UPDATE:  May 19, 2008.

Sadly, I must report that our dear friend Sparky, who has appeared in many of my columns in the past eight years, has left us.

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April 11, 2008

Well, that’s it. I’m outta here.

Not out of here, of course. Gosh no. I have cats to support. I mean out of the 21st century. You can have it back, thanks, none for me, not my sort of century. In fact, you can have the last twenty years of the 20th back, too.

Last week I spent a long afternoon listening to Radio Dismuke and browsing The Complete New Yorker Magazine on DVD, specifically Disk 7, 1937-47. I dunno, gang. Given a choice between, on the one hand, Robert Benchley and S.J. Perelman, and, on the other, the sort of twee lumps who labor to be funny at places like McSweeney’s, my course is clear. Give my regards to Blitzer and Russert, please, and feel free to drop me a line c/o the Stork Club.

Onward. I was sitting on the couch in my office reading The New Yorker in the first place because my legs weren’t working that day, which brings me to answering the nice folks who have written to ask how my ms is coming along.

Let’s just say that, as one soon regrets bringing that cute St. Bernard puppy home from the shelter, I seem, in retrospect, to have made a poor choice of disease.

For one thing, I evidently wasn’t listening closely when they told me that I have primary progressive multiple sclerosis and thus completely missed the import of the progressive part.

There are two main sorts of ms: PPMS and relapsing-remitting (R-R), the more common kind where episodes of disability can be separated by months or even years (or decades) of normal life. With PPMS, while the effects are often less dramatic than those of R-R, there are no remissions. You just have a generally slow, but inexorable, increase in symptoms. And, unlike in cases of R-R, there are no drugs that do much good with PPMS.

If this website had a soundtrack (aren’t you glad it doesn’t?), at this point you’d be hearing Procol Harum’s Still There Will Be More.

Anyway, it is progressing, like a fungus. Some days I can’t really walk, some I can’t see worth a damn, and one day last week I identified four distinct kinds of pain frolicking in my legs at the same time. It is a bizarre, deeply annoying disease. The pain and other unpleasant sensations, for instance, almost never have any connection to motion — it’s not like noticing that your leg hurts when you move it. You can be sitting stock still and suddenly it will feel like a pit bull sank its fangs into your thigh. But my fave on the menu is trigeminal neuralgia, also known by the romantic moniker tic douloureux. You’ll be innocently watching Law & Order, and out of the blue it feels like somebody is driving a railroad spike into your jaw.

The whole business is really like horror-movie voodoo, as if someone somewhere were stabbing pins into a small replica of me.

(Perhaps they are. If so, Wanda, you need to move on for your own sake.)

What really bothers me, however, is that it seriously impedes my writing. It takes me much longer to write these columns than it did just a year ago, and I find myself making ridiculous typos in nearly every other word. So if you’ve written to me lately and I haven’t responded, that’s my excuse.

I’ve never actually known anyone named Wanda, by the way.

By now you’re probably saying to yourself, “Gosh, I wish there were [because all of you use the proper subjunctive at all times, even in your internal monologues] something I could do to ease the poor lad’s trying existence.”

There is. Subscribe. Thanks to all this twitching, we are in serious financial straits, and every little bit helps. The kitties thank you in advance.