Slackjaw's Forum

It used to be sponges. You know the kind with the scouring pad on one side; sometimes dark green, but lately I’ve been buying them with multi-colored swirls. Sweetie had grown up using rags, a method I believe she has secretly always thought superior, but for the sake of our relationship has decided to consent. Rags never made sense to me, where was the fun in that? Sure you could wash them when they got dirty instead of throwing them out, but they didn’t have any abrasions. I tried, for a while, just using the thin green abrasive ones, similar in feel to the backing on those Scotch Bright yellow ones, the ones for Heavy Duty pots and pans, but they don’t hold enough water for my liking. That, and the fact that little bits of egg or flour or peanut butter would get trapped and it would retire to the top of the sink, too new to throw away but too disgusting to feel comfortable using again. For some reason earlier this month Sweetie decided that the only way to get the toi...

Well things have started to settle on the lawsuit front. For the past few years Sweetie and I have been embroiled in a lawsuit with Seattle Children’s Hospital over some sub-par care Ike had received when he still had his old illness. We had a mediation with them at the beginning of the month in which we reached an agreement and later this week we will sign all that paperwork and put it to rest. The mediation was harder than I was prepared for, at least emotionally. I had come to think of myself as toughened up and ready for anything, at least where Ike is concerned. But it’s one thing to talk, and quite another thing to be, or so it seemed in that office, near the top floor looking out at the melting-snow-covered view of First Hill. I had my ass kicked: Sweetie and I both did. When the day was over, after wandering around trying to remember where we parked, we sat in the car thinking how the simple act of turning on the ignition was really pretty difficult when you stop...

Well the Prairie Dogs have moved one step closer to legitimacy with the launching of their site at CDBaby.com. Lisa, my good friend in Indiana, has been helping me with the Prairie Dogs home page and right now all these things are starting to gel. I am humbled by the hard work all my friends have done to help me get these sites to the place that they are today, they have given their time and artistic talents for free and for that I am truly grateful. There’s a feeling around the trailer park that we’re at the start of a very good year. It’s an intangible feeling really, it’s not like I can put my finger on any one thing. Getting the CD out was one step, settling our case with the hospital was another. There’s a feeling around here that we’ve pushed our way to the top of this hill and we’re just about to start on our way down. The sun being out lately has helped as well. Sweetie, being a lifetime Tacoman, doesn’t seem to mind the gray as much as I do. It’s as if her body...

It came rolled up in a poster tube, sticking up out of the mailbox all white and taped up. The blue ballpoint pen told me it was from a family named Thorp in Selah. Sweetie knew right away who it was from. She’s like that some times, the way she keeps things locked away for future use. “Where’s it from?” she asked me again when I told her the name on the return address. But she knew already, knew before I even told her. Inside the tube was a large poster, and a three-page letter with a small picture of a bare-chested young man with his arm around his dog paper-clipped to the top corner. Jesse Thorp was a sixteen-year-old boy who died when the PT Cruiser he was driving lost control and veered off a highway back in the fall of 2000. He was also the boy who’s liver Ike got when Ike was so sick and no doubt on his way to an early death. Jesse Thorp was the boy who’s death saved Ike’s life. We had learned his name a day or two after the surgery. The transplant unit keeps...