What's New?

Well, let?s see.... I guess it's been quite a while since anybody's heard from me (not that I've heard many complaints), so I guess there's a bit of catching up to do. As you may already have noticed, after a great deal of procrastination, I finally got around to giving this site a new look. It hasn't been easy finding the time, I must say, since even the simplest of things seem to take forever. This was all somewhat amplified by a bit of turmoil in my personal life. I can't help but be reminded of a short film by Woody Allen entitled, "Oedipus Wrecks." Times have been tough with my mother ever since my father died a few years back. It amazes me how easy it is for me to say that now. I still wince at the thought of my dad not being around anymore, but time has blunted the pain substantially. Anyhow, my mother never really adjusted to the whole thing very well (a painful end to fifty years of marriage is a tough thing to have to deal with, after all). He was content to drive her around (she never learned) and wait for her out in the car, even when he was getting pretty sick. With him gone, my mother become trapped and isolated in her house. Neighbors had come and gone over the years, and she’d never become close to the new ones. Subsequently, she was forced to rely on me (now THAT’S a sad state of affairs). I tried to fill my dad’s shoes, as much as I could. For almost a year, I went over every night after work. I’d cook dinner, and in general just try and keep her company. I just wasn’t up to the task, I guess, and gradually I started to spending less time with her, and more time with the computer I’d finally convinced myself to buy on Easter Eve of 1996 (a Packard Bell which I got rid of in less than a year after I decided to start building them myself–by the way, anybody wanna buy one). Mom became more and more isolated, and depressed. She suffered through an infestation of little tiny spiders, basement floods, snotty little neighbor kids, and a host of other plagues that might have seemed small to most of us, but were amplified by my mother’s loneliness; I wasn’t much help, either. My patience (not my most impressive quality to begin with) had long since worn through. It was at about this time that yet another horror befell her.

Much to my utter shock and amazement, I found myself involved in a relationship for the first time in quite a while. I’d really given up on finding anyone (if you’ve visited these pages, you get just an inkling of truly strange I am), and was busily immersing myself as much as possible in my new toy, the computer. I’d had Dreamscape set aside some space for a web page quite a while before, but hadn’t really done much with it, other than toy around. One night I happened to stumble across a site called New York State Center, and from there to Syracuse Center. There was an offer to place a link to your website there, and so, on a whim, I decided to put one there for mine. They required a name, and so I picked the name "Patrick’s World." An admittedly less than inspired (or even original, I’m afraid) title, but it was late, and I was tired. And I figured nobody would ever see it anyway.

In a day or two, I found an e-mail waiting in my in-box from some guy up in Halifax, Nova Scotia who was writing from a computer store he worked at. He not only had stopped by Patrick’s World (from that link I’d nearly forgotten about), but said he liked the place. Well, I was pleased (yet somewhat terrified) to find out that somebody (other than relatives or friends) had actually seen what I’d put up. I figured I’d better get my act together and try and put something actually worth looking at up there. And so I began working on Patrick’s World (I figured I was stuck with that damn title, now) volume 2.

It was in volume 2 that I started adding some midi music, and tried putting up some graphics and using backgrounds on which you could actually read what was written. I also put up a story or two, including some nice cheery stuff about watching my grandmother die, and suffering through my father’s decline and death. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t think most folks would find that sort of stuff appealing. Volume 2 became official when I put up a "hit" counter in December of 1996.

Well, it was on the fateful night of January 11^th, 1997 that a rather strange person was surfing around on the Internet. She claims to have looking for the weather forecast when she stumbled upon Syracuse Center, and saw a link for "Patrick’s World." It seems that her former "Significant Other" (who had departed–though not very far, as it turns out–some five or six months earlier) was a techno-phobic Irishman named Patrick, and so she decided to check out my link.

As it turned out, the reason this person was looking for the weather was because she was an on-call Hospice nurse, and she was wondering what kind of blizzards were in store for the evening. Naturally, death and dying were right up her alley, and apparently my tales of misery and woe were too much for her to resist. She promptly fired off an e-mail to "Uncle Pat."

At that time I was checking Uncle Pat’s e-mail through terminal emulation software, and since nobody was writing much to him (some things never change), I only checked it every few days or so. It was with some shock, then, that I received an e-mail from someone named "NinjaRN" with the subject line, "Uncle Pat, I think I love you."

As it turned out, this RN was actually local and we began to correspond quite regularly; it was on February 26^th that we finally met in person. Much to my relief, she was (and still is) female. The rest, as they say, is history. She turned out to be almost as odd as I am, very much into space, and Star Trek, and...well, I could go on, but let’s just say the similarities are astounding. So now she and I live in a very strange house with two of her very strange children, two screwy cats and five computers. All of which has been very good for me.

But it’s been kind of tough on Mom. What with me having a life and all that, she began to see less of me all the time. We tried moving her into an "Adult Residence" type of place, and that seemed to help for a while, but unfortunately her diet began to suffer (this place catered to rich old farts and fed ‘em piles of nice mooshy, very rich and fatty food), and with that went her blood pressure, her nerves, and the last few strands with which her world was held together. In short, she pretty much fell apart, both physically and mentally. The place where she was living suddenly stopped being so nice and wonderful to her. She was being a pain in their ass, and they wanted her dealt with (after all, she was only paying about two grand a month; what’d we expect out of ‘em'). It soon became clear that they didn’t want her around any more.

After may trips to the ER, a rather lengthy stay in the hospital (another "tribute" to modern western medicine; these people had her more fucked up by the time she left than she’d been when she got there–and I practically had to pry her loose from the assholes), my mom is now living at St. Camillus Rehabilitation Center (in other words, a nursing home). It’s a very nice place with very nice people (and a very nice web page) who are taking very good care of her. They stay in top of her medications (don’t ask me how; I sure can’t do it), her blood pressure, and her diet and blood sugar. We seem to’ve finally convinced them that the diuretic she was on (the wonder-boys over at the hospital managed to change that one) wasn’t working, and she was swollen like a pumpkin, and wheezing. It pays to have a nurse around (a B.S.N., no less) to speak with these people. It’s about the only way to make ‘em listen. In fact, I just got off the phone with the social worker there (another very nice person) who was instructed to yell at me for bringing my mommy home too late from the Mother’s Day festivities at my sister’s house last night (I told them five, and we didn’t get back until after SEVEN!!).

Anyhow, so now I’m in the process of trying to take care of all my mother’s stuff (she gets some six inches of mail per day which I am supposedly sorting through and figuring out; thank God for computers), deal with her house and all the stuff in it (much of which is now scattered in piles here strewn from the basement to the attic, with the garage taking the hardest hit), while still trying to deal with my other (pre-Ninja) house, the house I live in now, AND go to work, run for Executive Vice-President of the CSEA Local 615 (PLEASE vote for me), sleep once in a while, fly my helicopter (Longbow 2–I highly recommend it), play Star Wars (X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter–also very cool), try to learn Adobe PageMaker, Adobe Illustrator, Corel WordPerfect, set up and administer my little home network, learn HTML, DHTML, CSS, fix everybody’s computer(s) and occasionally get some sleep once in a while.

So THAT’s why I haven’t been updating my web page, or writing letters, or seeing much of anybody lately.

But, I now have a start on volume 3 of Patrick’s World. I’ve changed the front page some, as you can see. And I have a thing or two I intend to write down once I get a chance, and of course the Links page is a god-awful mess which I need to deal with sooner or later (it looks a lot like my garage). My opinion of the medical community hasn’t changed much (doctors and administrators are a cancer on our society); if anything it’s been reinforced. And I intend to jot down a rant or two about them when I get the chance. I also have some artwork and photos to finish off and upload when I can, and I have a story or two to tell, when I can get the voices to stop yelling all at once and speak their turn. And soon, I’ll get around to putting up some of Uncle Pat’s tales from the road. There’s a lot of gibberish to weed out, but he’s had some interesting adventures.

Anyhow, until next time, take it easy and PLEASE, somebody sign my goddamn guestbook! It’s getting embarrassing.

See ya,