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Brett Favre sent a picture of his what....to who...and she wasn't in it for the money..and he was in his crocs....wuhuh....wuhuh....how am I supposed to explain this to my BOYEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!???????????

SO Brett Favre took the Green Bay Packers to a Superbowl in the 90's.

He also brought the MN Vikings as close as they're gonna get for a while in a stunning season that ended against the Saints in 2010.

He also said this on a voicemail:

Jen – Hey babee....Aww...huh...uh....just got done with practice, got meetings here, in a couple more hours I’m goin' back to the hotel to just chill, so send me a text, um, cause … uh...I'll be in the hotel for a couple of hours … come over tonight … but uh, … but …if you, might give you my number, or … gimme a text, love to see you tonight, talk to you later - bah babee

And it is in that context that my son Jack comes home from school today talking about Jenn Sterger, the masseuse who was at the other end of the MIDWESTOLDERPARENTGUY CREEPY PHONE STALKING WHO DO I THINK I AM WAIT I AM BRETT FAVRE phonecall(s) - allegedly.

"So dad, why did Brett Favre send that lady a picture of his private parts when he was wearing his croc's and call her?" Jack asked.

She was in the paper this morning. He must have had a friend talking about it at school today.

SO was his question: 'Why did Brett wear his crocs while on the phone to her?'

Or was it: 'Why did he send her pictures of his private parts and call her AFTER he put his crocs on?'

IT MATTERS!

See, she said this morning in the paper she was never after any money or fame or anything.

"Jack" I said, "Is that where we keep old socks now?" I said, pointing to the top of the Xbox 360 console where he had thrown his socks and now was wondering why the game controller wasn't receiving any signal from the said Xbox that had socks on it, which were in fact blocking the signal on the whatchamacallit.

"Huh?" Jack asked me, still trying to figure out why the G**D*** CONTROLLER WASN'T RECEIVING A SIGNAL!!!!!

I picked up the socks off the controller, he turned on his World Series of Poker game, and I started hearing the honky tonk blues music of the game...preceeded by "EA SPORTS......IT'S IN THE GAME!"

"Brett Favre did something GREAT for the VIKINGS last year, Jack." I said. "He gave them dignity. He gave them respect."

"Huh?" Jack asked, not missing a beat of his Xbox game, his little hands massaging the controller buttons left and right, toggling this way and that way...going all in with Texas Hold Em.

"Exactly!" I said to him. "So pick up after yourself, did you hear me?"

"Huh?" he asked.

"I said we don't leave socks on the Xbox!" I told him.

"Yes." he said, trailing off - his eyes still looking at and completely mesmorized by the screen.

"Do you still want to know about the Brett Favre picture to that lady?" I asked.

He looked up at me.

"Yes." he said.

"Turn off the Xbox." I said.

He did.

I sat down next to him on the couch.

"Ok, so he sent a picture of his private parts to that lady because he liked her." I began.

"Why?" he asked

"Because he thought she was nice and he wanted her to be his girlfriend." I said.

"Did you do that with mom?"

I knew what he said, but I needed a minute.

Then -

"Um, no. I just called her and asked her to go out with me."

"Did you show her your penis?" he asked.

"Not right away."

"When?" he asked.

"What?" I asked. Oh, I realized I said 'not right away' out loud. Shit!

"When did you show -" he began.

"Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't."

"How come he did?" Jack asked.

"Because he wanted to,um, he kind of.so....okay, so he liked her right?"

"Yes."

"And sometimes when guys like a girl they want to show off and take their clothes..no....actually...we, we don't know why he did that." I said.

"Did she like it?" he asked.

"I don't think so." I said.

"Why?" he asked.

"Because she told everyone that he did that."

"Why?"

"Because she didn't want to go out with him."

"Why didn't she just tell him?"

"I don't know. I guess she did, but he didn't listen and took that picture instead. I think."

I looked down at our area rug. Then looked back at him.

"Did you see the picture?" I asked.

"No."

"Well, it's gone, now, but yeah, she didn't like it." I said.

"Okay."

"So Brett was wrong for doing that. Some things we need to keep private."

"Like what?" he asked.

"Like our private." I said. "That's why we call them private."

He nodded.

"So did Brett Favre get in trouble?" he asked.

"Uh, yeah. Totally."

"How?"

"He had to pay a fine to the NFL."

"How much?" he asked.

"About fifty thousand."

"Didn't he make twenty million with the Vikings?"

"Yeah, something like that." I said.

"So thats not alot." he said.

"Right." I agreed.

"So is he retired?" Jack asked.

"Yes." I said. "Very retired."

"Dad?" he asked.

"What?"

"Can I play my World Series of Poker now?"

I looked at him, then down to his controller.

Then back up at him.

"Yep!" I said.

With that, the tv came back on, the honky tonk music began again, and balance was restored to the universe.

I'm up all night for some reason and then I start to think about my 8 year old son Jack

So I'm up all night I guess, now, and my brain floats all over the place, thinking about work, the mortgage, the sub prime loan market, and my 8 year old son Jack.

He's sleeping just fine, and there's nothing wrong with him.

I just wonder when he'll cross that line from where there are memories of when things weren't complicated and into the time when life started to hurt.

I think of a time when all was good in the world. I was about Jacks age. I remember a particular Sunday night, watching the "Wonderful World of Disney" on tv.

They were doing a special feature of the movie 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea starring James Mason as Captain Nemo and Kirk Douglas as some gay sailor guy. I don’t know if he was gay, but he was dressed very Village People. Not that there is anything wrong with it. It just looks –well - gay.

The guys have just got done battling some rubber sea creature. The sailors fighting it in the fake sea water managed to keep their balance in the middle of a howling windstorm on top of a wet submarine (Nautilus) which I believe to be made out of wood. All this saltwater splashing around in their faces and nobody so much as blinks. You don’t have to blink in a movie studio water tank.

I ask my mom if I can have some more pretzels from the blue box of Mr. Salty brand. She gives allocates a few my way, keeping close guard over the box and the bowl of M&M peanuts she has next to her on the couch.

I am in the bean bag chair.

Things were good that night.

I want for Jack to not feel any of the pain I have felt. I want for him to have a guard or a shell up to fight off any of it.

I just don't want it to be too thick.

I see a lot of me in him. He's terminally shy, and when people might think he's being rude, I know he's just hiding into his own shadow.

That's how I was..that's how it was for me.

And when I got older, I started drinking homemade wine because of the buzz I felt doing it, and how it made the pain I felt temporarily go away.

My dad made wine when I was a pre-teenager. He made it out of grapefruit and oranges.

After several weeks he strained the fermented liquids into wine jugs, and the rest is history. Looking back at it now, I’m sure the stuff tasted pretty bad, but I remember my first taste of it.

He had taught me how to siphon the wine out of the mixing pail and into the wine jugs. I then used that advice to siphon just a little bit (About a cup worth) into a Dixie cup.

That first time, I did it when my dad was at work and when my mom was taking a nap.

It was the middle of the afternoon. It used to snow more back then, or so that’s how I remember it anyway. So I was at home on a “snow day” when the schools were closed. I was down in the basement. I downed the whole cup of the wine in a couple of swigs, kind of shaking off the aftertaste and shuddering as it ran down my throat on its way to my bloodstream.

I waited a few seconds, and I felt my stomach flip a little bit, almost like I was ready to upchuck what I had just tasted.I got a quick cold sweat, I felt my arms, face and chest get all wet with cold sweat.

It passed. I took a deep breath.

Then I did it again.

No cold sweat the second time around, but I did get the shudder and the tingling in the back of my head.

I put the siphon hose back behind the jug where I found it, put the cork back into the jug, and inspected the jug. It didn’t look like there was any of the wine missing. For a moment I wondered if my dad would be able to tell.

The family dog Taffy was lying near where the jug was -under the stairs in the basement, and was judging me. Well, maybe not judging me. But she was looking at me like a dog with human emotions, as if she would tell my mom later about what I was doing.

I looked at her and met her judging eyes, and whispered “Don’t you even think about telling mom”

She seemed to sense I was threatening her, and even though I was convinced she didn’t speak English, she kind of felt like she was going to be in trouble over something. She lowered her head, as if dodging a slap, and I knew I got my message across. I had sent my first message. And it had been received.

As I walked away, I turned one last time and gave her a sneer so she knew I meant it, and while she had raised her head back up to watch me walk away, she lowered it again acknowledging I wasn’t pissing around with her. I would kick the hell out of that dog if she told anything to my mom about this.

Then I realized that in fact she was a dog, and couldn’t speak English after all. In fact she couldn’t speak any human languages.

As I began walking up the stairs, the thought of our dog Taffy telling my mom about me sneaking the wine cracked me up and I stopped, held onto the railing, and started giggling for a few minutes.

I turned around and went to under the stairs, kneeling down and looking at Taffy, who, seeing my smile, started hanging her tongue out, panting, wagging her tail (Never again would a female do that when seeing me-animal or human).

“You’re not-“ I started before laughing, “You’re not going to say anything, right?” I asked, laughing.

Taffy started whining, in a kind of happy, needy way. That made me laugh even harder.

“Please, Taffy, please don’t tell mamma” I said, as Taffy came up and started popping her nose into my crotch. It made me laugh even harder.

I lost my balance and fell on the stairs. Taffy started barking. I put a finger up to my lips again, and shushed her.

Taffy wagged harder and started to bark. I shushed her with my finger up against my pursed lips. She got even happier, her tail banging on to the cement floor while she lyed there, admiring me. I started laughing.

“No, don’t” I said to her, almost crying I was laughing so hard. “Please stop…”

Over the next thirty or so years I would, among other things, vomit on myself in public, vomit on a sidewalk, blackout and lose my car, get mugged, show up at work with liquor on my breath from the night before, and call in sick many, many times.

I will never forget my first buzz. And I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

I hope Jack doesn't go there.

Part Two: My mom who had ALS and I watched In Search Of UFO's narrated by Leonard Nimoy, the alien (Spock)

Bigfoot was ending. Then a new In Search Of was beginning. This One was In Search Of UFO’s.

“What else is on?” Mom asked. They didn’t have cable. Her other choices were golf, basketball, and a public television pledge drive.

“Lets watch more bullshit.” She said, taking a swig of Seven Up.

So, onto the UFO’s.

My mom asks me to get her some more pretzels. I offer to bring her the whole box (Mr Salty – blue box) she says with her weak arms its too hard to pull them out of the box and insulated bag lining. Just grab a handful and dump them on the tray, she says. I comply and when I get back and sit down in the light brown chair next to her hospital bed, the urine bag I am now used to, just a little bit, hanging over the side, I notice it is greater than halfway full, and I know my mom doesn’t want to have me drain it and reinsert the catheter.

“Mom, how much pop have you drank?” I ask.

“Why?” she asks.

Then she looks down toward me, her bed is high up relative to the chair.

She glances at the urine bag.

“Oh” she says. “Get me some saltines.”

I comply again and grab a whole wrapped line of saltines for her, the single squares packaged in a long line of about twenty, rip it open, and place the bag next to the pretzels.

The show is starting. In Search Of UFOs.

Mom?” I ask, wondering if I can grab a couple of pretzels off her tray.
She shushes me with her finger on her mouth. “Lets watch stupid farmers get kidnapped by aliens.” She says.

Nimoy is again narrating the opening sequence. The show opens showing the woods, and trees, from aerial vews.

“Is this Bigfoot again?” I ask.

“I don’t know.” She says. “Shhhh!”

The narrator begins by saying something like “They come in the dead of night….in fields or farms or the middle of a forest.”

“Why wouldn’t aliens just land in Washington DC to establish contact?” my mom asks rhetorically, I figure.

“Maybe they don’t want to be noticed, yet.”

“It makes us look stupid, when they kidnap these stupid backwoods people, and tell them they have a cure for ALS – or cancer, or whatever.”

Point taken. She is right.

“Maybe they are waiting around for the right time.” I say.

“Well, if they are trying to take over the world, they probably think we’re stupid, if all they are kidnapping is these stupid people.”

After the opening credits, where they show still photos of the loch ness photo (blurry), Bigfoot still frame from the film (blurry, grainy) Emelia Earhardt, Stonehedge and those Easter Island statues, Nimoy comes on to open the episode.

“Isn’t he an alien?” my mom asks.

“He’s a Vulcan.” I say.

“There’s the proof.” She says. “He looks like an alien, even without his makeup.”

I laugh.

“I saw him in a Western – Gunsmoke or Death Velley. He looked like an alien gunslinger.”

I smile. She shushes me again.

Nimoy speaks perfectly logical, as expected, and talks about all the saucerlike vehicles photographed – again grainy and blurry.

The most compelling part of the episode though was the part where some guy in Wyoming was abducted by aliens. He loved the woods and hunting, and in one October in 1974, he was hunting and a little after 4 o clock this giant guy wearing a white robe showed up – although he too was a blurry figure. This guy, the hunter, blacked out, and when he came to he realized some time had elapsed. I love the reenactments. They show this guy waking up in the woods and looking around. They show his friends finding him and placing him into one of their pickups. He was incoherent. I’ve seen that behavior in Northwestern Wisconsin during hunting season. It’s called being drunk.

Anyway, this guy couldn’t recognize his wife, and he was disoriented for a long period of time. Instead of calling a doctor, he calls a UFO institute.

“Bullshit.” My mom says.

“Why?” I ask.

“He doesn’t go to a hospital for further treatment for an aneurism, or a stroke. His first thoughts are to call a UFO Institute. Maybe that’s what happened to me, I don’t have ALS. I’ve been kidnapped by aliens. I went to the Mayo Clinic instead.”

The UFO Institute sends a shrink to evaluate the people, who are obviously traumatized after being kidnapped by aliens, as I would be.
The shrink puts this hunter guy under hypnosis. The reason being, says the shrink, when aliens kidnap people to study them, they then tell the people they won’t remember anything after this, and then they throw magic alien dust to make the people forget their experience. The shrink says it not only with a straight face, but as if he has this confirmed through some particular research of his own on some alien race. ‘What else would explain these abductees not remembering?” he asks rhetorically.

“Maybe it didn’t happen” my mom answers, rhetorically. “Bullshit.” She says as she takes a couple pretzels and chomps them down.

Under hypnosis the guy starts remembering. A blurry tall guy that looks human, dressed in a white robe, speaking in English, evidently, motions the hunter guy to come with him into his spaceship, which is, of course, a saucer like vehicle. There’s no door to the spaceship. They don’t explain it, but it sounds like he gets beamed into the ship. Remember, the show Star Trek had already aired by then, so its not like it would be far fetched to believe there was such a thing as being beamed up. After all, Nimoy WAS narrating.

The shrink is skeptical. The truth here, the Doctors name is actually Sprinkle. Doctor Sprinkle. That’s a bad sign when the shrink of the UFO Institute thinks you might be lying. This is the guy who put out the magic alien fairy dust memory lost theory. But he confirms through some test that the guy is actually telling the truth.

“Bullshit” my mom says. She starts laughing, and that makes me laugh.

What does that have to do with my middle aged life?

Because I am unclear of the supernatural, I think a lot of nuts are out there keeping a lot of mythology of these things alive. I also think there are sincere people who might have seen or experienced something, so I don’t know. My mom was facing death right in the eye, and when we’d watch these shows I noticed she wanted to believe, as they say in X Files, she wanted to think that miracles were possible, that Aliens found the cure for her disease and would share it with someone who maybe wasn’t some hick out in the woods mixing his Vicodin with a twelve pack.

She grew more disenchanted the more we’d watch that show or shows like it on Sunday afternoons. Pretty soon to her, all the shows were just bullshit, and as she entered her “acceptance” stage of her own death, before ping ponging back to her “anger” stage again, she realized they were nothing more than what they always were – an extension of the Enquirer magazine at the checkouts of all the grocery stores she shopped at.

The Enquirer was her candy, and she always bought one when she went shopping.

She also bought candy, her favorite being M&M’s.

Part One: My mom and I used to watch tv a lot when I was taking care of her when she had ALS (Lou Gehrigs Disease) including shows like "In Search Of"

My mom and I would watch a lot of television when she was dying of Lou Gehrigs Disease. I would be on a sofa chair in her bedroom. She would be sitting up in her medical bed. There’d be the tray where she had her pretzels or saltines, and her soda (7 up).

The particular episode we were watching one afternoon was In Search Of Bigfoot.

In this episode they showed the grainy film image of Bigfoot walking across some place in the woods. I learn later this is known as the famous Patterson film.

In the mid 1960’s some guy named Patterson and his friend witnessed a Sasquatch (Bigfoot) walking in front of them and started filming it. Patterson said it was about seven feet tall.

In the early afternoon of October 20, Patterson and Gimlin were at Bluff Creek in Northern California. Both were on horseback when they first saw the creature. They said they were in shock.

Patterson estimated he was about 25 feet away from the creature at his closest. Patterson said that his horse reared upon seeing (or perhaps smelling) the figure, and he spent about twenty seconds getting off the horse and getting his camera that he happened to have on him because when you ride horseback, in the nineteen sixties, you always bring your movie camera.

Digression: Google or Bing the typical movie camera of 1965, and see how portable it was. Possible, yes. Likely while riding horseback – no. I’m just saying.

The camera was in a saddlebag and it took him about twenty seconds, he actually counted, I guess, before he could run toward the figure while operating his camera. He yelled "Cover me" to Gimlin, (To which I ask ‘Cover me with what?’ Like is this guy Gimlin going to do – what – if Bigfoot comes at him - throw bananas?) Anyway, our story continues-who thereupon crossed the creek on horseback, rode forward awhile, and, rifle in hand, dismounted (presumably because his horse might have panicked if the creature charged, spoiling his shot).

The figure had walked away from them to a distance of about 120 feet before Patterson began to run after it. The resulting film (about 53 seconds long) is initially quite shaky (and blurry of course) until Patterson gets about 80 feet from the figure. At that point the figure glanced over its right shoulder at the men and Patterson fell to his knees; on Krantz's map this corresponds to frame 264. To researcher John Green, Patterson would later characterize the creature's expression as one of "contempt and disgust.” We don’t really see that look when we view the grainy footage though. But this is the Zapruder film of Bigfoot, in essense, and it is all we’ve got.

So Leonard Nimoy says this and my mom, not even bothering to turn her head to face me, says:

“Bullshit”

“Its on film, though.” I say.

“Its Bull- Shit.” she insists. “The gorilla man looked disgusted? I thought he was thirty feet away. And why is the film so blurry?”

“He was nervous.”

“So was your dad when he took photos of the Canyon on our camping trip a few years ago. They aren’t blurry.”

“Dad didn’t see Bigfoot.”

“Either did this guy.”

The film continues. Shortly after glancing over its shoulder, the
blurry grainy creature walks behind a grove of trees, reappears for awhile after Patterson moved ten feet to a better vantage point, then fades into the trees again and is lost to view as the reel of film ran out. Gimlin remounted and followed it on horseback, keeping his distance, until it disappeared around a bend in the road three hundred yards away. Patterson called him back at that point, feeling vulnerable on foot without a rifle, because he feared the creature's mate might approach- Said Nimoy.

“The creatures mate” my mom says, still able to lift the can of 7up to her mouth, taking a swig before putting it back down. “Now the monkey man is married, too.”

Nimoy offered up the believers reasonings why no bones of Bigfoot creatures have ever been found in the Pacific Northwest. Evidently, it was due to the many scavengers of the area and the highly acidic soil in the region.

They show the film over and over. Its always grainy.

“It looks like a fat guy in a gorilla suit on his way to a campground bathroom.” She says.

“They found footprints mom.” I say.

“Bullshit.” She says, taking a handful of pretzel sticks and chomping them for a minute. “That’s a guy with wooden boards shaped like big feet attached to baseball bats and stomped into the ground. Your dad could make those with his jigsaw.”

She had a point.

Bigfoot walked with a bad posture, hanging low and forward, like an old man hunched over in a forward lean.

“He looks constipated.” Mom says. It goes toward her conclusion he was looking for a bathroom. “Look how he’s hunched forward with those long arms. Your great uncle Frank walked like that in the last two years of his life.”

Nimoy says some witnesses have seen Bigfoot eating berries in the woods.

“Those two guys sat on a case of beer, smoked grass (that’s what mom called pot), and came up with the whole thing.” My mom said.

So my 8 year old son Jack asked me why America was shutting down tonite and I told him what we'd do if we were in Washington DC

SO my eight year old son gets in the car after school activities are done and we're on the way home. My infant son Dylan is asleep in the back seat.

"Dad?" he asks.

"What?" I say.

"How come America is shutting down tonite?"

I thought - 'Cuz they're a bunch of f**kin' idiots, Jack'

I said - "Well, all the Congress people can't figure out how to spend our money."

"What happens when America shuts down?"

"Well, remember we were gonna go on vacation to see all that stuff in Washington DC?" I asked.

He nodded.

"Well, if we were there, and America closed, we couldn't see the first space ship to the moon, the first flag, Abe Lincoln's hat, all the huge statues and stuff - we couldn't go see them. We'd just have to stay in our room and play cards."

"What if they stay closed when we go there?" he asks.

I smile when I think about it, like the Grinch did when he came up with that plan with the little dog.

"Well," I say, "We'd go to one of those fancy Georgetown restaurants where all those guys have supper, we'd send Dylan in to throw their plates of food at them, maybe spill some hot coffee on them."

Jack laughed.

I was just warmin' up.

"Then, we'd take all those guys over to Obama, he lives in the White House, you know that?"

"I know that." Jack says, still laughing.

"Let me tell you what's really funny." I say.

"What?"

"We'd take him to Obama, wake him up, and have them do pushups for a couple hours, then we'd go back to those restaurants, and spill their steak and lobster all over them and tell them to open America up again."

Jack loved it.

"We'd take ALL THEIR HOT SOUP AND CRABBIE PATTIES and throw it at 'em!" I say. "YEAH! We'll torch the streets....then we'll go to all their houses and wake them up and yell at them!"

Jack's trying to say something, but is laughing too hard.

"Then Dylan would walk up to them, pull their hair, take their glasses and throw them and break them, and poke and bite their faces until they did what we said!"

I looked over at him. I gave him one of those evil smiles, like the Grinch.

He evil smiled back.

Then I gave him an 'Atta boy!' hug.

So my shrink makes a play to lower my antidepressants as if he's ever been on them and knows what's its like to be depressed-it's depressing

So a couple years back I’m sitting across from my shrink and he tells me I should go down on my xanax. But he doesn’t say “I” should. He says “lets” instead.

“Let’s go down on this medication.” He says.

“Bad timing.” I say.

“How’s that?” he asks.

“Well, 'we' should not do that because my wife is pregnant, my porch is falling apart, I am more tired than ever, and it feels like the economy is collapsing. And did I mention we don’t have a savings yet for my wifes maternity leave she insists she will take? And my insurance deductible is seven grand. I have a lot on my plate. So let’s not do it.” I say.

I emphasize the word ‘let’s’ so hopefully he gets that I don’t like being talked to like a child, with the ‘let’s’ and ‘we’ when in fact it’s about ‘me’.

“We should think about it though.” He says.

“We don’t have to.” I say. “We are fine just as things are.”

“I just remembered” he says, “My billing person says she can’t get your insurance to pay for our last appointment.”

Ahh, the threat. The passive aggressive threat. No more meds until I pay up his bill. This was a power struggle. He didn’t need me to pay up that minute, but I questioned his authority and challenged his treatment plan – for “us”.

“Let’s call her, then.” I call his bluff.

Here’s what I say about medical billing people who work from their home computers. They are mostly retired old ladies who are in over their heads.
They are inexpensive (because they are in over their heads).

This is about my psychiatrist pulling a stunt about my past due account as I tell him I do not want to go down on my Xanax, a controlled substance. He is basically doing a combination of tough love meets don’t challenge me, but I am not in the mood for it.

Anyway, he nods, and sets his phone to speaker as he dials her number. It rings, no answer. Her voicemail kicks in. Very professional sounding.

HI IT’S ME I AM NOT HERE RIGHT NOW LEAVE A MESSAGE AND I WILL GET BACK TO YOU WHEN I AM.

My shrink leaves a message.

“Hey” my psychiatrist says. “I have Pete here and he wants to talk to you about the past due, give me a call, thanks.”

He hangs up, and a half a minute later his phone rings. It is her, Gramma Moses. That’s mean. Lets call her Whistler's Mother. He puts her on speaker phone.

“So I have Pete here and he wants to talk to you about his account.” He says. Then he looks over at me and winks at me. I’m not sure why the hell he did that. Is he making a pass at me? What?

“Okay, I have his account on screen.” She says.

I hear what sounds like something tipping over, maybe a cup of coffee, maybe a glass of whiskey, followed by an “excuse me a minute” then a “Ok, I’m back-sorry. What’s your question Peter?”

“My question is how come you keep sending me statements, not necessarily on a regular basis(that is a dig at how inconsistent her statements are mailed - my shrink makes a facial expression of surprise, mission accomplished). They are different colors, and say I still owe money. First, what do the different colored paper colors mean – like I get blue one month, red the other month, and sometime white plain?”

I actually know what Gramma Walton is trying to accomplish. By having different colors, it is supposed to - a) get my attention to act on the past due balance, and - b) stop me from tossing it in the garbage with all the other past due notices I may get. I do neither.

“Well I show you still owe a balance from your last four appointments.” She says, not missing a beat and blowing off my question. “How would you like to pay today?”

“Can I give you my credit card number?” I ask.

I know she doesn’t take credit cards, and it makes me seem like I intend to pay. Remember, Old Yeller does not have a big operation.

“Well, no, I can’t do that.” She says, predictably.

I believe she is giving me the finger over the phone. I feel bad vibes coming from the phone speaker. I am sensitive to the negative vibrations of angry old women. I always have been.

You can’t convince me that when she gets home to her efficiency apartment, dressed in her floral moo-moo, watching television from her worn green sofa, she doesn't yell and slap at her cat for sniffing out the noodle salad she is eating from a tupperware container ("No human food Josie, you rotten little cat!").

Maybe she doesn't own a cat, though.

Meanwhile, back in the present, my shrink is interested also; he moves forward in his chair and has his hands clasped.

“Well, you know insurance companies.” she says.

“Which insurance company are you speaking with?” I ask.

There is a shuffling of papers for a moment, then she says asks-“Medica?”

It isn’t.

“Actually” I say, ”It's Blue Cross”

“Oh, has it changed?” she asks.

I feel like throwing her a lifeline and saying it has, but screw it. Nobody has ever thrown me a lifeline.

“Actually, no.” I say. “It’s the same one I gave you three years ago.”

Another pause. Then my soul comes back into my body.

“I tell you what," I say, "I will pay cash for the current appointments starting today.”

She goes for it. When we hang up, I get what I was after all along.

“So” my shrink begins, “I’ll write your prescriptions for the Xanax and Paxil. Let’s just keep going the same way we are going.”

Mission accomplished.