Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was seldom in hospital, until the last year or so of her life.  She rapidly formed a low opinion of the amenities available to the medical frequent flyer. The food, the gowns, the furniture – all completely devoid of style or comfort. She was therefore pleasantly surprised by the luxury of infusion clinics.

It’s not something most people ever think about. You don’t find out about them unless you find yourself with lots of invasive scans to accomplish. Or dialysis. Or chemotherapy.

But  someone somewhere decided that a patient who had to sit still while dangerous (and usually chilled) substances were run into their veins with a needle, might just deserve a little comfort. In all the infusion clinics Kage visited, that was scrupulously observed. There were deeply padded leather recliners; tons of pillows; soft, warmed blankets. Visual delights like windows with real views were common; live plants abounded, and of course aquaria.  Fish tanks show up everywhere very sick people go to and fro …

Anyway Kage liked her infusion clinic, even when she had to go in and out in a wheel chair. It was so very comfortable! She could doze while I knitted; then wake up and dictate to me in the privacy of our little room. She said it was like being a nun, safe in a cozy cell. With Coca Cola to hand.

Today I had one of my own turns in the infusion clinic – I was having some contrast scans, which require radio-opaque dye injected into one’s veins. Also oral contrast media poorly disguised as a smoothie, to illuminate one’s digestive tract. The oral contrast comes in 4 so-called flavours: apple, mocha, berries and banana.  It looks like white show polish, has the texture of mucilage, and its designers have managed an amazing thing – they’ve succeeded in making something that actually tastes worse with every mouthful. I picked the berry. It was … horrible. Pro tip, Dear Readers: Never pick the banana.

The clinic all around me was gorgeous. The infusion clinic’s main room is two stories high; clerestory windows let in the light and keep out the glare. In the middle of the room is a glass column, which houses the required aquarium, stocked with big fat gleaming carp. Flanking the aquarium are living gingko trees that reach almost to the ceiling. I wouldn’t have been surprised if there were an artificial thunderstorm and rain show, with singing tikis descending from the roof … the recliners were delightful, the pillows were soft, and I almost fell back asleep while a nice little phlebotomist with a charming London accent installed a temporary port in my arm. I expected the port to be presented on a silver salver. And I could have stayed there all day, perfectly happy.

But eventually someone came to take me off to the CT room, where there another very nice aquarium (of course).  This one was stocked with fish in all the colours of moonlight; pearly whites, soft greys, silvers and pewters. There were, alas, no recliners. They’ve  just got an ordinary waiting room, maybe to make you feel humble until you are ushered into the silent sanctum of the CT machine.

Kage  hated CT scans. She said it was like being shoved into a cigar tube. I don’t mind them, because they don’t hurt. All I really objected to was suddenly being ordered to top up on the damned oral contrast smoothie, which meant glugging a sudden extra cup of the nasty stuff. Nor was I given the luxury of a choice. It was the dreaded banana, and it was vile beyond belief or description.

Artificial banana flavour doesn’t actually improve anything under the sun – I’ve no idea why people make popsickles, Now ‘N Laters, ice cream, and other staples of life flavoured  with it. It tastes like death, with saccharin. It’s just plain gaggy. But I think I know why they slip it into that last-minute top off drink. It’s because no one in their right mind ever asks for it in the infusion clinic, and they need to get it off their shelves before it escapes and breeds …

While I was laying there and gagging, the tech threw a sheet over me and told me “Okay, unfasten your pants and slide them down to your knees.”  I beg your pardon? While laying on my back on a narrow gurney, wound up in a sheet? Hey, I’m 60 now! I haven’t done this kind of thing for 30 years! Luckily, it turns out that shinnying out of your pants is like riding a bicycle: apparently, you never forget how.

But there is a weird, Tantric subtext to a CT scan. Posture is very important, and breathing  properly … I had to keep one arm behind my head on the pillow, and the other – with the port – straight up in the air. While being slid in and out of the CT machine over and over, holding my breath or breathing at command. To make sure you get that right, there are little illuminated cartoon faces – one holding its breath, one gasping through a gaping mouth – on the white wall of the scanner, so you don’t forget. And every few seconds, there’s a pulse of radioactive dye squirting into your arm, which brings on a few instants of feeling incredibly hot and enormously heavy – you feel like a lump of neutronium, about to burn right through the gurney and all the floors beneath you.

But it ends. Then you get to do the reverse wriggle back into your pants (I could still do that, too, thank God) and then they are done with you. Kimberly got me out of the building without mishap – I was lost, as usual – and home before the heat of the day quite peaked. It’ll be days before I know what they saw. I am resolved not to fret over it.  I actually liked the infusion clinic, so I’ll surely never have to go back.

And in the meanwhile, I am safely home with real berries, and iced coffee, and ice cream, too. As Kage used to say, Good stuff, Maynard.

Kage Baker once commented that “becalmed” was a freakin’ stupid word for the condition it actually described. She knew what it really meant, of course.

To be “becalmed” is to be stranded at sea with no wind. A ship becalmed is a paralyzed ship, stuck without propulsive power – traditionally, in the Horse Latitudes, but it can happen nearly anywhere on the seas. Maybe not in the Roaring Forties, where the winds circle the globe with no land to ever slow them down; but even there in the domain of monster waves, there must be the occasional cessation of the power of the air … and it would be just as rotten a circumstance there as anywhere else, I bet.

If you’re becalmed, you’re in trouble. You are at the mercy of currents and passing rogue waves – you can still find the points of the compass, but you can’t made headway in any direction because you have no wind. A ship is as much use then as a cocoanut tree blown into the surf with a cargo of monkeys and parrots: nobody can steer, nothing can guide the course, and no one volunteered for this journey. With good luck, you’ll hit an island by accident and can try your hand at evolving into a new species.

However, to the non-maritime-minded, “becalmed” is a nice word. It evokes peace and quiet. It conjures safety after tumultuous danger; smooth water after shooting the rapids in a barrel. There you float among the lily pads and pearly foam, perhaps being towed to the shore by a water nymph or friendly forest animal …

Kage had tons of utter scorn for any scenario that called for friendly forest animals.

This is, of course, completely to the contrary of what being becalmed actually promises. The food runs out. The water does, too, and usually even sooner. (Don’t even ask about the rum …) The bilges begin to stink, being unrefreshed by the passage of the ship through new waters. You try to make way to livelier seas, by towing the ship with teams of sailors in rowboats; wonderfully thirsty work, with the water rations low. Slow, too. And usually in the sun.

So, really, you see – being becalmed is in no way good. It might be quiet, but it’s not cool.

Nor is there any remedy, except the wind rising. Sailors’ tales say you might raise a wind by whistling (or by not under any circumstances whistling); by scratching the mast; by tossing the local Jonah overboard. But of course all these only work if you have a sail to fill. In these modern days, you may have an engine – and no matter how big and loud it is, if it flakes out you can drift for months before you’re found.  Dead or alive …

What I am currently, Dear Readers, is becalmed. Metaphorically speaking. The heat, the humidity, the static in my heart: they’re all conspiring to deprive me of any motive power. Though I am scratching the mast for all I’m worth, all I’m getting are splinters under my fingernails. There’s no one else on my little cockleshell  vessel to brand as bad luck; I’d have to throw myself overboard. And I don’t whistle well.

I think my metaphor might be taking on water, too.

So I’ll bail a while, and then just lie here, hoarding the last of the rum and water, and hope the currents take me somewhere. Some place with a white crescent of beach, and water so clear you can read through it; with breadfruit trees and cocoanut palms and friendly parrots. Or maybe it’ll carry me past the sleeping Queen Mary in her wading pool down by San Pedro, into the backwater where the Catalina Ferries moor.

I could catch a bus back to reality from there.

Kage Baker, I am fairly sure, would be pissed off at me right now. I am not rising to the varied challenges of my life. I am not pulling myself up by my boot-straps – in fact, I’m not even putting on boots. I’m just wandering about listlessly barefoot, in my pajamas.

The heat has gotten to me badly, Dear Readers. Mind you, it’s much better these last couple of days; merely in the 80’s. But it was killing hot last week, and it’s supposed to be killing hot next week. And the humidity keeps rising, while never granting us the relief of a thunderstorm. Lots of dry lightning, sure – which is setting portions of the West Coast alight hither and yon – but no storm. I could survive a storm. I’m not so sure about this relentless damned damp heat.

Kage would tell me to adapt. Fight back! Adjust the environment! Wear few and light clothes, drink cold drinks, sit in the paths of fans! Take cool showers!

I’ve done all those things. They do help – at least, they keep me alive – but they don’t make me feel well enough to be productive. And the relentless heat keeps knocking me out. It’s worse than last year … Sleep has become my most frequent reaction to this weather, and I’ve spent most the last week as an unconscious lump. I dream of suffocation, and of wandering around strange buildings looking for bathrooms and my pills: then wake to discover I can’t catch my breath, I’m nauseated and dizzy and my chest hurts … and I have to go to the bathroom on top of everything else!

So I stagger into the bathroom, caroming off doors frames and walking like a drunken crab: and there I am greeted with the local croca-cat. Just two cold green eyes and accusatory radar-dish ears rising out of the basin, disapproving of all the noise, fuss and bother I bring. And she likes it even less when I wash my hands …

The heat is my enemy. Our house has A/C in the living room, and fans everywhere else; I can stay pretty cool and functional, as long as I never ever step outside when the temperature gets above 80 … but with every day of heat, the house loses a little ground. All the while, I am desperately seeking a new normal, some set of circumstances under which I can survive this heat – but the only thing that helps is just to huddle here between the A/C and the fans, glugging cold drinks and trying not to move too much.

It’s not the discomfort. Honestly, I’m not that much of a wimp. I’m a native Californio, I know how to survive heat. It’s that my heart is having tantrums. When it gets hot … I am perpetually short of breath. Arrhythmias blossom like fluttering pigeons in my chest. I’m dizzy. I’m nauseated. I’m exhausted. And every couple of hours, I absolutely must sleep, bad dreams and SOB and all.

The head of my order of the cardiac-impaired (he’s my go-to advice guy on handling this from the patient side: you wouldn’t believe what’s wrong with him!) tells me that if I get sleepy, I should sleep. No argument – the narcolepsies are on my side, in their weird, inconvenient way. Apparently it’s a way for the confused heart to reboot itself. And I don’t seem to be in any real danger, as long as I take my meds and rest.

The problem is that I don’t like resting 20 hours out of every 24. On the other hand … if I ignore the signals or something kicks up worse, Kimberly is perfectly willing to throw a net over me and drag me off to the ER. So in the interests of at least being bored and exhausted in my own home, I am behaving.

I’m just not accomplishing much. But I will. I am learning how. And it’s a little cooler. Kage might disapprove of my lethargy, but she did find out what it was to be unable to keep one’s eyes open … as long as I keep trying, her phantom scowl will retreat and let me sleep.

Anyway, Dear Readers, that’s how it is with me. I’m at home, hiding from my own heart. It sounds romantic as all get out, but it’s not.

Nonetheless: as John Carter said, I still live! And I shall persevere.

Kage Baker was one of the world’s leading proponents of birthday celebrations.

I don’t know who keeps track of these things – some sort of cosmic clerk somewhere must, I hope. If there is a top 10 list (and I devoutly hope there is) she must be on it.

It was not a matter of money spent – largely because for most of her life, Kage didn’t have enough money to stage extravaganzas. She would have liked to, as she felt firmly that excess was the heart of every celebration. In the absence of monetary ability, she just saw to it that every birthday she had a hand in was excessive in every other degree she could manage.

Birthdays began on the night before the calendrical date, with a lot of broadly signalled sneaking and hiding things.; they continued for at least three days on the other side. Errands with loud announcements and no explanations were the norm, along with much gloating. By sunset of the day before, presents came out for display. Not to be touched by the celebrant, you understand: no testing of the translucency of wrapping papers, or heft of boxes was allowed. All you could do was circle the goodies like a lioness outside a boma, moaning desperately.

She always had a surprise set for whatever hour the birthday celebrant woke, too. Some of them were freaking memorable. A paper bag full of cold plums, and tickets to the Catalina ferry boat that had to be redeemed within three hours – she swept me, Kimberly and Jenny off on that one.  My thirtieth birthday we spent in Pismo, before we dwelt there permanently: I woke up from the previous night’s excesses not even hungover yet, still drunk – to be greeted by Kage, fiendishly wide awake and  singing the special Faire Happy Birthday song (which is profane in cheerful extreme), holding a chocolate eclair with a mushroom shaped candle flaming in it. One of the weirder sights of my entire life, that.

My 50th birthday party was held at Faire rehearsals. No one person could have hidden the proceedings from me – we were deep in classes and auditions – but Kage was the one who kept me away from Ground Zero while our Guild put together a surprise picnic. It was amazing. Man, can actors eat! But it does take care of the leftovers.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I shall be 60, which is frankly impossible and surely the result of some time-slip somewhere. Kimberly has been sneaking around on clandestine errands all day (Kage’s habits did not evolve in a vacuum, you see) and is even now vanished somewhere with my stalwart nephew on yet more mysterious ends. Harry the parrot must be in on the plot, too, because he is singing insanely to me – entire reiterations of God Save the Queen in half a dozen different keys and voices. (My favourite is the deep gravelly Monster Voice.) And the Corgi doesn’t want me to go anywhere in the house; Dylan keeps herding me firmly back to  my desk.

I figure that I am now living officially in the future. I must be, since it is completely outside reason that I could be almost 60 years old; the signs are everywhere. I’ve been exchanging emails with a dear friend who is presently racing across Japan in a supersonic train – we’re communicating through some sort of taken-for-granted time dilation. We’re been doing laundry all day in a washing machine that has more computing power than the Apollo Moon Mission. I’ve got 5 pieces of platinum arranged decoratively around my heart. And I have published a book and am about to publish a story.

This is the future, all right. Not the one I expected, nor even one I wanted – but there is no doubt that life is running ahead for me. With creaky knees, short of breath and inclined to chug perilously on the uphill bits: but I am for damned sure going on.

I hope I’m not woken tomorrow morning by a flaming mushroom – you can only survive something like that in your youth – but whatever it is, I will be happy and thankful.

Now I’m going to do find out why Harry is meowing and crooning “Oh, my sweet baboo!” Maybe he’s recruiting the cats …

Kage Baker loved photographs from space.

She wasn’t a science fiction fan growing up – not like I was, passionately reading anything with rockets or aliens on the cover. Kage found the science fictional art puerile and misogynistic; worse, it was badly drawn. The classic naked girl in a transparent space suit, menaced by an anatomically vague but leering tentacled alien: Kage was filled with scorn.  She said half of the covers looked like globs of mucous full of glitter and machine parts … which, I must admit, is a fair cop.

Shiny penile rockets were aerodynamically absurd for repeated take-offs and landings. Robots were clumsy rip-offs of Robbie from Forbidden Planet. Kage liked Robbie, thought he had a cute design: once. As an archetype for robots in general, he was no more logical than George Pal’s Screwball Army. Architecture looked like dried linguine thrown against the wall. And why were so many of the stalwart space explorers naked in their space suits?

When fantasy hit the paperback market and began to compete with science fiction, the art got – in Kage’s opinion – even worse. Now naked girls in cellophane could be found clinging to bronzed adventurers’ thighs while the hero waved a goofy ray gun instead of a sword. In the most shameless cases, even a guy in a NASA-correct space suit might find himself brandishing some unholy hybrid of a sabre and a cutlass. Mind you, I don’t think most readers looked at the art (or at least no closer than registering the naked chicks) but Kage said that was irresponsible readership: they should have cared. The art should have been realistic.

There should at least have been less mucous.

Nothing really rang any bells for Kage until photographs began coming back – of other planets, of distant galaxies, of unusual stars.  She fell in love with the actual faces of the Moon, of Mars, of Titan; the close-ups of the flying gems of Saturn’s rings; the discovery of Jupiter’s rings at all! There were real places out there, and suddenly it was possible to see them. Dawn on Mars. The tidal zone of a beach on Titan, unmistakeable in shape though the slow fat waves were liquid hydrocarbons and the gleaming beach rocks were solid oxygen.  Hurricanes on Saturn, big enough to hurl the entire Earth to Oz, let alone the dooryard of a farm in Kansas. Dustdevils whirling over red dunes below the rim wall of Olympus Mons.

That’s what thrilled Kage. That’s what finally led her to write about Mars – avid tourist that she was, she fell in love with the light on that landscape of a thousand shades of red. She never got a chance to explore the surface with Google Mars. She read the rumours of it and longed to explore, but a country even farther away won the bid for her attention …

Photos of nebulae from the Hubble Telescope were like chests full of pirate booty to Kage. Especially the weird ones: the Horsehead Nebula – it rises out of dust clouds off Orion’s belt,  a single misplaced chess knight. The Pillars of Creation, enormous stellar nurseries in the Eagle Nebula, full of infant protostars glowing like pearls wrapped in pink silk. The Cat’s Eye – more demented cat than coloured marble. The Ant Nebula, a cosmic bug made of blown glass. The Helix Nebula, that looks like the Eye of Sauron.

Kage’s favourite was the Sombrero Galaxy. It looks like the Diskworld, with the elephants Photoshopped out for the religious tourist trade.

And what utterly enchanted Kage was that all these wonders were real. So were the pictures of them; not the dreaded artist’s conception of the Sunday supplements, but honest to God photos taken by the most finely crafted cameras ever made. The fact that the cameras themselves were works of art pleased her as well – that they took their photos by strange lights, in exotic colours, on plates of precious metals and esoteric glass. Kage loved the Hubble Telescope.

This afternoon was taken up with a frantic house cleaning – we had to make sure the Sears deliverymen could get in with the magnificent new, ruby-red washing machine I ordered two days ago. The old one finally croaked it, and I was able to get the mate to the beautiful red dryer I got a couple of years ago. Oh, the wonder of them! The gorgeous colour, the gleaming lights, the silent motors! I am in ecstacy.

And in one of the moments of catching my breath, I came across a news item of a new stellar oddity found by the telescope at Kitts Peak Observatory: The Flaming Skull.

The Flaming Skull! Who could resist something  like that? Just take a look at the thing:

It’s a little blurry, a tad sketchy: but even so, you can almost see the Skull vibrating from a good thwack from Captain America’s shield. Or imagine it as the celestially preserved head of some Celtic shaman, for whom the power of visions was  called  a fire in the head …

Kage certainly had a fire in the head. And this one would have made her grimace and giggle; and then maybe get that distant look in her eyes that meant a story was trying to be heard. And really, why is there a skull with its hair on fire out there in the Serpent’s Tail?

It’s got nothing to do with Nicholas Cage, that’s for damn sure. Kage Baker would have known that in a single glance.

Kage Baker was never one for napping. Momma had lots of weary stories about that … for her part, Kage had lots of stories about the excruciating boredom of lying awake in cribs and youth beds, staring at the ceiling. She claimed to remember the particularly bland pastel pink and blue seals with balls that adorned her crib bumpers: Kage complained about those damned seals for her entire life. Momma certainly believed her, and would roll her blue eyes in despairing memory. But once Kage was ambulatory, she’d just get up and be about her own business with remarkably little fuss – unless you were counting on her to be asleep all afternoon.

I believed Kage. I didn’t nap, either, not once I could walk and talk and sneak around. My usual MO was just to get up and play on the floor quietly when I was supposed to be asleep; but I went wandering frequently enough to appall parents and guardians. I remember letting Kimberly out of her crib when she was about 10 months old. It was a tremendously exciting stunt, because while I had figured out how the catches worked at the sides of the crib, I wasn’t strong enough to hold it up, so there was an amazing crash.

Kage was much quieter than I, and got away with without detection much more often. Of course, she also slept more at night – and when she couldn’t sleep, nonetheless stayed quietly in bed, watching the late night shows on the telly (the electronic nanny in the bedroom, always) melt slowly into the Star-Spangled Banner and the iconic test patterns. She’d occasionally holler for room service: chocolate milk. It never failed to put her to sleep, and in fact still worked 50-odd years later when she was fighting exhaustion and cancer together …

Me, I just didn’t sleep much at any time, not for the first 56 years of my life. Nor did I mind – I could recharge on one night’s sleep in 3 or 4, and my batteries ran for days. Oh, the splendid days (and nights) of youth! I didn’t appreciate the fact that I was practically a 24/7 business, or how much time being asleep was eventually going to waste!

As I sit here writing, I have been asleep for about 20 of the last 24 hours. Yestreday was just as bad – slept most of the day, got up and did a few life-sustaining chores; then slept most of the night. This is my new reaction to extreme heat, evidently: estivation. How primally mammalian of me.  And how freaking annoying. I’ll be up until 2 AM again, I have no doubt – watching late night science and nature shows with my physicist brother-in-law. He surfs the Net while doing so; I read on my Kindle. And we listen to Morgan Freeman or some NASA engineer discuss quantum mechanics and planetary dynamics; or watch some weirdly fascinating reality adventure like River Monsters.

Kage rarely joined me in the white nights of our adulthood – she slept through the nights by then. It was only in the last year of her life that her own sleep patterns got wonky – then she began sleeping every 3 or 4 hours round the clock, un-responsive to the patterns of the sun and stars. When she was asleep, I read. When she was awake, I read to her and we watched TV.

In her case it was old movies, silents  if we could find them. No nature shows, because Kage couldn’t stand the violence – “They always feed some poor capybara to the piranhas”,  she objected. Old cartoons. New cartoons. Botany and gardening shows – what she gleefully called “plant porn”, pretending to swoon at graphic slow motion pollination clips … and The Wrong Box, over and over and over. Kage regarded cable TV as a gift straight from God, to ease her passage from the world. I can’t disagree, either.

But first and always when she woke up: she would dictate stories to me. Bits and pieces, plot lines; revisions to the works then in progress and wild new ideas that had come to her in her sleeps. That’s most of the lode I am mining now: Kage’s dreams in her last year, sleepily, urgently recounted to me while I coaxed her to drink a chocolate egg cream and checked the TV schedule for 1940’s cartoons.

And they’re what I think of when I wake up now, rising groggily from my heat-inspired naps: those stories. It’s like she’s still awake, even while the soft oppressive heat mashes me into a sweaty paste on my bed. Or maybe just dreaming a lot more loudly than I do, in the daytime hours that were always her proper time. I may be snoring in a tropical depression (ha ha ha) but Kage is awake and whispering in my ear.

That seems pretty likely to me.

Kage Baker was much, much fonder of heat than I am. Even when the summer heat waves overtook us, she was happy in the sweltering heat. A change to summer clothing, a fan on her neck, sufficient cold Coke and ice cream – these small things kept her happy and functioning.

In my youth, I could function in the heat even if I didn’t like it. At Renaissance Faires, I could bound about in two or three layers of linen and wool and do just fine – I lived on iced tea and all was well even when the temperatures went over 100 degrees.

Not anymore. Los Angeles is just today settling into its first serious heat wave of the summer, and I might as well be a fried bug on a windshield. Heat and I are no longer friends (not that we ever were, much) and in fact I think the temperature is trying to kill me.

This morning the temperature began rising like a rocket as soon as the sun was over the horizon; it was reaching for the 80’s here by 10 AM. That was when Dylan the Corgi decided he simply had to take a walk. Kimberly was about to make a quick trip to the market, and Dylan shot out the front door like a furry watermelon seed and headed for the border. Poor Kim went after him, shrieking for help; I leaped out of bed and promptly tripped over the little black cat.

In the few minutes it took me to find my glasses, find my keys, and throw something opaque over my nightgown, Kimberly and Dylan were out of sight down the block. Luckily, he decided to stick to his usual walk route: round the school at the end of the block, staying on the sidewalks because cars scare him … I caught up to them pretty quickly, with Dylan chugging along like a  little tank and Kimberly slogging grimly after him, almost catching him every time he slowed down to sniff something.

A couple of pit maneuvers in drive ways slowed and turned the adventurer enough for Kimberly to get her arms around him, and lug him to the car. He went happily enough, and actually seemed quite pleased to see her, giving the impression he’d been unaware she was behind him all that while. And now he got a ride in the car! He was a terribly happy Corgi.Corgis have charming grins, which was a great stroke of luck for Dylan today …

How can you yell at a happy dog, or a small child who has no idea they’ve just frightened you half to death? Dylan didn’t understand the vision of a flattened Corgi in the street that had Kimberly crying into his ruff. The 3-year old you find confidently on her way to the beach after a frantic search cannot imagine the awful things that sent you screaming in her wake. There’s a point where yelling at the little things in your life is just pointless, though you may be never so tempted to rain wrath down upon some grinning wee entity.

When I got us all home, Michael was standing on the porch about to call the cops. He’d wandered out from his bedroom to find the door standing open, neither Mother nor Aunt in sight, Kimberly’s purse dropped on the porch … I think he thought we’d been abducted. Though I can’t imagine who’d abduct two irascible old ladies and a self-righteous Corgi.

After this start to the day, things were pretty well scrambled. Dylan is still happy and pleased with himself, loping about begging for belly rubs; he’s still eying the front door, too, so whatever possessed him this morning is still ascendent in his little wolfish brain. When sternly warned away from it, he strolls off nonchalantly, pretending to have no idea what we’re talking about. But he knows.

I collapsed and slept for 6 hours. Which is insane. I will evidently be awake all night, but at least it will be cooler then, so … I can reverse my Circadian rhythms for a few days. In fact, it appears I have no choice; my heart, too, is apparently contemplating some knavery, and pretending it’s not. And there has been quite enough bolting out the front door for awhile, thank you very much.

Heat advisories and power outages are in place all over Los Angeles. It is very definitely summer now, serious summer where the main goal of the day is to survive until the sun sets. Time to glug ice water and put my swelling feet up, and see how the new meds work against the Season of the Sun.

And keep an eye on the Corgi.

Kage Baker loved summer. It was her time, her own season. She was born on its threshold, just as the signature sea clouds that mute May and June finally burn away (those years that they do): just when the first stone-fruit – plums, apricots, nectarines – came ripe on the trees all over Momma’s yard.

She was born when the moon is so bright and soft that the night sky is still blue: a dark blue, a dreaming sea blue, but not black, and thick with the soft summer stars. When we were little, the glare of the city was still subdued enough up in the Hollywood Hills that we could see the Milky Way over the dark garden. When we grew up, she and I, we spent a lot of our summers in oak groves, on wild-oat-seeded hillsides, on the white beach where the stars rotated down into the waters all night. Those soft summer stars were her favourites.

Things have been weird with me since Kage’s birthday, though the summer has certainly come on strong all over. It’s why I have been so quiet. It’s been like a long, silent explosion of rose petals and burning mist, spreading in the world like coloured glass melting into clear … just been hard to get through the days without Kage. The dreaded narcolepsies have been with me. Extreme  luck is still following me around, too, good and bad. The writing is going well. My health is just going.

It’s time, evidently, to have my heart tuned up again. Several annoying symptoms have gotten worse – just precisely when I don’t want them, too. I’ve got things I’d much rather do that sit still and concentrate on breathing! Hence my introduction to the squeaky-new Cardiac Center at Cedars-Sinai. Back to the enormous echoing temple halls we went.

I went to have an echo-cardiogram. Depending on what it shows, I may go on to an angiogram; and hence on to some interesting form of subtle engine implanted to discourage my heart from improvisational beats.

I quite dislike echo-cardiograms: I have sensitive ribs (I’ve broken a few over the years, and worn corsets for 4 decades.) a deep chest, and big tits. All this requires a lot of pressure for the magic sonogram wand to see through the muddy crystal of my flesh into the secrets of my heart … and it hurts. For a non-invasive test, it’s amazingly uncomfortable.  And I had a cranky technician: one who muttered darkly at the difficulties I posed, sighed heavily when she or I had to wrootch around, and glared at me when I winced. Luckily, I really don’t give a flying moon monkey if it’s difficult for the tech – they are never the ones who have to lie there and get a large sonic screw driver pushed between their short ribs.  I got through without wriggling, swearing or batting the tech in the nose like an irritated cat. So all was cool.

And Kimberly had kindly come along to drive me home, which was quite a relief; we made it home before the heat really began to rise. But it is rising; it’s 8:16 PM and still 76 degrees here. It’s supposed to get hotter each day for the next week, and end up smoking under triple-digit temperatures for several days. We’ll draw the drapes and turn on the AC and do all the washing after dark; lay in salads and interesting ice cream, and hide for a few days.

Kage would love that. She always rather liked it when the heat grew ferocious: she hated to sweat, but once she’d changed to her white silk pajamas, and aimed the big palm-leaf standing fan at the back of her neck – once she had her braid held up on her nape with a complicated scaffolding of hair sticks and butterfly pins – then she could relax with Butterfinger Ice Cream Bars and icy Coke, and play Monkey Island until the sun set  and the house cooled down to the mid-70’s.

I’m following my own mojo – which revolves round iced coffee and Stephen King novels – and has the same basic effect. By the time the night is deep and the stars are bright overhead, it’ll finally be cool enough to write. Which is the whole point of this exercise anyway.

Time to mope less and talk more. Sorry for the long sulk, Dear Readers. But I have new pills and mint ice cream now, and things are looking up. And it is still beautiful summer, after all.

Kag Baker saw the inside of a lot of hospitals during her last year.

Being the sort of person who catalogs things compulsively, she livened some of the time  by comparing the various medical facilities, one to the other. Food, colours of bed linens, designs on gowns and scrubs, gift shops, cafeterias. Decor – which can vary wildly in older hospitals, depending on how much area the latest donor re-decorated … she talked about writing a gourmet guide to California health care facilities.

Pismo Beach was too small to have a hospital of its own (though we had three fire stations). The tiny hospital in Arroyo Grande was where Kage spent a lot of her time that final year; it was rather eccentric, and very comfortable. At some point, fund-raising had evidently auctioned off decorating rights to individual rooms, and so no two of them were precisely the same. There was a room done all in grape motifs and prints of vineyards; another whose emphasis was hot air balloons. There was one done in tiger and leopard and bamboo patterns. The Marian Medical Center in SLO was heavily into fruit – photos, wallpapers, stencils. For reasons upon which we speculated wildly, the nurses station was walled in: no sight lines, which made it easier to break Kage out of the place when I needed to. The hospital in San Francisco was sort of health care Ikea: blonde wood and steel and straight lines. It sold plush stuffed bacteria and viruses in the gift shop.

While somewhere someone must have designed some attractive patients’ gowns, no one in California stocks them: they all had designs in pastels that just looked old and faded, and resembled the patterns on the ugly ties worn by elderly uncles. I’ve now gotten several new hospitals checked off myself, and while everything else changes: those damned paisley and diamond gowns are everywhere.

As I’ve mentioned before, Cedars Sinai has become my favourite medical center; they get all my business these last 3 years. The outstanding decor ikon of Cedars is the aquarium: there are fish tanks everywhere. I’ve been in and out of both the North and South Towers, and I’ve been waiting with bated breath to see what was going to show up in the new Cardiac Care and Neurology Buildings. Yestreday, I got my first look as I became a new cardiac patient. My oncologist/gynecologist can work miracles, but not with the stuff in the upper half of me.

The main lobby on the ground floor closely resembles one of those odd rooms in the Great Pyramid – huge, empty and echoing, and no one is quite sure what they are for. There’s an info booth on one edge, manned by a monastically still and silent guard; a forest of pillars, acres of polished stone tiles; you approach the elevators as if advancing on the High Altar. No seating, no people, no notice boards: just a huge echoing high-ceilinged space. There were at least three sets of elevators, too, all leading to different portions of the upper reaches. When we managed to find the Cardiac Center, it looked down into the huge airwell we’d traversed to get there.

But there is no straight line connecting them. Unless one abseils from the 3rd floor clinic offices, I suppose.

The new facilities are, obviously, open but not quite finished.  The air conditioning is turned up much too high, and no one can find the thermostats. The furniture is all  intimidatingly new. The exam tables are totally mechanized, which turns them into real E-ticket rides when the attending nurse confuses the UP button with the automatic scale controls.The Receptionist was entering everyone in manually, apologetically promising to get them all properly entered into the system as soon as her computer came up ….

The staff really was almost as lost as the patients. No one is quite sure how the new computer system works, so there tend to be worried little knots of back office techs at the computer stations, trying to solve the mysteries of the new paperless diagnostic posting system by assembling into a hive mind. The doctors wander through solo, occasionally breaking something or freezing a screen, evidently acting as catalysts in the cytoplasmic confusion.

You leave a bored writer sitting in enough waiting rooms and exam rooms, and some pretty strange metaphors start popping up.

What most struck Kimberly and I about the new clinic, though, was that it had no aquaria. The entire huge building appears to be a fish-free zone; unlike the rest of Cedars Sinai, where enormous glass aquaria seem to form load-bearing walls.  That’s how we knew it couldn’t actually be done yet. At least, not the decorating. Because there were NO fish at all.

Doubtless they will come later. I’ll have plenty of opportunity to find out, as I shall be returning often while they try to make my heart behave. It may take a while, but there’s plenty of time – especially since the computer system controls all the notes and records, and is evidently going through a HAL phase. I watched in great interest (from my merry go round examination chair) as all my doctor’s attempts to order me new prescriptions were FAXed into an unknown dimension.

The nurses finally had to telephone them in this morning. Trying to FAX from the computer terminals evidently cancels the FAXes as the last step in the process.

Still, everyone was very nice and did seem to know what they were doing, medically at least. The environment was giving them altogether too many challenges, but they were hanging in there. A fascinating bevy of tests has been successfully focused me, and will begin next Tuesday.

It’ll all be better when they get an aquarium or two in there. I’m sure of it.

Kage Baker loathed endings. She avoided them whenever possible.

She liked long, long movies. And she liked to watch a film several times in close sequence. The invention of DVDs was made for someone like Kage, who could happily watch a favourite film over and over and over. When entire television series became available on disk, she went nuts with delight – finally, she could sink into a series and float along for its entire length. She loved the REPEAT functions on record players, tape players, cassette players, CD players … put an album on, whatever was her favoured one that moment, and set the play function to Forever.

She came by the habit honestly. Momma used to do the same thing, even back when the only available medium was brittle varnish records made for needle-and-groove playback at 78 RPM. She was once kicked out of her apartment – which was, oddly, in the same Hollywood Hills neighborhood Kage and I lived in for 20-odd years – for playing the 1812 Overture (with a chorus of real cannon!) over and over. And again. And then once more.

Kage thought Momma’s broadcasting antics were completely logical. It was only my insistence on turning the sound down that prevented the same thing from happening to us once in a while. Though a patient downstairs neighbor – nice Irish gentleman – once did ask if we could please not play Rule, Brittannia quite so much: it was not his fave rave tune, and our recording was really weird … when I explained it was not a recording but a parrot, he just sighed and asked if we could try teaching him A Nation Once Again, or something.

Her first writing attempts were fanfic – though the term did not yet exist, and what she wanted was more Melendy books, Edward Eager stories, or a longer ending to The Jungle Book. And a single issue of Martian Manhunter with which she was inexplicably enamoured. She wanted more of the stories she liked – Momma, who was a good reader but needed time to paint, told Kage she’d have to write them herself if she wanted them so badly.

So that’s what Kage did.

I think Kage’s determined opposition to entropy was something formed at a cellular level. She hated to have things end; she didn’t believe that the Arrow of Time runs in only one direction – that, she maintained, was an artifact of our eyes-forward sensory input.  Of course, her eyes didn’t do that – face forward, that is; and she claimed it let her see how the ripples and whirlpools and fish ladders and otter slides and abandoned boogie boards and lost rubber horsie-floats actually moved in the matrix of Time.

This, after all, was a woman whose effort to write a trilogy turned into 8 novels.

She put people and things she loved in those books, too; what she loved best, she made immortal. Kage felt better if she could write happier endings for what and who she loved: she was aware the solutions were just fiction – after all, it was fiction she wrote – but she said it was a loss coping mechanism. A lot of writers insert cameos into their book; and, as Kage righteously pointed out, hers were a lot friendlier than Dante Alighieri’s  consigning all the people he didn’t like to Hell.

This has all come into my mind because I’ve had an uncomfortable and tiring week. I keep falling asleep – a wise friend has informed me that naps are how a wonky heart strives to reset itself; so I should be glad it’s the narcolepsies rather than  that hollow just-missed-a-beat sensation in my chest. And tomorrow I shall go whine at my cardiologist, so he can fine tune my meds again.

Also, I’ve been reading a book about the warming, de-oxygenating and acidification of the oceans. I’m not sure why I’m reading it, but … It’s a corker of a book, about all the horrible things happening under the surface of the sea. Many of them are amazing. One of them is the conversion of fishery after fishery to barren  ghostlands populated only by enormous and steadily increasing shoals of jellyfish. Which are of no commercial use, in case you didn’t know, and are also – despite their gauzy appearance – ruthless and effective predators. If you want some really scary reading, take a look at Sting by Lisa Ann Gershwin.

And the Western Black Rhino has been declared officially extinct. It’s old news, apparently originally released in 2011, but I only found out today. Doesn’t make them any less dead, of course.

Somewhere out in the emptiness of the Wazo National Park, though, Nefer is standing by a boma watching this spring’s calves frolic around their mothers. Rhinos don’t really frolic for shit, and even the babies are astoundingly ugly – but Nefer loves hoof-stock. So she’s the best guardian for them.

And Kage was right. Again. It does make one feel a tiny, tiny bit better.