cărtărescu entitled Solenoid. In it, I found the following description of Bucharest, the country’s capital:

More probably, like all of Bucharest, the saddest city on the face of the earth, the factory had been designed as a ruin from the start, as a saturnine witness to time devouring its children, as an illustration of of the unforgiving second law of thermodynamics, as a silent, submissive, masochistic bowing of the head in the face of the destruction of all things and the pointlessness of all activity, from the effort of carbon to form crystals to the effort of our minds to understand the tragedy in which we live. Like Brasilia, but more deeply and more truly, Bucharest was born on a drawing board from a philosophical impulse to imagine a city that would most poignantly illustrate human destiny: a city of ruin, decline, illness, debris, and rust. That is, the most appropriate construction for the faces and appearances of its inhabitants. The old factory’s production lines, driven by long-immobile motors had produced—and perhaps, in a quiet isolation beyond humanity, continued to produce—the fear and grief, the unhappiness and agony, the melancholy and suffering of our life on Earth, in sufficient quantities for the surrounding neighborhood.

My Toy Story

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White Plastic Building Blocks

When I was young, I did not have many toys. My father worked in a factory as a machine tool builder, and my mother held various jobs including supermarket checker and assistant occupational therapist. We didn’t have much money.

Perhaps the fanciest toy I had was a Lionel O-Gauge model train I received for Christmas 1949. It ran on tracks with three rails and had several freight and passenger cars. My Dad must have felt financially secure that year to spend so much money on me. That train was used by my brother and me for approximately fifteen years.

1950s Vintage Lionel O-Gauge Train Set

What I probably played with more than anything else was a set of white pre-Lego plastic building blocks such as the ones illustrated above. I would build all kinds of structures and use them in conjunction with my pirate and military figurines.

I had a rich imagination as a boy and could play for hours imagining different situations. Do children whose toys are mostly electronic in nature have the same imagination? I think not.

Somebody Sez

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To begin with, I am not a great lover of the news media. In fact, I believe that if somebody wants to have a good night’s sleep, they should not watch or listen to the news after dinner. And certainly not the eleven o’clock news just before bedtime. It’s just not healthy, because those news outlets are peddling fear or outrage as their primary product.

One example is what I call the “Somebody Sez” news story. Just to give you an example, here are a number of headlines I just gleaned from the Cable News Network (CNN) website tonight:

  • Biden could face obstacle getting on Ohio’s ballot, secretary of state’s office says
  • Retired judge says statute cited in Trump’s motion raises concerns about NY judge
  • Republican lawmaker says Russian propaganda has ‘infected a good chunk’ of GOP base
  • Retired US general predicts Israel’s withdrawal won’t prevent an invasion
  • Republican strategist says Trump has made a critical mistake in the campaign

CNN apparently relies on an army of “experts” who “say” certain things or “predict” certain outcomes. It is possible that none of these things come true, but they can certainly succeed in riling up the consumers of the news.

Let’s take a more biased news medium, the Salon.Com website. Its readership obviously does not wish Trump well. (Neither do I, for that matter.) But its page today bristles with chatty “experts”:

  • “Punk”: Don Winslow on Donald Trump
  • “This is a big deal”: Experts say Judge Cannon’s order signals “bad news” for fate of Trump case
  • “Things just got very real”: Legal experts say Jack Smith appeal threat “puts Cannon on notice”
  • “Trump is running scared”: Legal experts slam “harebrained” scheme to get NY judge to recuse
  • Profs: Trump ruling unlocks key evidence
  • Experts “very worried” at Cannon’s order

People, it’s not news until it actually happens.

It is possible for editors to avoid this type of rampant supposition. For example, I could find no examples of blabbing experts in the NBC or CBS news sites. Apparently, they are more interested in reporting the news rather than creating it.

Eclipse

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Enough Fentanyl to Kill a Regiment

Yesterday afternoon, I heard some strange animal-like sounds coming from below my living room window. I pushed back the blinds, only to see several policemen and paramedics tending to something hidden by the hedge separating my building from the neighboring building. As I continued to look, I saw the paramedics hauling a black man in a bloodied t-shirt who was still howling.

Just another day on the streets of L.A., watching as our civilization is being eclipsed. And not just for a few minutes, either, but for the long count.

I do not understand why anyone would think that recreational drugs would be an improvement on real life. Even when real life is grim, it beats madness and suicide by chemical.

What is the tipping point after which there are so many people on drugs that reality has been supplanted? For a possible picture, read Polish sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress.

“Prepare Yourselves”

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Maya King at Mérida’s Palacio Canton Museum

After being conquered by the Spanish, the Maya of Yucatán wrote a series of miscellanies in the 17th and 18th centuries referred to as Chilam Balam. Many of the entries are poetic and filled with foreboding. Poet Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno translated a number of them in his The Destruction of the Jaguar: Poems from the Books of Chilam Balam. Here is one of them:

Napuctum Speaks

Burn, burn, burn
on earth we shall burn
become cinders in
the blowing wind
drift over the land
over the mountains
out to sea.

What has been written
will be fulfilled.
What has been spoken
will come to be.

Weep, weep, weep
but know,
know well:
Ash does not suffer.

Sawtelle Days

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Ketchie’s Stand at Sawtelle and Missouri

The third place I lived in Los Angeles was the first that I had picked out for myself. The apartment on Sunset Boulevard was picked by my roommate and best friend, Peter; and my father picked out the hot-box on Darlington where I sweltered from a total lack of ventilation.

In the fall of 1967, I was diagnosed with idiopathic aseptic necrosis of the left femoral head. My orthopedist at UCLA thought I would be placed in traction for months, so I hightailed it back to Cleveland to stay with my parents. It turned out that the treatment was for me to be on crutches for a couple of years.

Around New Years of 1968, I returned to L.A. and, with the help of my friend Norm, found a studio apartment on Mississippi Avenue a half block west of Sawtelle Boulevard. It was and, to some extent, still is a Japanese neighborhood. And this was at a time that I was gaga over Japanese films and cuisine and culture. I dreamt of meeting some Nisei cutie who looked like Toho film star Mie Hama.

Toho Film Cheesecake Star Mie Hama

Of course, I didn’t—and, besides, what kind of dating scene can a guy on crutches have who doesn’t have either a car or a driver’s license? For me, that was still in the future….

But it was interesting living in a Japanese neighborhood and eating teriyaki and donburi regularly at the O-Sho Restaurant and the Futaba Café, which were right around the corner on Sawtelle. And there was Ketchie’s Stand at Missouri and Sawtelle where the friendly Okie chef cooked up some very creditable hamburgers and tacos.

I was still attending graduate school in film at UCLA and wound up taking two Santa Monica buses to and from classes, unless I just decided to walk the five blocks from Santa Monica Boulevard and Sawtelle.

Around this time, I joined my film friends from UCLA in making regular treks to the Japanese movie theaters in town. At the time, there were five of them: the Toho La Brea, which showed films from Toho; the Kokusai and Sho Tokyo, from Daiei Studio; the Kabuki, from Shochiku; and the Linda Lea, from Tohei. At the time, I think the Japanese film industry was consistently making the best films anywhere. Needless to say, those theaters are no more.

I lived in the Mississippi apartment for about a year before moving to the first of my two Santa Monica apartments on 12th and 11th Streets respectively. But that is a story for another time.

Road Trip

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Tortoise at the Santa Barbara Zoo

Because of all the rain we’ve been having, Martine and I haven’t gone on any road trips lately. Today, we drove to Santa Barbara, had a great seafood lunch, and went to the Santa Barbara Zoo. Unlike the Los Angeles Zoo, there are usually fewer than 10,000 visitors present; and consequently there is about 76% less chance of having an infant stroller destroy your ankles.

Mind you, there were many small children in attendance. But that is to be expected at any zoo. It’s one of the few places one can take one’s small progeny and allow them to act like kids without inflicting too much damage to the animals and other visitors.

We’ve been visiting the Santa Barbara Zoo for upwards of twenty years, so we were saddened to hear that the two Asian elephants, Sujatha and Little Mac, died in 2019; and the zoo is not planning to replace them. Instead, their large compound is now an Australian “walkabout.”

On the way back, we took the pleasant and very rural California 126 to avoid the usual traffic jam around Oxnard and Ventura. We stopped at Francisco’s Fruit Stand in Fillmore to buy some honey, strawberries, and mandarins. I was shocked to find that taking 126 and I-405 in Santa Clarita takes no more time and eats up no more miles than taking either the Pacific Coast Highway to U.S. 101 or taking U.S. 101 all the way.

Unfortunately, Martine was in considerable pain from a pinched nerve in the back that has been bothering her for several years and getting progressively worse. Unless she finds a way of ameliorating her condition, we may not be able to go on many more trips together.

A Vanished Legacy

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My Old Grade School—Since Renamed

Between September 1951 and June 1958, I attended Saint Henry Catholic School in Cleveland, Ohio. It was taught mostly by Dominican sisters who had a two-story convent on the premises. I started in second grade after having finished only half of first grade at Harvey Rice Elementary School in the old Buckeye Road neighborhood. My persistent nightmare is that someone will find out that a illegally skipped half a grade and force me to go back to Cleveland and sit at one of those tiny desks and spend my days trying to puzzle out phonics.

I suspect that we moved to the Harvard-Lee neighborhood primarily because, when I lived in the old Hungarian neighborhood, I didn’t speak English, which didn’t help my academic standing.

The good sisters at Saint Henry forced me to become more of an American (and less of a Hungarian). With my poor second grade marks, Sister Frances Martin O.P. (short for Ordinis Praedicatorum, or Order of Preachers) would sneak up behind me when I misbehaved, pull my ears and call me “cabbagehead.”

My grades improved, until in fifth grade I was considered less of a wiseacre and more of an “A” student. My seventh grade teacher, Sister Beatrice, was in her eighties when she taught my class. In eighth grade, I had Sister Rose Thomas.

Back at Saint Henry, we typically had an average of 55 students per class. At some point, the Harvard-Lee neighborhood became majority African American and (probably) Baptist. The church (whose entry is the door on the right in the above photo) was closed down; and in 1993 the school was renamed Archbishop Lyke School Saint Henry Campus, with an average of 17 students per class.

While I was in college, my parents joined the “White Flight” to the all-white community of Parma Heights on the West Side of Cleveland, where my brother attended Holy Family School.

When last I was in Cleveland—for my mother’s funeral in 1998—I couldn’t recognize the old Harvard-Lee neighborhood. The trees that were planted when the neighborhood was new right after the Second World War were now massive. We never had anything like that in the way of shade during the 1950s and 1960s.

Ablative Absolute

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St Peter Chanel High School in Bedford, Ohio

The year was 1958. I began attending a new Roman Catholic high school which had opened the previous year. At the time, there were only a sophomore and freshman class. I was in the latter.

My most memorable teacher was the Rev. Gerard Hageman for English. He was super strict. Some years earlier, he has put together his own summary of grammatical rules which he distributed copies of to the class. Any violation of the rules, and the student received not only a flunking grade, but a zero. Since the numerical grades were averaged out—without any sort of bell curve adjustment—it was possible to get and stay in deep trouble insofar as your English grade was concerned.

Fortunately, I led the pack with an 89% average. I thrived in Father Hageman’s class. Even though I told everyone I wanted to be a nuclear physicist, at the time I did not know that I had no head for the sciences and only an indifferent head for mathematics.

I remember Father Hageman assigned us to write one page essays (graded either 0 or 100—nothing in between). Being a good Catholic, I wrote a whole series of essays on Jesus Christ standing before Pontius Pilate. My writing style was influenced largely by what I gleaned from William Faulkner after reading only The Sound and the Fury and by my class in Latin I.

The only thing I remember clearly is when I actually used an obscure Latin construction called an Ablative Absolute in one of my English essays. The opening phrase of the sentence in question was “Cold sweat covering his dolorous countenance” followed by what I conceived Pontius Pilate was thinking.

Prett6y fancy for a 14-year-old! I guess I’m still the same kind of writer, though I generally avoid obscure Latin grammar. On the other hand, by now I have read all of Faulkner’s novels; so I can copy him with some degree of confidence.