Last Words to a Lost Love

To My Wife

When you passed, I not only lost the best cuddle buddy this side of Bandit, but also my biggest fan and patron. Now that you are gone, I will do my best to try and make a living off my blogging as you always told me I could.  Up until now, I’ve always considered myself the Mr. Tanner of blogging.  I do not know how well I write, it just makes me “whole”.

The me without you misses you but it’s gonna be ok because there’s still ‘me’. The two people who knew me best and I loved the most were you and my mom. Both of you were exceptionally intelligent women and the only women who held me close to their bosoms while whispering to me how special I am.  I believed you both.

You did your best. I tried my hardest.  You were always right!  Your mother will always be the Devil.  She did call the cops on me as you feared predicted, but you did have me properly ‘papered” against the local police. Same goes for the immigration office.  Just as you warned me, your ruthless, soul-sucking mother tried hard to abuse me!  I can never thank you enough for making sure my scrawny ass was well protected.  I attended to MOST of your unfinished business before bouncing out of Germany and will tend to the rest as time and situation dictate. You would be proud of how well our son is handling the situation in your absence.

Rita’s First and Last Husbands

Your first husband Rudolf and I had a touching non-verbal conversation at the “coffee and sandwich” get-together after your funeral. I’m glad you got to spend some time alone with him in your last months reminiscing and comforting each other.  I know he’s as hurt by all this as I am, even with the passage of time, and realize from your conversations about him, as well as the shared intimacy and caring glances I saw you exchange, how much you meant to each other.  I was never jealous or threatened by your fond residual feelings for any of your previous loves, lovers, husbands or the ongoing stream of men who hit on you.  They were been bound to fail, but they did show good taste, even as you skillfully swatted them away.  I wonder how many other couples have memories of sitting around on multiple occasions comparing notes on which of their friends, acquaintances, etc. had tried to hit on them at any given time?

I held with you to the end babe and you to me. On your last day it’s as if you waited for me to whisper a final goodbye in your ear before slipping quietly away.  I never sought an avenue of escape from Germany when you offered though you lovingly suggested it would be easier on ME.   Bandit and I have now cast ourselves back off into the world, far away from the toxic miasma of the Devil.  We are now back into the great swirling seas of American opportunity, far outside the confines of our shared German Utopia.

And Vinny?  He honors us both. I recognized his love for you as being as strong as mine for my mom.  It has had a profound effect on my attitude towards him. He is a positive influence on the world reflecting your gentle manner and delicate sensibilities. We did something seriously right with Vinny. I mostly ‘blame’ you for that. That’s boy’s seriously not, not right. Polished. Savvy.  I see your heart in his eyes.

Lizzy will be tended to by Vince. I wish she was young enough to travel with me and Bandit. I think of you when I see her.  Vince needs a dog too after all!  I will miss her and Vince as I depart the continent, but will do my best to save our one remaining beloved family dog ManMan in the US.

I can recreate the loving environment we hand-raised him in. Imagine Bandit and him getting reacquainted!  I understand he’s still a nervous little nelly belly.  We both know where that comes from.  I have your recorded wishes on ManMan’s disposition. I have your favorite picture of ManMan from your bedside to remind me, but I wouldn’t forget anyway.

People still take so much for granted. All is well. And thank you. Thank you for everything. I shall remain in awe of your brilliance and your faithfulness forever. I shall continue to sing the graces of our shared humanity and your special place in the hearts of so many. I will represent your wishes through eternity. I will not burden future relationships by impossible comparisons to you.

I promise to try and find the good Dutch woman you suggested would be ideal for me as a best fit companion, if and when I ever desire to remarry.  I’ll give it a go, somehow. I will vigorously defend those who misrepresent your memory with the actual documentation of your life from any distortion no matter the threat. The book of your love is written on the nooks and crannies of my heart and I shall sing it’s harmonies in prose and speech til my own throat goes stiff and lifeless and my fingers limp.

“You were you, I was me, and we were happy” Our happiness befuddled many who didn’t know our special bond. Still does. You are proof there IS some actual humanity in humans. I hate that your mom misused you so horribly. I understand your addictions. You were mine.

I will always love you.  We’ll talk about a lot of stuff later. Or not. Heaven for me will always be the time we already spent together in Eden.

If Hell shortly awaits, you’ve left me toned and properly rested. I think there are papers to prove that too!  Count on me to remain good without God. I have plenty of experience battling Devils, so don’t worry about me.  Now off to find your loving daddy Joe.  You and him have a celestrial coffee and cigarette break.  You can use the regular sugar now instead of those hideous low-calorie substitutes.  After all, it won’t kill you!  Order one of the most expensive of the ethereal blends.  Try out the special “Stardust Mix” for me and drop a Yelp review into one of my dreams.

#yourbiggestfan #tangledsouls #myprincess

Enjoy.

One Last Bite

Updated to add: My dear and lovely wife Rita is gone. She passed at seven p.m. here in Germany the last day of September, after battling a series of cancers and tumors that eventually consumed her. She passed at home, in as peaceful and loving an environment as any of us could wish for ourselves or any of the loved ones we hold dear. She was truly a very special princess.  Details of memorials and services to follow. This blogpost was being proofed for release as I watched over her in her final hours.

Fast Food and Timeless Love

Those who follow my life’s travails on Facebook will have a better grip on the decidedly gloomy situation imposed upon our family by the continued degradations from my wife’s terminal illness.  There’s enough pain, sorrow and heartache to drive many a formerly sober man to whisky, without delving into the hoarier details involved in cohabiting in the apartment above my 85 year old Nazi-era mother-in-law!  Before proceeding, be advised that these missives have been prepared and released under the most dire of circumstances and incredible stresses.

On the matter of the extraneous errata of my sick mind, it’s probably as a result of the mind blowing decisions my wife and I discussed being up against, of which a brief glimpse is offerered in the love story I’m sharing with you today.

Whatever else bubbles out of my brain, today’s offering is just a ‘simple’ tale of a man and his dying wife going out on their last dinner date together in a romantic German location, on a rare balmy night in late Autumn somewhere close enough to Paris to fear guillotines pulled by donkeys headed north.

For some odd reason, the French really have issues with the past when it comes to dealing with the Germans, but there were no wagon wheels or donkey hooves pounding north on the cobblestone streets the night of our last dinner together.  It was just another of the minor blessings that have fallen our direction.

We grab blessings these days with all the vigor we can manage, because time and the degree of significance of their appearance is amplified by the deepening shadows and gathering storms we’ve ignored in order to remain in our amorous stupor for as long as is humanly possible.  You count your blessings where you find them.  That’s the philosophy Rita and I have maintained for a quarter century together and I’m not messing with success.

The Gathering Storms

If you’ve an aversion to fear, death, Nazi storm troopers, video game screen caps or humor bred of morbid fear and impending doom, stop now.  Everyone else…..

Another Victim of Bible Science

Another day, another dead religious-idiot snake handler.  This time, the fellow had a high enough profile to have scored some National Geographic facetime (Why, National Geographic, Why?).  I’ll assume the best and figure that National Geographic was running a high brow bit on the lunatic fringe of religious society and not trying to go head-to-head with a bunch of waterlogged homophobic Duck Hunters on another network.  If I’m wrong, don’t correct me on the assumption.  I’m old and cranky enough already, living in the world of George Jetson with neighbors apparently beamed in from The Flintstones.  For what it’s worth, I’m feeling quite well today, but then I’m a firm believer that laughter is the best medicine, and given the ongoing freak show of the fundamentalists, I’m assured plenty of healthful smiles to keep me fit.

As a matter of curiosity, and with a nod to the photo of the white guy in the masthead above (and the white guy killed today), are there any/many instances of Black preachers dying this way?  I can’t think of any off the top of my head.  Most of the Black people I know, religiously affixed as they are, seem happy enough just bashing homosexuals and have enough common sense, having escaped slavery and all, not to be messing with deadly snakes.  I’ll leave that question to the racial sociology department at JSU or Howard to work out.  I’m always happy to toss out a free doctoral dissertation topic for a young Black college student having trouble finding a topic.

Jeebus’ Law and Order

And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. (Mark 16:17-18)

In spite of many previous snake bites, one of which led to the loss of the finger of the aforementioned God slobberer, as well as previous troubles with law enforcement over the transport and ownership of his deadly vermin, today’s Darwin Award nominee was undeterred.  The courts in the US, particularly those in the former slave states, are apparently reluctant to enforce long standing laws against public displays of deadly snakes in church services, so this is what we get to read about every other year or so.

Ken Ham’s Killing Spree to Continue

The southern court system, in declining to prosecute a previous case of snake bite induced religious death, stated that there would be no deterrent effect for prosecuting this type of crime, so hardened were the biblical felons in their proclivities and so devoted were the practitioners and followers of this particular religious aberration.  There are literally places in the US where you can get charged with child endangerment for leaving your minor child at home alone for ten minutes to run to the grocery store but it’s perfectly ok to drag them into a sermon where a preacher is slinging deadly rattle snakes around.  Holy shit! 

Prosecution being useless as a deterrent has never stopped any of the former slave states from dragging every other poor black man into the court system and prosecuting them for smoking marijuana, though it’s a pretty easy observation that the incarceration of those young Black males is as ineffective a deterrent to marijuana use in Black youth as the prosecution of White Pentecostal snake handlers is presumed to be in deterring other young preachers from committing suicide by snake.  Wonder why the difference?

Bonus Thunderfoot Video

Enjoy.

Spring Housecleaning

Since my often wonky Internet connection seems to be momentarily solid, having no doubt worn itself ragged from jumping up and down like a midget on a Dutch hooker the duration of this morning, I shall attempt a quick but meaty post on current affairs.  I know the title seems a bit inappropriate for this time of year, but with the winter two thirds over and STILL not a speck of snow (or a good hard freeze) here in my German neighborhood, it seems like spring is ready to break out any day now.  I’ve been a bit less active on my blog lately, owing to the distractions and perturbations of life, but still post willy-nilly across many social platforms and websites, even if I don’t post full-on blog entries with as much regularity as I would otherwise be compelled.  Figured I’d hit my main talking points in one fell swoop here.   First the big three.

Sex

I am still for it, even though my pom-poms are dangling a bit lower than your average hip-hopper’s pants. My wife is also struggling with health issues that make my rooting for sex a more prominent feature of the day than actually having any, but going out to dinner and talking dirty to each other before coming home and passing out in bed was already a prominent feature in our post-50 bag of sex tricks, so it’s not as huge an issue as if we were in our more succulent youth.

That said, I don’t think women need help from Republicans in figuring out their end of the deal, so why the hell won’t these rightwing politicos keep their hands off women’s vaginas?  I like handling a vagina as much as the next guy, but I know I’m only renting it and am not allowed to go nailing pictures all over the walls and trying to install new plumbing fixtures, let alone make up new rules on the maintenance thereof.   Ferchrissakes.

Politics

Politics.  Pardon Snowden and build a statue of him next to the Washington Monument.  Put some bankers in jail from the space being freed by not arresting pot smokers.  Quit arresting pot smokers.  Quit pretending that legalized pot is the end of the world as we know it, particularly you highly paid TV perps with all the false pearl clutching (you know who they are). Put some of those torturers from the past Bush administration in jail before you go all half-cocked about other countries and their “international” obligations to law and justice.  Give us all a fucking break.

Religion

A wish fulfillment fantasy for nervous mortals.  Still as useless as tits on a pumpkin.  In dwindling demand, but still a huge threat to national and international stability due to their reckless reliance on poppycock in their search for deeper meanings in shallow water.

Life

Having a few teeth pulled this week is nothing compared to what Rita is dealing with. My wife is hanging onto life tenaciously, even as she struggles to deal with her terminal cancer.  It’s  already been a bit over a year since she abandoned her unsuccessful treatment regime at a renowned German lung clinic, walking away from an opportunity to turn herself into a long-term medical experiment for a bunch of curious doctors.  Her local doctors are now pushing us to make accommodations at a full blown palliative care facility.  That is an unlikely event in any case, since my wife would sooner do herself in at one fell swoop, than linger in such a pitiful state for weeks/months.  She is still not ambulatory.  She still manages to teach English classes and keep our business running, but her pain is becoming increasingly difficult to manage and the prescriptive solutions more debilitating.  It’s a heartbreaking and worrisome thing to have to witness.  Right now we’re hoping she’ll be physically able to make our 25th wedding anniversary at the end of the month.  Dinner in Paris.

Living

We’re still getting along as near “normal” as we can under the circumstances.  My wife continues to worry more about my future success without her, than she does with the fact that she has bigger issues of her own right now.  I don’t want her to worry about me.  Providence has seen fit to bless me in ways that most men only dream about.  I have no idea why the dice of the universe haven’t crapped me out already, but I’m optimistic on my future even as I attempt to squelch the tears from considering the present situation with my wife.

Blogging

I’ll continue to blog, tweet, post pix, just as I always have.  The subjects will continue to be as diverse as my interests.  I’m still in love with Spotify and thankful to be able to reach out and access so much music.  My wife and I both engage in a fair amount of musical therapy made more pleasant by their vast catalog of music and our deep (read: old people) memories of songs from out past.  I pop in-check in on Yelp every now and then.  I’ll occasional throw a comment on my GetGlue TV social app when viewing a show I like, but never in real-time, since my TV and time is shifted by half a globe from the US.  I’ve been tossing up a few odd AudioBoos lately.  Also trying to spread my photos across several apps.  My main pro Flickr account, Instagram and Facebook get the biggest share of my pics.  Look forward to more photo blogging fun since I acquired my Sony DSC-QX10 for Xmas.  I’ll be trying to organize and post a lot of pics locked on my computer at present and adding new stuff along the way as well.  A fairly comprehensive map to my social media is on my Social page here at this blog for those who are interested.

Enjoy.

A Eulogy over Tea

If you find it morbidly inappropriate to speak ill of the dead, click away now. If you’d have enjoyed getting the chance to drag the remains of Hitler’s smoldering corpse though the streets like the Italians did with Mussolini, please proceed.

I find it morally reprehensible to gloss over the damages done by morally reprehensible people who publicly propagate the most vile sorts of ideas into the public domain. I am moved to displays of public outrage like this blogpost when the people doing the damage claim to be working under direct contract with God.. Expect a much more scathing eulogy on the occasion of the deaths of all those monsters who promulgated legal torture and shamed us as a nation.
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I have been receiving a lot of questions regarding the whereabouts of Mark Francis Krebs. His prolific trolling on Facebook feeds (mine and others) suddenly went silent and it left many people wondering what happened to him.

Facebook might know more about you than the NSA, FBI and CIA combined, but one thing they haven’t yet mastered is the concept of death. In real life people actually die all the time, but on Facebook your electronic soul can exist in an amorphous cloud of bits, ready to be called upon to hawk any brand or any cause you intentionally (or accidentally) clicked a “like” button when your finger still had a pulse.

Such is the case for Mark Francis Krebs, dead at age 52 of bloat and self-neglect (see pic). Sad, lonely figure of a man, laying dead in his Texas apartment for ten days, rotting away unnoticed in his Lazy Boy until the stretch of his decay invaded the physical space of his neighbors invoking calls to the authorities.

Mark was an underachieving underclassman from high school that I ‘reconnected’ with thru Facebook awhile back. His academic acumen was so sub par it left him wide open for a life addicted to Fox News propaganda and Pentacostal wing-nuts alike, which resulted in his stalwart support of the kind of idiotic thinking that favors “rapist’s rights” over the dignity of our wives, mothers and daughters. Krebs was a shadow member of “Zygotes over People”, and a persistent right wing troll on my Facebook feed. If he were alive today Krebs would be pimping shotguns for babies as a solution to gun violence. He was the sad, bloated, living stereotype of every Tea Party lunatic, NRA slobbering gun nut and Jeebus freak you ever encountered, all rolled into one apparently corpulent soul.

I did my best to try and council the crazy out of him but given the limitations on what can be accomplished through Facebook, I was unable to move Mark from the extreme rightwing category on religion or politics.

All surviving family should be joyously consoled with my testimony that he went to his grave fully believing every bit of religious tripe ever fed to him, so he should be safe in the arms of imaginary Jeebus by now and insulated from my necessarily savage review of our online relationship

Mark was my most dedicated Fundamentalist Facebook troll. I figured he must have been getting paid a few pennies per post from Rove’s 350 million dollar wingnut welfare machine just based on the amount and intensity of his efforts, but that’s just a guess.

Though his extremism and Christian delusion knew no bounds, I never thought to block or unfriend him. My theory is that the best defense against people that far off the map of common public sense and decency Is to make sure they are seen. The more people see of these types of lunatics, the better off for the rest of us. Sunshine, disinfectant,

Enjoy.