Tuesday . . . "Pretty sure that it's an inoperable and fatal brain tumor," I told Dr. Bruce's receptionist as I made my appointment. She said, "I doubt that."
I said, "What else could a sore throat, an ear-ache and a two-week headache be?"
"You can see his PA at 2:35PM today," she answered.
Disappointed that she did not agree with me, I accepted her offer. Sadly, the full-sized, female physician's assistant diagnosed another sinus, ear and/or brain infection for which she prescribed the normal five-day, six-pilled treatment of Zythromax. I guess I'm going to have to quit the practice of cleaning my earwax out with rusty, large-sized paper-clips. The drugs, plus the doctor's co-pay, brought the visit to the cost of a full tank of gasoline for my Peugeout: $50. Back in my spacious Town of Paradise Valley apartment, soley in an effort to double the drug's effectiveness, and especially since there were no warnings against it, I washed down the first day pair-o'-pills with a carefully measured double-dose of Cuervo Gold. I took my last pink tablet Monday night, and I do feel much better. I wonder how long I've been terminally ill and not known it? But then, like a woman with her period, Monday morning's shower saw three incredibly smelly Hershey Kisses-sized of 'something' drop from my butt and scamper to the drain like the baby Alien in the Sigourney Weaver movie of the same name.
Back on the phone to Dr. Bruce's office again.
After a surprisingly short wait on hold I heard the curt, "Doctor's Office."
"I have butt mucus", I said.
"Pardon me?", she replied. I went on to explain to her what had happened, and that since I did not have a vagina for globs to drop out of, I felt I should see the doctor. I told her this time I had to see Dr. Bruce because I didn't want a lady looking up my butt.
"When I come in, you're not going to announce to everyone in the waiting room that I'm here so the doctor can look up my butt, are you?", I asked.
She assured me that she would not.
Knowing then that I most surely have a fatal inoperable gastro-intestinal tract cancer, I down-loaded an "Advance Health Care Directive" which is a strange name for document which allows the doctor to let me die. Mainio and a lifetime school friend were watching a "Survivor!" type show on cable, so I had them both witness my signature and also sign the declaration that will allow me to die with as many painkilling drugs that the physician can find.
     www.doctormalamud.com
Thursday . . . I write today from a hospital bed with tubes stuck everyone. And I do mean everywhere. Rather I wish  I could be typing from a hospital bed, fated with a terminal illness that demanded abundant doses of intravenous pain-killers, but unfortunately, I'm at my job I hate so very much. And incongruously enough, I am enjoying the cool desert outdoors and the finest morning weather offered in these continental United States. I'm bracing myself for the unending greetings ending with the rhetorical, "Isn't this weather great?" God keeps throwing it in my face what a wonderful world He's given us. September 15th, 2005 and it seems the stainless steel spine of summer has finally been snapped by the sheer weight of the yearnings of so many wanting that searing season to melt away. The temperature of my south facing bedroom will finally be below 85F degrees when I arrive home, on the afternoons that I do arrive home in the daylight hours. It's odd how life works out. My sixty-seven-year-old and good friend Guillermo, who had the most delightful outlook on life, and consumed such healthy and full-balanced meals that it was scary, passed last year when his almost decade-old heart transplant died and him along with it. J.G. (think "Jay Gatsby" har!) my only financial benefactor, is wobbling towards eighty, in poor health, (although he can still journey about without a walker, while I convey him to expensive luncheon locations so he can buy me $25 shots of tequila and listen and laugh uproariously as I joke, rant, and rave) and has a horrible marriage, but yet, J.G. wants to live to be ninety. While Dr. Hammurabi Malamud, me, I, could die tomorrow and get "it all" out of the way. Although, when faced with the actual choice of life over death, I've always been offered, or chose, I guess, life. A life of depression, defeat and dullness. But only because I chose that too . . . I guess.
     www.doctormalamud.com

Saturday . . . "08/10/05 20:07" read the receipt I had wrapped around my sole financial asset in the whole world, my STARBUCKSCARD. Thirty-eight days since I was last here? I am burning a twenty-one hour break between shifts and it feels like a vacation. I've been listening to the audio book of The Great Gatsby and parts of me feel like I'm back there in the Roaring Twenties; when manners and appearance and propriety mattered. When people cared, if only to maintain appearances. My curiosity is piqued as I notice a blue and white Phoenix Police SUV in front of the pick-up bar disguised as a Mexican food restaurant and a television news camera-man walking past with his tripod folded and lugging his heavy cappuccino maker-sized tv camera. As always happens, even though the place was virtually empty when I walked in, a steady stream of customers has appeared out of nowhere. I had planned to read more of the 632-paged hardback titled "White Lotus" that I could not seem to finish back in 1965, because of the strange and fearsome veil it seemed to hang over all the dreams of that teenager. However, I left the book back at the apartment. Thursday, the Ex-Mrs.Dr.Malamud sent me an incongruous email with the subject line of: "You are a keeper." I replied that she must have forgotten that I was on that group email list. She emailed me back that, "I don't have lists, I address each email separately," and we left it at that. I occasionally journey back to those days when I first learned of the pending divorce. Now I cannot even comprehend how distressed I was. Outside, English sparrows, addicted from specs of lapped up coffee left on recently vacated tables, now crowd outside the front door of the Starbucks as if there had been birdseed thrown down. They want in. Suddenly, once again, the place is empty and Lisa Minelli sings to me from the hidden Bose speakers. Speakers tuned to what else but the Starbucks channel on XM radio.
     www.doctormalamud.com

Tuesday . . . At Safeway, while in line amongst seniors of immense age, I was chuckling at the article promoted on the cover of a women's magazine promising to expose "What Men Think." Oh my gawd! what a waste of time. Most men's minds are concentrated on entirely one thing: themselves. Ranking second through fourth (rank is entirely dependent on age) are their own privates, female breasts and sports. Back at the office, one of the managers was presented a proposed new schedule for an employee. As scuttlebutt has it, without even looking at the approved-by-sub-managers form, he balled it up and executed a two-pointer into the garbage can. He did this knowing the result would be the employee turning in his two weeks notice two minutes later. Being charitable about the man, I thought that given a chance to explain his thinking, this manager's decision might make perfect sense. Actually his immense pride prevents him from discussing his commandments with anything other than his boot placed firmly on your chest, so I think I'll pass should explanation-time ever present itself. And then, I was ruminating about how women think, if they even know why they make the decisions they make? Or if their conclusions just grow organically and they do not even realize where their decisions sprout from? But, there I go making women mysterious and unknowable; like they were when I was groping through my teens and twenties. Nowadays, molded by modern American society, so many females have become nothing more than men without testicles. And we already have enough of those, eh?      www.doctormalamud.com

Friday . . . Eviction day is today. Or tomorrow. I should be able to come up with the precious dollars needed to feed the multi-national investment behemoth who grants me my month-to-month passage in the steerage compartment of Paradise Valley apartments. But then the fight begins anew Saturday. The fight to curb my appetite for enjoying the extravagances of life: auto, health and death insurance; a laptop computer/recording studio purchased on my credit by Mainio, a land-line based telephone service (for collection agents to call), cell phones, networked cable service for our apartment PCs, a jug of (cheaper-than-Prozac) Cuervo Gold and my precious sale-bought books, versus the bare necessities, such as gasoline, food, lodging and paying income taxes, social security taxes, Medicare taxes, hidden taxes (such as the unseen tax on each gallon of fuel) and taxes (as in Orwell's novel 1984) given 'Newspeak' names such: as 'traffic tickets', 'fees', 'tariffs' or 'registrations'. I had a feeling this reckoning was coming and, for once, my feeling was correct. Perhaps this is Jehovah God's way of nudging me, reminding me that I must leave the world of high pressure, low paid seven-day-a week labors and enter into the high paid, low pressure atmosphere He designed me for. Whether that be some sort of ministry or not I don't know. Although, since ministry would necessarily forbid me from using the 'ef' word and the 'excrement' word in every other sentence or thought, and that could hardly be termed low stress <grin>. At work, the inapproachable powers-that-be have assigned me a stand-in during my meager off-hours, who is so imperious and imbecilic that surely my clients will riot, string him up, burn down my offices or violently sever their contract with the aforementioned inapproachable powers-that-be. Since inbreeding has been all but banished except for in the Southern United States and Colorado City, unlike Great Britain, this gentleman possesses a quite unique combination of the contradictory talents of being an imbecile (he may actually be a moron) and being imperious, that is: acting like a king.
     www.doctormalamud.com

Thursday . . . Last Wednesday, the 12th, was my first job interview since July 31st, 2001 when I was accepted with open arms by my current employer. An employer who has come to love me and well, basically, 'abuse' me by kowtowing to my lust for money. My first day off in one dozen weeks was last Sunday, October 9th, 2005. It appears that only a strict and trimming financial diet will solve my money woes. Or perhaps a live-in to help with the burden. I do have a live-in with Mainio, my youngest son, but being as he hasn't had a job in months, oddly enough, he just isn't improving my financial situation. In truth he is the sole cause of my financial woes. I fear I will soon be living with sewn-up clothes, feeding only on the eight known varieties of Maruchan Ramen Noodles (the ones in the Styrofoam cups that you pour boiling water into) using public transportation, clipping Wednesday's and Sunday's food coupons and selling my plasma at the blood bank like a common drunk, while my car is being ransacked by other drunks recently drained of their arterial fluids. The new employer offers at least 20% more income, but a full 30% less than the rumor mill had ginned out. I was promised to get the 'famous call', the one telling me to come in for another interview, or the, "Don't even think of ever driving by here again and tear up my business card!" call, today: Thursday. This morning, I was watching a younger client take off to work and imagining the necessarily long journey he had to his place of employment and what a hardship it must rising before daybreak and driving his $80,000 G500 Mercedes Gelaendewagen SUV for almost an hour. But then, I thought of his young wife and of how when you are equally yoked in marriage, you can get through any struggles. As a matter of fact, when you have a loving wife (or husband) struggles do indeed deflate to mere challenges, versus the huge walls and barriers a single person (un-equipped to be single) attempts to scale alone. When a person is married, especially for a male, he most often has no idea how much his woman, his spouse, his partner, his lover, and often his mom and maid, contributes to his own wellbeing, both financial and emotional. That reminds me that my actress friend in California, is moving closer to Hollywood, and she advised me, for some unknown reason, that her new house came equipped with a separate guest house.      www.doctormalamud.com

Wednesday . . . Don't you just love the smell of the summer's dust being burnt off the heating coils when Fall finally comes? Although today we will have a high temperature of 87F degrees, we still call it 'winter season.' Sometimes the ex-Mrs-Dr-Malamud says such mean things ... of course e-mails always sound much meaner than meant, hence the constant insertion of <grin>s or silly icons to indicate "I'm only kidding", or a less than serious mode. Perhaps rather than being mean she is simply venting the constant financial frustrations of single parent-people who won't lie, cheat and maim to earn additional income. Speaking of the lack of sufficient income: if we were still married and cuddled-up in the same abode, either in sweaty and stagnant Fort Worth, or sunny and sultry Scottsdale, we'd have at least one thousand more dollars in-come than out-go. It seems that the Man-Boy Mainio finally decided to take a job. I write 'decided to take a job', because, even in my usual 3PM to 10PM drunken-stupor-wanderings, with my shoulder sliding horizontally across the front glass and doors of buildings, I cannot shuffle more than a few hundred yards without peeling off two or three 'Help Wanted' signs. Some businesses even list five or six or seven open positions on four foot tall sandwich signs. It's ironic that he'll be working for the coffee-seller that we both laugh so much about. And in my case, write so much about. It truly is amazing that the product they are known for stinks, but all the other drinks they have morphed it into (most often by cooling and dumping in massive amounts of sweetener, churning foam or whipped cream of all of them) have made the corporation a real money maker. I have rarely said or e-mailed the ex-Mrs-Dr-Malamud any nasty things, and the few times I have, later I felt guilty. I wonder if it is still love or if I'm just getting soft in the head?
     www.doctormalamud.com November 2005

Saturday . . . Still no new employer. Still in a job I hate and a job that hates me. A job that pelts me every day with insults and hurts. But I'll be billing sixty-four hours this week, so that's good. The ancient "Mr. G." returns Monday, so I must return his mansion, his Cadillac, his convertible and, most precious of all, his blue, rearview mirror adorning handicapped parking tag that has allowed me to dock his DeVille within fifty feet of the front door of my tony Town of Paradise Valley apartment. The repairs the Peugeot needed that I had, and could put-off (see the line above about Cadillac's and convertible's) finally had to be performed by a factory trained female mechanic. The one repair I imagined to cost $500, did cost $500, but was paid for under the conditions of a warranty so arcane, only an Apache medicine man in the seventh hour of a peyote inspired trance could comprehend it. However, like any good dealership, they located a silent, secret and dreadful, oil and grease shrouded monster, by locating teeth he had lost while lurking inside the dark bowels of the busy four cylinder engine. This monster they eliminated too. For, of course, $500. Got good and drunk last night on beer and tequila. Well, Mainio said I was drunk. I felt pretty much like I do every day at quitting time when I escape the Portal to Hell and retreat to the darkness of my tiny abode and, in an attempt to reclaim my soul over the span of sunset to sunrise, begin replenishing my soul with carefully measured doses of both cold and warm (but always yellow) medicines. While the teen Mainio stepped out with my credit card in his fleshy grip, I slipped in, once again, Disc 2 of the President Reagan funeral. I was hoping to witness the twenty-one cannon salute that probably had never before been executed for any freely elected national leader anywhere in the world. What a admirable man Ronald Reagan was. I believe I was in the presence of possibly someone as great as George Washington. My generation believed the Soviet Union and its armies would last forever. I remember Palo Verde Grade School ending at noon and teachers and students practicing evacuating by forming columns and marching off to our nearby homes. This was in case a cornered Cuba launched a nuclear attack on the United States, we in Arizona had ninety minutes to prepare. In the 1980s, in a gray-market 745i turbo-charged BMW, it took me, including the time it took to change a flat in the parking lot of Teamster's Union Hall in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, twenty-six hours to get from Florida to Arizona and here a missile could go much farther in twenty-four and one-half hours less. Speaking of distances, I was thinking my Crazy Brother is fifty-eight years old and I only four years younger. The grave is rushing towards us all.
     www.doctormalamud.com Wednesday . . . Is it intelligence that gives a soul a presence? Remember, no questions are stupid, only the person posing them is. Or something like that. It's November 2005 and I'm seated outside at my Starbucks. Out in the weather with all the smokers, who I consider weak. Because there is no physical rush or buzz with cigarettes, why are they so hard to quit? So hard for so many people? It's a pure addiction without a purpose, other than to hasten death. Awful. Two of my kids are tobacco addicts. Sad. Now, I can understand being a closet drunk like their father is, but there are benefits - none that I can remember (my head is still throbbing from my three tequila lunch) - but benefits nonetheless. Like I've argued before, the only difference between being drunk while driving and driving with Prozac pumping in your veins, is the doctor's prescription held at the pharmacy; which is always just a few steps from the the liquor department. The drugs that manipulate the brain's serotonin uptake, as Prozac does, cause the individual to draw away from life, like a turtle withdrawing into his shell. While alcohol seems to bring the 'real person' out. And then again maybe not. They tore down the Garcia's Restaraunt and I'm enjoying a clear five hundred feet view sans any buildings or fences or artificially placed trees. I feel like I'm writing while sitting in the middle of an Iowa ethanol-field. I tried a who-knows-how-many-day free trial on a Christian internet match-making site. It was so damned hard (can I write 'damned'?) filling in the big, white, empty boxes with text, that I only got one stuffed with Arial font ripped from my heart, before I clicked the 'resume-later' button. I received a single response from a lady who appeared to be about twenty years younger than your Dr.Malamud. Her photo revealed that she would be a good bet to win any State Fair held hotdog eating contest. At Starbucks, one car backs out and immediately another vehicle replaces it. One that left wore a rear bumper that repeated the vinyl plea of "Peace Please" again, and again. Yes, "Peace Please". What a moron. The driver, a gorgeous blonde, born with my favorite, 'too-long' torso resulting in a pair of incredibly sexy, low slung hips, was shrink wrapped into her purposely stained, white spotted, and dyed denims (most likely costing more than a five hundred pound gravity bomb), confirms my previously unseen judgment. I'm outside and I'm chilled, but yet tomorrow is predicted to reach a high temperature of ten points above normal at 82F degrees. The ex-mrs.dr.malamud cell-phoned me the other day and left a voice-mail of such trivial concern, I wondered if she recalled that she was the one who instigated the divorce? An attractive young lady, looking soft in her gray cotton draw stringed pants, sees me look up at her as she approaches after stepping out from her Infiniti SUV. I know she expects me to again raise my head again, as she reaches to open the door to the cafe. I don't.
     www.doctormalamud.com Friday . . . Still no new employer. As a matter of fact, I was called into the corporate office, reprimanded for the tiniest of things and almost ended up resigning. Which is what I should do. What I must do sooner or later. Took Thanksgiving Dinner at my ex-in-laws home which was about forty miles from my office and tony Town of Paradise Valley apartment. They are good people who possess little ambition, but seem happy in their unbelievably bland routines. My only daughter, Aili was there, along with her husband, who I call Casper (but not to his face) because he is so pale and white. Like Casper the Friendly Ghost. She was telling me about how him and her had to move something heavy and I told her that Casper needed help with pulling his wallet out, and she laughed and laughed. As if to slap me in my face and remind me that He is still in control, God made sure that by the time I got to the feast, they were out of gravy. So I endured my third Thanksgiving Dinner without my wife (now the ex-Mrs.Dr.Malamud), without my youngest son, Mainio (who was at the mansion of the parents of one of his lifelong private school friend's) and worst of all <grin> without hot, brown, greasy, gravy spooned on top of the soft and dark turkey meat I love. My oldest son, who I 'married' along with his mother when he was seven (and who only after the divorce has begun calling me his "step-father") was at work, as was his cousin, who is also my favorite nephew. Things could be worse, three of my client's died in the last four months. And you're probably thinking that since I'm a doctor, I could have saved them. Nope, not that kind of a doctor. One cancer took, one Alzheimer's took and one a failed organ-transplant took. Two were quite a bit older than me, one was younger. That reminds me, I must make a donation to those unsung hero's who bravely care for the dying at Hospice of the Valley. Again. I'll miss seeing the jolly deathbed priest Father Bryan too. Death wouldn't be that bad for me. I was thinking about death the other day. I think about death a lot. And what I was thinking that it is so odd that so many people hang onto life, cling onto life, simply because they are convinced that this mortal existence is all there is. Ever. While I believe there is an afterlife, but I cannot preempt this life to visit it, because suicide might sentence me to an eternity in Hell, Abaddon, Gehenna, or my current employment. Speaking of torment, my two shots of tequila, one snifter Gran Marnier, iced tea, and tough steak lunch at the Elephant Bar Restaurant, continues to cause the back of my head to throb. Just can't resist imbibing of the fermented fluids when someone else is picking up the tab.
     www.doctormalamud.com
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