Family

Raising a Daughter in Epstein’s America: Cozy Turns 11

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

August 17, 2025

Eleven years ago today, I was driving west on the Sunset Highway like a bat out of hell. Andi was in labor and we had to find some place to have this baby. We had planned a natural birth in a bathtub birthing center, but our daughter Cozy had started to poke her head out and said, “Nope!” and was retreating back into the security of the womb. The nearest hospital had no room at the maternity inn, so my barely mobile wife, her mother, and the midwife hopped in the Prius and headed west. St. Vincent hospital was on the very edge of town and I was assured that it was still in Portland. This child would be born in Stumptown.

Fortunately, Cozette was born at 9:25 pm in Portland, Oregon, not Beaverton, during the second term of Barrack Obama. That night seemed like the most perfect exhausting evening on earth. Our daughter was here and the world was hers. Little did we know what was ahead.

I had hoped for a girl because I want to help put strong women into this world, who aren’t saddled with the marginalizing messages girls have typically gotten from their dads growing up. This was a feminist household. But easier said than done. We are always working against our patriarchal programing. And then came Donald Trump to make everything so much worse.

Cozy turned two during Trump’s first campaign for the White House. She was too young to hear the reports of the man who would be king bragging about grabbing women, “by the pussy,” and all the credible reports of sexual assaults by the alleged billionaire. (He still hasn’t released his taxes.) She never heard how he talked to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (Although, she did put the ballot in the box for me and shouted, “Hillary!”)

Cozy was in first grade on January 6th and already knew Donald Trump was a very bad man. But it was his second term that made things the most challenging. The constant news coverage of Trump and his pedophile ring has just filled the air with the most disturbing sex talk. I can’t even listen to NPR with her in the car. But she already knows it all.

At 10, I got my puberty memo, so I knew Cozy was already in the zone. I bought a supply of menstrual pads for when it officially gets here, but the fact that the style among her and her friends is the visible bra strap means we’re fully in it. I knew it was coming, just not this soon. And now the normal relatively innocent adolescent sex chat has been colonized by the flood of chat about Epstein’s rape of underage girls and the protection of those fellow child rapists by the President of the United States.

I keep flashing back to the days when the GOP was the “party of values” and rich Republican ladies would clutch their pearls over the lyrics in rap music. Now the GOP has become the Guardians of Predators and I’m doing everything I can think of to protect my child from them. We’ve hit the point where children are safer with priests than they are with Republicans. It’s a race to the bottom with Trump, and the old man is in a full on sprint.

Maybe the whole “innocence of youth” thing is a myth. There are kids shooting up schools, after all. But I had a naive hope that I could save my daughter from the reality of our sick culture that elevates rapists and refuses to punish wealthy white sex predators for a few more years. She knows she’s a target. There’s no way in hell I would leave my daughter alone in a room with the President or any of his uber creepy MAGA cult. (Many of Trump’s white nationalist following believes the age of consent should be 14 so men can marry children, so there’s that.)

If there’s any silver lining to this disgusting state of affairs, is that Trump’s rape culture has forced us to talk to our daughter about sexual safety early and often. And Cozy is clear on her boundaries. She’s already shut a classmate down who sent an inappropriate text. It’s horrible at age 10 she had to but she knows how to protect herself. But the other side is the non-stop sexual content she must see as she endlessly scrolls through her TikTok. I want to believe it’s all Taylor Swift but I know it’s mostly Sabrina Carpenter. Our baby is surfing in a sea of sexual messages, and not all are affirming.

Tonight, Cozy will celebrate her birthday with a big overnight party. They will want to keep me and any other adult at arms length. May they all be safe, happy, healthy and live with ease. Welcome to adolescence, Cozette. I am still here to protect you, but I’m going to let you start to lead.

Saying Goodbye to My Little Brother in the Pond

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

March 27, 2025

My little brother didn’t have the best life. I wasn’t the kindest sibling but we seemed to be destined to be on two very different paths from the start. Instead of playing the role of nurturing mentor, I was the perpetual antagonist. So when it came time to help him through his stage four rectal cancer, I was gifted a chance to make up for some bad childhood mojo. But ultimately, it was too little too late.

I was on a work trip to DC when I got a late night call from my mom. I knew what the news was. Ron had finally succumbed to his cancer.

He had asked me to send his body back to be buried in Cartersville, Georgia, where he had been “living off the grid” for ten years. I looked into it and it would have cost over ten thousand dollars that neither of us had. We hit on a reasonable compromise. That I would take his ashes back to the hill in Cartersville that he lived on and spread them at his camp. He found great peace there, living among the owls and squirrels, so it made sense to bring him home.

So on March 23, on what would have been his 58th birthday, Cozy and I hopped a flight to Atlanta, with Ron riding in my suitcase. The next day, with my dad, we drove up to Cartersville. While they waited in the car, I hiked up the hill and found Ron’s campsite that we had broke down two years ago. I could see another tent further up the hill so I didn’t want to linger too long. I spread half of his ashes around he camp, said a few words, and headed down the hill, feeling I had fulfilled Ron’s last request.

But there was another spot that I wanted to take my brother before I said goodbye. Growing up in Stone Mountain, Georgia meant we spent half our childhood at Stone Mountain Park. One of our favorite spots was the gristmill, a 19th century mill whose water wheel was fed by a small creek. Summers were spent at the millpond. We’d swim in the pond, find crawfish, and then slide down the long wooden flume with the rushing water. Right before the water went over the wheel, we’d jump out and do it all over again. Then my mother would buy cornmeal at the mill and we’d walk up the hill to have corn on the cob and boiled peanuts. Summer in Georgia in the 1970s.

I booked a few nights at the new hotel in Stone Mountain Park so I could share some of the fun I had as a kid with Cozy. We climbed the mountain and said rude things to the Confederate “heroes” carved on its face. But mostly we hung out at the mill pond. Ignoring the “Stay out the water” signs, we waded in. Our project was to rebuild the dam they had torn down when they stopped sending water to the mill. We moved boulders in an attempt to revive the pond to its old swimming hole status. With each rock well placed, the water level inched up.

Then, when it felt like the place Ronnie I would splash around in, I poured his ashes into the pond. Some formed a cloud and moved through the dam, down the creek, and to Stone Mountain lake, where our parents would take us canoeing. The rest spread across the pond floor, to forever be a part of our sacred little spot in the woods.

With that, it felt like my brother was finally back home. Ashes to ashes.

Remembering My Brother Who Lived in the Woods

~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

December 14, 2024

My little brother and I never got a long very well. One time when I was 12 or 13, and he was my daughter’s age, we got into a big fight at our house in Stone Mountain, Georgia. He threw a tennis ball can at me that sliced open my forehead (I still have the scar). With blood pouring out my face, I smashed through the flimsy suburban house door of his bedroom and Ronnie jumped out of the second story window, escaping into the woods behind our house where he spent the next two nights. I remember my mother saying, “Let him. We’ll have some peace and quiet for a few days.” I can’t imagine feeling good about Cozy, 10, living in the woods for a few days, but my childhood home was a firestorm of sibling chaos.

Last Sunday, Cozy and I went to spend some time with Ron in his room in the assisted living facility where he’s been in hospice care for the last year. We brought him snacks from Safeway, including requested chocolate covered pretzels. We told him about our trip to Vancouver to see Taylor Swift and I promised to bring him some eggnog on Friday when I got back from a short work trip to Washington, DC.

Yesterday, I sat on his empty bed in his empty room, eating those pretzels and thinking about his body in a funeral home down the street. When we were leaving Sunday, he had a look of terror on his face. I think he knew we’d never see each other again. I tried to reassure him. “You’re gonna be OK. I’ll see you on Friday.” Now I wish I would have stayed a little longer. He died in his sleep Tuesday night. Finally free of the pain of cancer and the nightmares of demons dragging him to hell.

It’s a strange experience, losing a sibling. He drove me crazy for 57 years. I remember the day he came home from the hospital to our little house in Parma Heights, Ohio. My mother tried to head off the inevitable sibling rivalry by giving me a box of building blocks and saying that they were from the baby. But our life was only conflict. That included a 17-year stretch that I didn’t speak to him after he went to prison for threatening to kill our mother. After that, I thought I’d never speak to him again. Now, I find myself missing him. It’s a weird, dream-like state. Is that the same kid who threw the tennis ball can at me?

About 12 years ago, Ron became homeless, moving into the woods in Cartersville, Georgia, about an hour north of Atlanta. He found comfort in the woods, where he told me he talked to owls and ghosts. He was never what you would call a “people person,” challenged by the requirements of modern living. He had a job washing dishes at the local Applebee’s restaurant and would call me to lament his exclusion from our family, including his estrangement from his son. We slowly began to reconnect. On one visit, I took Ron back to our old neighborhood in Stone Mountain, and stopped by our elementary school. I could start to interact with him without the weight of the past and focus on the good memories of our childhood.

And there are good memories. We’d take family trips every summer, often to Florida or to Colorado, where my cousins lived. A favorite picture of us is at Disney World, 50 years ago. We’re on Mainstreet USA with Alice in Wonderland. I refused to hold her hand because, at 10, I thought girls had cooties. Ron, 7, had no hesitation. I use that picture to talk to my students about how straight people come out as well. Ron and I fought a lot but we also found great moments of joy on those road trips, so when I went to get him out of the Georgia woods last year to bring him to Portland, it was one more road trip for us.

Getting my brother situated was a challenge, he was so used to being alone in nature. Finding him housing (after a few rough weeks on my couch) and getting him to chemo appointments were a struggle. Fortunately, there was a great amount of support from my friends in a fundraiser that got him into a care facility. Eventually, he recognized hospice care made more sense although he often talked about “getting better” and building a cabin in the woods outside Knoxville, Tennessee, where he had visited. Our road trips got shorter, the Oregon coast, the Japanese Gardens in the West Hills, until finally he was bed bound, with the trees of Forest Park barely visible out of his window.

It is of great comfort to know my brother isn’t suffering anymore. Anal cancer is the worst thing you can imagine. “Why does it have to be in my ass,” Ron would say as I’d deliver his opioids from the Safeway Pharmacy. It was excruciatingly miserable and he’d often wish he was back in his tent in Cartersville. “I’ll drive you to the airport if you want,” an older version of me would say, annoyed that he didn’t appreciate having a roof over his head and access to legal weed. But I knew Ron was doing me a favor by letting me play the caring older brother role I’d failed to as a kid.

Today, I will deliver his prayer shawl to the funeral home for him to be cremated with and a note expressing gratitude for letting me take care of him. In the coming year I will take his ashes back to Georgia and spread them in the woods where he found his peace. Fittingly, there are no photographs of all the times we fought, just of us in times of happiness. I’ll let that record be the memory of my little brother.

The end of the Eras Tour and how Taylor Swift stopped time for my daughter

~ Randy Blazak ~ 6 Comments

December 8, 2024

There are a lot of responsibilities of a parent. We need to keep our kids safe and provide the skills so they’ll be successful as adults. We need to wrap them in love and make sure they have three meals a day. But sometimes, we gotta make a dream or two come true to show there is still magic in the world.

At some point in the last year, Cozy’s obsession switched from the Animal Crossing video game to Taylor Swift. It corresponded with me also becoming a fan as I started talking about her music on my YouTube channel. We got to develop this thing together. When the concert film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, came out October of 2023, neither of us were that interested in seeing it. Then, seeing the actual Eras Tour became the mandate. Swiftmania had come to our home.

For me, as a music fan, it was coming to appreciate the incredible talent of her songwriting and the unique production of each album. For Cozy, it’s also about her connection to her friends, the fifth grade Swiftie crew. The old teeny-bopper culture of the bedroom has gone from the days of dreams of male stars, and the dream to marry them, to a 21st century connection to a female artist who empowers girls and women with empathy and strength. No wonder fragile men hate Taylor Swift.

So the hunt for tickets was on. We had a place to stay if I could score some tickets to one of the London shows. The tickets for the Warsaw show were the cheapest. I entered every contest I could, including buying lots of raffle tickets. I’m from the days of $12.00 concert tickets so the thought of paying more than a hundred times that for a show was beyond me, but the kid wanted to go. And so did I. We renewed Cozy’s passport just in case we got tickets to one of the more affordable shows in Europe. We didn’t.

The tour, that began in Glendale, Arizona, on March 17, 2023, was set to end not too far up the road from us in Vancouver, BC. A few weeks ago, Cozy was in tears realizing her dream to see Taylor was winding down. Then she woke up one day and said, “Can we try a fundraiser?” So we recorded a video and sent it in to Kickstarter right before Thanksgiving but it never got approved to launch. So, in a last minute appeal, I asked fans of Cozy to Venmo support for this mission to get the kid to the Eras tour. We scored a couple of semi-obstructed view tickets on StubHub for the Friday show for only $999 each with a $700 service charge. (I hope the CEO of StubHub is laying low.)

With the tickets on my phone (and some sustaining donations from Cozy’s mom and some great friends), we headed north to Canada. The highway was jammed up with Swifties. At one point, north of Seattle, Cozy and a car full of girls tossed friendship bracelets to each other as we headed for the border. I’m guessing there are a ton of the famous bracelets on I-5 that didn’t make their target. The Canadian customs guy laughed when he saw our car, covered in graffiti, including writing on the driver’s side that said, “Broke Swiftie Dad” with my Venmo handle.

Once inside the BC Place Arena in Vancouver, the excitement was leaping off the walls. I was a year younger than Cozy when my parents took me to see Elvis Presley, so I wanted her to remember every second and just breathe the whole thing in. She was busy trading bracelets while I checked out all the subcultural fashion. (My favorite was a T-shirt with a picture of Jake Gyllenhaal’s face, the inspiration for the epic “All Too Well” song, with a red cross over it.). Cozy was in her “22” outfit, hoping she would be selected out of the 60,000 in attendance to receive the coveted “22 hat” from Taylor herself. But there we no mistaking that we were in the middle of a cultural phenomenon, about to be in the room with the biggest pop star on the planet.

After a pleasant set from Taylor’s buddy Gracie Abrams (daughter of JJ Abrams), the countdown clock struck zero, the lights dropped and our special concert wristbands started flashing. Happy Eras! It was wonderfully deafening. Like the Beatles times a thousand (dollars). I recorded Cozy as Taylor appeared mid-stage to launch into the Lover Era portion of the show. She screamed and didn’t stop screaming for three hours. It was blissful. Dad mission accomplished.

The show itself was incredible. I got to hear all my favorite songs, including “Cardigan” and “Midnight Rain.” Her acoustic set, different each night, included “Never Grow Up,” which always reminds me of Cozy. But the zeitgeist of the night was the first bridge to “Cruel Summer,” where we all sang at the top of lungs with the women herself. “I’m drunk in the back of the car…” They were filming the concert so if there’s an Eras Tour 2 movie coming out, you may see Cozy and I singing our hearts out.

Cozy didn’t get the 22 hat but during that song she’s convinced that Taylor waved at her up on row XX in the upper level of the arena. I’m sure she did. Every moment of the concert was brilliant, from “Miss Americana” to “Karma.” After three and half hours, I didn’t want it to end. Swift put on a brilliant show, singing a thousand songs, dancing her ass off, and making everyone of the 60,000 in attendance feel like they were sharing a personal moment with her. I’ve got a pretty good resume of concerts over the years (I was at Live Aid, for godssake), and this was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever experienced, both musically and culturally.

We made are way back across the border after the show and got a hotel in Bellingham, Washington, and drove home yesterday in the pouring rain. We made it back to Portland in time for Cozy to get to the birthday party of her Swiftie bestie who had a house full of girls waiting to hear from a friend who had actually been to the Eras Tour. When Cozy knocked on the door, you could hear the screaming down the block. She came bearing friendship bracelets for everyone.

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour ends tonight in Vancouver, after 149 shows on five continents. It is the largest grossing tour of all time and has shaped culture and economies around the globe. Astronauts have reported being able to see the concerts from space and geologists have claimed the crowds have caused the earth to vibrate. All that is true but I know for one 10-year-old girl it was simply about the moment Taylor Swift waved at her that caused time itself to stop. And (with a little help from my friends) I got to be the one who made that moment happen.

To you, everything’s funny

You got nothing to regret

I’d give all I have honey

If you could stay like that

– Taylor Swift, “Never Grow Up”

Watching Coach Walz and the Painfully Fragile Masculinity of MAGA

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

August 24, 2024

It seems like there is a widespread consensus that the highlight of this week’s Democratic National Convention was the reaction of Minnesota governor Tim Walz’s son to his nomination to the vice president slot under Kamala Harris. We’ve all see the clip of 17-year-old Gus Walz overcome with emotions, in tears, shouting, “That’s my dad!” I burst into tears watching it as did millions of fellow dads, moms, sons, and other normal human beings. Gus immediately became a meme, celebrating joy, pride, and a love of a child for their parent.

That was among normal people.

As is my habit, I flipped over to check on the dark side. Fox News commenters said the young Walz was faking it, overly feminine, and “retarded.” Some said this is the kind of “sissy boys” that liberal men raise and another made an image of Tim Walz breastfeeding his teenage son. Seriously damaged commentator Ann Coulter decried that the teenager’s display of emotion was “weird.” And it just got worse from there. “We need to raise men who can defend their country, not blubber like babies. This proves that communism destroys masculinity,” one poster wrote. Others pointed to the teenager as proof that “liberals have turned boys into girls and girls into boys.”

This is par for the course for the right. They’ve tried to emasculate Democratic men for supporting a female presidential candidate. (Numerous memes assert that liberal men are all gay.) That includes National Guard veteran and former high school football coach Tim Walz (who, I’m quite sure, is a better gun shot than any of them). MAGA men want “trad wives,” not “boss ladies.” And while they feminize Democratic men, they turn Trump into a hyper-masculine Rambo, giving the elderly obese junk food fan a six-pack and bulging muscles, dodging bullets and taking down communists. It’s perfectly homo-erotic.

This is the tried and true tactic of the schoolyard bully. I co-authored a book with Wayne Wooden in 2001, in the wake of the rash of school shootings that peaked with Columbine in 1999. It was called Renegades Kids, Suburban Outlaws and in it I examined a wide range of school shooting cases, often digging into court transcripts. The common denominator was that the shooters were typically bullied with feminizing language, like “fag” and “pussy.” The bullies tried to take these young men’s masculinity away. The bullies also helped define masculinity as the opposite of femininity, after all, “opposite sexes.” Anything coded as feminine, including showing emotion and not supporting violence, was “unmasculine” and “weak,” threatening the masculine/feminine boundary, deserving of punishment.

I dealt with this in 10th grade when I quit the football team and became a punk rocker. The attacks were relentless. I can still hear Ted, the bully of Martin Road. “Hey Gayzak, you like that fag music!” One afternoon he stopped me after school and said, “Hey Gayzak, you’re a pussy!” And I replied, “Well Ted, I guess you are what you eat, you dick.” He punched me in the face.

For the school shooters in my book, when bullied, they attempted to reclaim their masculinity in the only way they knew how, with murderous gun violence. They took the old macho adage “die on your feet or live on your knees” literally. They went out like “men.”

Fortunately there’s a new version of masculinity in town and it’s not the John Wayne, strong, silent, and violent model that gets men and boys killed. It’s not defined by dominating women, girls, and all things feminine. It’s strong, free with emotions, and embraces women and girls as equals, not bodies to be dominated. We’ve traded in John Wayne for Tim Walz and, boy, are the fragile “alpha” men of MAGA triggered. If Trump men don’t have domain over women and their bodies, what do they have?

We’ve been here before. Right-wing men called Barack Obama a “pussy” and his wife a “man.” But it’s not 2008 anymore. The majority of the workforce is now female and women are not going back. The looming reality of a female president has fragile MAGA men apoplectic. If the president is female, what is left of their “God-given” authority?

But there is a way out of this quicksand of toxic masculinity. Those men can talk to the women in their lives and, by “talk,” I mean listen. Ask those women what they really want to see in the world and I guessing what they will hear is that the women and girls they love want men to enable them, not disable them. Or they can just ask, what would Coach Walz do? #WWCWD

Conversations About Death: Confronting End of Life Decisions

~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

August 23, 2023

My brother delayed his cancer treatment for over a year. He was convinced his stomach problems were the work of parasites, the result of living in the Georgia woods. It was anal cancer. So it wasn’t much of a shock to either of us when his Portland oncologist said that his cancer was Stage 4, having metastasized into other parts of his body. Unfortunately, Ron still believes that it is possible to shrink his tumor and cut it out. His entire body is now the tumor.

I’ve been split into multiple roles since bringing my brother back to Oregon. One is to help him get the medical care he needs to fight his cancer. But another is to try to get him to be realistic about the prognosis. The doctors get paid to treat so that’s what they want to do. His doctors want to fight the cancer to the bitter end, and this end is very bitter. Last week his palliative care nurse was finally honest with him. That, at best, he had “several weeks” before the cancer takes him. A hospice social worker told me yesterday that, because Ron is severely underweight, “he will live longer off the chemo than on it.” I write this while he is sitting in the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute receiving his second chemotherapy treatment, knowing this cure may kill him.

I 100% get where my brother is coming from. If someone in the medical field told me, “You’ll be dead by Halloween,” I’d say, “Well, we’ll just see about that!” And then I’d throw my spinach smoothie in their face. Ron wants to fight and that’s a good thing. But it’s also time to talk about the endgame and how going out on his own terms might, just might, be better than barfing up endless chemo treatments, praying for it all to end, on the outside chance that a few more months of misery is worth it. This has to be his choice, but my brother doesn’t have a very good track record for making good choices.

So we’ve begun talking about hospice care. The word “hospice” has a specific connotation for a lot of people. Images of terminally ill elderly people on deathwatch, being pumped full of so many narcotics that they don’t know who they are. Hospice care has evolved greatly over the last few decades and is now all about quality of life, not just managing pain. Ron’s already on Methadone and Oxycodine, so he’s got the narcotics covered. But the chemo is not adding any quality to his life. The poison is stealing it from him. Medicaid in Oregon gives you the choice – chemo or hospice. If you want to bail on the chemo, the state makes sure you are taken care of. But you can’t do both.

So this is my brother’s conundrum, to receive the full care that comes from hospice, he has to give up on the (extremely slim) chance that chemo will “cure” him. He tells me he thinks that chemo will get the tumor (again, the cancer is now in several parts of his body) to a size where his cancer will be “manageable,” and I ask him what manageable means to him. His response is that then he can treat it with good diet and live a long life in a cabin in Tennessee. He then accuses me of wanting to “kill him off” so he won’t be a burden anymore.

In the abstract, conversations about death are hard. In the practical, they are nearly impossible. We believe we will exist, in some form, for as long as time itself exists. But we also want to be here now for as long as possible. I’m not ready to die. Are you? But we all do. All of us. There will even be moments when Donald Trump, LeBron James, and Taylor Swift cease to exist. (I’ve got $100 bucks on Trump, massive coronary, DC courtroom, March 2024.) We’re all just sacks of meat with an expiration date. But when that date starts getting close, I get why people try to renegotiate their deadlines.

I want my brother to choose hospice care. I want him to get off the torture train of chemo. I want to take him to the Oregon coast. (He’s never seen the Pacific Ocean.) I want the next weeks to be spent listening to music and laughing about the stupid stuff we did when we were kids in Stone Mountain. But I come off as the Grim Reaper for suggesting this might be the best choice given the bad hand he’s been dealt. He just wants to fight and I’m glad he’s not ready to give up. Sometimes hope can win over science. It’s his choice, but the clock is ticking.

If you want to help with Ron’s care, we are still taking donations at his GoFundMe. Maybe we’ll get to take him to the Oregon coast.  CLICK HERE

From Big Brother to Cancer Care Giver

~ Randy Blazak ~ 7 Comments

July 23, 2023

What’s the John Lennon line about how life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans? I had this vision of flying into Georgia (on my father’s dime), rescuing my brother from his shithole hobo camp, and delivering him to a Portland cancer treatment facility, then watching his recovery from a safe distance. It didn’t quite turn out like that. 

When I got to my dad’s after landing in Atlanta, my brother, Ronnie, was on the phone, telling me I had wasted my time and that he wasn’t going to leave his camp in Cartersville, Georgia. I could tell he was afraid of the incredible change he was facing. Instead of suffering from his rectal cancer in a hell he knew, he was looking at relocating in a place far away from the Georgia piedmont. And he had never even been on a plane. I told him I wasn’t going to force him to do anything, I was just headed to come hang out with him for a bit. He’d been held up in a Quality Inn for a few nights because his pain was so great. He was convinced he was on death’s doorstep and just wanted to be left alone. This would have to be his choice.

Finally seeing him after two years was a bit rough. I thought about the last days of Howard Hughes but without the billions. His hotel door was propped up open so the Georgia heat and flies could come in as he lay in the bed. I went into operational mode. Food, coffee, and whatever else he needed. Gradually he realized he would be better off in Portland. He wasn’t ready to die just yet. I got a room next to him and we made plans to strike his camp later in the day.

He had been living on a hill behind the Cartersville IHOP for seven years. How he survived, I’ll never fully understand. Another blistering summer in rapidly evaporating Georgia would have killed him. His camp was a tent, full of spiders, and a year of garbage hidden under tarps, and a dozen gallon jugs of urine that served as his bedpans when he was immobilized by pain. It wasn’t pleasant but that thought that there was something better waiting motivated us to clear the camp and head to Atlanta to catch a flight to the land of Obamacare. 

The journey home was a challenge. Whatever you do, don’t fly Frontier Airlines. It’s the nightmare airlines. Just getting a wheelchair to get Ronnie to the gate at Atlanta Jackson Hartsfield Airport was an ordeal. Then, because of cancelled flights, I had to race him to another gate on another concourse and hope that delayed flight would get us to our connecting flight in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas to Portland flight was cancelled and they told us they could get us on another flight home three days later. I told them he was a cancer patient who had an important oncology appointment the following day and Frontier Airlines ticketing agent just shrugged her shoulders. So we headed to another terminal (Ron still in a wheelchair) and bought a ticket for that night on Spirit Airlines. (I never thought I’d say this, but Frontier makes Spirit look like Delta.) We finally made it to Portland, but Ronnie’s backpack didn’t arrive until six days later, with all his electronic items stolen from the bag. Frontier sucks.

After a day of adjusting to West Coast time, my job driving my brother around began. First to an oncologist in Tualatin, south of Portland, where we found out his cancer was Stage 4. Then to a residential facility I was hoping to move him into, where they told us it would be a few weeks. This was happening the week I was driving Cozy to and from art camp, way out in the traffic hell of Beaverton. Endless calls to Medicaid to get his long term care interview moved up from late August, making CT scan appointments, preparing meals, and administering pain meds every two hours.

Suddenly, I’d become an in home care nurse.

It just seemed really clear that this was the obvious role to step into. What else should I do? My brother is battling anal cancer. He was doing it alone in the Georgia woods, and now he’s doing it on my couch in a state that has legal weed. 

The legal weed bit has blown his mind. It’s been hugely helpful with his pain and appetite (although it wasn’t helpful with the Taylor Swift video I tried to make after we got high and watched Yellow Submarine.) In the conservative state of Georgia, possession of less than an ounce of pot is an automatic year in prison, on the taxpayers’ dime. In the liberal state of Oregon, an ounce of weed just means you’re running low on weed.

Once the pot and narcotic pain meds started to work, Ronnie started to feel human again. He’s got an amazing oncologist at OHSU’s Knight Cancer Center and wonderful palliative care coming. We’re still trying to find housing for him. Going through chemo on my couch is not an option. Keeping him in colostomy bags and diapers with an 8-year-old running around is a less than an ideal setting for him and my family, but he’s, literally, out of the woods. Sitting on our porch in the cool Portland night air (the opposite of Georgia), has allowed us to connect in a way we never did when we were kids. It started to feel like this experience was healing me as much as it was intended to heal him. 

It’s certainly a left turn from my normal summer, teaching on line and working on my side projects, but the support of Cozy, Andi, and Jaime makes it work. Watching Cozy and her uncle bond has been a thrill (Cozy is ferocious on the board games), and Andi has helped me remember how important this effort is. The moments I can escape with Jaime for a bit have kept my battery charged and her concern for my brother just fills my heart. And I’ve been able to show Ronnie some of the joys of my little town, like green tea at the Chinese Garden and way too much sugar at Voodoo Donuts.

Fifty years ago, everything was a constant fight between us. I never would have thought of trying to comfort him. Now my hand is on his back as the doctor tells him that his cancer has spread from his rectum to his lymph nodes and lungs. I don’t put him down for his assertion that he can “shred” his tumor with turmeric and sound waves. I just encourage him to listen to his doctors, who are among the best in America. This isn’t Georgia. Under Oregon’s expanded Medicaid, even the poorest among us have access to be best care.

Part of employing empathy is seeing this through my brother’s eyes. He has to be scarred shitless about this diagnosis, that is close to a death sentence, with a treatment option that will be a true test of his mettle. He’s lived as a hermit in the Georgia woods for ten years and now he’s in the hipster metropolis of Portland (Just the number of people walking around has shocked him. Nobody walks down the street in Cartersville, Georgia.), and, on top of all that, he has to trust a brother that has showed him more hostility than love in his life. I can’t imagine what’s going on in his brain. Thank God (Oregon voters) for legal weed.

Ronnie has been incredibly appreciative and acknowledges turning my living room into a cancer ward has been an imposition. But I thank him. This opportunity to help him has been good my for soul. If I can expunge a lifetime at anger towards him, I can deal with my anger issues for good. The other day he reminded of me when I knocked him out for calling me a “baby killer” in front of my girlfriend who had just had an abortion. He’s not the same person, and now I have a chance to be different.

Healing can take many forms. For my brother, it’s going to be regular radiation and chemo treatments, a bunch of pot, and hopefully a bed of his own. For me, just being here for him is the healing I needed.

Ron’s GoFundMe campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-house-my-brother-for-cancer-treatment?utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_source=customer

He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Little Brother

~ Randy Blazak ~ 2 Comments

July 7, 2023

My little brother, Ronnie, and I took sibling rivalry to a new level. In fact, I’m quite sure we sent each other to the Emergency Room when we were kids. Our constant fighting must’ve driven our parents crazy. I know it did for me. It was the cause of some desperation, at age 16, when I first thought about throwing myself into a lake and drowning. (To be clear, the lake was a Stone Mountain, Georgia pond that was maybe three feet deep.) As an adult, I stopped talking to him for 17 years after he threatened to kill our mother. He did some time for that one.

Things have changed with my brother.

We started to reconnect in 2012, when I was back in Georgia. We visited some of our old stomping grounds in Stone Mountain and I learned how to talk to him in a non-antagonistic way. Ronnie has had a challenging life and I think our sibling dynamic played a roll. I wasn’t exactly the best big brother. I think Ronnie was the first target of my rolling anger that was the result of my abuse. I relished in the fight as that was my standard mode. When I could have been protective and nurturing, I was combative and cruel. So the reconnect was a chance for repair, especially when my bother fell into homelessness.

For the last few years, my brother has lived in the woods in Cartersville, Georgia, north of Atlanta. Cozy and I had lunch with him and my father in 2021 at the IHOP near his camp and he was skin and bones. We didn’t know it at the time, but he had cancer. We didn’t talk for 17 years, but we talk pretty much every day now, unless he can’t make it down to Kroger to charge his phone.

Trying to find Ronnie adequate cancer care in a backwards red state like Georgia has been next to impossible. Dissertations have been written on how the Republican Party has conned poor and working people to vote against their interests to pad the pockets of elites, but suffice it to say, being sick and poor in Georgia is a death sentence.

So I’m bringing my brother to Oregon.

The assumption in Georgia is that every poor person who claims to be sick is only after OxyContin, so the insane amount of bureaucratic bullshit that is required to even see a doctor guarantees poor and homeless people are cut out of the health care system. Ronnie’s cancer doctor was 46 miles away at Emory University and he was routinely too sick to even organize a ride to the city. Tired of missed appointments, they dropped him from their patient roll, a cost cutting measure that shortened my brother’s life expectancy. Social scientists know we can predict your life span by the zip code you live in and the death gap for Cartersville, Georgia is as wide as the Tallulah Gorge.

Oregon, on the other hand, expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, making sure low income people have first rate health and dental coverage. It took a matter of minutes to get Ronnie signed up to the Oregon Health Plan and get him space in a residential facility and an oncologist to start his cancer treatment. My mother was dumbfounded by how easy it was to get my brother the services he desperately needed. “Well, I live in a blue state, Mom,” I told her. Now I just have to get him here.

Early tomorrow morning, I’m catching a flight to Atlanta (paid for my father) to collect my little brother. The nature of his cancer is among the ugliest, anal cancer. He hasn’t been able to access the health supplies he needs so he’s often sleeping in his own waste. I’ve been Amazoning him colostomy bags, but he needs so much more, including diapers and clean clothes.  Getting him in shape to fly back across the country is going to take some work. He’s in great pain, without access to any sensible pain medicine, often sure he’s not going to live through the night. I assure him Oregon also has legal weed to help him through those nights. I would bring a bag of THC gummies with me from the corner pot shop, but in Georgia that would get you a one way trip to prison. (The penalty for possessing less than one ounce of marijuana is up to one year in prison and up to a $1,000 fine.) Did I mention that Georgia sucks?

These may be his last days or the wonderful care given to low income people in Oregon may extend his life considerably. Anything is better than being poor and sick in the South. I’m banking on him being alive when I get to Cartersville and being in good enough shape to get on the plane. I’m looking forward to our cross country trip and getting to know the guy I didn’t have time for when I was a kid.

DWM: Dating While Married

~ Randy Blazak ~ 5 Comments

June 30, 2023

What are the rules of being separated? Nobody sent me the manual. Also, is there a handy guidebook to diagram the complexity of romantic love? I’m in the weeds out here.

The day A moved out the fall of 2021, I thought it would be a short term break while I figured my shit out. I was just at the beginning of understanding how my experience of childhood abuse had been controlling my brain. Therapy, some good reading, and quiet reflection, and we’d be fixed in a few months. A week after she moved out she told me she was “dating” someone (well, that wasn’t exactly the word she used) and that person quickly became her boyfriend, which didn’t help my intention to calmly become a better person.

In fact, it did the opposite. It unleashed my inner redneck. I’d go the bar that he frequented, order a double bourbon and imagine kicking his ass. Not exactly the practice of someone who leads workshops on mindfulness. Gradually, I came to accept her choice and focused back on my own work. If she’s happy, I’m happy. Blah, blah, blah. We were talking about divorce, but it always seemed to be on the back burner. And every time she’d breakup with this guy, she was back in my arms.

But by the end of 2022, I thought I should try this dating thing. I missed having a partner in crime. Someone to get out of the house with. Also, I was still angry my wife was spending all her free time with this guy. A friend suggested I go on the Bumble dating site. So I set up a profile and met some really great women; a flight attendant, an artist, and a movie producer, who I went to NYC to stay with for a week and is one of the most accomplished women I’ve ever met. But I felt like I was a performing a role; A and our fantasized reunion always on my mind. It just seemed like a hoax. So I cancelled Bumble and focused on winning her back.

Then all that changed.

Two weeks ago, I was feeling aggrieved because I felt like A was routinely disregarding me and I was all in my head about it. It was Friday and the start of her week with Cozy (and the end of her week with her boyfriend) and my Pisces brain was going to claim I had a date with a beautiful lawyer just to drive a splinter in. Then I took a left turn.

According to Facebook, I have over 2,800 friends. Some folks go way back to high school, some I don’t know how I know, and a whole bunch are dead. But there was someone in my feed who I didn’t know how I knew, I just knew she owned a Portland dress shop and was stunning. I found myself exploring her pictures, with her dogs, her family and friends, and travels. So I took a chance and messaged her.

Me: You’re always in my feed so I thought I should say hey!

Her: How are you doing? I’m rarely on Fb and miss a lot of messages so if I ignore you, I swear it’s nothing personal.

Me: Was just looking for some live music tonight. I need tunes.

Her: Ooh did you find anything good?!

Me: Usually I go to No Fun on Hawthorne for random bands. You should come out!

Her: Sounds fun! I’m down

And that’s how my relationship with Jaime started. She walked into a favorite SE Portland joint of mine, a bar called No Fun, and it was like a brand new chapter was about to unfold. We immediately clicked, like nothing I’d experienced before, while the band played TLC and Britney Spears songs. Sitting at the bar, we began to plan a trip to Paris and I said, “I’m going to kiss you tonight.” Then we ended up on the dance floor at Goodfoot, another local bar, for Soul Night, and by the second song we were already a couple.

I can’t explain what happened to my brain. All that bandwidth that had been taken up by my obsession with A, winning her back and/or hating that she was with this guy who I detested, just vanished. What did it mean? Was I not in love with her? My love for her had defined every day of my life for the past ten years. But my love for her was often about “my love” and not about her as a person. I was unable to repair that disconnect to lure her back. But now all I could think about was Jaime. It was like a channel had switched.

At first I felt the need to keep this new relationship on the down low. I didn’t know how to “frame” it. But after the April car crash that Cozy and I had been in (that totaled the RAV) and the cancer scare earlier this month, I know every second in this life matters.

Jaime and I quickly became connected at the hip. I wanted to learn everything about her. I wanted to not make the mistakes of the past. In a few days I was convinced that I could build something with her and finally release A from the crushing weight of being tied to my project. A seemed relieved that I had found someone, which was both nice and annoying. A week after our first meeting, A OK’d Jaime and I taking Cozy to a Portland Thorns soccer game. Seeing how wonderful she was with my daughter sealed the deal and I asked her to be my girlfriend.

I truly don’t understand the nature of love. My ten years with A, including the year and half separation, still carry a real meaning to me. She’s the mother of my child, but she has a boyfriend who I know she loves. I know there have been people rooting for us to reunite (and others who haven’t). When she told me a year ago, “I love you, but I’m not in love with you,” I laughed it off as the standard doldrums of marriage. But now I feel the same way.

All I know is that my heart has been kidnapped by someone I want to be with as much as possible. Cozy loves her madly and so do I. It came from out of the blue, but I know it’s real because she has me listening to Taylor Swift and thinking about my words before I say them. It may just be a summer affair or it may be something with some staying power. I don’t know and I don’t care and it feels damn good.

It’s nice not to worry about what people think. I just want to put all these lessons to work to keep this magic moment going that started on a Friday night in a bar called No Fun. As Taylor sang, “A string that pulled me, out of all the wrong arms, right into that dive bar. ” There is a golden string that now connects me to her and I can’t help but just say, “Yeah, well, it’s divine intervention.”

Tonight at 8:30 will be our two-week anniversary and it feels like I’ve known this person for a lifetime. Two weeks from now, I might be saying, “What the hell was THAT?” I have a feeling that we’ll be doing just fine. Love is a beautiful thing.

NOTE: I let Jaime read this before posting it. If she’s good, I’m good.

Sept. 26, 2012: My 10-year Reconstruction Begins

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

September 26, 2022

Everything changed on September 26, 2012 at 10:15 AM (maybe 10:17, she was late). But first, the backstory. And it’s messy.

My forties were emotionally confusing. I had successfully risen up the academic ranks to a tenured full professor position but my love life was always in turmoil. I hadn’t yet connected the abuse I experienced as a child to the bad patterns I had perfected in adulthood. And work and romance tended to overlap. Pew research reports that most Americans meet their spouses at work, and I had habit of dating former students (with the emphasis on “former.”) While the university had no policy against relationships among faculty and university students, that line mattered to me. After grades were turned in, two consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want. It never was an issue, nor should it have been. There were several respected professors who were married to former students. Let love rule.

About a dozen years ago, I had a brief relationship with a former student that started off fun but, as new relationships sometimes do, quickly hit a dead end. It was clear that not only were we not a good match, there were red flags popping up all over the place. (The university would later deem this woman “unstable.”) I tried to end it amicably but she was not having any of it and went into full Glenn Close/Fatal Attraction mode. She found allies in the administration to champion her cause. They’d drag me into regular administrative tribunals and lecture me about “power dynamics.” (One of these administrators was having a “romantic, amorous, and/or sexual” relationship the administrator who had appointed her to her six-figure job.) I hired a lawyer who shut it all down and I recorded her confession that she made all her accusations up. Hoping to expedite my return to normalcy, I offered to sign an agreement that I wouldn’t date anyone who was enrolled at the university. Although I did briefly date an administrator after that. Because irony won’t be lost on me.

September 24, 2012 was the first day of the 2012-2013 school year and I had asked to teach a Sociology 101 class that started on Monday mornings. I wanted to be the first professor a fresh batch of college students would encounter. So I put a lot of work into that first class. It was a true performance, a sermon on the salvation of critical thinking. There’s always a few students who blow off the first class because they think nothing important happens on Day 1, and it always annoys me because everything important happens on Day 1. I make note of their absence and develop a grudge. One of those absentees was named Andrea Barrios.

So before she walked in late on Wednesday, I already had a bias against Ms. Barrios. Then she walked through the door. I’m not being overly dramatic when I say it felt like being struck by a bolt of lightning. It was an out-of-body experience. (She has told me of a similar experience.) My first clear thought was, “Oh no, universe, do not put this woman in front of me. I signed a contract!” as she sat in the front row and smiled. I was on the tail end of a two year relationship with a wonderful woman that was sputtering because I didn’t have a basic understanding of how to be in a relationship. But I was a good professor and stayed perfectly professional the entire term (while my teaching assistant routinely hit on Andrea). I stayed focused, as hard as that was.

At the end of the term, I posted on Facebook that I was going to see local singer Storm Large at dark club to celebrate the end of the quarter. It was a rainy December night and I was sitting by myself at the end of the bar when Andrea walked in. Of course I was thrilled to see her. She was probably the smartest person in a class of a hundred students and she radiated. She bought me a shot of tequila and said we should hang out sometime. I told her I didn’t date students. She bought me another shot of tequila and we ended up making out at the bar.

A mature man would have stopped right there. I began building my career as sociology professor at 17 as a freshman in college.  It didn’t make a lot of sense to risk it over a woman in her twenties, as fascinating as she may be. I invited her to dinner the next night so I could explain the situation, that I had signed a contract with the university and if I dated her I could lose my job. “Maybe nobody will find out,” she said. That’s all I heard. I was already head over heals in love. I just wanted to be near her. She tried to get into another school to avoid the conflict but that didn’t happen. We were two adults who just wanted to be together. Two years later we were married with a baby.

But it wasn’t easy for her. I was only just starting to figure my shit out. The first lesson was how I tended to keep old relationships on the back burner in case the current relationship went south (a product of deep abandonment fears). I learned that only burned the person I was with and I almost lost Andrea. Fortunately, it was a surprisingly easy fix. So many of my other issues, wrapped in my narcissistic tendencies, made her feel invisible. But, as a tenured professor, I represented the stability she craved. Then all that changed.

This is the part of the story that involves a psychotic inmate in an Oregon prison. (“Psychotic” isn’t hyperbole. It’s in his medical records.) He was a “former” racist skinhead who I had worked with before his incarceration. He had decided, for some stupid reason, that I had aggrieved him. He made it his personal mission to destroy me and found allies in the university who were endlessly annoyed by my role as a faculty union agitator. I was dragged back in before the administrative mob, with our daughter in her baby carrier, and asked me if my wife was a university student. “Yeah,” I said, “She’s taking an online Women’s Studies class.” That was it. They had me. I was toast.

My long career was successfully destroyed, not by a nazi skinhead, but my failure to make better choices. I could blame Glenn Close girl, psychotic skinhead, or a university administrator who was banging her boss, but it all came down to bad decisions I made over the course of years. I just wasn’t ready to accept that fact.

Who was I without my career? Certainly not the stable provider Andi and our baby needed. My issues began to cascade. I thought I was one of the good guys, but I centered my anger, creating less and less room for her in the relationship. To her credit, she not only finished her undergraduate work but earned a Master’s Degree and began teaching her own classes. All while I tried to pick up the pieces of my life and figure out how the hell to be a good father and husband.

There are numerous details but suffice it to say she told me in very clear terms what she needed but I was so wrapped up in my pain and anger that I repeatedly failed to deliver. It was when things were at their worst, that I started remembering the experiences of early sexual abuse. But it’s not like one has a realization that leads to an immediate change, “Oh, I was abused. Now I can stop being a self-centered prick.” I still had a ways to fall before I hit the bottom. And that happened on last New Year’s Eve when Andi told me she was in love with someone else. The floor opened up and I was ready to cease to exist. I felt beyond repair. Beyond redemption. There was nowhere to go but oblivion.

After that, as I have written much about, I found a wonderful therapist who helped me not only connect the dots from my trauma to my behavior, but who gave me practical tools to start to change the patterns. My trip to Ukraine to resettle refugees this past spring encouraged me to be a source of healing instead of pain. And Andi’s patience helped me to see how childish my behavior tended to be. I’ve learned that love is more than a feeling but behavior in the small moments; a comforting look, a curious question, a snarky text not sent.

I’m marking this ten year point for two reasons. First, that psychotic skinhead is out of prison and still threatening me. I need a public record of my journey. But the main reason is that this ten year effort to deconstruct myself and build a better version of me may not be enough to be Husband 2.0 to Andi, but it’s been worth the attempt. We all can repair harm and fix ourselves to reduce harm to the people we love. I’m proud of who I am becoming.