Sidney Zimbalist

The first year after he died I began writing a song that I never finished. At the time I was also attempting some sort of concept album based on Gustav Meyrink's Golem that I also (thankfully) never finished (This has become an impossible beginning to a story as I simply cannot tie the too together well enough to feel comfortable with it. This sentence -- or the previous one, or the one not written -- has been scrapped several times because of that fact).

Sidney was not my paternal grandfather. This is likely why we called him Sidney. It mattered little. I never knew my grandfather, who died before I was born. I could not think of my grandmother without him by her side. His mustard-yellow cardigan. The way he hung his wool cap. His old-man glasses. His giant, bulbous nose that somehow made him seem incredibly friendly. And he was. Kind, gentle. Slow-talker like my father. Avid reader, writer, scholar, philosophizer, family man. Never missed an event. Always asked the right questions.

When my sister and I would stay overnight, we could not wait for bedtime. Sidney had a technique. He called it "tucking in," and now that's the only way I can think of it. After climbing into bed, he would hover over us, one at a time. Clutching the ends of the bed with both hands, he would push down on the mattress, bouncing his hands up and down, shaking the entire bed like a giant spring, as we jiggled left and right, up and down, giggling, laughing, chortling.

I find myself instinctively doing this with my one-and-a-half-year-old son. He giggles through his pacifier as his body shakes and tumbles.

Rarely have I seen my father cry. It wasn't until Sidney was on his deathbed that I truly realized how much my father adored and admired him.

It is just three months before my wedding day.

A Monday night, the day before April Fools. I stay with my grandmother for several hours keeping her company. She leaves around midnight. It is not easy to convince her to go, but eventually her exhaustion wins out. I sit in the waiting room, checking up on him from time to time. I fall in and out of sleep on several different chairs, in several different positions.

At 5:55 a.m. Tuesday morning, "Boonie," the wonderfully-kind, 73-year-old Korean nurse, wakes me from my half-rest on the waiting-room chair. I sluggishly get to my feet and stumble into his room in a daze.

I know now that she was inviting me in for the last moments of his life. Truly, his last moments were some days before. When he could still nod and acknowledge the presence of his wife, children, and grandchildren. But here I am, the unwitting witness, dragging my half-conscious body through the doors leading to his room. 

Within moments I find I am talking to myself. I place my hand on his and words begin to flow and it is not clear whether I really believe the words are for him.

For the next few moments, Boonie and I watch him die like a time-lapse photograph. I see his right ear turn purple and mention this to her. She begins to walk out of the room and tells me to sit down. Like a small puppy, I obey. A few minutes later, a doctor comes into the room, only half-noticing me in his gloves, face mask, and smock. He takes out a stethoscope wrapped in plastic, checks several places on Sidney's chest, and then wanders back behind the ten or so machines keeping my grandfather alive to find an instrument. He pulls it through the tangled wires, opens my grandfather's right eyelid and shines the light of the instrument into his pupils. Leaving his eyelid to slowly close on its own, he begins to walk out of the room. He stops to look at me.
  
"His heart not beating," I think I hear him say. I stand up and come over to him at the foot of the bed. "I don't understand," I say. He points to the machine at my grandfather's left. I had spent the previous evening and early morning staring at this machine, at one spot in particular: the blood pressure indicator, which had been declining steadily for days. It was at forty last night when I had naively asked a resident exactly how low it could actually get. It was now in the thirties, and I thought he was telling me that it was getting low and would be any time now. He repeats his previous words, and adds, "He's dead. Did the nurse not tell you?"

I look at the machine once more, as he points this time, more specifically to the topmost measurement, my grandfather's heartbeat, which now reads "0" with a barely visible flatline to its left. I must have sighed, because the doctor backed away after this and began repeating, "I am so sorry, so sorry."

"It's okay," I say, "I'm tired, I'm confused. I didn't know."

As the doctor leaves the room I notice the multitude of machines that seem to be keeping my grandfather's now deceased body in a sort of limbo. His chest is still moving up and down with each automated breath. It is several minutes before the nurse comes in to unplug him.

My mother arrives fifteen minutes later, my grandmother another ten. She cries at his side, while touching his forehead. "He's still warm," she says.

A Hypochondriac Diagnosis, Part I

I have (and have had) many ailments. For starters, I'm near-sided and have flat feet -- both of which prevented my grandfather and namesake from going overseas during WWII (he was instead part of the National Guard in Atlanta, Georgia).

I had such horrible acne as a child that I was given Acutane, a drug now famously known to cause both eating disorders and depression (thanks both).

I have a deviated septum, chronic earwax, seasonal (all seasons) allergies, a bad overbite (corrected as a young adult with a torture device known as a "palate expander"), and a unibrow.

I suffer from the ridiculously named Globus Hystericus, which in simple terms is classified as a "lump in the throat." From Mosby's Medical Dictionary:

a transitory sensation of a lump in the throat that cannot be swallowed or coughed up, often accompanying emotional conflict or acute anxiety. The condition is thought to be caused by a functional disturbance of the ninth cranial nerve and spasm of the inferior constrictor muscle that encircles the lower part of the throat. The physical examination result tends to be normal, as does the result of barium esophagraphy.

When the weather is just right and the moon is at 5/8 my right eye twitches and feels as if someone is pulling on my eyelid with a tweezers.

As madness seems a common side effect of a distorted world view, I won't go into detail about the dreams, which are most definitely not nightmares, but fully-realized, plot-driven sci-fi melodramas. But I can't complain. As Karl Pilkington says, "If you're living the dream, how would you know whether you are awake or asleep?"

At age five I vividly remember sitting on the toilet pondering infinity and having what amounted to my first anxiety attack. While being dead forever seemed like a stretch, I was equally paralyzed by the thought of living forever. This seemed to leave no alternative on which to be excited about.

Luckily, there was a poster on my wall growing up of a zoological scene, in which a snake was curled up in the middle, poised to strike -- this was frightening enough to allow me to forget eternity for moments at a time, allowing me to eventually slip into unconsciousness.

That was before I found masturbation.

Perhaps I was the only one, but at the time of realizing my own mortality (back to the toilet) it struck me as an absolute that by the time I turned thirty this would not bother me. As if a magic blanket of calm understanding washes us over once we reach the one-third mark of our lives.

This moment never came. Instead, a series of anxiety-induced maladies exploded into a Japanese-Anime-like pink cancer that threatened to overwhelm the world.

It could be that the psychologist I saw in high school was correct -- I need to believe in something. This will make everything better. Doesn't matter what. Just pick something and believe. I recall a drawing of some sort, sketched rather hastily on the coffee table in his office. Circles, lines, words like "World" and "View" and "Me" in giant all-caps.

Buddha seems nice. Or Krishna. Or Kalki. Baldr, Odin, Skaði. Yu-huang, Anu, Gaia, Ahura Mazda. Flying Spaghetti Monster.

This isn't helping.

Because You Know You Want More

Recently, I pressed "GO" on a new project in which to poke and prod myself into submission. Beginning yesterday, I will be creating a new album in 366 days (now 365).

I have created a tumblr account, called One Year, One Album, and with any luck, I will not make a liar out of myself by changing the title and URL mid-year to Two Years, An EP...

It will require of me at the very least, five minutes a day, in which to write a journal entry like, "Nothing today" or "I changed the battery on the smoke detector this morning, hooray." I may even post some song samples, for that is the main idea of the thing.

During this time, I will continue to update this blog as well, which will likely become its own procrastination from working on the project itself. In this way, I can bury myself in a multitude of blogs and social media projects so that I never know which one needs to be a priority, and can thus brood endlessly over not having enough time to tackle any one of them.

For those of you that may read this, I appreciate your readership, and I hope that you might follow me at this new location as well. If you thought you only needed ONE self-deprecating blog to fill your day, you are simply wrong, and I hope to prove it to you.

More soon...