Slackjaw's Forum

Took the youngest boy off of Phenobarbital this weekend. It was the last step of a three-month plan to wean him off it, one that we started after our last stay in the hospital back in October. He had been in for a 24 hour EEG that showed his brain “background noise” was getting closer to normal and that most of the posturing he does were not a result of seizures, but a result of muscle spasms cause by his brain injury. Good news to us of course, and also to him, as his Neurologist thought we could start taking him off of Phenobarbital as he could see no medical need for it to continue. He hasn’t been completely off it long enough to see if it’s gonna make much difference in the day-to-day. So far, as we’ve been tapering down, the biggest change has been his frustration in his inability to move very much. Now this might be good in the long run. We’re all hoping that perhaps this frustration will be the motivation he needs to start doing more, that it’ll be the dissatisfact...

Welcome to the new and improved Trailer Park. We’re just about finished getting everyone to our new location at thetrailerpark.org. There are some new friends with web pages that are still in the process of moving in so be sure to take a look around at the park at the other trailers in the coming weeks. I hope you like the new look. Though the look of the page has completely changed, the biggest improvement has really been the inner-html-workings. A great big kudos goes out to my friend Minnie from Indianapolis who worked her ass off on this. I could not have come anywhere this close to cool without her know-how and hard effort. She totally rocks. Notice how you can hover over the trailers on the homepage and the trailers name pops up, totally cool. The writing, on the other hand, is the same old same old, not too much I can do about that I guess. I’ll continue to try to update the forum once a week and bring you a bit of what’s going on in my life and posting up new musi...

The Saturday night fishing club was not a club that met on a regular basis. It used to, before there were kids and wives and mortgage payments to make. Before Brian moved back home to Lethbridge and took his amazing box of tackles with him and before Hank stopped drinking and falling into the bay. In those days they would gather rain or clear summer or winter at the fishing pier next to where the old Top-Of-The-Pier used to be before it burned down. Back before the city turned it into a park, and Harbor lights was the only waterfront restaurant left that was worth a damn. For one summer back in 82, the club boasted 12 members, all Canadian. Although it didn’t start out that way on purpose, the Canadian only rule was quickly adopted and remained in effect ever since. There was no charter for the club, no set of rules per se, you just had to have your own reel, bucket and only drink Canadian beer. The fishing would start whenever you got there and go on through the night an...

One apple and one coffee cup full of water sit perched on the edge of my desk. I put them there to eat but I have little stomach for them right now. I have the remnants of a cold lingering and I thought an apple might do me good but as I sit here now and look at it, I’m not sure I want it after all. I gave my desktop monitor to the accountant. Hers blew up yesterday and I have my laptop so I gave her the one off my desk. I cleaned up the dust and little bits of chewed rubber band that though sprayed all over my desk, settle under the monitor. Somehow I think that by chewing rubber bands into tiny chunks, I might control my nail-biting obsession and in some pathetic way create an illusory modicum of control over my life. I also cleaned up small chunks of fingernails and un-bent paper clips, post-it notes that have been folded up on themselves and paper dots left over from a filing mission I mistakenly undertook in a four hour frenzy of office organization last June. I h...

I spent New Years on my back on the living room floor, staring up at the ceiling and reading book titles that live on the lower shelves of the bookcase. A little earlier in the evening I was reaching down to help the blind cat get off the couch and I threw my back out. It dropped me to the floor and that’s pretty much where I stayed until it was time to go to bed. It’s the first time I’ve ever done that, had my back go out on me leaving me helpless on the floor. Sweetie was nice enough though and got me an ice bag to put on it and fed me painkillers. She wasn’t feeling to hot herself, having come down with a cold that had her head all stuffed up and her throat a little sore. Heather and Earl came by with some baked chicken and a few other assorted goodies from their party. It was very good and right before midnight I even managed to struggle into a standing position to toast in the New Year. A moment just like in the movies, if only movies were a bit more pathetically li...