Why Visiting the Doctor is Among my Favorite Activities

The cackling latin lady in the next office was going berzerk. Then she told us all how funny it was. According to her she couldn't breath.

Wish that were true.

I'm pretty sure if she wasn't breathing then that sound wouldn't have been there.

Anyway I better explain my doctor's visit just now.

I got there ten minutes late. The shady kid in front of me wearing a camouflage shoplifting coat says he's here for the same doctor I'm seeing. The receptionist twinkles a happy, "I'll get you checked in." and the kid skulks to a chair. 

I walk up to say I'm also here for that doctor.

She doesn't twinkle. I can sit over there. Preferably in the garbage can.

I don't know if there's a lot of paperwork that has to be done, or if someone has to drive to his house and remind him he's seeing patients today but it always takes a long time. I thought maybe by getting there late, they'd be waiting for me and I could just get rushed in since they were planning on seeing me ten minutes ago.

no.

I pick up a magazine to thumb some pages and find out there are people out there making horse magazines. Kind of interesting if you want to know which splint to buy this season in case one of your thoroughbreds gets a sprain. I put it down to entertain myself with the wallpaper and ceiling tiles.

After another twenty minutes, the nurse comes out and asks for the shady character. He shuffles back with her with a suspicious look on his face as if he might have some of the magazines packed away in that coat. I sit for an arcane amount of time before she finally returns for me. Then its the weigh-in, and the temperature, and the blood pressure and the pulse oximeter. Finally she finishes and leaves me in the little exam room to wait another half hour or so by myself while the doctor gets a cappuccino or something.

My doctor is from Israel. But leave the joy stained imagery of Fiddler on the Roof out of it. This particular visit is one of the last two I will have to endure.

As a sidenote, I'd better backstory this a little. I was in a big accident three months ago. Broke my neck. Had a post op infection and got re operated on and the fun of having a PICC Line installed. If you're a doctor and I used the wrong number of letters somewhere in there, don't correct me, I don't care. I know more about PICC lines than you will ever know even though you went to school for umpteen years so you could do something frivolous like save lives.

No. A PICC line simply means you get the joy of playing hospital every eight hours for the rest of your life or until they take it out, whichever comes first. The way mine was going I thought it might be the first choice. Anyway, during the ten weeks I'm playing hospital I get to meet with this doctor every week to bolster my confidence and cheer me along the way. Oh and get stabbed weekly by a nursing student.

Enough background.

I'm sitting there somewhat elated that before too much longer I won't be seeing this doctor again or get stabbed, when he tells me once I'm done taking antibiotics, I'll still have a high risk of the infection coming back because all they really do is suppress infection. Since I have permanent hardware in my neck, "It has maybe..." he wrinkles his face trying for optimism,

"fifty fifty chance of returning with hardware."

He grins.

"In that case, if spine has fused, we take hardware out and repeat treatment." His eyes glint hopefully.

"If it hasn't fused then you'll be in a cast for..." he pauses to soak up the joy of conveying such news, "six months... sometimes longer." I stare back blankly, unwilling to give him the shock and amazement he's hoping for.

"A full body cast then?" I ask.

He nods vigorously. I feel my neck.

"That'd be inconvenient."

"Oh yes! I remember I was finishing medical school back in the late 70's. I used to moonlight as a... a nurse."

I nod.

"Two schoolmates of mine; they were from my high school in Israel, got into a car crash and both had to wear spine casts in the ward I was working."

He smiles, deeply satisfied by the memory and the thought that one day soon he might relish the same satisfaction seeing me in such a cast.

"Was very embarrassing for them." He chuckles. "They shouldn't have crashed their car."

Wise man. I bet they never thought of that.

Reassured that my weekly doctor visits might not actually be coming to an end, I skipped happily to the lab to get stabbed once more by a young lady of almost steady-handedness who I assumed knew what she was doing.

After-all, she was wearing pink pajamas. 

How I Won The Crayon War

Thought I'd better explain the header on this blog.

For those of you to which numbers have a great deal of meaning and happen to know my age, the label at the top of the blog might have you a bit confused. 1987 doesn't seem to be a significant year in my life.

The answer is to be found in just how many years after my birthday on the first of July 1982 the September of 1987 had me.

Five.

I was five and it was school that became a part of my life that year like a relative moving into your attic with no plans to vacate the premises for a good long while.

You see, my mother was an artist and so i guess it never occurred to her to correct us in our artistic endeavors at home because art is art and children are apt to do whatever they like including coloring outside lines.

But when school became a welcome guest in my life, it soon became unwelcomed and loathsome because of the idea in my teachers' heads that there is a right and wrong to crayons.

Now I'm an adult I can see that crayons have very little application in grown up society and if any of the A grade receiving children of days past moved on to jobs coloring maps in map shops because of the precision with which they first outlined each country, then filled in the body while keeping painstakingly within the lines, I'll swim to Bangladesh with the next herd of reindeer going that way.

Not that keeping within lines ever concerned me. I didn't much care how teachers "liked" or didn't like my work. My first memory of really being frustrated with teachers using art as a vehicle for societal conformity happened because it was a requirement for leaving the classroom at the end of the day.

My kindergarten single-wide trailer sat in a swamp in South Carolina. My teacher, Ms. Bailey, decided this particular day to reinforce the idea that we were prisoners she ought to make it harder to leave. Our assignment was to color a self portrait and bring it to her to be ridiculed before returning home for afternoon cartoons. I felt confident I could do this and so soon had my paper in hand, my bag on my back, and myself in the line forming to head out to freedom.

She stopped me when she saw the hair.

In my childhood I had very light blonde hair. Being light blonde and five I assumed in my ignorance that a white crayon might work since other children sometimes called my hair white.

I had eight crayons. It didn't take long to see I was deficient in "light blonde."

She frowned at me and explained why I was confused and that "your hair isn't white Benjamin."

I turned back to the table. Only the five or six really mentally retarded kids in my class remained.

I tried to erase the white and found out that doesn't do anything but smear the white with a lot of black from the outline.

Yellow.

Add yellow to white and you should get blonde. Right? It was worth a try. But the yellow just sort of smeared over the top. It looked really crappy.

She looked angry this time. I wasn't sure what she expected me to do, but this obviously wasn't it.

"Your hair is not yellow Benjamin." You may start to understand why I go by Ben.

This went on for about a half hour.

Me being told what color my hair wasn't, going back, and continuing to see how inadequately equipped my stupid kindergarten crayons were at recreating realistic lifelike colors.

I think the paper finally ripped as I tried unsuccessfully to mix brown and gold into the mess my head had become. Ms. Bailey, its a wonder the kind soul never married, finally let me go home because the afternoon kids were filing in and an eight year old returning for his third try wanted the seat I was in.

Another pleasant experience in coloring came what seemed like years later because we moved to Florida in between, but was really just the next year in first grade.

We were in my math class.

I guess I should elaborate. For some strange reason the entire school besides the office and the library consisted of trailers connected by covered walkways patrolled constantly by power hungry fifth graders in orange road construction vests. Many of them I believe are  still wearing one.

It was this math class where for a number of weeks our time was spent numbering graph paper. We sat busily filling in each square of graph paper with numbers. I think the teacher called this "counting exercize".

I apologize for the lack of detail on the teacher but I had seven. I think my goal in school at this point was filling my folder as thick as I could before the end of the year. This was accomplished by never turning anything in. Every paper I got whether homework assignment, permission slip, or note to my parents about my lack of drive was added to the two inch thick collection I proudly carried with me.

I also remember spending much of my class time pushing my eyelids from the sides to make the room go sideways so the teacher seemed to stand on the wall. It was a productive year.

Counting exercizes lost their intrigue when I reached a hundred and realized the numbers just started over again like the double digits. There were no new numbers. 
1-9 was all there ever would be. This really disappointed me. I remember thinking adults were a lot dumber than I'd imagined if the only things really  separating us were this and height .

Some of the more eager students at my table got all the way into the four and five hundreds.

One day, as a result of a parent teacher conference or threats of firing my math teacher gave us something else to do.

Worksheets.

All I noticed was the picture of the turtle smiling back at me. I heard the word crayons and so put two and two together- MATH- and got mine out to begin coloring. Here was an assignment I could sink my teeth into. As the other children at my table began solving the addition problems at the top of the page to unlock which colors went with which number in the picture, I gathered up every ounce of observable reference material in my head and began.

My brother had two turtles at home. I was familiar with the complexity of colors making up the shell and skin of the North American Terrapin. I pulled out a brown crayon and started on the rim of the shell. Whoever drew this hadn't looked at real turtles much. It was way too curvy and I'd never seen a real turtle smile.

Gasps of horror suddenly exploded from the ignoramuses I was forced to share table space with. "What are you doing?"

"You're not even in the lines!"

"I'm telling!"

A hand shot up followed by the other arm rested horizontally across the head to help hold up the signal arm. She would wait however long it took to ensure my demise.

I'm not sure if the teacher ever got around to helping my dismayed table-mate or not. I guess if counting was really considered challenging, then addition was bound to stump a few in the audience. I apologize for the lack of detail here but I honestly don't recall any response to my work.

I was proud of what I'd accomplished with some white and yellow here, and some greens, browns, and oranges there. It really resembled Tom. That was my brother's turtle, the browner of the two. I was really pleased with my work and who cared what a bunch of kids with boring green turtles thought of it. I was sure my teacher would appreciate my creativity if she'd seen it, but of course, if she didn't come over to answer the raised hand, then she missed her chance.

Like everything else, It went in my folder.

Hence the blog undertitle, Coloring outside the lines since 87.

Its kind of funny. From my failed experiences coloring as a child, you'd think I'd never qualify for a coloring job. But I did.

I'm a colorist.

That means I'm in charge of the color balance, saturation, and contrast of footage in the TV shows, commercials, and movies I work on.

So I guess if you or someone you know is struggling with school, I'm a bad example. But I'm happy because its much better than filling graph paper with numbers for a living.

Brooksby Color Demo Reel from Ben Brooksby on Vimeo.

The Great Escape

Once upon a time I ripped my pants in the sixth grade.
 I don't know how it happened, or when it happened, only that it did.

The horrifying realization that at least six inches of inseam, 
the most important six inches-
 that up to this point you've trusted completely to remain tightly and securely sewn together are now completely unsewn and open as the parted red sea for the children of Israel to walk through, happened to me about four hours into the day during a German folk dancing assembly.


 This was due to the helpful sitting position employed in my elementary school assemblies because of the belief that the best way to improve circulation in a child's extremities and compress space was to have us squeeze into rows via Indian style on a cold gym floor.

I was sitting there happily enjoying the numbing sensation when I happened to glance down and relive a nightmares of recurrent nature where I discovered halfway into a school day that in my haste to arrive and learn I'd failed to put on pants. I squeezed my elbows down into my lap as far as possible hunching myself in a ball hoping a stupid fifth grader wouldn't feel the need to glance back and notice. That's all it would take to sound the alarm and my life would be over. Things like this spread like wildfire in a bored assembly.

Just as I felt I'd successfully folded myself into complete and relative safety, the professional folk dancers, not exactly sure how you aspire to this, but they decided a good way to keep our attention on the front of the room would be to jump and skip through the audience with jaunty grins pulling random children into the polka. I felt semi safe for a millisecond as I comforted myself with thoughts of safety in back rows. But the fear soon gripped me again as a guy in lederhosen and a few ladies in fluffy dresses came skipping back to our section. I stared at the floor and by the quirky enthusiasm of certain kids in my class was spared going forward to parade my problem to the entire student body. It was the worst assembly I think I ever attended, including the frequent ones where we had to sing in unison, "Peacemakers talk about it. They don't fight about it. They want to make up and be friends." I think this is the reason so many kids from my elementary school got beat up in Junior High and High School.

The rest of the day was agonizing. Every time I would relax a little, the teacher sensing someone in the room was dreading being called on would begin pointing fingers and having students tramp up to the board to try and write on it, something that  would inevitably scrawl up and down without lined paper to guide it and inevitably would be to small to be read from more than three feet away, but no matter. My teacher smelled fear and so was compelled to point. I avoided detection again till afternoon recess.

Lucky for me, I had no friends in elementary school. The situation would have been ten times worse with friends since no friend at that age can ever be trusted to keep such a hilariously juicy morsel a secret for long. I chose to play wall ball, an unusual choice any day since most children play this game with two or more people, but it was the location I fancied. The wall ball wall was the farthest north wall of the school right next to the little alley we'd walk through in the morning to get there.

I stood there, thighs clenched, idly bouncing the ball every few minutes to avoid looking conspicuous. My eyes flitted from duty to duty. For those of you that are unfamiliar let me explain:

A duty is the only adult on the playground during recess. The duty's job is to stop little boys from doing anything interesting. The school usually hires from the parents of the loudest and most annoying little girls in the school in order to increase her effectiveness on the grounds. They wore dark glasses for the same reason they did in high school during the early 60's, so it was impossible to tell where they were really looking and when they yelled in your face all you were greeted with was the cowering reflection of your own tear stained face. They carried whistles which they blew constantly while pointing thus sentencing kids to "the wall". Not my wall, but one of the middle ones where they could be derided and ridiculed by all grades at once.

And so it was the duties I now had my eyes on, but not too much when they were turned my direction for nothing irks a duty more than to be watched. I pretended interest in my little game knowing that if I looked like I wasn't doing anything, I'd probably end up on the wall as had happened once in fourth grade when I didn't feel like playing with anybody and decided to sit on a bench. First mistake. Never sit down during recess.

So I waited, amazed at the audacity of my own resolve. Was I actually going to do it? I had to. I had no choice. Nearly every member of my class had been called on. I could feel it. I would be next. The teacher would point. What excuse could I give? Nothing. Once the teacher calls for you to stand, there is no way out. My life would be over. I had to. Just as I reached my decision the most incredible miracle since the parting of the red sea happened.

I looked at the chubby duty to my left guarding the jump ropers. Her back was turned. With lightning quickness my eyes flashed right, to the skinny one with the ugly hair by the kickball field. She was blowing her whistle and pointing... at a kid on the other side of the field! Somehow the stars had aligned and both duties were turned the same direction at the same time!

No time to celebrate. I turned and ran as fast as I could toward the end of the wall. I should have been closer to it. I should have been faster. It was like running slow motion in a dream. As I rounded the corner I glanced behind me searching the horizon for the dark silhouettes of the duties. Surely they'd seen me. Nothing like this had ever happened. Two hours before school had ended I was running through the funny pedestrian only gate on the side of the school, designed I guess in the hopes that children would be forced into single file from the very beginning of the day. I ran suddenly aware as I rounded out in front that I was visible to every classroom window on the front side of the school. But two angry duties might also be on my tail. I ran with all my might which was faster than normal no doubt aided in my flight by the absence of inhibiting fabric between my legs.

It was then that I realized the real problem with my escape route. Waller Road Elementary sat right on its namesake, a long, straight, and flat two lane affair frequented by local traffic. So I ran, ignoring the confused expressions of passers by, intent only on one thing: living to see tomorrow. The duties might be right behind me in their cars. Whole classrooms might be in an uproar over the "escaped student" that just flew by their window. The cops might be getting the call right now from some old lady neighboring the school that a kid just ran by two hours before class let out and that they'd better bring the dogs. I couldn't tell.

 Too exhausted to look back and to scared to stop running I pounded on down the shoulder longer than any fat kid has ever run.

Finally after what seemed like eternity I rounded the corner onto the safety of my street. I slowed my pace and began to relax. Surely they'd have trouble finding me now that I'd turned. They'd probably just stay on Waller wondering where I'd disappeared to.

 I squeezed through a barbed wire fence into an empty pasture below the hill my house was on. I sat down in the soft grass and removed my shoes basking in my new-found freedom. I dipped my toes in the cold stream and caught little frogs for what seemed like hours. Actually it was.

Two hours later I heard the familiar growl of my bus climbing the hill.

 I wasn't on it.

How superior I felt as I watched the bus make its way up the hill. I could hear the trapped voices of my schoolmates aboard its rickety chassis. As the air brake squeeshed at the top of the hill I had the sudden realization that I didn't know what to say when my mother asked why I wasn't on the bus.

 Realizing that your parents are going to ask questions you don't want to answer is one of the key problems with childhood.

I ran up the hill.

Luckily Mom was busy doing some kind of Mom thing like dishes or canning or something so I just passed off some story about the bus taking so long to get there at the end of the day that I decided to race it home on foot.

 Almost had it too. Hill just slowed me down.

 I made sure to breath really hard and move around a lot so she wouldn't notice I was missing a backpack. 

It worked.

The next day as I walked through the pedestrian only gate I realized another problem. My teacher was going to notice I wasn't there. 

He was going to ask.

 What would I say? 

Bathroom? Two hours? 

No. 

Wouldn't work. 

Nurse's office? Don't they tell the teacher when you go there? 

There was a line and I had to wait. 

Yeah... maybe yeah.

As we filed into the classroom I sat down nervously and began arranging my things on my desk, ready at any moment to provide my excuse.

 But no questions came. 

Not even from my fellow students.

 It turned out that nobody'd even noticed I'd left...

The worst part is that now that I look back on it, I wonder why I didn't go play in the creek more often.

What a colossal waste.

note: Ben Brooksby does not condone or  endorse the skipping of school 

public or otherwise in any degree as it reveals a lack of character and

leads to juvenile delinquency or the improper use of otherwise 

and misspelling and otherwise.

The True Story of Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims, and Who ate all the Turkey

History is important.

If you don't know it, you'll probably repeat it. 

Kids these days are lazy and don't know their history. At least that's what my doctor told me during one of my last $378 dollar visits while he tried to convince me to show some of his favorite BBC history shows at the TV station I work for.

So for the literally hundreds of people out there that have been waiting, here is the true ungarnished, non embellished story of how we really got the very first Thanksgiving. 

Don't repeat it.

Thousands of years ago in Spain lived a man who liked nothing better than a good long trip to China. But his wife complained it was too long and, “You're so smart anyway why don'tcha find a quicker way or find a different wife to drag along.”

He agreed and in no time he and his three ships, The Nino the Pinto and the Santa Mario, that he borrowed from the Spanish Navy, were out on the open sea, sailing and singing gayly. But as the years wore on the singing grew less and less gay till it stopped completely. The men on board were just about to dump the guy overboard when the shout was heard, “Land ho!”

As the crew elbowed their way forward to their first glimpse of China they were surprised to not see the bustling skyscrapers of Beijing, and they grumbled in disgust as you might imagine. “India!” The man declared! “We've discovered a new route to India!”

As the crew threw up their hands with joy and began shouts of “Yay!” they were suddenly attacked from behind by giant Sea Beasts of a particularly veracious temperament. In seconds the crew, the three ships, everything in fact besides the left overs were completely devoured. The man known as Columbus miraculously survived, and so with his plank of wood as flotation, he began the swim back to his portage in Spain.

The next morning, he washed up on a famous Spanish beach whose name and location is lost to history but preserved in children's nursery rhyme. What we do know however is that the ship owners in Spain, a.k.a. Royalty, were completely unwilling to give Columbus any more boats to go sink on the far away shores of India. They also had some ridiculous notion that he should pay for them. So to appease them he gave them Mexico. When they asked were that was, he pointed to southern India. With dreams of a popular new cuisine and glorious battles against coon-skin capped individuals in churches, they graciously excepted and that's how we got burritos. But how did we come to Thanksgiving?

England,

 Columbus' next choice for boats happened to have just what he was looking for. A man had a notice out that he had a ship full of people who were being kicked out of England for wearing their belts on their hats, and had no place to go but the open ocean since France refused sanctuary. This man, Ted Plymoth was contacted by Columbus shortly after about maybe possibly letting him guide the social outcasts along his new route to India. Ted thought that sounded alright since anyone traveling to a new land from England was automatically allowed to name it after himself, so was the exploration bonanza of the time.

So with glorious thoughts of a new Continent of Plymoth, the pilgrims and Mr. Columbus set out on the Mayflower which was latin for wood that floats or something like that, to find a new home far across the sea.

On the way there they ran out of food so they had to kill mermaids to survive. Finally they sighted land, but it was unlike any land they'd seen in England. 

Just as Christopher Columbus was about to tell the amazed pilgrims that they should watch out and keep their heads low because this was about where his men were attacked before, a giant sea beast rose up out of the water and snatched him by the head,

 and that was the end of the greatest man that ever lived. 

But the pilgrims acted fast. They got out their machine guns and sawed that sea beast into little tiny chunks. That attracted a lot of Seaguls which was a good thing because they helped hide the boat. The Pilgrims looked back out at the land before them unlike any land they'd ever seen before.

Giant long necked lizard things were wandering around on the beach chasing the natives and eating them. The Pilgrims thought it might be a good idea to turn around and go back to England but they couldn't because the tide was going out and they were stuck on a big rock. 

Ted Plymouth decided to name it after himself. So everybody decided rather than stay on the stupid boat and wait for another Plymouth beast to come around and eat them like the one that got Columbus they'd lower the Plymouth boats and go ashore to see what this new land of Plymouth had to offer.

 Unfortunately for Ted, he fell on his way down to one of the Plymouth boats and drowned so they decided to name the land after his brothers Amer and Ica. As soon as they hit the shore a pack of velociraptors attacked the group dragging off several screaming individuals. 

While this was happening a guy named John Smith aka our hero decided to chase after them and save the screaming people, but he soon lost them in the thick jungle. Over the sound of screaming he heard the beautiful sound of a girl singing about leaves and air blowing around. He soon found her and fell in love and was never seen again.

The remaining pilgrims mustered their courage and started a fort right there on the beach. As they busied themselves shooting anything that moved the natives watched from the forest forming their own opinions. The most popular conclusion was that these strange looking people were white devils from heck that wanted to kill everything and take the land to build K-Marts and Piggly Wigglies.

 But one man named Squanto saw something good in these white devils and perhaps if they could just make friends with them, they could use the new pilgrim weapons to defeat the reptilian beasts and make the land safe again for children and wild flowers.

 Most of the elders called him a long haired hippie till he demonstrated the superior firepower of the pilgrims by rushing a heard of apatosauruses down onto the beach in direct firing range of the new Jamestown Colony mortars.

When the smoke cleared and hunks of meat stopped falling from the sky. The Native American's and the pilgrims decided they should stop the senseless violence between themselves and join with each other temporarily to defeat the dinosaur scum infesting the island of America. 

So they did.

They killed off every last dinosaur on the continent. To celebrate they cooked up all the lizard pieces and had a party where they sat outside at the end of November to eat because neither group wanted to invite the other group over to their houses for the dinner. It was pretty cold so this one really sappy pilgrim decided to go around the table and see what people were thankful for. And So was born the age old holiday of Thanksgiving.

And if you look closely today, you'll notice that on your thanksgiving table is the corpse of a bird flat on its back with its feet in the air, just like all the tyrannosaurs we had to fry back in the day a thousand years ago when we killed the dinosaurs.

We would like to add a disclaimer that this blog nor its subsidiaries endorse or condone any violence or maleficence toward dinosaurs be they herbivorous or otherwise disposed.

We like dinosaurs because they are special.