Category Archives: The Everyman Chronicles

Just Sign on The Donor Line…


Open Letter to an Organ Donor: Samuel Flegel (8/31/78-1/11/2000) 

Dear Sam,

It’s odd, how compelled I feel to write you on this day. It’s the day we met, yes. But it meant such starkly different things to each of us and the people who loved us. Love us.

Twenty-three years on the blade. Can you believe it?

Of course you can. You allowed it to be. Or whispered ‘And so it goes.’

For the longest time, I thought of you as mine. Literally, like something I owned, as a parent might think of a child, or an animal lover their pet. After all, you were 14 years my junior at the transplant. Just a kid on a motorcycle, coming home from a party.

Sam

But they must have transplanted something beyond organs that day. Because lately, you have been more like bigger brother than younger charge. A big brother who keeps hammering me with a singular message:

‘Embrace the beautiful sorrows.’

It took a couple decades, but I think I’m beginning to catch on. To spot — and accept — the profound moments when bitter must follow sweet, if only for their passing, just as sweet must trail bitter, if only for their presence.

I think we had one of those moments the day we met. I think we have one with every blood test that goes well, every eye exam that goes poorly, every number that inhabits limbo. Or, as you would have it, south of great, north of hopeless.

It’s been a while since I felt hopeless, and that has to be your doing, your consciousness at work, right? It’s as if a note came with your kidney and pancreas: ‘It’s not enough to live this life. Insist on it.’

So I try to barge. I try to smile, genuinely, at least once a day. I try to laugh, genuinely, at least once a day. The dogs make that possible, though I still often fail.

I try to cry, genuinely, at least once a day. You make that possible, though I often fail there, too, because if I think too hard about it, I sometimes cry a lot.

But you welcome all hypocriticals, especially the ones about seizing sunlight and sniffing roses when some days you’re just trying to get tomorrow in the bag.

Since Covid, I find myself dropping into virtual college lectures on the sciences, from biology to astronomy to physics to math, a class I never took beyond high school. Now I’m convinced math is a faith. That’s you too, right?

Lately, I’ve been consumed by the notion of the multiverse. I love contemplating the quantum possibilities of our seismic days.

What if you hadn’t had the motorcycle crash? What if I hadn’t had diabetes?

Would you read my stories? Would I ride your trains? Would we be friends, fathers, famous? It’s all possible, the physicists say. And I’m all-in on science.

So I believe. I believe that you were at the transom of the multiverse on that day, making sure the rearviews were folded back and the windshield was spotless. I believe you found me. I believe that, like Han Solo ledged over the carbonite bath, you grinned, winked, and said ‘Seeing more yesterdays than tomorrows ain’t exactly a calamity, kid.’

And you were gone. And we were off. And it still makes me cry, a lot sometimes.

What a beautiful sorrow.

L.A.’s Hottest Wheels

I’m not much of a grocery store shopper, maybe because I’ve cooked a total of 10 meals in my life. Maybe.

But I’ve discovered something that’s shot to the top of my shopping list whenever I go to Ralph’s, Food 4 Less or any other grocery store in the San Fernando Valley: a shopping cart.

They used to be easy to find in the Valley. A couple of them used to live at the end of my block. I once commandeered a cart to bring home motorcycle gear walking from the shop.

But a pandemic, recession and rising homeless population have made shopping carts harder to find than an honest plumber.

Two weeks ago, I found an abandoned cart in an empty parking space of my Ralph’s (the outdoor corral and entire store were empty). Last week, I found a cart but left my wallet in the car. When I tried to walk the cart to my car, the front wheels locked when I passed the security sensor. Yesterday required a five-minute search-and-shop scour.

I asked the store manager what happened.

“It’s the homeless,” she sighed. ”They’re even asking for them when people are packing their cars.”

She said the store had begun alerting customers to not feel rushed into unpacking. ”That cart is theirs as long as there’s something in it.”

But once the cart is empty, she said, clerks have to rush to fetch them.

Even with the store mandate, ”We can’t keep up,” she confided, unaware that the customer was an old newspaperman. So, being one, I researched the problem when I got home. Jesus.

According to the Food Marketing Institute, 2 million grocery carts are stolen every year, costing individual stores $8,000-$10,000 annually. Supermarketnews.com estimates a cart is stolen every 90 seconds. And those studies were pre-pandemic, in the age of human contact and heavy metals.

Now, a lifted cart is serious larceny. I Googled the cost of roll cages, and they routinely run from $200 to $500 – without an anti-theft system.


The solution is obvious and impossible: a return to the days when a clerk would help you load the car. Those went the way of the full-service gas station, and corporate Darwinism all but guarantees their permanent extinction.

And L.A. is its own nation-state: If it is happening here, it is likely headed to the other 49 – if it’s not already there.

Covid has proved a seismic shaking of the tree. All assumptions of everyday life are on the table, from the jobs we’re willing to work to the people we’re willing to talk to. I guess shopping carts shouldn’t be a surprise casualty.

Still, I had big plans for my 11th meal.

Open Your Mouth and Say Beep

I had my first robot doctor’s visit.

Well, I’m the one who visited. But a robot did the doctoring. In fact, the entire visit was without human contact, a first for me. And the experience was seamless — save for near-contact with a human being, who nearly fucked the whole thing up.

The occasion was a CAT scan my sentient doctor needed. But medical imaging is as expensive as a Marvel motion picture, just with an hour-long wait. And no popcorn.

The exorbitant cost forces myriad patients to reserve a spot in line for what amounts to an IMAX X-ray machine. On the day I visited, there a dozen patients, some on crutches, some in slings, some with a belly full of baby.

The night before, I looked over the electronic pre-exam instructions for a non-contrast CAT-scan: Bring insurance, a mask and a stomach emptied of a four-hour fast, including water.

As instructed, I showed up an hour early with the proper criteria. After finishing the paperwork — slid beneath a ceiling-high Covid shield that encapsulated the reception area of the waiting room — I took a seat with 45 minutes to spare.

About 10 minutes later, a woman came out from behind the section area. She wore a mask and gloves as she delicately walked a plastic cup brimming with…something.

“Hi Mr. Bowles,” she said in a friendly tone. ”You need to drink this. It’s contrast for the scan.”

I leaned back in my chair. ”I think mine is a non-contrast scan.

She stiffened and turned. ”I’ll take another look at your file,” and disappeared behind the desk.

I would not hear from her again, to neither confirm or deny whether I was supposed to drink…something.

An hour later, a…tech? nurse? told me to lay down on a gurney hooked to a large digital display that sat over a five-foot(?) ring that flashed lights and featured a giant, spinning lens.

“Put your hands over your head and listen for the instructions,” he said, politely. When I did, I heard the click of the iron door behind him.

It took a minute, but then a calm male voice. ”Hold your breath for three seconds,” he said. I couldn’t help but notice that the ”doctor” had a male voice, unlike Alexa, Siri, GoogleHome, Amazon and just about any A.I. you’d like to do secretarial tasks.

So I took a breath. A large hold-breath emoticon lit up over the ring, and the bed slid into the ring, which spun like an auto-focus camera looking for the target. The bed slid back, and a breathe emoticon lit up.

So I breathed. The process, twice more. The metal door clicked.

“Okay, we’re done,” he said, again politely. ”The requesting physician should have results in two to three days. Thank you.”

I dressed and walked out. I had registered at a new medical center, undergone a procedure and been discharged without human interaction. Thankfully, because the human interaction was the only near-glitch in the day.

I’ve heard much sturm and drang lately over the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the dark specter it casts the fate of humanity. But I think that fear is misplaced.

Look at the real source of human suffering, through just the headlines of today. It’s not natural disaster, famine or disease, and it won’t come attached to Artificial Intelligence like email malware.

Math adds up; that’s why there’s an equal sign. To err is human; that’s why there’s us. We’re in the way.

The real existential threat facing us is Human Intelligence.

There must be an app for that.