Well, I finally had the housing inspection last Friday to determine whether Mom will be allowed to come home. Looking good. I did all the things the in-home care agency PACE CNY needed to facilitate this. As long as we have all the paperwork completed to enter her into their system by September 20, she should be allowed to go home on September 30 to start in-home care on October 1. I’ve scheduled an appointment to meet with the woman at PACE on September 9 to help facilitate the discharge. Having cleared out most of the problematic areas in the house once she could no longer fight me on the hoarding and with support from the in-home care agency, I should do a better job of taking care of her than I was doing in 2023-2024 in the years when they weren’t in operation. They would be putting a hospital bed in the front room so she can go in and out through the front door and down the ramp, which was just installed. They have little buses that I’ve seen running around for years that can take her to doctor’s appointments or their main offices if they need to wash her there or something. They are allowed to visit and/or pick up Mom up to 20 times a month, so hopefully, this should be better than 2024 was.
And in theory, I would be allowed to make some money taking care of her through New York’s FreedomCare as well. I investigated that a few years ago right after I lost my job transcribing calls for the deaf and hard of hearing in 2022 because they kept sending postcards hawking their services, but then I learned about how the money from this or any in-home care services obtained via Medicaid would becoming . Nobody ever told any of us about Medicaid estate recovery or Medicaid trusts. That all passed in the ‘90s and I would’ve been too young to even know about it or understand the ramifications of it, and I am sure that when all that passed, it got hardly any mentions in the mainstream media either. I had never heard of any of that until it was too late, so I decided not to try to get paid as a caregiver to protect the equity of the house. Now that it is almost lost for sure after she got forced into Van Duyn against her will for a year and a half (which was also something I didn’t even know Adult Protective Services could do, even if she’d already been warned about the hoarding) I possibly have a different view on this. Admittedly, it seems complicated determining what counts as care worthy of being paid and what doesn’t and it also seems difficult properly quantifying how much time any of these sorts of tasks took, so I might not even bother.
There will still be some issues with her coming home. I did not do a great job feeding her in 2023 and 2024. I did feed her most of the time as she increasingly did not have strength to make her own meals, but I typically waited for her to tell me she was hungry to feed her and wasn’t proactive enough. I didn’t have a specific feeding schedule and I probably should have. Often during the times when I asked if she was hungry, she would say no, or when I asked her what she wanted to eat, she couldn’t even tell me. So, for a while she was eating almost exclusively toast and cheese because those are the only things she said she wanted, or maybe the only things she thought I could make (I can make a bit more than that, c’mon). She used to eat a lot of TV dinners but at a certain point could no longer stomach the taste. I will need to be more proactive with feeding her for sure, and I will likely be enrolling her in Meals on Wheels again. She thinks she might have the strength to cook her own meals, but based on what I saw two or three years ago, I don’t think that will be happening. But I also don’t think I will do as well as the cooks at even a subpar nursing home like Van Duyn.
She also poops her pants a lot and while I’ve changed her before and am willing to do so again, I don’t know how good a job I can do of cleaning her. I’m willing to do it, but I obviously don’t think I would do it as well as trained nurses can. I also think I’m going to have a problem having the house properly lit. My mom was heavily reliant on incandescent light bulbs and I didn’t think to stockpile a bunch once they were outlawed. I still have some in various lamps across the house that I occasionally raid to use for other lamps, but they’re all going to run out at some point and she said she could never see out of any of the replacement light bulbs as well, so I foresee this being a problem. Part of the problem is that she does have cataracts. I had already suspected this and an eye doctor confirmed this while I was visiting. She had said she didn’t want to have cataract surgery for fear of losing her eyesight entirely, but now she seems to have changed her mind. I’ve asked the fourth-floor head nurse to schedule surgery for her although my guess is it won’t happen until after she’s come back.
Then there are potentially two other big issues. After I was offered the current job I have now in 2022 right after losing my previous one, she told me not to take it and I complied, even though it wrecked me financially. At the time, I had qualms, but now I seem to have sold out all my principles in taking it this year. I haven’t told her I decided to take the job that she didn’t want me to take four years ago yet, and I’ve been trying to avoid this conflict but if she comes home and I am working from home, it might be unavoidable. Working for a military contractor isn’t what I want to do either (and her problem with it was not that so much as that she found my boss and high school best friend creepy) but I kind of feel like at this point, I need to. If I’m already about to lose the house after her death largely due to her hoarding (although I certainly don’t take zero responsibility here), I have to look out for myself at least sometimes so I can hopefully pay off my credit cards in default and get my credit back up so by the time I need to rent again, someone will be willing to rent to me, which looks dicey now considering how long I was in default. I still don’t feel good about any of this. I don’t even know if my mom will remember our previous fights about this since she seemed to lose a lot of her recent memories due to her stroke. She forgot buying the house, her brother’s death, and seemingly most things from the last 40 years. She’s regained some memories, but almost half the time, she still forgets I’m her son and thinks I’m her brother, so there’s a good chance she’s forgotten all these fights as well. I think her cognitive decline is more stroke-related than dementia-related, but there are probably elements of both.
Finally, as I revealed in the “Manchild in Exile” post I published and subsequently unpublished a year and a half ago, we had a long string of political fights where she would say all sorts of vehemently racist garbage while listening to NPR, which was for a while almost the only thing she was doing when she couldn’t see to read, watch television, or use the computer anymore. She does not remember this period when I heard her say the N-word literally thousands of times (while also simultaneously sharing unhinged fantasies about all the violent things she wants to do to Trump), and I don’t want to remind her. I think she’s gotten better now since then after she got weaned off that addiction in the nursing home, but I don’t want to risk it and I’m going to keep her away from the news as much as I can. I don’t want her to come home and then end up fighting with her about Israel/Palestine again.
I still want her at home more for her than for me. She had told me numerous times going back to the ‘90s when her cognition was quite stout that she’d rather be dead than in a nursing home. I took that very seriously and I’ve been fighting for her in a way that I guess a lot of kids wouldn’t. Both the woman at PACE CNY and the nurses at Van Duyn have been impressed by my dogged determination to bring her home, even if many people would say it isn’t in my self-interest, especially at this point after the house is already lost. (Well, I did always see myself as a family values guy and I have to put my money where my mouth is, but it’s not like I don’t want to also, even as insufferable as she was behaving the last couple years she was home.) But I really want this for her and I do think I can balance caregiving, my job, and my Substack, as long as I don’t have to waste time fighting with her about her unhinged political statements. I definitely need to learn to be gentler about that stuff. Even some of the black nurses there seemed to be less offended when she said the N-word (much more rarely than at home) than I was. They just feel it’s the dementia talking and that I need to learn how to be more patient and gentle. I think I’ve been better this year in that regard than I was last year.
One thing I likely will have to cut out is most of my social engagements outside of the house. I’ve been going to mass every week, seeing my counselor every other week, going to bar trivia nearly every week, and frequently going to the men’s group and neurodivergent support group at Unique Peerspectives. Honestly, if I have to stay home almost all the time, I’m not going to be too bothered by that. I’ve been desperately lonely for real world connection for a very long time and obviously all these things indicate that I’ve been trying (and most of these were things Mom wouldn’t have let me do her last couple years at home because she was paranoid something would happen to me wheneve I left the house), but in all these endeavors, I wouldn’t say I made a single close friend at all, which was my main goal. I’ve appreciated all these things, but I still don’t feel there’s any friend locally I could call for support, and it seems unlikely I’m going to make any through any of these means at this point. I won’t be super devastated to have to drop most of these things (counseling is definitely what I’d drop last). But I still need somebody to talk to locally. Maybe having the PACE CNY people coming and going into the house will be enough. It could be.
Speaking of the bar trivia, our team did win at Heritage Hill Park as I expected. It was inevitable I guess since we were the only team to show up every week and we won five of the eight weeks. However, my teammate Bill was the only other person who showed up every week, even if we occasionally had other people shuffle in and out. Even though we qualified to compete in the downtown Syracuse trivia tournament against the winners from all the other bars at the Marriott Syracuse Downtown on September 13, Bill will not be able to make it because he has committed to going to a Buffalo Bills game that day. Our team is called “Bartenders Always Right” and it’s called that because the bartenders do occasionally feed us answers, but obviously there’s a strong chance that both bartenders might have to work. We had various other people joining us but who knows who’s going to show up. It looks like it might be just me. So, I had to think long and hard about whether I wanted to pay the $170 entry fee to compete. I decided that I did. It might be one of my last big social engagements before Mom comes home. Now, I’ve looked up all the other players’ scores in other bars and they were outscoring us massively. We had fewer cumulative points across the tournament than any of the other winning teams, which makes sense. Heritage Hill had the worst competition for sure. We were the only team to show up every week, and I suspect most of these top teams at the other bars have a consistent squad of eight players showing up every single week while we often had as few as two or three. So, do I have a prayer of winning? No. But I still think I need to do this to give me closure on this aspect of my life before Mom comes home. And Bill was giving me all but $5 every time we won (first prize is $25 and second prize is $15 each week), so with five wins and one second, he gave me $110 and it isn’t that much of a loss even when I don’t cash. Although it’ll probably be way more than $60 if I need to catch a cab to get there…
Well, the Internet got so much less usable last week after Elon Musk decided to send all the alternative Twitter readers like Xcancel (which I had been using) a cease and desist letter. I don’t think I ever want to be on there again or Bluesky either. My combination of economically leftist and socially right-leaning centrist views not to mention my vehement opposition to edgy, comedic irony-posting makes me a poor fit for either of those platforms. I did try to log into my racermetrics Twitter account again - to try to archive and/or purge it again - and I got locked out again, so at a certain point I once again decided not to bother. Furthermore, and more devastatingly, the Internet Archive has been down all week and it feels like it might be good. Well, at least the website portion of it is down. I’ve been watching Murphy Brown on the Internet Archive’s video platform and it still works, but when you try to access any historic website on http://web.archive.org/, it doesn’t work. I know we are in an era when more and more historic online content is being paywalled, so it seems inevitable that this would happen. People believed the Internet was permanent, but I never did (that’s a big reason why I wanted to write Nerds per Minute as a book, not a blog), and this is going to make researching things a lot harder even for this project, particularly I think for American sports car drivers. There are a lot of racing sanctioning bodies (even ones that still exist) that have removed a lot of statistical information they used to have on their sites, and I need the Internet Archive to find any of it that I haven’t gotten down already. I hope it’s not gone for good before I’ve at least collected all this information, but I fear that it might be. And now of course Reddit isn’t letting you use old.reddit.com unless you have an account now, so I guess maybe I’ll stop reading that soon. Not much of a loss.
Well, I guess the Washington, D.C. IndyCar race was a good move commercially even if it was a bad move morally. While I stuck to my guns in boycotting that particular race, America apparently loved it. 3.3 million viewers, the most for a non-Indy 500 race since either the 1995 or 2000 Michigan 500 (sources seem to conflict because it’s hard to directly compare viewership now to ratings then when considering that the metrics TV execs seem to care about have changed over the ensuing decades). This truly depresses me, but I guess one of the big trends these days is that anything that causes big controversy or outrage ends up exploding in popularity, whether it’s conservative country songs, the Roseanne revival, or this. I don’t like it, but if they can leverage these ratings increases to hopefully add real tracks in the future, I guess that might be a good thing.
I don’t have much to say about Dolly Parton, but I guess I should say the same thing everyone else is saying. I wonder if it’s even possible for any celebrity to have such universal appeal across every single demographic group like she did anymore. I don’t really think that it is in a post-monoculture world. I also thought I’d share this quote from my favorite sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati. It is a quote from its most famous and storied episode “Turkeys Away”, but not one of the ones that people typically cite. I even added it as a TypeRacer quote!
“Well, the Red Cross called out, you know, for blankets, clothes, anything. So Carlson, out of the goodness of his heart, shipped these destitute earthquake victims in Guatemala three thousand blonde stretch wigs. You know, I still have this picture in my mind of quake victims stumbling through the rubble, all looking like Dolly Parton.”
Rest in peace, Dolly.
Okay, this is unfair! Last time in LearnedLeague 109 there was a Scrabble question and now there is a NASCAR question? My guess would’ve been that most players wouldn’t know this since NASCAR is certainly unhip amongst trivia demographics, and I was right. Only 43% of people did. I put iconoclast instead of nihilism for Question 2, which was the most common answer. I can’t remember whether I considered nihilism or not. I don’t think I did, but I should’ve realized that iconoclast was from Greek and not from Latin; I think I knew that. Supply and demand is the easiest question I have ever seen. I was pretty sure I would have heard of the answer to Question 4, but I would be unable to pull it. I put Indira Gandhi knowing she was from India and not Pakistan just to put something. I have heard of Bhutto because the ‘90s is probably when I was watching international news the most, but I never would’ve gotten that. Color television was an educated guess. I figured that the C in SECAM had to be a word where both the English and French versions of the word were very close, so color was a good guess since the French is couleur. From there, television felt like the best guess and I got it. Definitely didn’t know it though. Question 6 was a 50/50 for me between St. Louis and Joan of Arc. Even though I felt that Louis was the better answer since I knew that he was the only king I could think of who was also a saint, which obviously makes him a national icon, I think I got thrown off by the village aspect of the clue. Joan of Arc obviously represented the more rural regions of France, while Louis obviously lived closer to Paris, and that threw me off, even though I thought Louis was probably the better answer. Oh well. Still won.
And finally, I made a Billy Joel joke since “Movin’ Out” famously mentioned Cadillac and I will be covering both of Cadillac’s F1 drivers today. The team really does seem to be a big waste of money right now in every regard, but who knows, maybe that could change. I felt it was safe to do both Pérez and Bottas today since I think most people would say they’ve been washed up for years and it would be hard to imagine either of them ever posting a top 200 season again. Admittedly, until this year, I would’ve thought Colton Herta would’ve genuinely been an improvement over either of them and now I definitely don’t…
I wrote most of this on Friday and Saturday and it just took me that long to finish the Pérez and Bottas posts (which I was trying to do for Bottas’s birthday on August 28). I’ll cover last weekend’s races whenever I write my next post. I also spent the last couple days calculating my IndyCar statistical table so I could finish that right after the Laguna Seca finale.
