Dispatch from the Medical Marijuana Revolution

So, here's the thing. Last week was not a good week. There was a pretty decent earthquake, a full moon, a vague virus, the bottom of the bottle of the second batch of Charlotte's Web and some seizure activity after several weeks with virtually none. The week before last, there was also an Onfi wean that The Husband forgot to tell me about. AHA! Withdrawal was probably more the reason for the increased seizure activity than all those other things combined. I think. There's always a lot of thinking going on in these parts --shallow thinking (why, why wasn't it me that had a Javier Bardem sighting in the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills the other day***), mid-level thinking (why the hell can I not make it through novels longer than 400 pages anymore?) to highly complex thinking (perhaps I walk around and drive around in a weird state of numbness because I actually CAN after nineteen years of dealing with the adrenaline rush of constant crisis?)

Anyhoo.

I highly recommend that any of you with children with refractory epilepsy or any of you with seizures or other autoimmune diseases at all give this medical marijuana thing a try if at all possible, because the thing is: even when Sophie does seize, she recovers quickly, she's coming off of one of the most vicious anti-epileptic benzos, she's more alert overall and it really, truly looks like this is the thing. I know that hundreds of you are struggling in your states to get easier access or access at all. I know that many of you have neurologists who are perhaps more like dinosaurs than healers. I say forget them and pursue what you think will help your kid. I'm not going to even qualify that and say something bullshitty like I am not a physician and in no way recommend this treatment without a doctor's referral. Think back. Didn't I tell you not to try that fifteenth drug if it was in combination with the thirteenth and fourteenth?

This concludes today's dispatch from the Medical Marijuana Revolution.








***Probably because I have never been to the Polo Lounge. A friend of mine posted it on Facebook and I died a small death -- you know, la petite morte. There's some medium-thinking for you. Look it up if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Me Want

A hobbit hole house of my very own.

Here's another one:

Children, husbands, men in general not allowed entrance. Women allowed, but only those bearing books, coffee, bourbon, cheese and chocolate can stop by for a few minutes. Javier Bardem is exempt from above rules.

See more here.

Blue is the Warmest Color

Bathsheba at Her Bath, Rembrandt

That's the title of the NC-17 French lesbian movie that I'm going to see this afternoon, after I have coffee with a fellow de-schooler. I'll let you know how it is -- the movie, not the de-schooling -- whether I give up dreams of Javier Bardem in favor of the fairer sex. Here's a poem from the 16th century:

Bethsabe's Song

Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air,
Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair.
Shine, sun; burn, fire; breathe, air and ease me;
Black shade, fair nurse, shroud me and please me.
Shadow, my sweet nurse, keep me from burning;
Make not my glad cause cause of mourning.
      Let not my beauty's fire
      Inflame unstaid desire,
      Nor pierce any bright eye
      That wandereth lightly.

George Peele (1556-1596)

Maybe I should have posted Sappho, but I loved this one, especially the line Make not my glad cause cause of mourning. I got a couple of sweet emails today from teachers at Oliver's school that have worked with him and with Henry, when Henry was at the same school. My eyes teared up when I read them. I also heard that the Powers That Be at the school were snarky when they heard we were leaving, and my ego bristled and my thoughts turned toward the negative, but I let it go, let it go, let it go, more links in the chain behind me.

Make not my glad cause cause of mourning.

Yesterday with the Poet

I have yet to wake up from this dream because each day dawns and there is something new to marvel over. Heather took me to Butchart Gardens yesterday. They're famous -- world famous -- but I admit to feeling jaded about gardens when she told me where we were going. I live in southern California. I know some pretty wonderful gardens.

Well -- these were some amazing gardens, unlike any that I've ever seen.

Over the top.

Where's Javier? you ask.

Ridiculous, right?

Heather is very beautiful.

Here we are. It would only be cliche to say that Heather not only writes poetry but actually lives it -- her care-giving of caregivers is -- well -- I don't know what to say.

Enough? That picture right above is where the gardens end -- right at the Pacific. Outrageous.

Did I tell you about the food, yet? Heather and I both love it.

What a coincidence (although there are probably no real coincidences --)

We left the gardens sated and tired, but the skies were finally clearing up so she took me to her tiny apartment up in the sky where we looked out over the water, at the snow-topped mountains that had suddenly appeared.

I know, enough. Too much. Uncle.

Are you breathing heavily?

I'll save the ones of me and Javier for another day.

The new family slideshow (lots of photos of places that you might not care about)

I stood at the top of these stairs to nowhere, aptly marked in case people thought otherwise (the Canadians are polite) and tried not to make metaphor.

These huge pieces of timber float everywhere along the coast. I was told that they are from nearby forestry -- boats filled with felled logs sometimes lose their cargo, and the wood floats and bobs along the shore.

This sign warned passers-by from what looked to be a small fabulous junk-yard.

I have more photos and will post them later. I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening with The Poet. She charming and funny and wise, and I feel as if I've known her forever. We talked about poetry and art and music and family and men. Her drive and commitment to caregivers is truly awe-inspiring, and my gratitude overflows. I really can't believe that this is my third day of respite and that I still have three more to go! I imagine you'll have to steel yourself for another slideshow or two, more rhapsodizing about Victoria, and the possibility of an Elizabeth filled with contentment.

Are you still there? I guess you need a reward.

Come back later and maybe I'll post about me and Javier Bardem on the beach.

The Semi-Annual Visit to the Dentist in Beverly Hills

So, yes, I stood across the street from that black sports car and took this photo while my boys went inside the building behind me for their semi-annual dental check-up. It's a Lamborghini, Mom, Henry said, dismissively, and it might cost $1,000, 000. I think he was serious, but don't quote me as you know I tend toward hyperbole, and certain apples actually don't fall far from the tree.

Anyhoo.

The fact that I'd just given him a hard time for wearing his gray, polyester gym shorts to the dentist that he picked out at Target despite my protestations (I despise athletic shorts when they're worn as clothes and not for athletics), made his dismissal of the million dollar car and the subsequent posturing of the various large men positioned everywhere, cameras hanging from their necks, seem even more jarring to me, still a bit of a star f**ker when it comes to celebrities. I might be reading War and Peace, but when it comes to star sightings, I'm as excited as the next moderately overweight middle-aged woman to perhaps glimpse Johnny Depp or, if lucky, Javier Bardem. Just the other night, I walked in front of Annette Bening at a local restaurant as she waited for her car, and I admit to a frisson of pleasure that I'd come full circle. It was just a few years back that I stood on the steps of Royce Hall during an intermission of King Lear, looked to my right and noticed that it was Warren Beatty standing right next to me. I nearly jumped into his pocket.

Reader, I imagine you're wondering whether a moon, worns as if it had been a shell  has lost its devotion to all things disability related and might be morphing into a gossip rag?

So be it.

After fifteen years in Los Angeles, a city that I never thought of as anywhere in particular other than the cover of an Eagles album when I was my sons' ages, I'm still a bit freaked out that I have two boys who are Angelenos. We're from LA, they say when we go back east, and I startle like I did when I took my first husband's last name and whenever I uttered Elizabeth Supercalifragilistic, saw the words in a cartoon bubble coming from my mouth. Being born in Los Angeles doesn't mean that you have blonde hair and skateboard in empty pools or even surf in Malibu before school, but it does lend a certain insouciance to the sighting of million dollar cars and people, and I guess that's a good thing.

I waited a bit outside the dental office and tried not to crane my middle-aged neck too far to notice who the paparazzi were waiting on, and after a few minutes someone came out from across the street, there was a bit of shouting and jockeying, the other big guys with the even bigger camera lenses pulled them up to their faces,  and some very large men pulled up right in front of the million dollar car and blocked it with their Exxon Valdeez cars so I really didn't see anyone or anything. For all I know, it was Beyonce getting a hair extension or buttock implants. I pretended to be a native, turned away and walked into the dentist's office to retrieve my sons who both got a good report -- no cavities, sparkly clean, and when Oliver asked why his teeth were sort of yellow despite brushing them all the time, the dentist told him that only million dollar teeth are that white. As reward for no cavities, I bought them each a cupcake from the fancy cupcake machine up the street, and then we walked up the stairs of the parking garage, got into our sexy white Mazda  and sped off.

Biutiful, written last night

I am in a daze tonight, late, just getting home from a solo trip to the movies where I sat in the dark and was enveloped by the movie Biutiful. 

I don't know what to say -- I've seen nearly all of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's movies, and they have been ponderous at worst and  ecstatic at best. I'm going out on a limb right now to say that great art for me always, always always transports me,  and is a reflection, seen through a glass darkly, I think, of the artist's soul - his or her transcendence. Javier Bardem seems to be a vehicle for great art -- it stares out of his huge, sad eyes and settles into the deep laugh lines around them. This movie is dark and intense and disturbing and so beautiful that I sat, stunned, with tears in my eyes when it was finished.

I've been hard put to explain why I thought the recent Social Network was a horrible movie -- one that "entertained" me for the two hours that I sat, subject to its slick and witty seduction, but left me wanting to shower off the filth that it portrayed. A great movie (again, I'll qualify with the words "to me"), no matter the subject matter -- and the moral conflicts and constant despair of Biutiful make the lowlife characters of Social Network look like the cast of Leave it to Beaver -- reveals the vision and soul of the artist and that vision and soul is something recognized that is collective. It is love.

I felt tonight as if I'd escaped my little life for two and a half hours and glimpsed another. I watched Bardem play a single father of two beautiful children, a man dying a slow and hideous death from cancer, married to a messed-up and mentally ill woman and caught, himself, in a dark underworld of corruption and social despair. I watched him commune with the spirits of the dead, fall into the arms of a strange and magical healer and confessor who shared his powers, parent his children with heartbreaking tenderness and strength and make feeble attempts at redemption. And despite the horrific details -- the crazy exploitation of immigrants, the insane web of lies and corruption that govern commerce and making a living  -- he is redeemed. It's all redeemed.