sweetheart redux

Mom had me on a rain-soaked and rosy-fingered dawn in March, in Beverly Hills, of all places.   Good, bad or melodramatically worse, she loved being a mom, and so do I. My son has my bad habit of only wanting everything or nothing and my bad heart. Yesterday when I told him it was time to take his heart medication,  I forgot to use our magical language, I just said "It's time for your heart medicine." "That's not what it is." "Oh?" "It's watermelon juice."

Some of you are familiar with my old punk rock war story of me getting jumped by a bunch of skinheads and krusty punx after my first band's first gig.  I was 16, and as a teenager I was overflowing with creative energy and also a sense of everything still being new; even when something was awful, it was an intriguing new experience I wanted to examine with a feverish intensity.  So I wrote and wrote and wrote about the attack.  I did a zine regularly for years and at least 3 issues of it are practically exclusively prose and lyrics, and comics, and clip art, relating to my experience of being attacked. Other than that particular life-changing experience, though,  I tend not to record the big events in my life.  I didn't really write in any diary, fiction or essay format about living in my first roommate-free apartment, or my first heart surgery, my wedding, the birth of my son, my second heart surgery, the month or so I spent of rehab with family in Flor...