Time in a Bottle

Five days after beginning this post, I'm finally taking a moment to log in and try and finish it. As I write, I am surrounded by a mountain of wrapping paper and knotted up ribbon. For not even being done with my shopping, I am seem to find myself with a seemingly endless amount of stuff I've collected to give to people. I've already spent hours wrapping, and the pile isn't shrinking!! I used the morning to bake cookies to try and have for Christmas day when the family is here and have enough for the staff at Mom's nursing home. As I was baking, I fielded two phone calls from said staff telling me Mother wants to write me out of her will and is on a hunger strike because I didn't take her Christmas shopping yesterday (I spent it at the vet trying to figure out what is wrong with one of my dogs. A few hours and several hundred dollars later, we're still not completely sure, but she's sleeping peacefully beside me stoned on pain medication, so for now anyway, she's having a happy holiday). Now I'll spend the balance of the day trying to convert the mountain of miscellaneous stuff into a mountain of wrapped miscellaneous stuff without feeling horribly guilty about what I'm doing to the environment with all that wrapping paper and ribbon and eventually have to gut it up to go deal with Mother. My back hurts, my head hurts and my football team sucks on an unprecedented level and my own Mother routinely hates me. Even if Kelsey were here with us, I might be nominating this as the worst holiday season ever, with last year being in the running and probably edging this one out by a red reindeer nose. Of course, this one now wins hands down. The bottom line to all of this is: the rest of life doesn't stop when the holidays come around, bringing with them all the extra little tasks, errands and parties. It amazes me that any adult finds this time of year enjoyable. And, once again, the actual reason for the season gets trampled in all American greed and excess. But, I know that people do actually enjoy the season. Maybe I'm wired wrong, I don't know. But, I really don't have any more time to think about it, there are presents to wrap and a football season to mourn. Anyway, this is what I wrote starting last Tuesday:

I'm just getting home from a memorial service the funeral home held for their clients. I picked Greg's mom up and brought her back home in fog thick enough to cut with a knife, spending probably twice as long on the road as we did at the service. But, it was a nice affair and, as emotional as it was, I was glad I went. However, here I sit, another evening mostly gone when I should have been here working on getting my holiday cards out. And there are gifts to wrap, and some of them need to get in the mail. Then on Friday I have to come up with a dessert to take to a dinner at Mother's nursing home. I have my own food issues (I get kind of queasy around cafeteria style food), so this feels me with total dread, nonetheless, I have to do it. And this brings me to my second night of anti-holiday rant. Think of this as my own Christmas Carol and last night we were visited by the Ghost of Greed. Tonight we are traveling with the Ghost of Time Constraints.

The holidays bring with them a lot of extra errands, tasks and mandatory social situations. Add that to the normal time drain of football season and the award season movies coming out, and time management becomes a high walk across a very tight rope. And it's just all piled on to all the normal stuff that we have to do everyday. I don't know about the rest of you, but I haven't had a moment where I thought to myself, "Wow, I'm bored." in I don't know how long. I would actually like a moment like that. I would probably use it to sleep. I don't have time to shop for gifts, let alone wrap them without something else falling by the wayside. Then I have to rearrange the whole house to put up the holiday decorations, only to face another arduous day to put them all away. And we're supposed to experience comfort and joy this time of year? Who the heck has time?

Put a Bow on It

The Mean Season. Our grief counselor coined the phrase to describe what the holidays are for eating disorder patients. Unfortunately, the phrase fits more than that particular group. Personally, I think it started kicking me around about the time I became an adult and suddenly had to buy people gifts with my own piddly income. I've been black and blue just about every year since. I've just spent the last 45 minutes staring at my bank account, marveling over how completely empty it is. Finally, I decided staring at it really wasn't helping anything. I'm still trying to convince myself that hyper ventilating won't do much good either. Scanning the activity, it's a lot of extra expenses that come with this particular time of year. And I'm not done. Granted, this is an unusual year. Most years, I begin to amass Christmas gifts in earnest around May. By now, I should be in mop up mode only. This year, I became a little distracted and did nothing about the holidays until, well, the holidays. And, granted, this year, I am coming off five months of unemployment, and have been a little more than generous with myself since going back to work in my various vain attempts to forge back into life. But, truth be told, there has never been a time when money, or the lack thereof, didn't factor into the holiday equation somehow. Our first Christmas as parents saw us so broke that we did all our shopping at Sears because we had a credit card from there. The only Sears store in town had all of two aisles of toys, so our choices were limited. I remember how stressful it was to look over those picked over shelves and try to find decent toys for my daughter, wanting so much to shower her with gifts to show her how much she meant to me and wondering how I would ever pay for it. One of the items I finally picked up for my six month old was a Cinderella tote bag. I didn't really think my infant daughter wanted or could play with a tote bag, but it was something I could give her that maybe she would like someday. And, as it happens, the tote is in use to this day and is in Marissa's possession now. My little baby girl seemed perfectly content with her lot in life that year.

Once the kids got a bit older, the pocketbook had a little more heft to it, but along with a new largess came a new level of expectation. I remember the first Christmas we hosted here, with Kelsey in full blown tween mode. That meant her wants and desires were tipping toward bigger ticket items, but she was too young to really have a concept of what things cost. What she could grasp was volume. As she watched her two younger cousins rip through present after present of less expensive toys, her expression became darker and darker. She held her tongue until later, but eventually gave voice to her displeasure at the seeming inequity. I was not shy in responding with how I felt about that. In fairness, once I explained the economics of big girl toys versus the things she wanted at that point, and reminded her of the piles and piles she had brought home in year's past, she relented. But, I knew then I had created the All American Monster. Somewhere down deep in their minds, my children knew that the fact that they had gifts at all had some tie to the birth of Jesus, but it was a cursory relationship at best. The thing that really mattered was what they were going to receive. You can say what you want, but even in families where there is a lot more traditional religious dogma going on, the children don't run down the stairs Christmas morning to sing praise to Baby Jesus. They want to see what they're getting in His name. And it better be good.

Don't get me wrong. I love buying gifts for people. Actually, let me amend that. I love it when I give friends or family members gifts that please them. I try pretty hard every year to make that a slam dunk. But, there are the inevitable misses. The fallen faces, the slightly insincere thank yous, or the lack of a thank you at all, later to have a friend of a friend let it "slip" that so-and-so wasn't overjoyed with what you gave them. I think my track record is fairly good with some occasional strokes of brilliance, but I've been stung by all of that. Mostly, I am stung because I don't like the idea that I've disappointed someone I think enough of to actually get a gift for. If I had unlimited resources, that would be less likely to happen. I would imagine Donald Trump generally pleases people with his gifts. And, wouldn't you like to see what Tiger Woods gets his wife this year? My guess is, whatever it is, it could resell for a large chunk of the national debt. Anyway, for my part, hopefully all the people I've ever given a lousy gift to were at least able to re-gift it and get some good out of it that way.

But, that's just the tip of the gifting iceberg my not-so-luxurious ship is heading for. There's the politics of gift giving: do you get a gift for your spouse's boss just because he's the boss? And, if so, how much do you spend? And what do you get since you know nothing about him, and you know your husband's going to be no help at all? I could go on like that for hours. I'd sound like I am whining, but it's the same kind of debates that are repeated in households all over the country. I'm just ungracious enough to verbalize it. But, there's no point. Time's a wasting, and I've got more shopping to do!

It's Ornamental My Dear Watson

If you look at a family's Christmas tree, you can see clues about them. You see a lot of what they want to present to the world at any rate. My tree, for instance, is peppered with a lot of black and gold, dog oriented ornaments, a lot of Star Wars themed baubles, and a few Cowboy ornaments just to pretend we're giving equal time to the man of the house. Like me and my life, my tree is a loud, random collection of colorful stuff.

That was not my initial intent. Originally I thought I would have a tree that was very formal and built around solid colors. I started out not wanting the cornucopia of ornaments I have now, and built a tree around white lights and two colors of glass ornaments. The white lights survive, but, I realized today as I dressed our tree, not a single ornament from that first tree is still around. I'm okay with that actually. The random collection that adorns our tree is really more indicative of our lives than the sterile, formal tree I once envisioned.

Like many trees dotted throughout the world, my tree sports a history of our family, dating back to our wedding. We were married at Christmas 25-years ago, and some of the ornaments that Greg's mom used on the little tree that was at our reception now adorns our tree. From that point forward, most of what hangs there now are actually gifts over the years. Every year, Mother gave the girls and myself each an ornament. I long ago lost track of which ornament was which, and that used to worry me, thinking at some point I would need to split them up to allow the girls' a start on their own trees. With a heavy heart I realize now that it no longer matters. Marissa can have what she wants, if she wants any of it. As I hung each one today, however, what I could still tell you was who gave it to us and roughly when it came into the fold. The ones that do not really connect to us in any real way are generally from my mother. She was fond of Hallmark ornaments. I have a Garfield ornament, a few Currier and Ives inspired ones and a few Peanuts ornaments. She also provided us with lots of teddy bears. Not that I don't like any of those things, mind you, but I probably would not have picked them for myself. Not to worry. My friends have supplied me with the Steelers this and Steelers that, Darth Vaders and starships that dominant these days. My husband even lent a hand and added Han Solo to the mix. They are the harbingers of better times. Of times when my children were young and starry eyed about the holiday. Before it became a time that they dreaded because of all the food triggers and stressful family dynamics.

And that's where the story a tree can tell you stops. As I glance over at it now, it sits there all dressed up in its wild array of colors, trying to send a cheerful, hopeful message to the world about the family who lives in this house. But it doesn't say anything about the hole in our hearts, or the pain that all of us experienced throughout the years that led to this, the most painful year of all. Someone new who walks in now would think we're just a family of sports fans with a sci-fi nerd in the mix. Unfortunately, we are that, but we are more than that as well. Would that we were not.

A Diva's Day

Well, I've ridden the express train to Bummerville long enough, I would imagine, so it's time to switch gears for a bit. I am asked from time-to-time about Kelsey's cat, the famous Tum-Tum (would should have been named Celine). She is her owner's prodigy, of that there is no doubt and in her Kelsey's spirit lives on for us. And, as such, not every day with Tum-Tum goes all that smoothly. She can keep things stirred up.

She is a very attractive creature, delicate and fine boned. Even before she became ill, she weighed in less than 11 pounds. Now, even totally healthy, she does not possess a voracious appetite. This seems odd to us, since our other cat, Charlie, believes he is a panther and stalks prey and never wastes an opportunity to eat it, whether it is a bird trying to catch a little rain water out of the bird bath or my left over milk in the cereal bowl. I watched them dine together the other day; Charlie dug in without much regard to decorum. Tum-Tum watched him for a moment with what I swear was a look of disdain, finally settling in to take some delicate nibbles of her own.

How she got to the point where she is eating in the same locale as her larger, much heavier housemate was interesting to witness in and of itself. When Kelsey first brought her to the house, she made a few tentative trips downstairs to satisfy her feline curiosity, but I think she decided that with eight large, strange beasts anxious to meet her, curiosity might just kill the cat, so she retired back up the stairs and her interaction with the rest of us was limited to us hearing her loud cries from the landing when Kelsey came home or when she clearly felt Kelsey had been gone too long. She would occasionally lean through the stair railings and allow us to pet her momentarily if she'd get particularly lonely, but for the most part, we weren't the ones she wanted to see, and she didn't mind that we knew that. Problem for her once Kelsey was no longer there for her, she was upstairs all alone. What's a diva to do with no audience? So, with deliberate care, she began working her way down the stairs. First, she began hanging out on the landing most of the day with occasional forays into the kitchen when the coffee was brewing. I moved her food there. Not too long after she made her way into the room where we keep Charlie's food. An odd kind of space that appears to have been originally built almost like a greenhouse, it now houses my exercise equipment. Walled mainly by windows, it is accessible by a cat door that the dogs cannot breach. It catches a lot of afternoon sun, so she took to stretching out on the treadmill during the day and curling up on the weight bench at night. Eventually I moved her food bowl and litter box there.


She could see us from there and we her, but she still was isolated for the most part and, it would appear, lonely. Gradually she made tentative trips out of the exercise room. She would wait until the dogs seemed settled and then, with great stealth, sneak out and jump up to the back of Greg's chair where she could curl up on the back of it. Then, one night she crawled down into his lap and snuggled with him for a while.

She got bolder, deciding that visiting me in the morning as I brewed coffee, and following me into the bedroom, leaping onto the highest pieces of furniture to be safely away from the dogs. At some point, however, she learned that she could intimidate the dogs. All of them. No matter their weight or their station in the pack, with a swipe of her dainty paw and a guttural growl, she could send them packing. Once she discovered that talent, she moved into the main part of the house and she has reigned there ever since.


This dainty little thing has a vicious streak however. She will lure an unsuspecting human over with her plaintive cries, leaning into their strokes for a moment, then will suddenly grow tired of the fawning and take a swipe at him or her. Offended or shocked, the person will pull away, only to have her then decide she wants the attention again, and she will follow the person around mewling loudly, only to repeat the process. Personally, I've learned to watch her tells. Her pupils dilate a little more right before she turns deadly, in addition to the twitching tale. The long and short of it is that her mood turns on a dime. Hard to say what will swing the pendulum, so you just have to stay on guard when dealing with her.

One thing we learned early in the football season is that she does not like chaos. One night Greg invited several people over to watch the Texas game, and her reaction was violent. Literally. She used that "woes is me" cry of hers to pull the guests over to her, whereupon she would swat at them. Without fail. Good thing her swats and bites barely scratch the surface.

Now she is the Queen of the Castle. She roams the downstairs, causing the dogs, almost all of whom could swallow her whole if they had a mind to do so, to give her a wide berth. She is highly vocal, making sure everyone knows exactly where she is at almost all times, not always at the most convenient times. Open any kind of door, she is right there, ready to slip in. She has a real penchant for tight spaces.

A couple of days before Thanksgiving she seemed to be aware that plans were in the works because her mood turned dark and she sulked around, striking out at the hapless humans with more force than usual, drawing blood for the first time since she decided to interact with us at all. She made a complete nuisance of herself, draping herself all over wherever and whatever I didn't want her to. And Charlie, not to be left in the dust, followed suit by being uncharacteristically obnoxious, as supported by the photo of him draping himself over the china.

Tomorrow I will unpack the Christmas decorations. I am interested to see what her reaction will be. I know it will be notable whatever it is. She knows no other way.

This Old House

When I was going through Kelsey's things trying to find the right quote to use for her memorial folder, I found a detailed list she had made entitled "Seattle". It was a list of things she needed to do before she could move there. I could tell it was a recent development based on some of the items, but it wasn't the first time she had gotten it in her head to try and get away from here. She had tried to convince me to give her bus fare to Boston at one point, having an online friend who had offered her a place to stay. She had considered Arizona after that, wanting to be closer to her aunt and younger cousins. She had not discussed Seattle with me, probably because I would have said the same things I always said, which all related to how she proposed to live. And I had pointed out more than once that wherever you go, there you are. You can leave the place, but not the disease. It would move with her. Yet, at the same time I understood her compulsion to leave. and a part of me wanted her to make her escape for a number of reasons. I confess that having her somewhere else, particularly as she deteriorated over the last year and Mother took more and more time and attention, was appealing just for my own selfish purposes. But, I also understood the desire to leave the shadow of her adolescence behind and try for a fresh start somewhere. Plus she had a big spirit, and it was being unduly confined here. She had been born and raised in Austin and aside from her time in treatment, she had never lived anywhere else (Round Rock versus Austin does not count - they are essentially different shades of the same color). The problem was that the practicalities outweighed everything else. She had no money and her prospects for being able to go to a new place and find work, shy and unwell, was slim (pardon the Freudian slip). So, to a large extent, she was stuck here. Her list of things she needed to do or pay off before heading off to Seattle was a big dream with little hope of coming to fruition.

Sunday morning as I went outside to put out the deer's food, I looked around me and realized I'm very much in the same situation. I would rather be just about any where but here. I looked up and down the quiet suburban street, hoping no one was peering out their windows back at me in my unfortunately coordinated outfit of slippers, flannel blue pajama pants and brown hoodie and thought how nice it would be to be someplace where no one could see what I wore to feed the various wildlife and where I wouldn't have to worry about the man from down the street driving by and yelling at me for feeding them at all. But, those are minor irritations compared to the house looming behind. This unusual, interesting house that we have occupied for the last 11 1/2 years, much to its detriment, holds way too many memories for my liking. I want to be away from it. I feel as though I am almost a character in a Stephen King story and the house holds me hostage somehow. As it is, I can barely stand going upstairs, and it has fallen into a sad state of dusty disrepair. I had a vague notion of spending some of the long weekend cleaning up there, but I trudged up the stairs once the entire four days and then only when I absolutely could not find what I needed any other way, and with a fair amount of delaying on my part. It's not that I'm scared that I will run into some otherworldly apparition up there, but there are echoes from both girls' pasts that will always be here for me. There is no secret that I've long yearned to go back north as it is. This has always been a place I was hoping to hang my hat temporarily until I could get back to someplace where there are real mountains and actual seasons (as opposed to really hot, spelled briefly by a few weeks of not-so-hot and about two days of actual cold). But now, I feel as though I might suffocate if I cannot get out of here; this place has become oppressive.

Of course, with my mom not in any shape to even make it here for Thanksgiving dinner, let alone be hauled across the country (although she herself almost daily talks about when she'll be moving back east), leaving the Austin area isn't really practical, so, like Kelsey and my mother, I am largely trapped here. However, I reason with myself, we could at least move back into Austin. Maybe back to Hyde Park, where my Sunday morning outfit and matching disheveled hair would be considered Big-Lebowski-Chic and probably admired, along with my Democratic tendencies, as proof of my individualism. Worst case scenario, it would not catch even a sideways glance. And whatever house we lived in would have lots of history, but it would belong to someone else, not me. I would be free to start a new chapter in it. But, these are all wistful thoughts. I am completely and irrevocably stuck here. At least for now.

All these thoughts make me sad. Sadder than I already am. I love this house. As much as I hate it. This house deserves better owners than us. Like our pack of dogs, it suffered as more and more of our resources funneled into other things. Built in 1980, the house needs a consistent level of care that we haven't been able to provide it. There is the break in the septic pipe, there is a hole in our back porch, roots from the ancient and massive oak out back long ago grew through the pipes leading into the house, making the upstairs bathroom unusable except for the sink (a situation we purposefully left untended for years to keep Kelsey from purging up there -not that it was particularly effective). I have popcorn ceilings still, for crying out loud. The list goes on. I do what I can with what I have left, but we have lost pace with the march of time. Without a rather massive infusion of cash or someone with more handyman skills than I possess, time will continue to chip away at this poor old house. Of course, the paradox is that I cannot even realistically think of selling the house without making some of these repairs, but I need to sell the house to be able to afford to make them because, like most of us, it's my biggest investment. See what I mean, Stephen King could not have entangled me any better.

I think the house must hate me for my neglect. Just as I hate it for housing all these memories, even the happy ones from the very early years, because they are so painful to face right now. But I saw two Super Bowl championships come to me from right in this room. I have all my deer here, including my beloved Red, who is named for the Katherine Hepburn character in The Philadelphia Story and who will respond to her name when I call for her. If you look out the windows just right, you can't really tell that you're not in Montana and there aren't mountains past the graceful oak trees that tower over the house. I can meander down to the creek at the back of the property and watch the egrets as they search for fish in the waning light of day, spotlighted by fireflies fluttering in and out of the shadows. How can I leave these things? Maybe the question is, how I can get back to the point where love of those things outweigh the shadows of the other things that passed within these walls?

Survival

Well, we knew it would be tough, this first major holiday without Kelsey. Finding the right words for it is a challenge. I really cannot. For me personally, the actual holiday itself was not as disastrous as I worried it might have been, but only because there was the busy work. Coordinating the meal, worrying over the house with eight dogs and the dust and muck that creates, pulling out the linen and china and crystal, worrying over whether Kelsey's Diva cat would make a mess of things, all of it served to distract me from the place at the table that I wasn't setting. I imagine things were harder for Marissa and Greg. They both pitched in to help with the preparations, however, and the day pulled off as a result of family effort, in a way that we really haven't had in a while. Dealing with Greg's mom was hard, I will readily confess it. Her own grief, as from the very beginning, clashes against our own. In a way, my mother's contempt for Kelsey has made it more bearable to deal with her. She rarely speaks of her and doesn't miss her, so comforting her is not among our many tasks. Kelsey always gravitated toward my husband's family, finding a level of understanding on that side of the genetic fence that she couldn't get from Mother. Maybe Mother couldn't go there because of the lack of actual blood ties, but I tend to think it was more generational. Mother was, after all, practically old enough to be Kelsey's great-grandmother and she therefore has a more buttoned-up approach to individual frailties. Add that to her advanced dementia, and it's a wonder she remembers I lost a child at all. But, my mother-in-law is another story. She feels her granddaughter's loss like an acidic burn because they were close, and she has not had the opportunity to process it and try and come to terms with it. That is very obvious every time we have any interaction with her. So, we try to limit that interaction. Because one thing we know for sure is that we cannot act as her outlet. She needs one, on that we can agree. But, it cannot be us. I believe we can also agree on that point. Yet, we know she means well. The situation is one of those messy scenarios that likely play out in every "PT" household. Everyone grieves in their own way and those ways don't always fit together seamlessly. The holidays put a spotlight on it. Intellectually I know that, but I did find myself wondering how I was going to get through Christmas if she pushes the same buttons. Worrying about it is premature, I suppose. I need to get all the way through this one first.

As it turns out, Mother was too tired to come over. The irony of this is that we put on the traditional holiday dinner mainly for her benefit. Greg's mother would have hosted us at her apartment dining room as an alternative. Further irony is that the receptionist had called me earlier in the day to say Mother was up front waiting to be picked up. I explained we hadn't planned on picking her up that early so we wouldn't wear her out. In the end, she did not seem to be particularly upset that she missed the time with us, and I have to accept this is just the way it goes when someone is 91 with multiple health problems.

I noticed Greg was a little more edgy than normal during the UT game and Marissa was hard to read, but we all got the hours to pass and the day to end finally. I failed, however, to mentally prepare myself for the next day. Black Friday. Traditionally, this is a mellow day. It's a day to catch up on chores or errands long pushed aside. This year, the linen tablecloth clean and pressed, the china stored away, the house still relatively dog hair free, the quiet settled in once more. I am not sure why, I guess maybe because I was so intently focused on surviving the actual holiday, I had no counted on the oppression that would come with that silence. As I have mentioned before, the quiet house gets to me. I think the same was true for Greg as well. Neither of us stayed at the house for long. I fled like a perp leaving a crime scene. Greg left before me. I spent the day out, coming home having suffered through a bad movie and with blond hair.

Now, it's Saturday. I have TNT on a little too loud. I have laundry waiting and poo to scoop in the yard. I cannot continue to flee the scene, but listening to Kyra Sedgwick's thick false Southern accent does not cover up the quiet in the background, and the yawning void it represents. I find that I am becoming impatient with myself and my frail state. I want to take control of myself again and enjoy time alone again (well, surrounded by a pack of dogs and an ill-tempered cat), but I can barely hear myself think with this stupid show on. So, I think I'll leave.

Perspective - Get Some

As everyone who has ever even laid eyes on me knows: I bleed the Black and Gold. Sometimes that is more fun than at others. Right now is one of the not-so-fun times. They just dropped a critical game against a team that they dominated statistically, and for whom winning is a real rarity lately. On top of that, our two time Super Bowl winning quarterback gets hit in the head (and this is the man who planted his face through a windshield and almost died a few years back), and our veteran, trusted back-up breaks his wrist. Things look dark. I have fought back tears all day. All I have, I keep telling myself, are these Steelers. They are all that are keeping me going. I rely on them. I can't imagine what will happen to me now. Overly dramatic? As Sarah Palin would say, "You betcha!" I wallowed in self-pity like a fat pig in a deep pool of mud. Then I came home tonight and read a comment left on "Steelers Today" Facebook wall. This raving jacka*s is calling for Coach Tomlin's firing, pointing out that Coach Cowher was a better coach (in his opinion) and only missed the playoffs once. Then he committed the Cardinal Sin. He finished by stating that he followed the Steelers more than most of us. I commented back in a less than discreet fashion. Here's the lack of boundaries coming out of me again, I'm afraid. I could have just grumbled a little at how horribly ignorant and probably racist he is, and then move on, but I'm not about to suffer this kind of insult, however. I just cannot allow his ignorance to go unchallenged. Someone had beaten me to the punch on correcting him on the fact that Coach Cowher did in fact miss the playoffs more than once (five times was the answer), but his response was polite overall. I was less polite. I called him both wrong and insane. I did not cuss, but only because I was afraid Mr. Steeler Today would block me if I did. I am livid beyond belief. I mean, c'mon. Let's refresh, shall we? Who are the defending Super Bowl champions? Mmm, that would be: US! Tomlin, in his young career, has not missed the playoffs, and we are still on pace to make them. We may not, but c'mon, who would dare call Jeff Fisher a bad coach and look at the start his team had this year? Greg has pointed out to me since we first met that the degree of separation between the best NFL player and the worst one is pretty minor. There are 1,696 players in the NFL out of 305 million people in the United States. It's a pretty exclusive club. The Chiefs didn't suit up to lose the game. It was a shocking loss, in that I'll agree. But, that's all it was. It wasn't the end of the world. But, you know what, it took that incredible dirtbag to bring me to that realization. My tendency is to hang all my hopes on the Steelers, particularly after all my other little forays out in the world have tweaked my grief rather than helped heal it. But, I was once again reminded that I have to do the work on my own. Big Ben cannot wipe it away for me. Coach Tomlin cannot call a play and make it disappear. So, I guess I should thank Mr. Supreme Jerkface for helping me get some perspective. I can only hope somone does the same for him. (And don't ever tell me you follow the Steelers more than I do - you incredible ignorant bleep!)