i found them in the smush

Howard Zinn

Alex Chilton

Mark Linkous

Ed Thigpen

J.D. Salinger

Some names you may be familiar with. Some you may not. All five of these people played a large part in aiding my development as an artist, a critical thinker and a person as a whole. Unfortunately they have all been taken from us in the last few months and the voids they have left behind will never completely be filled.

When people close to you die the world’s orbit seems to shift a little bit. Little things in life mean a lot more. Hugs, smiles, laughs, birthdays and even brushing your teeth can gain new meaning. In some inexplicable way it can gain a new importance. I may not have met any of the people above personally, but their passing has effected me deeply none the less.

All of them came from drastically different backgrounds and for the most part worked in different fields. They all however created works of art and educational treatises that were extremely influential to me and many others. Though they may not have been household names as some of their peers were, their impact can be felt and heard and learned around the world and will be for a long time to come.

Of course losing some of my “heroes” turned the spotlight back to focus on my own ego and what kind of impact I am going to leave on the world. Will I be just another guy who raises a family, cashes some checks and then fades into obscurity? Will I do something extraordinary that reverses the revolving of the world and explodes everything that has come before me into dust? If I had the answer to those questions I most likely would not be writing this right now. I would hire a ghost writer to do it and then claim all the credit for myself!

I have been very fortunate in that I have been able to meet a number of my “heroes” in person. And other than a small handful of them, they have all been very humble, kind and generous people. I think that has been more important to me over time than their various talents or reasons for their fame. Once the initial shock and Oh my GAWD!!! I cannot believe who I’m talking to! faded into background noise in my head, they were really interesting people to talk to. So when you get right down to it all these famous folks seem to be just like you and me.

I don’t plan on being famous anymore like I did when I was seventeen. I don’t dream at night of sharing the stage with U2 and Peter Gabriel like I used to. Even though those were some pretty cool dreams, and every time I hear “Solsbury Hill” or “Where The Streets Have No Name” I still picture myself up there playing drums in front of a crowd of thousands, my aspirations are somewhat more personal now. I want to be a good dad. I want to be a good husband. I want to be a good friend. I want to be a good man. In Yiddish, I want to be a “Mensch”.

That may not seem as sexy an aspiration as rock star. It might not even be as great of a conversation starter as being a culturally defining history professor. But it is my dream. It is the goal that I strive for each day. I may not always achieve it, and I don’t always expect to but I try.

For those of you who don’t have children, it is the hardest thing you could ever do if you try to do it well. It is also the most rewarding and inspiring endeavor as well. I am by no means the first person to realize this, nor will I be the last you hear it from.

People told me when we first got pregnant that I wouldn’t really understand until the kids were born. I of course thought they were crazy. Then my son showed up. They were right. I didn’t really understand until I cut the umbilical chord and said his name for the first time. At the sound of my voice, he stopped crying. His tiny arms reached up for me and he took my fingers in his hands. I understood it then.

My wife and I have been married for almost ten years now. It hasn’t been easy and on more than a few occasions we almost didn’t make it. I wasn’t always a good husband to her and I am incredibly fortunate that she stuck around anyway. We did not get handed the life we had always pictured that we would have. Circumstances rolled in like waves trying to wash us apart and break the frame around our dream of a perfect life. Lucky for me she loves the ocean and as we let the frame break we swam as hard as we could and found new pictures. This time we found them together.

It’s hard for both of us to let go of those old pictures sometimes. But there is no resisting and there is not much choice in the matter. So every day we watch the colors change, follow the brushstrokes and see what takes shape. I guess the trick isn’t to put life inside a picture frame at all. You can’t box it up like that and expect it to be real. Life needs to roll around and splash down on top of the water color you just finished painting. Somewhere in the smush that remains is what’s real.

Maybe that’s what Messrs Zinn, Chilton, Linkous, Thigpen and Salinger were getting at in their work. None of them seemed to care about the picture frame. They all painted outside of the lines. That might have been why they weren’t as famous or popular as other people. But it also may be why their work resonates so much with me. I found them in the smush.


Howard Zinn: www.howardzinn.org

Alex Chilton: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Chilton

Mark Linkous: www.sparklehorse.com/

Ed Thigpen: www.myspace.com/edthigpen

J.D. Salinger www.salinger.org

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Infinity on It’s Side

I just tucked my seven year old in to bed for the last time. Tomorrow he will be eight. The BIG Eight. Infinity on it’s side. Earlier this evening we had all gone as a family to a fourteen year olds birthday party and it has never been more apparent to me how a few short years can make such a huge difference in my “coolness” factor.

Tonight I was definitely not cool. The adults gathered were all very nice people, and we had a really nice time. However, other than for securing their slice of cake, the teens could not have spent any less time inside the house with us.

It’s not that I blame them, because I don’t. When I was a teenager my folks were nothing short of embarrassing to me too. It’s a rite of passage I guess. It’s strange to me to look back though and realize they were close to the age I am now back then. That is most assuredly un-cool!

But tomorrow I get to be Dad to the Birthday Boy! I get to act stupid and tell fart jokes and make funny noises with my mouth. I get to act like the Pirate King and make sure all the kids eat their oranges so they don’t get scurvy. I get to grab my son and hug and kiss and tickle him and nobody will think I am strange. I get to be cool. Probably the coolest I will ever get to be in my whole life.

I want to bottle up the day before it even happens. I want to walk into the bedroom where my kids are asleep and press the giant pause button to keep them both this way for as long as possible. To turn infinity on its side and hold on to things the way they are. When I still know everything. When I am still funny. When I am still Cool.

A few weeks ago I went to lunch at school with my son. It was a “Bring Someone Special to Lunch Day” so I was honored that he asked me to go. We sat at the table with some of his classmates and their fathers or grandfathers eating cafeteria food and talking about their class. One of the dads and I even struck up a conversation as he asked me where I was from.

“Did you know my Dad is a Rock Star?” my son puffed up his chest and proudly exclaimed. “He used to play guitar and drums on records and stuff back home in L.A.” A few people glanced my way and I nodded red facedly in the affirmative. “Yeah, he’s pretty cool.”

You could say with those four words he made my entire life.

And you would be correct in saying so.

I really don’t want to keep them kids forever. At least part of me doesn’t anyway. I know there will be amazing events and conversations and first loves and sports and vacations and so much more to come. I just selfishly want to stay this “cool”. They won’t always want to impress me or do what I tell them too just because I say so. They won’t always want to do fun stuff together. I won’t always be their “Someone Special” to bring to the cafeteria for hamburgers and apple slices.

My father always tells me that being a dad is eternally practicing the art of “letting go”. As he says this he folds his arms across his chest and slowly opens them as wide as they can go. And I believe he is correct. But letting go isn’t easy at all. I have yet to come close to perfecting it, and neither has he (sorry Dad!)

It’s a tight balancing act between teaching them to be the people they want to be and smothering the crap out of them! There really is only so much in the world we can protect them from until they shove us out of their way and take off on their own. I know I did when I was a kid. You probably did too. That’s why we call it “growing up” and not “growing down”. The former not only relates to physical size, but to gaining knowledge and hopefully some wisdom as well. The latter would shove the kid back into the embryo and keeping them hidden from the world forever. And we can’t do that no matter how hard we try.

I must say at this point that I had an extremely lucky childhood. I had two parents that stayed together because they actually loved each other, not just for the sake of their children. They didn’t split up like most of my friend’s families did. My older sister and I butted heads a lot, but we had a better relationship growing up than a lot of siblings I know. Yes, my folks were protective. They were involved with our schools. My Mom even became an assistant teacher at our elementary school because she was there so much. My Dad coached my first few soccer teams even though at the time he knew nothing about the game at all. He learned it as we did.

It saddens me today to know that most people who hear those things now might find them to have been over protective. I think they just loved us and wanted to be involved in our lives. Spend time with us. Now after we became teenagers we weren’t so pleased with their involvement of course, but by that point all the other kids in the neighborhood knew our folks. They even called them Mom and Dad! They would come over sometimes to ask my parent’s advice before talking to their own parents. Sometimes they even got dating advice or help with their homework.

I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty damn cool. I can see myself trying to be that cool. Maybe by practicing the art of letting go, we open ourselves up to letting other people in who need us. That way we don’t really lose our eight year olds and get stuck with fourteen year olds. We keep our own loved ones close by expanding our family to bring in those that our children have chosen to be their family. Their friends.

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Dude... you just won the genetic lottery!

My doctor told me a few years ago that I had an irregular heartbeat. It was caused by a thyroid problem that runs in my family (we’ll get to THAT one later). We thought it wasn’t the biggest deal in the world, but because it had been there for several years he recommended I go see a Cardiologist to make sure it wasn’t something we needed to be worried about.

According to the cardiologist we should have been plenty worried.

As it turns out, what I had was called Dilated Cardiomyopathy. Because of the extended period of time spent in the irregular rhythm my heart muscle had swollen and was only pumping about 15% of the amount of blood I really needed. That's barely enough blood for an eighty year old. Did I mention that I was only thirty-seven? The doctors and nurses were all surprised that I was walking around upright let alone not tired and sleeping all the time. Guess I’m lucky drummers like syncopated rhythms!

The doctor told us that the disease was treatable with medications and minor surgery. So we were sort of relieved. Wait a minute… is there such a thing as “minor” heart surgery? Yeah right. Then he told us the bad news. Even if the treatments we were discussing worked, I would most likely need a heart transplant within a couple of years.

Mushroom clouds anyone?

A HEART TRANSPLANT? Me? Wasn’t that something that happened to someone’s grandfather? Or to some dying lover in sad sappy romance movies? Other than profanity and a tremendous amount of fear there wasn’t really room for much else in my head.

Was this all my fault? I mean, I had lived a pretty fun life. I ate junk food most of the time, for a few years back in the day I smoked cigarettes and of course I loved the bourbon. Admittedly I did my fair share of recreational pharmaceuticals, but I stayed away from the really hard scary stuff(…mostly anyway). I certainly wasn’t an addict or junkie or anything like that. I was overweight, but my heart should be pretty healthy right? There had to be people out there treating their bodies worse than me who would go first right? Isn't Keith Richards still walking around with his Telecaster?

All seemed to be valid arguments. But as one of my closest friends would tell me a few years and several diagnoses later, “Kids with autism, thyroid problem, M.S. and heart disease? Dude, I guess you just won the Genetic Lottery!”

I remember distinctly laying in bed that night next to my wife and all of a sudden my face felt damp. It was like an out of body experience. I didn’t feel like I was crying, but I was. I remember hearing a voice say, “I don’t want to die.” Of course that voice was mine, and my wife was there holding me and comforting me until I eventually fell asleep.


A few months and many arguments with my insurance company later, we headed to the hospital for the big day. I felt strangely calm. Probably because at this point it was completely out of my hands and there was nothing I could do except lay there. I trusted that my cardiologist knew what he was doing and he had put together a great team for the grand event. If you were to ask my wife, I guarantee that she was feeling a bit different that I was that day. I can only imagine that it was much harder for her than it was for me.

They wheeled me into the operating room and I shifted into position on to the table. My anesthesiologist was very funny although I don’t really remember what he said. I think we talked about music for a while until…

According to my wife I am apparently not the nicest person when waking up from anesthetics. I tore the entire recovery staff of the cardio thoracic surgery department at that hospital a collective new one! See I had to lie still for four hours after the surgery to make sure the sutures held. Apparently I wasn’t so pleased with that and the profanity stream now permanently etched into the walls of my room remain there forever as a testament to that fact.

Believe it or not, the worst part of the recovery was not my heart. Thankfully, that had gone surprisingly well in a fashion. When they perform an Electronic Ablation they cut small incisions into the groin area and send small cameras and tools attached to the ends of long cables up into the heart via the femoral arteries. In order to prevent any damage on the way up and to make sure the heart is protected during the procedure, they have to strap your body down to the table securely so you cannot move.

Apparently as I lay there at some point in the first or second hour, my arm supports gave way and fell backwards and just hung there beneath me. The doctors could not risk moving them back into place for fear of the damage that might be done to my heart by shifting and jarring my body around. If it had been just my arms alone I would have been sore, but I probably would have been okay. Unfortunately I was laid out in a cross-type pose strapped to segments of metal table. For close to nine or ten hours my arms were hanging behind my back, supporting their own weight in addition to that of the metal supports that were supposed to be holding them up.

While I should have been experiencing chest pains as my heart recovered, my arms hurt so bad from the tears in my muscle tissue I didn’t even notice my heart. For about six months after I went home, I could barely raise my hands up to my stomach. I will say that the pain medications they put me on were AWESOME! When we could actually get them that is.

My doctor prescribed me some heavy pharmaceuticals and he recommended I be very careful as to not become addicted. He also said, “Use as needed.” Um… Okay? I was in a lot of pain most of the time, and I took quite a few of the pills. Not beyond a reasonable dosage, but we ran out of them a little bit earlier than expected.

My wife called in to the pharmacy to re-up the prescription and of course they said it was too soon. She called the doctor and he wasn’t in so she left a message for him to call back as soon as possible. He didn’t get back to her until about 10:30 that night when the pharmacy was closed and she was in bed anyway, so there really was nothing we could do that night. I would just have to tough it out and try to sleep through it somehow. Not likely.

The next morning I had finally passed out from exhaustion so my wife let me sleep and went to work. Can I just say how much fun that day was? It was awesome. Sweat drenched and screaming, unable to move and yet unable to find a comfortable position. Did I mention the cable went out around lunch time too? I was not a happy guy by the time my wife called later that evening. It turns out she had been playing phone tag with the doctor all day and had yet to speak with him directly about what was going on.

On her way home she went to the pharmacy and told them our situation. They would love to help of course, but the medicines I was prescribed were narcotics and they could not by law give them out without direct approval by the doctor himself. She finally talked to him a little while after getting home and he agreed to call in the orders. Guess what? By then the pharmacy was closed again!

Say it with me now, “And there was much rejoicing!”

We knew of a twenty-four hour pharmacy near by and decided to have the doctor call it in there as well. So by then it was after midnight, she was exhausted by taking care of two young cranky kids who did not want to bathe or go to sleep, her husband who was a complete pool of screaming inconsolable gelatin on the couch, and she had worked a full nine hour day with lawyers who treated her like the lowest form of pond scum that had just splashed into their caramel macchiato. Even with all that going on, she was going to make sure I was taken care of. Somehow. She piled herself into the car and drove to the twenty four hour place. They got the call from the doctor but unfortunately did not have any of the medicines we needed in stock.

That was when I believe that she Lost IT!

Bloodshot eyes, hair flying everywhere, pajamas and slippers… the lady behind the counter told her they wouldn’t give the medicine to “drug seekers” anyway. Wrong thing to say and wrong time to say it. After a screaming match that would have sold more pay-per-view tickets than Mike Tyson vs. Muhammad Ali, she finally got the manager to come out and speak with her.

I don’t know how she did it, but she convinced the manager to call another twenty four hour location and have the orders transferred over to them. By then it was close to three a.m. and my wife could not have looked more like a junkie. So when she walked into what we have since lovingly dubbed the “Heroin Pharmacy”, I am sure the employees were more than just a little hesitant to perform their duties.

When she got home she threw the little white bag full of goodness on to my lap, kissed me on the forehead and the stomped up the stairs and slammed the bedroom door. I don’t know if there had been a time when I ever loved that woman more.

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It's All In Your Head

Fibromyalgia noun

A syndrome characterized by chronic pain in any of various muscles and surrounding soft tissues (such as tendons and ligaments), point tenderness at specific sites in the body, and fatigue. Inflammation is absent, and the cause is unknown*.

-Dictionary.com

*Really? I am SO shocked!!!!!

I pulled my headphones off from the mix I was working on and heard my wife crying downstairs. I ran down calling to her as I was going, but she didn’t answer. She was on the couch, curled up in a ball trying to wipe her face so I wouldn’t see the smudge marks left from her tears.

“What’s going on Bu?” I knelt down side her. “Are you okay?”

She smiled and sat up, “Nothing. I’m fine.” She had to be the strong one. She always had the stiff upper lip.

“Bullshit!” I said. “I could hear you from the studio.”

“It just hurts. That’s all.”

For the last few years my wife had experienced chronic phantom pain throughout her body though mostly it occurred in her legs and feet. At first we thought it was stress. Then we thought she needed more rest. Maybe it was an allergy? Or even possibly a chemical imbalance? We didn’t know.

We took her to doctor after doctor after doctor and none of them could find anything that might be causing it either. They ran tests for spinal nerve problems, Planter Fasciitis, Mono, Photophobia, Pregnancy and everything else you could possibly think of. Of course the results always told us nothing. So the doctor’s all came to the same conclusion. All of these highly educated people with thousands of dollars spent on educations at prominent medical schools as well as decades of actual practicing medicine under their belts came to the exact same diagnoses.
It was all in her head.

Well, they have run every test imaginable so she MUST be making it all up. When she hurts so bad that her cries don’t make any sound and she tries to make it up the stairs by crawling… When I have to carry her to the bedroom because it’s gotten so bad that she passes out… When she wakes up screaming in the middle of the night begging me to cut her feet off because the pain is so intense… Yeah. She’s just making that stuff up.

Doctor’s just don’t seem to be able to comprehend anything that isn’t written down in a book. If it hasn’t been regularly diagnosed by them personally, it just can’t be real. I understand that for the most part it takes a certain type of personality to want to pursue a career in medicine. And I do know that there are some good doctor’s out there. It unfortunately appears that the majority of them refuse to actually listen to their real, living and breathing patients. They know everything, and we know nothing. So we should just submit to their infinite wisdom and swallow the pills they give us. After all, they know what’s best for us right?

SO having eliminated all possible causes including West Nile Virus and S.A.R.S., we finally found a doctor who determined that it might just possibly be Fibromyalgia. After all, it sure wasn’t anything else. He started her on a new course of medication and after almost three years of constant pain with no relief, it actually started to help. It wasn’t a complete cure, but the wonderful woman that I knew was hiding in there started to reappear from behind the clouds of agony.

And there was much rejoicing!!!

Now I am a big guy. If you don’t know me, I might even be a bit frightening to you. Shaved head, Van Dyke goatee, tattoos and for the most part I wear a scowl on my face. I used to have big earrings too. I appear to be pretty tough. But next to my wife and what she went through, I am like a little girl. I have mentioned before that I enjoy complaining right? Well if I had had to deal with what she struggled through almost silently, I would have been screaming so loud that the residents of the International Space Station would have been asking me to turn it down.

I don’t know if they ran before we found out and I just never noticed them, but it seemed like as soon as she was diagnosed with firbromyalgia there was this entire new crop of commercials for medicines developed just specifically for that disorder. The commercials were all over the place! Every time I turned on the television or opened a magazine there was an ad. It was very encouraging and very frustrating at the same time.

While I am extremely happy that there are now treatments available that will help, wouldn’t you think that doctors might have received some kind of information on this problem before the advertisers did? Don’t they get monthly medical journals that list new procedures and results from clinical trials? Why did every major television network and magazine have details about what fibromyalgia was and yet every doctor we saw told us that it was all make believe pain? That she should se a therapist because she was making herself sick?

I really wish that it felt better to say I told you so to the doctors. But that only feels good when you’re under the age of sixteen. Right?

I TOLD YOU SO!!!!!!!

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Many Scars (Really)

This wasn’t how I pictured my life you know. I was going to be on the cover of Modern Drummer magazine. I was going to win Grammy awards. My music was going to echo through the ages like Beethoven or Lennon and McCartney. Yet here I sit typing mostly with my left hand because my right has a mind all its own now. You see, it is not solely the Jewish guilt fighting against myself. As it turns out my body isn’t too thrilled with who I am either.

Brief lesson #1
Multiple Sclerosis: –nounPathology.
a chronic degenerative, often episodic disease of the central nervous system marked by patchy destruction of the myelin that surrounds and insulates nerve fibers, usually appearing in young adulthood and manifested by one or more mild to severe neural and muscular impairments, as spastic weakness in one or more limbs, local sensory losses, bladder dysfunction, or visual disturbances.
-Dictionary.com

Do they know what causes M.S.?
Not really

Do they have a cure for M.S.?
Not really

Is M.S. hereditary?
Don’t really know

Is M.S. painful?
Really


The last month has been tough. We packed up the kids and the dogs and the cat and moved from L.A. to Rhode Island to be with my wife’s very generous and supportive sister and her family. The kids, sis-in-law (Sil) and I flew out on a Sunday. My wife and the animals chaperoned by my cousin in the moving truck would arrive behind us by a week or so.

The doctors all said that cold weather is better for M.S. It is supposed to slow the progression of the disease. While the snow was pretty and for the first few days I actually did feel better, the last few have kicked my ass.

Have you ever been so drunk or stoned that the floor feels like a rolling sea storming around the great white Moby Dick? So drunk that every time you stand up, and most of the time when you’re sitting too, the world spins so hard you have to hold on the wall so you don’t fall down? Vertigo is just one of the lovely added benefits of the version of M.S. that I have. Problem is that unlike being drunk, it doesn’t go away when I wake up the next morning. Oh, and if you think that it gives me a get out of hangover free card you are sadly mistaken. I’m pretty much nauseous like a first trimester pregnant lady 24/7.

WHEEEEEEE!!!!!!

So we came three thousand miles and everyone arrived safely. Not necessarily sane, but safe! Our dogs loved playing outside in the snow with Sil’s St. Bernard. The cat found a wonderful hiding place inside the wall behind the electrical panel. (Refer to the “not necessarily sane” quote above) The school was wonderfully supportive and adapting to the boys special circumstances and our oldest was even put into the same classroom as his cousin! Things were looking up.

It was early on a Saturday morning and I was sitting in the living room adjusting one of the boy’s pairs of socks when Sil noticed that there were some cars stopped with their lights flashing at the end of her driveway. I barely noticed that she was gone, but I guess it was a few minutes before she came back. Her hand gently rested on my shoulder and she whispered into my ear, “Ringo was hit by a car and he is dead. We need to get him out of the road and figure out a way to tell the kids.”

We had gotten Ringo about a year and a half ago as a puppy for my wife’s birthday and for my youngest son. But he was really my guy. A tri-color Pembroke Welsh Corgi that was so smart he just decided to misbehave all the time. Every single person who met Ringo loved him. He made people who absolutely loathed and detested dogs want to rush out and immediately get one just like him. He had the biggest heart in the world.

After I started having seizures and had to stay home from work Ringo was my partner. He was always at my feet making sure that I was okay. If I was sleeping, he was right there. If I was writing, he was on my feet. If I was in the bathroom he would try to push the door open to make sure he could see me. He was a great little pain in the ass.

As we walked down to the street, it was as if it was a dream. It hadn’t really hit me yet. Not really. My wife was about twenty five yards in front of me when I slipped on the ice, but I was in so much shock that the fall didn’t register. When I brushed the snow off of my butt and eventually made it out to the mailbox I saw him on the ground. Ringo was already on a blanket and Sadie, our younger puppy was licking at his face trying to get him to wake up.

I don’t remember when it started but I was screaming. I hit the mailbox so hard it almost came off the post. Fortunately it was still snowing and I wasn’t wearing any gloves so my hands were numb. I didn’t notice that my hands were hurt until I saw the red marks a few hours later. Maybe it was the stress of being sick, or maybe it was everything else in life. Maybe I didn’t want my kids to have to deal with this too. Or maybe I just really loved that dog.

The police officer on the scene offered to help us bring Ringo back up the long driveway to the house so we could figure out what to do next. That was the hard part. We had to tell the kids. It’s difficult for anyone to teach their kids about death I would imagine. But be seven years old, move three thousand miles away from all of your friends, replace the sunny beaches of Malibu with snow covered roads and freezing temperatures, get stuck in a new school with no familiar kids and have your dog get run over by a car two weeks later? Oh yeah, add to that the emotional distractions of Autism too. My youngest has had a rough go.

Sil and her family came to our rescue though. All the kids wrote notes that they put in with him. They put in drawings, poems and even some toys. One of Ringo’s favorite things to do with my kid’s was light saber fight. He would put a sword in his mouth and go at it with them just like he was Yoda! So when my middle nephew put a light saber in with him so he could always play I turned into a puddle of warm jell-o.

They found a beautiful spot on their property underneath a cherry tree where we laid Ringo to rest. Then we all took turns shoveling a little dirt in on top of the blanket he was wrapped in. That was the hardest part for me. I don’t think I will ever get the image out of my mind of dirt falling on the point of his ear sticking out of the blanket disappearing under the soil for the last time.

Sil even put a Buddha in the corner and surrounded his spot with branches to keep the chickens out. Every day I go out and spend some time with him and tell him that his little boy is doing fine. We miss Ringo a lot, but life keeps on lifeing right?

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The Bedside Manner of a Mushroom Cloud

Our first son was born and we could not have been happier. He was beautiful, funny, full of farts and poop and as far as we knew as healthy as a bull. He was the first grandchild for my parents too, so needless to say they went a little bit nuts. Controlling, guiltifying and overbearingly Jewish grandparent nuts! But we knew it was all out of love so we went along for the ride.

I was playing drums in a few bands at the time, and one in particular was starting to do pretty well. We had just put a record out and were about to launch our first small tour of the UK. It wasn’t easy for me by a long shot, but I looked into the eyes of my new son a realized my touring days were over. Drums had shown me a lot of the world, but they had nothing more to show me now that even came close to competing with my little boy’s smile.

Fortunately the singer-songwriter of the band was very supportive. He was an old friend and kicked me in the ass to keep writing my own songs and start doing my own music. I was jealous of my replacement or course (like of an ex-girlfriend), but he was a really nice guy too and the band had to keep on moving forward with or without me.

I had a decent day job at the time at a well known record label, and the benefits were good. I wrote more songs, changed diapers and basically did not sleep for a year. A few months later my wife began to notice that she was very tired. More than a new parent should be that is. So we went to the doctor to see what was up.

After listening to her describe what was going on the doctor suggested she should get some more rest and start taking acid reflux medication. Really? Wow. That’s just genius! If overtired, get some rest! Medical degree champion #1!!! You might say we were less than pleased with the half assed diagnoses.

After many sleepless nights she was not feeling any better at all, so we went to another doctor who actually performed some tests! (Who knew they could actually do that?) Turns out she had every right to be more tired than me. She was pregnant! We being the smart folks we were had decided to listen to the old wives tale that you can’t get pregnant while you are nursing. Here’s a little tip just in case you are wondering…YOU CAN!

We were broke, but we were happy. We always used to say that we lived on love. My oldest son’s first word was “Cool”. What could have been better than that? Not the typical yuppie “Mommy” or “Daddy”. “Cool”! I was so proud of my little man. He did everything early. At nine months old he was running and climbing all over the furniture. Have you ever seen a nine month old? He was TINY!!! But there he was running around the room and dashing underneath the dining room table with plenty of headspace cleared above him.

He loved his little brother when he showed up too. I will never forget the huge smile on his face when we brought him into the recovery room. It was almost as big as the shark tank smile. But that would come later.

One day we noticed out of the blue he stopped saying “cool”. He stopped turning his head when you called his name. He would grab a few toy cars and sit in the corner trying to figure out how they were made. He wouldn’t roll them around on the ground and make engine noises like all the other kids. He would put the bottom of the car right up to his nose and squint his eyes tight almost as if he were trying to see inside of the plastic. He would put the car on its roof and slide it up a table leg and follow it with his face tracing whatever other straight lines he could find.

He stared not sleeping. I mean really not sleeping. Like he was only getting fifteen minutes of sleep a night not sleeping. I don’t know how we survived it, but my wife and I traded a few hours of duty by sleeping and staying up with him for close to three years. We definitely were the grumpiest family on the West Side. And that says a lot! I am sure our neighbors just loved us.

All this time our Pediatrician would say things like, “Oh Einstein didn’t talk until he was five” And “Just be patient. You guys just worry too much.” Nothing like being told you are stupid, pain in the ass, overbearing parents by a medical professional when you haven’t slept a full night in almost five years. It was spectacular some of the profanity filled conversations we used to have riding home from those appointments. I would share them, but there may be a child reading this somewhere.

So to get him as sleepy as possible we used to take him to the playground at the Westside Pavilion and let him run for hours and hours until they kicked us out. One of the fun things was that he LOVED bare feet, especially with painted toenails. If you have ever met a yuppie socialite L.A. Westside Mom, you will know that they love to show off their freshly pedicured feet. Needless to say, it was an open invitation for our little guy to invade these unsuspecting ladies’ personal spaces and put the bottom of their feet right up against his mouth. All we had to do was listen for the screams and we would know it was time to grab him up and move on to the next freshly fetid foot fetish victim. Fortunately we went there often enough that security knew us and pretty much took our side all of the time. We didn’t get arrested anyway, so that was good.

One day my wife struck up a conversation with another mom who suggested that we have our son’s hearing checked. So we made an appointment with an audiologist and set off to see what kind of drops or medication to use that would help him start talking again. They put him on my lap in a soundproof room and turned on the lights over a stuffed bear to his left. He looked at it and smiled. Then they did the same on his right. Once again he looked and smiled. Then they lit both and only had a fun sound come from the left. He responded appropriately. All appeared to be going smoothly. When we were finished with the testing the technician sat us down in his office room and told us his hearing was fine. But he had a strange look on his face and almost reflexively backed away from an invisible gunshot.

“Have you ever had him tested for Autism?”

Screeching tires, suitcases falling down the stairs, mushroom clouds over Santa Monica, Superman flying fast enough to get the Earth to spin backwards…What the fuck? How dare he tell us that our perfect little boy had autism! That’s just coo coo for coco puffs! No way!

Wait…what is autism again?

After the yelling, screaming and tears all died down at home we decided we were going to get a second opinion. I mean, he’s just a little quiet and doesn’t like playing with other kids. That’s not so odd right? He’s only an audiologist, what does he know about autism?

We waited in the lobby of the Westside Regional Center and my wife filled out paperwork while I held my son up to look at the fish tank. I kept repeating “fish” over and over again in his ear while he just smiled and tried to get out of my grip so that he could attack the maze covered balls on the wall. After what seemed like an unbearable amount of “waiting room time” (which I have discovered is a very different kind of time than regular time which I think should win me the Nobel Prize for time definition or something right up there with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and stuff) the doctor finally came in and brought us into an office keenly disguised as a “play room”. I could tell because of the red rubber ball in the corner.

Instantly there was an air of Kim Jong Il or Mussolini to this woman. She was in charge and I really don’t think that she ever smiled. Ever. I mean, her facial muscles did not work that way. In other words, this was not a doctor with a good bedside manner. (Catching a theme here maybe?) After flipping through previous test results provided by our pediatrician and UCLA, she spent all of five minutes with my son.

She called his name twice and he did not look at her. She held up some pictures for him to look at but the pattern of the carpet was much more interesting. She gave him a toy car which he promptly dropped on the floor and started chewing on the wooden alphabet block hiding under my chair.

“He is going to play with one of my assistants while we speak in the other room.” She barked in a monotone voice as she high stepped it through the door and left us assuming we were following. We looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders and tentatively followed her down the hall.

My wife and I took the two real fake leather chairs next to her desk while she sat behind and instantly said, “Yeah. He’s autistic.” I stopped breathing and the only sound I could hear was my wife crying. The doctor started to pass paperwork over the desk without skipping a beat somehow missing or not caring that with three small words she had overturned our entire world. Oh yeah, did I mention my wife had a job interview less that an hour later? No pressure. (How she was able to pull herself together for that I will never know. P.S. She got that job too!)

Twenty years ago a diagnoses of autism meant a life in institutions. It meant Dickensian and morbid treatment by doctors, educators and everyone else you ever came across. It meant a life stolen and only partially lived. No real human interaction. No first dates. No hugs or kisses. No children/grandchildren. Seven years later we were not too far ahead of that old way of thinking. There may have still been a few places left that applied leeches, but I don’t think they did that in our town anymore since the 1970’s.

Now that we had an official diagnoses we were completely depressed and terrified. So we did what any responsible parent would do, we went to the bookstore and bought about three hundred and twenty seven books. Books on treatments. Books with personal stories. Books on differing diagnoses and even “The Completely Terrified and Sad Because Your Entire Future Has Just Been Turned Inside Out Idiot Parents Guide to Autism”. Then we took them home, laid them all out on the floor and stared at the covers while she drank a bottle of vodka and I had my own special bottle of bourbon. To this day I still don’t think either of us has actually read any of those books beyond the introductions. Believe it or not, it’s still too painful.

A week or so later we went to see our Pediatrician again to set up our new plan of attack! We were gonzo! We were itching for a fight! We were going to meet this autism thing head on and crush it! Do you smell what the daddy is cookin’? I digress…

We sat down with the doctor and as we talked about autism and the future my wife and I both fell apart. We were raw nerves covered in pudding at this point. I think I frightened the doctor with the volume of my sobbing and the sheer amount of snot dripping down my nose. It must have been impressive to freak out a pediatrician with too much noise and nose fruit.

Now I have to believe the doctor meant well by what he said next. As a member of the same genus and species I have to trust that he was attempting to be kind and supportive when he leaned forward, took my wife by the hand and said, “You just have to mourn now. Most people get to wait until the teenage years. You just have to mourn the loss of your perfect child now.”



I have never wanted to punch someone in the face more in my entire life.



The loss of my perfect child? He wasn’t lost. He was sitting right there on my lap. Just because he wasn’t like every other kid in the room didn’t mean he deserved less of a shot at happiness. It didn’t mean that he wasn’t perfect just as is. It sure as hell didn’t mean that I didn’t love him so much it hurt.

Besides, “typical” kids are tougher to deal with right? Over the years I would see my friends with their kids and I would be so confused when they felt sorry for us. When they offered us some help. I wasn’t the one with the frazzled and frayed hair mustard stains on my shirt out of breath trying to answer the phone and drive to soccer practice kids beating each other to death in the backseat. I, on the other hand was the shaven head unwashed shirt toys in the driveway mismatched socks rushing from OT to PT to the neurologist speeding ticket taking late rent paying alternative therapy seeking calmer downer of a screaming child who can’t tell you what’s bothering him because he can’t talk dad.

Guess the grass was always greener.

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One...two...three...four...

I was un-cool. I knew it, I cared, but there was nothing that I could do about it. I had red hair, freckles and was just over-weight enough to attract the unwanted attentions of schoolyard bullies. I read comics like the X-Men (LONG before the movies made them acceptable) and my grades were pretty good. That was another bullet in the chamber for my enemies for sure.

I played sports too though. I was good at soccer and baseball. Basketball not so much, but I did make the Junior Varsity football team. So at least some of the jocks were my friends and kept anything really bad from happening to me. Then I got hurt at football practice. Nothing serious but enough for me to establish that pain was not something I wanted to grow too accustomed to experiencing.

My parents were both very into the arts. My mother was Irving Berlin’s great, great niece so music was always around. My father, a former child opera singer, was an Industrial Designer with a penchant for airplanes, the military and anything by Gilbert and Sullivan. He used to grab his old Kay acoustic and sing folk songs to my sister and I when we were kids. “The Great Wreck of the Titanic”, “Rahdy-Do-Dah!” and “Greensleeves” were household staples.

When I turned ten my folks wanted me to play an instrument for at least a year. That way I would be exposed to music and spend enough time with it to know if I really wanted to pursue it on my own or not without feeling as though it were a punishment. My icky older sister Jodi was playing guitar at the time so there was no way I was going to do the same thing as her! But what was I going to play? I would have to spend some time on this one.

One day my parents dragged me to a party some friends of theirs were having. Other than me, there were no other kids there. It smelled like sour tobacco, everything was polyester and shaped like something straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. I was b. o. r. e. d. I sat on the couch kicking my black and white checkered Vans up and down trying to figure out how to tear a new hole in my Tough Skins. Bored I tell you!

Fortunately my dad’s friend Mel had taken a liking to me and felt bad that there was nothing for a ten year old to do. “Want to see something neat?” he asked and smiled.
“Sure. Ok.” So I stood up and followed Mel and my dad up a thin wire staircase winding around and around in circles up to the attic. Not too much neat or cool up here as far as I could tell. Just a bunch of old furniture, some paintings and generations of dust mites flying around looking for somewhere else to be too was all I could see.

“May I?” Mel asked and my dad nodded. He reached over to a blanket that I hadn’t noticed yet. It was not covered in dust like the rest of the attic so when he pulled it off it was clean and beautiful. Just like the old silver and white Slingerland drum set it had been protecting. It felt like it brought all of the air back into the room. I’d seen drums before, but never this close up. I was enraptured.

“Wow.” Was all I could say. It came out long and slow like there was no breath left in the world. It took me a few minutes to realize that my dad and Mel had left me alone up there. I was in my own world. I was in love.

I went downstairs and to the car in a daze. Everything had somehow shifted. Colors even looked different on the trees as they blurred past the window. The radio played sounds like I’d never heard before. My folks were talking and I asked them to be quiet and please turn back to that weird music with no singing again! My dad smiled and turned the dial back to KKGO. At the time I didn’t really know it, but I was listening to the drums for the first time.

The way they danced around the time and still created forward momentum. I had never felt anything like it before. Everything had a rhythm. My heartbeat, the way my parents talked and even the tires rolling over cracks in the road. I couldn’t get away from it. I heard drums everywhere. And they eventually lulled me to sleep in the backseat of that old Honda Civic wagon.

I don’t remember much else about that night except bits and pieces. It was almost like floating in and out of a dream. Forty five mile an hour ghosts of streetlights floating above the windows as we passed. Miles Davis turned into Chick Corea turned into Bill Evans. Tony Williams turned into Steve Gadd turned into Paul Motian. I didn’t know the names yet, but I knew the sound. The rhythms.

As my mom woke me in our driveway with a smile she said, “I think I know what instrument you want to play.” Leading me towards my bedroom door and the comfort of my bed, it became even more like home when she suggested “You should play the drums.” It wasn’t more than a few days later when we walked into Action Drum and Guitar and signed me up for weekly half hour lessons.

Now my first drum teacher…he was cool. He was the absolute pinnacle of cool. The drum room in the back of Action had a double window that looked out on to the store. Looking back on it now it was probably put there so the manager could keep an eye on the store when he was giving lessons. But for me, it was there to further my education.

John was a grown up. He was about six feet tall, skinny as a rail and had long flowing brown hair down to the middle of his back. He had a warm and welcoming smile than really made those on its receiving end feel like they were the most important person in the world. He was loose, he was free, he was handsome and he was probably all of eighteen years old. As far as I was concerned he was the coolest person I had ever met.

Every Thursday afternoon at six I would ride my skateboard down the hill past the local Alpha Beta video store and Pioneer Chicken with practice pad, sticks and lesson books in hand. I’d open the door to the music store and make my way through all of the electric guitars and new fangled Casio electronic keyboards. I’d wave to the owner behind the counter who was always surrounded by a cloud of strange and exotic smells and seemed to be a bit too itchy to make anyone feel comfortable around him. Then I would push through the Tommy Iomi and Asia posters to enter the drum section of the store.

The girl whose lessons were before mine would usually be getting ready to wrap things up or if they were already finished, John would be hanging out over the counter changing the radio station to find something with a good groove to it to listen to. “Hey Al!” John would smile when he saw me. (By the way, I am Alex. Not Al. Ever. I hate Al. Always have. If you try to call me Al, there will be extraordinary amounts of pain involved. Mostly headed your way. But John could call me Al and it never bothered me. THAT’S how cool he was.) “You ready to groove my friend?”

We would head back into the lesson room filled with posters of Stewart Copeland, Buddy Rich, Louie Bellson, Tommy Lee and the ever present Neil Peart. He would sit on his stool to my right just behind the floor tom and would ask the first question of the week, “So… did ya practice?”

“Sure did! At least a couple of hours every day.” I would smile back as I adjusted the drum throne to fit my stubby ten year old legs.

“Great!” Then John would lean forward onto his pale skinny legs and look straight at me. “But did you practice your lessons?” Silence. He had me. And he knew it. It was the same every week. He would teach me something new each time and I would be able to play it by the end of the lesson. Then I would go home and play along with Genesis or Rush or Styx for hour after hour and never work on it again.
“Okay Al. Play #27 for me. One…two…three…four…”

I would breathe out dejectedly and get ready to start flailing at last week’s lesson. Just as I was getting ready to play there would come a knock on the door to save me. “Yeah man. What’s up?” John would say.

“Visitor bro.”, a disembodied voice would say. “Should I tell her you’re busy this time?”

Then I would feel John’s hand squeeze me firmly by the shoulder, “Naw man. I’ll be right out.” He would stand up and sneak behind me too the door, “Hey Al, why don’t you warm up for a few minutes. I’ll be right back!” John would give me a wink, walk out of the lesson room and call through the closing door, “One…two…three…four…”
The door would close and instantly I would jump up trying to get a look through the window between all of the drums stacked up for sale in the room. I would look to the right and see if I could catch a glimpse past the Roto-toms. Nothing. Then I would look to the left and there she was, John’s hot squeeze of this week. I could hear muffled voices say things like “Hey girl! What’s up?” or, “How’s it going beautiful?” He always seemed so calm and self-assured. I could never be that cool around girls. They would always be beautiful, thin and smiling as if the sun rose and set around him.

Then it would be quiet and I would see him start to turn around. Fumbling for the sticks I would start playing my lessons so as not to interrupt his flirting. I would see his hand go up and count down the numbers “One…two…three…four…” He wouldn’t even look. A few minutes later I would glance up and the girl would be hugging him. When she leaned up for a kiss he would smoothly turn his head and gently press one into her cheek. It would always land on the cheek. Every time.
She would end up smiling a little sadly and wave as he headed back toward me in the lesson room. John would wink as he caught my eye and start walking faster as if to make up for the time he had taken away from this week’s lesson. I would still be repeating the four bar phrase as he walked in behind me and sat down. By then I would have usually remembered how the lesson was supposed to sound and had it sounding just close enough to think he would be fooled into believing I had actually spent some time on it.

“Good man. You did practice.” He would pat me on the back and I would stop playing. Then the real lesson would start. You see, these weren’t only drum lessons. They were life lessons. John taught me everything. How to meet girls…How to get dates with girls…How to get girls to kiss you (and later on he showed me how to get them to do even more than that!). For every twenty minutes about girls, there was maybe five or ten minutes of drums thrown in there. It was the best night of the week for six years. John was just a teenager at the time, but to me he was the only grown up in the world who thought I had the potential to be cool. And that meant more to me than gold.

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“We’re not sure, but we think that it’s…”

I am a medical oddity. I am special and have magical powers that can mystify even the brightest of learned doctors. Please do not be tricked into thinking that this is a good thing. It most certainly is not. Every doctor I have seen over the last ten years of my life has been stumped and baffled by my various conditions to the point of referring me to “the best specialist in this area of medicine”. And still I have been misdiagnosed so many times that I’m surprised my keyboard still types with all the searches I have done on numerous afflictions. I wish I owned stock in Google.

Yes I am a little cynical. But cynicism get’s a bad rap sometimes. It helps turn the world on edge just enough to let the bad news roll downhill with the rest of the shit. And everyone gets some bad news once in a while I know I’m not alone in that. Don’t get me wrong, I love my healthcare professionals. I love spending hundreds of dollars on medicines that might help alleviate some of the symptoms of a disease that I possibly have. Or that might not.

How do I look my two little boys in the eye and smile knowing that it’s possible I won’t be around for their high school graduations? Or that I will most likely not meet their wives or even my grandchildren? Cynicism is my friend. It’s my magical shield of temporary denial that I can function behind during the day until I am all alone at night inside my own head.

Unfortunately there is no denial at three in the morning.

I sit here looking out the living room window over a mysterious white and brown landscape lit by only the reflection of the sun off of an almost complete wolf moon. All the kids are asleep. My brother-in-law is making a late snack while his St. Bernard barks away foxes and coyotes from her chickens. Sometimes you have to marvel at the beauty of these mundane quiet moments. And although there is still a bubble of fear about to burst in the pit of my stomach, its times just like this one that reassure me we are doing the right thing.


About a year ago I woke up in the middle of the night screaming. A slow tingling sensation rolled in waves from the right side of my ribcage all the way down to my fingers and toes. It grew in intensity as my right leg and arm curled up closely and every muscle tightened. I couldn’t make it stop. My hand clenched into a fist so tight that it felt like my fingers were about to burst their way through the back of my hand. I never thought the bottom of my foot could contort itself into such a twisted and horrifyingly painful position.

I screamed. At first in pain, and then begged for help from my wife sleeping next to me. We had been partying a little that night so at first she didn’t respond. By the time I was able to rouse her, my limbs were relaxing and the pain was slowly fading away into the dark room around me. “Go back to sleep honey..” she mumbled and rolled back over. Unfortunately sleep would not be something I got too much of over the next few months.

The next time it happened was about a week later. Again we were asleep in bed, but this time I was able to rouse her and she tried to calm me down and help ride it through. For all we knew, they were panic attacks with all of the stress we were under. Trying to pay bills on time and find the right doctors for our oldest son with autism. Things were crazy, but they always had been.

The good thing was the panic attacks only happened when I was sleeping. So other than making it difficult for me to go to bed, they didn’t seem to pose any real problem in our day to day life. A few Monday mornings later the alarm went off at 6:00 and I started my normal routine. I had a glass of water, stirred the kids, shaved my head and hopped in the shower. I was in no hurry to dry off given the warm southern California weather. By the time I had gotten dressed it was almost 6:45.

I remember unzipping my pants to pee. About half way through, I began to feel the now familiar tingling sensation running down my leg and arm. “It’s happening again!” I somehow shouted and stumbled my way into the bedroom. I collapsed into a ball next to the foot of the bed. My entire right side searing in agony, I kept repeating to myself “It’s going to end soon. It’s got to end soon.”

I could feel the gentle hand of my wife stroking my back and hear her whispering that I would be ok. But it didn’t help at all. After what seemed like an eternity the tightening slowly loosened its grip and I was able to breathe normally again. I couldn’t bring myself to stand yet. I remember my six year old son’s feet were right in front of me and he mimicked my wife saying, “Don’t be scared Daddy. It’s going to be ok.”

I wiped the drool from my mouth and lay my forehead on his toes. “I think you need to take me to the emergency room now.”


After the third MRI the E.R. doctor sort of confirmed that I was having what he thought night possibly be seizures. Didn’t know why or how they were happening, but said I should take some preventative medications and be sure to call my personal physician as soon as I got a chance. This is when it got kind of fun for me. You see, for those of you who don’t know my wife, she is a very friendly and loving person. A former stand-up comedian she is always joking and brightening up the room wherever she goes. Just don’t fuck with someone she loves.

My wife literally jumped into a shark tank to protect our son. Seriously, a tank full of sharks. Real sharks with teeth and everything. No joke or exaggeration. Just check with the aquarium and they’ll tell you all about it. Our oldest son is autistic. Not very uncommon now, but back then people only recognized autism by remembering the character Dustin Hoffman played in Rain Man. Not very much like my son at all.

He doesn’t count cards or magically tell you how many toothpicks have fallen to the floor. He doesn’t speak. It’s not that he can’t, his brain is just not wired to communicate the same way as “typical” people do. After years of living with him and working closely with his therapists, my wife and I have slowly begun to unravel his language. He is a very loving, funny and bright kid. He adores his younger brother and absolutely without question 100% loves with all his being to play in the water.

Given that it was a 107 degree day, the edge of the shark tank was only 3 feet tall and my son’s penchant for playing in the water…he decided to jump in as soon as he got a chance. He is smart. Did I mention that he is very smart? He waited until the precise moment that I was directly opposite from him with my camera and my wife was distracted by my youngest son starting to cry for his bottle. I saw the entire event unfold through the lens of my camera. His hand had been freed from the protective grasp of his mother for a nanosecond. And then there he was, in the air. The biggest and widest smile in the history of smiling spread across his little face as he cleared the tank wall and splashed down into the water.
At first most of the sharks swam away in fear. Then he started splashing and jumping up and down in the shallow water. One shark in particular had him in its sights and was swimming faster and faster straight for him. Everything was moving in slow motion for me. I wasn’t quite sure that what I was seeing was real. Then all of a sudden I heard my wife screaming out to the little boy. She too took flight in the air over the tank wall, although with a very different facial expression. Hitting the water she grabbed the laughing child, kicked the oncoming shark in the face and climbed over the wall as the on looking crowd barely had time to react to the action scene unfolding right before their eyes.

Now that you have more of a gasp of the superheroineness of my wife, where were we… the E.R. doctor may have been tired from a long night’s shift. He might have even been a good person with friends and a family who cared about him. But none of that mattered anymore. He had crossed a line that could not be uncrossed. You just don’t fuck with Shark-Attack-Rescue-Mommy! (Insert theme from your favorite 1970’s TV cop show here) I bet he never knew how lucky that shark was to swim away.

I wish I could put into writing what was said and done next. But I literally cannot. As I was about to interject something charming or funny to calm the mood created by the lackadaisical medical diagnoses, my wife gently rose from her seat next to me, took the young doctor by the arm and led him into the hallway closing the door quietly behind them. I could hear only a slight mumble that rose swiftly in pitch and tempo along with the flailing shadows seen through the drawn blinds of my windows. The female shadow eventually slowed to a standstill with her hands on her hips as the crouching shadow of the doctor nodded swiftly and nervously sped off in the other direction.

My wife smiled and cocked her head to brush the one hair out of place from her eyes. She exhaled long and slowly while taking her place on the uncomfortable chair at my bedside. Before I was able to say anything, she placed my hand in hers and stroked my arm. “Everything is going to be alright now. Don’t worry bu.”
Twenty minutes later my doctor was there with his recommended neurologist.


If you have never experienced the joys and spacious freedom of an MRI machine, I most emphatically do not recommend it. I am not claustrophobic but whoever designed this thing must be a long lost nephew of Joseph Mengele with a death metal spelunking fetish. I am a large man. Not huge, but larger than your average bear. So if a one hundred and eighty pound man thinks it is a bit of a squeeze, try being three hundred and five pounds.

First they put a Hannibal Lecter-like mask on me in order to keep my head still. Then they put straps on my arms to hold them closer to my torso. When the nurse finally rolls me into this torturous device, I can’t even move my fingers more than a centimeter or so. The top of the chamber I am put in rests a comfy ½ inch above my face. Most people only have to go in to just above the stomach. Not me. Nope. I have to go in all the way to my ankles. That way they can do all three forty minute scans of my brain, upper and then lower spinal areas. Not three scans in forty minutes mind you, forty minutes for each scan.

The technicians give you the useless option of music earphones that supposedly play your choice of Classic Rock, Jazz, Classical or Pop; but you can’t hear anything over the intense, ear shattering sound of the machine anyway. Now I have been a drummer for thirty some odd years. I have toured the world in arenas full of screaming people. I have performed for stadiums sitting right next to giant stacks of guitar amps cranked to eleven and nothing even comes close to the sheer gut shattering feeling of an MRI machine.

Oh yeah, then they stick a rubber ball in my hand and say, “Squeeze this if you feel a seizure coming on or you just can’t take it anymore. We’ll try to get you out as soon as possible.” Then they roll me in.

It’s all white. It’s cold. I can’t move at all. It is so loud my ears feel like they are bleeding. It’s going to take another 158 minutes. That’s when I remember I live in earthquake country. Perfect timing sub consciousness! Just freakin’ peachy. I try to slow my breathing and find the rhythm of the machine. It hurts but I’m almost there. Then a news report flashes across my eyelids of a woman trapped in an MRI machine for almost an entire weekend because she was able to fall asleep inside one of these insane things and the technician forgot she was in there! It took her twelve hours, but she somehow managed to wiggle and shimmy her way out of the machine. If there was ever a time for an out of body experience, I was hoping for it to be right now for sure.

The first forty minutes have passed and they pull me half way out to inject a small amount of radioactive die into my blood for the next scan. I had told the nurse previously that I have very deep veins and they have been notoriously difficult for phlebotomists to catch on the first try. Of course I am just a stupid patient and should apparently stop trying to help them when they can stab me thirty seven times on their own and end up putting the IV in my hand like I suggested to them in the first place a half an hour ago thank you very much.

Then I go back into the machine but I am unceremoniously pulled out again five minutes later because the IV was placed incorrectly and we have to try another twelve or thirteen places to get it right. At this point I started singing “Happy Happy Joy Joy” from Ren & Stimpy to lighten my mood. It strangely had no noticeable effect on the medical staff present in the room at the time.

After they get the IV straightened out and the second scan done, they pull me out to inject anther fluid for the third and final scan. This one fortunately passes by uneventfully but seems to drag on for days. As soon as I was dressed and walked outside the sky was the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes on. I wanted to kiss every cloud and drink up the smoggy brownish blue with a swirly straw.
Then we got home and checked the answering machine. It was my neurologist’s office. They had received the results of the test already. It was a fortunate byproduct of my doctor working for the same hospital that had the MRI machine. Unfortunately the nurse at the MRI department had written down the incorrect information and they had run the wrong tests. They needed to perform another set of screenings and would two months from today work for my schedule?

Smiles everyone, smiles! Or else.

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