Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1112
Earth Defense Force, ALS, PSP, Kantishna appropriation, Dad, Slift, Riki's boyfriend
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Holding up in this pandemic okay? Have everything you need? Seen any friends on Zoom lately? How’s your kid doing in school? How’s your health? Your relationship? Everything good?
I would like to thank Ashley who woke me up this morning via text at 6:50 because I forgot to set my alarm tonight. Why do I like to set my alarm every day instead of auto-scheduling it? Why do I insist on keeping this opportunity for mistakes in my life? Because I like to live life on the edge, man. Overslept 35 minutes, got to school 3 minutes later than usual. Take that.
I am listening to the latest Slift album for the ten thousandth time trying to pick a few standout tracks, which is basically impossible because the whole thing flows so well and is such a great album. Slift: a great psych band or the greatest psych band?
Ashley and George are leaving today, that is very sad. We will all miss them. The kids did not get to say goodbye. Will they notice? They’ll see each other again in like four weeks. This will be interesting. I am somewhat disoriented with Jane actually having friendships that transcend each visit and linger in a more long-term memory. I hope we’re doing right by her I would be annoyed if someone decided I didn’t need to say goodbye to my friend.
Last night after the kids went to bed (very easily! without too much argument!), Ashley Emma and I watched more Garfunkel and Oates sporadically as we chatted. Did you know that Riki Lindhome has a kid with Fred Armisen? Maybe? Wikipedia is intentionally vague on the definitive parentage. And they are dating? or were? Did I talk about this already? Really not sure what to make about this. Fred Armisen has some…. well that is quite a dating history.
Excuse me a moment just gotta dash off a letter in my very important capacity as official HOA treasurer.
Okay, back on track.
Note on previous topic: I would like to acknowledge that yes, Alexi Nalvany had some repugnant opinions, especially early in his life. That does not mean I am sad that he died. If Liz Cheney, anti-choice beliefs and all, were the one to save us from Trump, or even, god help me, Nikki Haley, I would still be sad if Trump killed them. This seems… non-controversial. I will leave it at that.
Got a ton of walking in yesterday as I ponder a very difficult business decision. You know I had to do a lot of pondering because I closed my rings on my watch without doing any actual exercising. Just from nervous phone pacing all day. It really is too much! Hard decisions are hard!
Yesterday my friend Nick dropped some mysterious quote into a group chat. The mysterious quote recalled memories in us of our friends’ Rye and Scott’s old hip hop band, Earth Defense Force. They were so great. That got me thinking about my guest appearance on one of their songs. I think it was called “EDF Anthem?” I can’t remember the name. But in any case, I remember my verse very clearly:
Moving through hyperspace without a sound Defending us from evil within and without Outer space, inner space, what's all in the mind Gorgons, gods, greed, gaia the lazy mind EDF has evil's minions on the run Defending our earth and our FREEDOM
Great verse, always loved that verse. Where evil can come from. I stand by most of it. I am somewhat muddled about how we need defending from Gaia, but, you know, nature ain’t all a bed of roses and even if it were those things are fierce. One nearly killed me a couple weeks ago.
Somewhere there is a picture of me rapping that verse in a lab coat. Oh. I found it. It is like 200 pixels. Here have a higher res photo from a different show. Real shades of James Murphy there, Rick. Hey cmon it was 2003 they hadn’t even put out their first album yet.
Anyway, that got me thinking about how my stage name in that band was Kantishna, and that was my solo act name for a while, and how that name is problematic these days, what with Kantishna being an anglicization of the Lower Tanana word Khenteethno, the word for the river. There are only 30 or so speakers of Lower Tanana left, mostly in and around Minto. So. you know, white colonizer, appropriation, all that. I pretty quickly realized all this and stopped using the name back in the early oughts.
But, (uh oh, there’s a but) you know, the flipside is that Kantishna has a deep place in my personal psyche and history. Dad was driving back from Kantishna to Denali Village when his bus flipped over, and rolled several times, and he broke his neck, though did not know this for some 30 years. And obviously, had things gone just slightly differently, no dad, no me.
Then that got me thinking about my dad, and how I miss my dad. And I had a new thought. I was thinking about the broken neck, and how I’ve always been kind of grateful for it. Because in the early 2000’s, my dad was slowly becoming paralyzed, and they thought it was ALS. I was braced for it to be ALS, we all were. And there’s no real diagnosing ALS, so they just sort of do it through process of elimination and one of the things they eliminate the possibilty of is nerve damage from a broken neck, but he couldn’t have a broken neck, ha ha, but let’s do the X-Ray anyway and, oh, wow, look at that broken neck, look at all that calcification. Do you remember getting into any kind of accident 40 years ago, they asked him? And indeed he did. Well there’s your problem. No ALS, but rather a broken neck.
So they did neck surgery and fixed all that and for a while he got better and for a while it was a funny story, ha ha, and that’s kind of how it’s all been in my head.
But last night I started realizing that the broken neck was a red herring, really. If he had never had the broken neck, maybe they would have caught the PSP — the ALS-like disease that killed him in the end — several years earlier. And all those years where he was slowly degrading and everyone chalked it up the neck… I bet they wouldn’t have settled for that diagnosis. And come to think of it, did he ever really get better after the neck surgery? I mean, I think so? For a while? Before the PSP started degrading him again?
The average time from the diagnosis of PSP till death is 7 years. My dad barely made it one. In hindsight I think the broken neck story, as good as it is, distracted from the PSP story.
But then I wonder: would it have been any better? PSP is incurable. Did we want six more years of knowing he was going to die? What would that have been like for him? For anyone else?
Strange memories on a nervous morning in Chapel Hill.
I am sad there is not more EDF on the internet.
I guess we’ll go literal today and make today’s Media of the Day the Slift album I mentioned and that I am listening to. Or just one song from it. Dip your toes into the world of French Psych Rock. You will not be disappointed. Maybe.