Mark W Tiedemann

Month: August 2012

Two Steps Forward….

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

Well, things slid backward this past Monday.  I had a low-grade fever all weekend and decided if it was still there Monday morning, call the doctor.  Events took charge and I ended up back at Barnes with a soft-tissue infection in half the appendectomy incision.  They did a CT scan to be sure that was all it was and lo!  I have an abscess.

So another day in the hospital having a drain installed, which is really annoying.  I’m home now and I have a nurse visiting everyday to make sure things track the way they’re supposed to.  There’s a twice-daily routine to go through which is unpleasant but I’m sticking to the program. …

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Plodding Along

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

For those who may be interested, recovery continues.  I know things are improving because my memory is fairly clear about how bad things were.  Last week, the week before.  But, as is the nature of the critter, we tend only to focus on the present and how crappy it may be.

But I am getting work done.  I’ve completed the first few prints I intend to exhibit in this year’s Archon art show.  Done the critiques of the short stories for the workshop I’m conducting then.  And just about finished two chapters in the current project.  (About those chapters, it is with wry amusement I note that I was about to doggedly go down the wrong path in one of them when this nonsense struck. …

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Gravity

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

Sometimes you just come to a sudden stop because the universe puts a wall—or a floor or a ceiling—in your way and you bang into it.  I am for the foreseeable future in recovery mode.

Let me explain.

Last Wednesday, August 8th, I finished up for the evening and started getting ready for bed.  I confess to preening.  I’ve been hitting the gym pretty hard and pretty regularly and things were beginning to show for all the effort, so I was checking out my torso in the mirror, noting a small bit of belly definition I have never had much of but is—was—beginning to show.…

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Where It Comes Down For Me

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

I grew up in a sexist culture.

No, really. I was born in 1954. I grew up in the stew of sexism and was made very aware of it because it was being challenged throughout my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. I came of age during the heyday of Male Privilege, when the default assumption was that men were the smart ones, the strong ones, the ones who shouldered all responsibility, and women basically came along for the ride because, well, we needed them for babies and cooking and occasional interludes of sex and, well, because they looked good. Strong, independent women were weird, unnatural, and intended to be conquered by a stronger man who, paradoxically, didn’t actually need them but decided, for some reason, to protect them because while they were getting along fine without him, that simply couldn’t last because women couldn’t sustain themselves and it was great that one was independent for as long as she was, but it was really a man’s duty to take care of her, so…

It sounds absurd when you break it down like that, but really, that’s what it was.…

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The Vital Gore Is Gone

Posted on By Mark Tiedemann

Gore Vidal has died.

Anyone with the merest scintilla of cultural or political awareness of the last 50 years should know who he was.  My first memory of him was from the 1968 election when he called William F. Buckley a crypto-nazi and Buckley, losing his cool, threatened to “sock you in your goddam face” on national television.  At the time (I was not yet 14 and only beginning to become aware of politics in any meaningful way), I thought Buckley was the cool one, but in retrospect Vidal never got ruffled, continued speaking clearly, and made his points.…

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