Muggsy's Brain

Marty Sundvall (12/12/1965 - 5/13/2012) WARNING: Some of this post may be too graphic for some readers. My friend Marty was looking pretty bad back in February. His legs and feet got so swollen he couldn't even tie his shoes and his skin and eyes were taking on a sickly yellow hue. In his words: I had been feeling weird for a couple weeks. In that time my energy was zapped, I was very disoriented, my abdomen and feet started to swell and my eyes were an ugly shade of yellow. Being a stoic Minnesotan, he ignored it and continued life as usual, teaching classes at SCSU and the Minnesota School of Business, and having a few cocktails at the White Horse. But his Saturday and Sunday sojourns to the bar left him feeling sick and he was in bed by early Sunday evening. Monday morning he could barely walk. I got up in time to catch the bus to St Cloud State and opted to tough it out. Well, the bus stop is probably 500 feet from my office and I had to stop 4 times to be...

I am very angry at my brother for his bullshit parroting of the radical right. I hear it all the time from others and it annoys me, but when it comes from my own family, and from someone who, up until now, I had always thought of as being thoughtful it really makes my blood boil. The whole thing started on Facebook , but I am ending it here. One thing I've learned is that you can't change the mind of a fucking sheep. The block quotes are what he said, the others are my responses. Did y'all know that slobamma accused our troops of bombing villages and murdering civilians? He did. He doesn't support the troops, he thinks we're war criminal. Why not check your facts rather than parroting what the radical right tells you? Because he actually SAID it. I don't care if it was "out of context", he SAID it. What he said was this: "We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages...

All my life I've supported my oldest brother. When I was a kid he was my best friend. When he joined the Marines I was proud of him. When he got married I cried tears of joy. When he got divorced I cried again. When he fell into the bottle, I was sad. When he admitted himself into the alcohol and chemical dependency unit of the Veterans Hospital I was thankful. Throughout his sobriety I have been as loving and supportive as I can be. He is my brother. We share the same blood. And I love him. Recent discoveries have brought me to a point of confusion and rocked my view of him. I will not go into them here, but they have brought things to the surface that have been long kept buried. He joined the Marines when he was only 17 years old. He had to get special permission from our parents to do so. He went through basic training and came back strong, lean and tanned, as all Marines do. He had a confidence I'd never seen in him before. He got his MOS (Military Occupational...