Sad, lonely geezer

Last Sunday, I sat down to watch the Grammys for the first time in many years. Well, I didn’t watch all of it live – I watched the first hour, but as I was recording it, decided to watch the rest later when I had the ability to fast forward through what I considered a waste of my time.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Bon Iver nominated, mostly because I have just one song of theirs, weirdly named Re: Stacks. Now I have had this song for a couple of years now, but couldn’t for the life of me remember where I had originally heard it. Then today, I remembered.

I say remembered like my brain was so powerful that it was able to sort through most of the crap in my head and pinpoint the exact date and time that I first heard it. Actually, nothing could be farther from the truth! I remembered because I saw it on t.v. today.

There’s a show that I like to watch called House, starring Hugh Laurie, and today they had some reruns. There’s a two parter from a couple of years ago that I really enjoy watching. The first episode is called House’s Head, and the second one, Wilson’s Heart.

The rest of this post is going to assume that you have seen or at least know about House, so if you don’t, then I do apologize!

Anyway, at the beginning of the first episode, House wakes up in a strip club, bleeding from the head, and unable to remember how he got there. It turns out that he was in a bus accident, and has a concussion. Even though he wasn’t really aware of what his doing, being House, his subconscious somehow directed him towards a nearby strip club. If you’ve ever watched House, you know that this is normal behavior for him.

What is out of character is what comes next. He knows that he saw something while on the bus, something that would cause a person to die. The accident, however, has messed up his short term memory, and he is unable to recall exactly who it was, or what he saw.

The rest of this episode covers him trying to find out exactly what happened so that he can figure out who it is he has to save. All while popping Vicodin, bleeding from the ear, and experiencing excruciating headaches. House wanders from reality to a hallucination where he sees an attractive woman that he doesn’t recognize, who gives him cryptic clues as to who she is. He finally gets the bus brought back to the hospital, and has the staff sit where the passengers were, with their names and pictures attached to their chests. He then pops a couple of alzheimer’s specific medication (the medical name escapes me), in order to light up his brain so that he can remember, and enters his hallucination again. This time, the woman asks him what her necklace is made of. The pendant at the bottom is a fly or other insect displayed in an orange resin case. House then realizes that the resin is amber, and the woman was representing Amber, Wilson’s girlfriend, and former member of House’s team. He then sees a replay where she is on the bus with him and it’s hit by a garbage truck. We cut back to reality, and Cuddy is giving House mouth to mouth, while Wilson is banging on his chest and giving him compressions to get his heart going, while everyone looks on anxiously.

House comes to, and explains that it was Amber who was with him, much to the confusion of Wilson who wonders what his girlfriend was doing with House on a bus.

They find Amber in another hospital, and there ends the first episode.

The second episode deals with them trying to figure out what House saw that made him feel that she was going to die. It’s a very powerful episode, and towards the end, House agrees to have probes placed in his brain so that they can send an electrical current through it, in order to stimulate his frontal lobe and hopefully remember why.

He remembers that he was drunk at a bar, and the bartender had taken away his keys, so he called Wilson to get a lift back home. Wilson wasn’t home, so Amber answered, and House asked her to get Wilson to come and pick him up. Since Wilson was working, she decided to come and get House herself. So she shows up at the bar, to take House home. House first cons her into having a drink (a cosmo), and then walks out without his cane, and without paying, forcing Amber to go back and settle his account.

She catches up with him on the bus, and sneezes. He sees her taking some flu medication, and  then realizes what is wrong with her. The pills contain something called amantadine. During the crash, her kidneys were damaged, and being unable to filter out the amantadine, she was suffering from amantadine poisoning. His delivery of this news is so somber, Wilson doesn’t realize that it’s not good news. He tells House that they can set up Amber on dialysis and filter out the amantadine. House looks at his best friend and tells him that the amantadine binds with proteins and so can’t be filtered out by dialysis. He turns to Wilson and says that there’s nothing to be done, and that he is very sorry.

In his minds eye, he replays the accident again, and when the garbage truck hits the bus, he suffers a seizure and falls into a coma.

Wilson is heartbroken now, but Cuddy tells him that they should wake Amber up so that he can say goodbye. The rest of the team also want to say goodbye, and this is where Bon Iver’s song comes on. You see Kuttner standing awkwardly at the end of the bed, Foreman  patting Amber’s leg as he looks at a distraught Wilson, Thirteen gives her a tearful hug, Taub kisses his fingers and puts them on her face. The song plays while they all say goodbye. It’s a powerful scene, and the music is perfect. Then we see Wilson lying the bed next to her, besides himself with grief, while Amber seems oddly at peace. She tells him that it is time, and he says that he just needs a little more time. She looks at him fondly and says that they will always just want a little more time. He then tells her that it isn’t fair, and asks her why she isn’t angry. She looks at him with nothing but love in her eyes and tells him that she doesn’t want that to be the last thing that she ever feels.

Wilson then turns off the machines that are keeping Amber alive, and gazes deeply into her eyes as she dies.

We then cut to House who is back on the bus with Amber. They have an interesting conversation where he tells Amber that he wants to stay there with her. When she asks him why, he tells her that his life is miserable, and filled with pain. In addition to that, Wilson will hate him, and since Wilson is his best friend, he just can’t take it. Amber points out that he deserves it, and moreover, we don’t always get what we want.

House then wakes from his coma with Cuddy waiting anxiously at his bedside. Another beautiful song starts to play – Passing Afternoon by Iron & Wine. We then see how everyone is coping. We see Kuttner eating cereal in front of his t.v. (which actually makes more sense in a later episode), Taub goes home, and just holds his sleeping wife, Foreman, Chase and Cameron meet for a drink and a bite to eat, while Cuddy sleeps at House’s bedside. We then see Wilson standing outside House’s room, staring at him despondently. House wakes up, sees Wilson, and lifts his head. Wilson can’t look at House any more, and just walks away.

We then see Wilson go home and sort of fall onto his bed, clutching the pillows for solace. He then sees an envelope sticking out from one of them, so he pulls it out to read it. It’s a note from Amber that says something like “Sorry I’m not here – went to pick up House, love A”. The pain on his face is plain to see.

Both episodes were very powerful, and I read somewhere that the main characters have said that these two episodes are their favorites.

I can’t find the actual video from the show, but here’s the song with lyrics:

Here’s Passing Afternoon:

Have a good night!

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post, that I was unable to continue, due to a combination of the lateness of the hour, and the dimness of my spirit.
Quite a morbid topic, I’m afraid, but I have to continue.
During the summer of 2009, my parents were in India visiting their families. My father’s mother, whom I would call achamma (in Malayalam, achan = dad and amma = mum, so my father’s mother would be achamma) was having her hip fixed. She was quite old, but still sprightly. My dad went and saw her in the hospital before the operation, and had a long conversation with her. Once they had her sedated, they made the incision for the surgery that was planned, when they discovered that she had bone cancer that had spread throughout her body, and that had weakened her hip, causing the problem in the first place. This was totally unexpected, even though she had a double mastectomy some years ago. So they stitched her back up, but while they were doing so, she had a heart attack. Unfortunately for my father, she lapsed into a coma, and was declared brain dead not long after that. My father took the decision to keep her on life support for a while longer, in order to give the rest of the family time to come and bid her farewell. Part of me feels sorry for him, but another part feels glad, because he was able to spend some time with her before she passed. In addition to that, her death was sudden, and not a long, slow, drawn out affair. There’s another reason too. When I was born, my father flew both sets of grandparents in from India to see me. Upon their return journey, his father had a heart attack and died. My mother once told me that it was the first time that she had ever seen my father cry. As I was just a newborn, and my father had spent all that money bringing both sets of parents to the UK, he was unable to go back to India for the funeral. While he has never said anything about that to me, I know that not being able to attend his father’s funeral must have hurt him. So I’m glad that he was there when his mother passed.
My achamma and I had a very strange relationship. There were times when she told everyone how good I was, and then there were times when she told people how bad I was. When I wasn’t. She once told some friends that I had actually pushed her over in front of my father. To put this into perspective, I am bigger than both my father and my grandmother, but never in a million years would I even dream of laying a finger on either of them. There was a time in my life where I felt that she didn’t like me, and that continued until a discovery that my mother made one day. While cleaning out my achamma’s prayer room, my mother found a prayer for me wrapped up and placed in front of my achamma’s deities. She actually wanted nothing but good things for me, and the prayer was placed there for my well being. After that, our relationship improved immensely. When I went back in 2002, she was very happy to see me, and that feeling was mutual. I haven’t been back since she passed, and it will be odd not to see her again.
Now we come to my grandfather, or ammachan. Last October, my mother had a strange dream in which she felt the need to speak with her father. So she did. The next morning, she called him up, and they spoke for hours. A couple of days later, he was at a wedding, when he complained of a shortness of breath as well as pain in his left arm. He was rushed to hospital, where they said that he had suffered a heart attack, but that it was mild. Since he was 91 years old, my mother changed her ticket (she was initially due to fly out in the latter part of November for my grandmother’s birthday) to a couple of days later, which was the first date she could get. That was on a Saturday. Initially, the doctor said that he was responding well to the medication, and that it was only a minor heart attack, They said that he would be discharged soon, but as the doctor on call was a junior doctor, he wanted to get approval from the senior specialist on call. That’s when things changed. The specialist examined my ammachan, and found that the heart attack was more serious that previously thought. Luckily my mother got back and was able to see him and speak with him. He was in the ICU with tubes in him, and was not really comfortable. Who would be? My brother Navin also flew out to India to see him. Then a day later, he suffered another heart attack, and they were unable to revive him. Rather than wait, they decided to have the funeral straight away. My brother wanted to see him before that, but my mother didn’t want to keep the body on life support and then have my brother see him that way. That should never be the last image he had of our grandfather.
I didn’t go. It was the week of a big launch at work, and to be perfectly honest, I was numb. I had been planning on going to India in December for my ammamma’s 84th birthday, which was going to be a big deal, and had looked forward to spending some time with my grandparents. My sister Sandhya couldn’t go either. She had just moved here from Korea was waiting on her Green Card, so she couldn’t travel.

Around the same time, I had started going to the gym on a regular basis, and had also signed up for sessions with a personal trainer. Not that it is any easier now, but after my weight training, my trainer had me use the treadmill for an hour. Naturally, at the beginning, I was struggling to do 10 minutes. I found inspiration from my ammachan though, closing my eyes, and seeing him smiling down at me from heaven. It may sound a little corny, but if you’d ever met him, you’d understand. He was a man that no-one ever had a bad thing to say about, kind of like my dad. He had a great sense of humor, and even though he was a vegetarian, would go out and buy some chicken curry for the three of us. That’s the kind of man that he was.

So his death anniversary is coming up, and my mother was talking about it. I have a cousin getting married a month later, and I was telling her that I didn’t think that I could do both. Given a choice, I would want to be there for my ammachan. That’s what I told my mother, and then the dreams started. I was already having trouble sleeping, but my dreams were consumed with thoughts of my grandfather. In the last one, which was the most vivid, I was with my ammamma in her house, and my ammachan was there, smiling. But he wasn’t really there – it was like his ghost was there, telling my ammamma that everything would be alright, and that he loved all of us very much. I started to cry and tried to explain to him that I was sorry for not having visited him for so many years, and for not calling as much as I could have. At this point, tears were streaming down my face, and he just turned to me and smiled. Then he turned to go, and as he walked away, I was calling for him, crying all the while, and that’s when I woke up. I was crying.

They say that dreams are often manifestations of our subconscious mind, and that in essence, we are trying to tell ourselves something important. The only thing I can take away from these dreams is that I really miss my ammachan, and it pains me to think that I will never see him again.

I’m sorry if this has seemed a rambling, disoriented post. While I never proof read any of my blog posts, I do try to stick to a pattern, a structure, but in this case, I just wrote what I felt.

So for a video that would match this post, here’s Luther Vandross with his moving “Dance with my father”:

Peace!

If my memory serves me correctly, my friend Jamie used to watch a show called “A Touch Of Frost” starring David Jason. I must admit to having never seen it before, mostly because I loved David Jason’s character in Only Fools And Horses, good old Del Boy. Recently, I’ve been trolling Netflix to find something new to watch, and as it turns out, they have the entire series available for streaming. So I’ve started watching it, and I must say that it is absolutely brilliant! There’s a sense of humor in this show, even though it is a drama, and David Jason is awesome as the wily Detective Inspector Jack Frost. The show started in 1992, and ended in 2010. I’m only up to Season 4 now, but am enjoying it immensely.
The show is set in the fictional South Midlands town of Denton, and was shot around Yorkshire. Despite being an excellent Detective, Frost is a flawed human being, and I believe that only makes his character more lovable and believable. Take the first episode for instance – his wife is terminally ill, and he ends up a widower by the end of the episode. At the end, he is in a pub talking to the nurse that was helping his wife, and he explains to her that their marriage had been over long ago, to the point where he was planning on ending it. On the day that he was going to tell his wife, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. So he went out and got drunk, because he knew that he couldn’t leave her. While drunk, he came across a situation with an armed man, and resolved the situation, but not before getting shot. For his actions (reckless as they were), he was awarded the George Cross, which is the highest civilian honor for bravery.
As the series progresses, we find out that his wife was never happy with anything that he did, as she was more interested in people’s perceptions of him, and wanted to be able to brag about him to her friends. That was one of the reasons why he felt that the marriage wasn’t working. When he was awarded the George Cross, that was one of the proudest days of her life.
Interestingly enough, Frost doesn’t have a single sidekick in this show. He is assigned different people of different ranks, and the chemistry between them is different. He enjoys a love hate relationship with his superintendent Norman Mullet, who Frost refers to as Horn Rimmed Harry. Mullet is Frost’s foil, and is more politically inclined than Frost likes.
Please remember that British police don’t carry guns, so it’s very different from the American shows with guns a blazing and car chases galore. Somehow, that would seem out of place for this show. The stories are excellent, the locations are apt, and the acting is superb. I really am enjoying it!

Instead of a music video, this time I’m going to leave you with one of the most famous clips from “Only Fools And Horses”. I dare you not to laugh!

Peace!