The evolution of the 21st century man occurs everyday. This one has a keen sense of what is likely to set a parent off. He doesn’t hide my keys, for example, but merely puts it on his mother’s night stand, in plain sight, knowing full well there are parts of the house where I am blind.
He comes up to me within earshot of his mother, and declaims loudly in his small voice, “Do you know how to speak woman?” I turn to him, pleading with my bloodshot eyes, “Don’t do it, man!” All I could manage was a whispered, “Nooooooo.” He grinned broadly, “You say the opposite of what you mean! Hahahahahahaha…” I turn to look at his mother and shrug with the deflated denial of a man found with women’s underwear in his coat pocket. She let me hang for a while, and let me off by saying, “He saw it on TV.”
Grabulosity is the incessant need to get the attention of the self absorbed parent. For me, I had more of its opposite, confabulosity, which was the self-absorption in response to overly attentive parents. As an only child, I can understand these intersecting emotional forces. It is the incubator of complexity and wisdom. Just ask my sister.
In medical school, our anatomy professor was very grabulous. There is a lot of hissing in the Ivy League. There, hissing, which is done by making a sharp Ssssss sound, like air coming out of a tire, is done to express displeasure, disagreement, and dyspepsia. To our anatomy prof, a lecture without hissing must have been an empty day indeed. He loved goading angry, over-educated women into fits of livid rage by attaching whatever body part we were being lectured on to a slide of a naked and inevitably hot woman. Foot anatomy? Naked chick with foot. Head and neck -always with a bit of breast. It was grabulosity at its finest and it was an epic display of one man raging against a changing world.
Seen in many videos on the web and on the television, an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at GW Bush. It has great meaning in the Arab world, this shoe throwing, but GW didn’t have a clue as he didn’t understand neither Arabic nor the meaning of projectile footwear. He concluded to the audience that it was a size 10 and that dissent was a part of a free democracy -you can hear the screams of the fellow as he was carried out for a beating on various Youtube videos. His grievances were heartfelt and resonated across the Arab countries. 
It’s interesting to me that the method that I use to capture my words has an effect on how and what I write. One of my great interests is using old school methods of pencil and pad. The handbound leather book filled with blank sheets of handmade linen paper is a joy to have around. I scribble in it a few times a year.
This is the sketch I made for a series of paintings I have planned entitled, “Practice Signs for the Post-Apocalyptic Physicians and Surgeons.” This one is for an otolaryngologist. 
My current writing instruments include a Macbook Pro 15 inch running the simple TextEdit that came with it. When I want to create formatted documents, I use Pages (Apple) or NeoOffice (free! port of the OpenOffice suite). Just can’t stand to give another dime to Bill Gates. When I go portable, I use an Acer Aspire One pictured below. It goes 6-7 hrs on a charge, and allows for a fair bit of work, if you don’t mind the cramped keyboard. It is the size of a non-fiction hardback book. The only handicap it has is that it runs on Windows XP. 
I confess that I write to enjoy the process of writing as much as reading the final product. Mastering the many ways you can write -whether scratching a mark on a rock or typing in the cloud on Google Docs, is pleasurable. It’s the same in fishing when you tie your own flies or dig out your own worms, grubs, and crickets. Or when you golf by knocking a rock with a stout tree branch.
I haven’t found a single golf game I could recommend for the iPhone, not a single one. Mario Golf for the Gameboy is the best I’ve seen so far. But, I have found The Game for my iPhone. Every computer I have owned had its Game. My first computer, the Coleco Adam, came with Buck Rogers, but it was the Coleco cartridge game, War Games, from the movie, that managed to blister my thumbs. In college, I had a Fat Mac, with all of 512k and two disk drives, and the Game for it was Dark Castle. Subsequently, in medical school, the Game was Spaceward Ho! for which the authors have ported to OSX -played it on Quadra 900. Funny thing has been that I never got into the 3D shooter games -the closest thing was Turok for the Nintendo 64, both of which I received for free from a friend who was the tech writer for Newsweek. My favorite arcade game in college was a game whose name I don’t remember involving playing as an elf, a dwarf, a wizard, or least favorite -a human. My favorite pinball game was Taxi or Pinbot, whichever was not occupied at the time. The last game that would qualify as The Game was Myth played on a Powerbook G4 that J brought home from work.
Golfism -life is a metaphor for golf 