Nice People: What should I get the Brother-Unit TW for his birthday?

I've noticed it happen chez other bloggers, so why am I surprised? The slow and steady erosion of my distinctly tough outer shell due to the influence of...

nice people.

You know who you are.

Thank you for looking past my whines, thanks especially for laughing with me -- it's always appropriate. Sure, maybe there is a *smidgen* of laughing at me -- again, always appropriate, but I can sometimes hear the guffaws and snorts flying around rooms and cars, spacious mansions and cute efficiencies. (I have rented my share of cute efficiencies -- and "rooms" located in various odd relationships to the central housing [basements, "wings," garages])

I imagine them as angel farts. Gaseous Tinkerbells.

So, my little gaseous tinkerbells, my darling angel farts -- Will you do me a favor? (Ay caint heeeear ewe, gashush tenderloins!)

You will!

Wonderful, thanks a lot.

My brother-unit TW's birthday is April 20. We have an incredible story, I suppose, though the more people I come to know, the more I learn that "estrangement" is the common exception that proves a bunch o'rules -- like "absence makes the heart grow fonder" and "home is where the heart is." I would say "blood is thicker than water," but I don't want to malign TW.

Oh, that photo up there is one of TW's -- he works and plays and loves as a guide to Grand Canyon serious trekkers. In the colder months, and to make enough money to feed his cats, he labors as a bookie. This photo is from a blog post of his called A Parable of Immortality (Thomas Wolfe).

He was basically abandoned by my original nuclear family (yes, we were armed) -- as a young teenager, and at a time and place that was simultaneously wondrous, dangerous, and mythologizing. He spent some time following The Dead. He was shot in the gut by a deranged CIA operative. He ate out of garbage cans, was homeless. He is BRILLIANT and KIND and the only way he could have turned out that way is through the good gifts of being receptive and generous.

Through the years, we weren't allowed to speak of him. His name and my Mother's name were anathema and a person could be punished or their suitcases retrieved from the attic for speaking their names. He changed his to Tumbleweed. Oh, yeah, and I am pretty sure he's been very wasted from year to year, but then, haven't we all? I bear my Mother's name as my middle name, I guess because I was born on her birthday... but still -- after all these years -- under duress about these god-forsaken names, I say: My name is Retired mumblemumble Educator.

I love him a lot. I wish there were more to offer than the meager "Gee, I'm sorry we left you a continent or so away, alone -- oh, and hungry -- maybe in a little danger. Glad you survived, there, good buddy. Made a man of you, didn't it!"

I forgot probably more about him than I really knew. I had a rich fantasy life and both of my brother-units filled in as Superheroes. I didn't even know his mumblemumble name, just the first name, discarded. But I always remembered that he was born on Adolf Hitler's birthday, April 20.

Will you help me figure out a gift for him? I know you can't, really. But would you try? He's very well read, so I am afraid to get him books. We share a lot of the same musical taste, so there'd likely be a redundancy if I sent music. There was a sentimental item I hoped to send at some point, but I ran over it and cracked it with my wheelchair as I was chasing The Felines out of my office.

Our grandfather's pith helmet. It still smells like salt and loam.

TW has been clear that he's not interested in frilly reunionesque drama... me, neither. I have had two dreams -- the same dream, twice -- where I held something in my hand and was reaching out to give it to him -- so I know that somewhere in me, there is a real notion of "gift." There is something that I am supposed to give him.

Do you know what it might be?

Thanks, friends. (As for such matters as price range? Well, I used to be brilliantly rich, enormously laden with gold and lucre of all kind, but now am essentially destitute, dependent on the good Captain Haddock for food and shelter. So I am thinking $50-$75. Ar!)

I worried some of you by posting in so much pain and anger a few days ago. The pain is down a notch but it does appear that I am in a new phase (or whatever, as the kids say...) of disease with CRPS. No one really knows. There is always the worry of what the infections are doing. Also of what the infecting organism is! And *where* it is! Thursday morning, I am having another echo done to check my funky junky valves and see how my aortic aneurysm is doing -- I am too tired to get out of bed many days, have developed the disgusting habit of passing out now and then (more like going momentarily "black" -- a cold tunnel sort of thang) and my bloodwork sucks. That's suspicious, I guess, for my aortic insufficiency to perhaps have worsened. We'll see on Thursday. And, as confusedly related earlier today, the infection and the steroids have caused my blood sugar to rocket out of control. (At this very moment, I am in awe. IN AWE, I say! How can a person be simultaneously nauseated to the nth degree and starving? I have almost stopped eating the last 4-5 days... I suppose it's not all that inexplicable -- pain as I'd forgotten exists, blood sugars weirded out, fever, worry, fear, added-on pain meds. Oh, yeah, and all of that prednisone...)

This pain... sorry, I'll stop.

Is that what I *am* -- all of that krap jumbled together as a woe-is-me? Am I become "woe"?

Better than "woo," I suppose!

From the Skeptic's Dictionary:

Woo-woo (or just plain woo) refers to ideas considered irrational or based on
extremely flimsy evidence or that appeal to mysterious occult forces or powers.

Here's a dictionary definition of woo-woo:

adj. concerned with emotions, mysticism, or spiritualism; other than rational or scientific; mysterious; new agey. Also n., a person who has mystical or new age beliefs. When used by skeptics, woo-woo is a derogatory and dismissive term used to
refer to beliefs one considers nonsense or to a person who holds such beliefs.

Sometimes woo-woo is used by skeptics as a synonym for pseudoscience,
true-believer, or quackery. But mostly the term is used for its emotive content
and is an emotive synonym for such terms as nonsense, irrational, nutter, nut,
or crazy.

Most of the time, I align myself with The Skeptics. My nature, I guess. It's not a way of being that is all that wonderful, and I am trying to change. But, in the shift from Konstant Skeptick (say that, fast, twenty times) one must beware the allure of woo-woo.

Ahem. Excuse me while I whack the butt, oh-so-rhythmically, of Our Little Idiot, Dobby. He loves it -- and we will all be in jail should some representant of the SPCA drop by. (Yeah, but "dropping by" ain't all that easy, here at Marlinspike Hall, deep, deep in the Tête de Hergé. The roads are frequently out, and we have an impressive, and recently renovated, moat.)

I'm back. Where is my train of thought? Choo?
Oh, a b'day gift for Tumbleweed.

Once, when he returned home after a brief run-away, I didn't see him standing there looking down on a bunch of us kids organizing a baseball game. And when I did see him, it was clear that It Was A Moment In Time. Like it was yesterday and not 40 years ago, I see him. When I first saw the cover of Nashville Skyline, Elliott Landy's famous photograph, I gasped -- that's TW standing there -- a fuller face, less of a nose, more sensual lip -- but the same attitude, dress, guitar, expression. A traveler on the road, knowing something.



That's TW: a traveler on the road, A Song of Myself. A paean of all that could be.

Shit. I've made myself sad. Oh, what to get him? Maybe I will sleep tonight. Maybe I will dream dreams, and see what I have in my hand for my brother.