In The Wash

The house has a new actor playing Marginal Liklihood, and I like him. He's laid-back, composed, tranquil, serene...well, when you boil it down I guess "medicated" is the word you want. Sort of like So Long Stan, whom I also like, you know. I guess if M.L. is drugged and like this, then I don't have to be drugged. I can stop the Seroquel, I started just two days ago.

Stan is from prison too but who is afraid of Stan? Not me! Same goes for this guy.

M.L. has both ears pierced. I thought only women did that. Have times changed? It's like, you get used to seeing guys in ponytails but you don't expect to see one with pigtails.

There's something I'll just tease him about, and then we'll become great joshing friends.

Spring days, at work it feels sinful wishing the hours away. Ten months a year waiting for this time of year. Yesterday I noticed the clock at a quarter after 8. Sheesh, what a long way to go. No such thing as an all of a sudden lunch.

Afterwards, one of the men of the olde press, Earl, confided all about his ongoing marital breakup. I swear , for an hour, it was about as interesting to me as the sound of the stitchers. He said he was using me as a sounding board and near the end I was actually ...well, what could I do?! I was telling him what to do.

He was all agreeable, then it turned out , he thought I meant he should get his five year old daughter into Sleepy Hollow for 72 hours observation.

I said NO NO NO, not HER. Your WIFE! Who plays video games 18 hours a day!

Pause for twenty seconds. "No, no, no, Earl... not your daughter... geez! "

What other harm may I have caused, I don't know. Go see your minister again. Be patient. The truth wills out...

Chill Pill

What proceeds my suddenly remembering to take a pill? These are Klonopin (nerve-soothers) and I take three a day but never like a part of my ablutions, never because I've looked at the clock. So, I always find it half-ways kinda funny when suddenly it hits me: take a pill.

Some thinking makes it so. Some ruminating; maybe if you saw me you'd note I was starting to glower. Those two horizontal lines that knit, are knitted I suppose. Just now I turned on the air conditioner, by the way. A minute before that, I wasn't aware of any need to. It feels much better in here now. The Klonopin takes 45 minutes, or never. I say "never" because there's no click! and I'm calm.

The woman I'm seeing now, we've been through a lot together. I forget what had just happened but I remember well, opening an aspirin bottle and after palming two, naturally offering her a couple, which she took. We laughed. Things frequently go south here, but that is the only time I've shared aspirin with anyone.

Last night I took a quarter dose of a Seroquel. Only afterwards did I recall that's sort of traditional with me, when a new house-mate is voted into our Sober House. (By the way, turning the temperature down here has just improved my mood five-fold and I'm damn near listening to some music and writing to some friends. Maybe family!) Seroquel, I've discovered, not only puts me to sleep but makes me sort of a character the next day. A glad-hander, "how's every little thing, Mrs. Pringlehoffer, my my it's good we're having this rain", and a vocal contrarian, "here here my good fellow I implore you, walk in Mrs. Pringlehoffer's shoes before you pass judgement. That goes for all of you."

I like to be friendly to any new wrecks moving in here, since it takes a lot of willfulness to cover up this bubbling hatred for the humbled, shuffling, criminal alcoholic. We are really some god-awful people--- forgive me Jesus, but Jesus!--- it's hard to fathom but quickly evident that some are sicker than others.

It just occurred to me that I haven't voted "aye" for any newcomer here in six months, and that fellow was deaf and dumb (not mute, dumb...and good naturedly so). Plus he had a gorgeous sister who liked to visit.

I don't want to live alone, I don't want to live alone even as a couple, but I am so tired of this six-man house. They asked me this time: why did I vote no? After a 45 minute interview, what was it that turned me against the fellow?

I said, too many tattoos. If they'd asked me to elaborate I'd have confessed my suspicion that one of his dreams is to have his own personal attack-dog.

I remember now, what reminded me to take my pill. It was the sound of water running, or rather the THOOMP when it was shut off.

I am never myself anymore. Sometimes it feels like I was never myself even once.

Stan for a movie

She woke from her nap, stretching her arms, pressing her chin down to her shirt. Mouthing a clown frown.

Yawn.

She relaxed into that second stage of wakefulness she has: elbows and knees out, up, in close, far flung. Her eyes opened to the near distance and her right hand twirled a lock of her long curly dark hair, patterned on the pillow.

The back of her fingers resting now over her parted lips. She quietly announced: "If I were stayin', I'd be so mad. Oh just furious!"

I was confused. "What do you mean? You're--- not staying?"

"Huh?" Her body came back into shape and she got up on her elbows, laughing suddenly.

"I said, if I were Stan. Stan, upstairs! What the Tramp Steamer did to him!"

"Oh! "

Then she laughed and we both of us bust into a fit of laughing and she said "Stop making fun of me!" and I insisted I wasn't. Anyway, she did laugh first.

"I'm tarred!" she declared, and flopped back down and turned on her side away from me. Tired, which is when the good State of Mississipi comes out, I suppose. Or is that accent from Memphis?

"Geez. Going into Stan's room and unplugging his air freshener??! I mean "?" You know?"

sober but intemperate re: the con man Imus

"Come and get me, copper!" someone wrote about the current P.C. controversy.
____

Now CBS has dropped the old con-man too. I can’t wait for Maureen Dowd, a frequent Imus guest, to write about her attitude toward Imus.
He came on in 96. It was odd for that genre of radio to be on TV, it brought the anger of the Bronx to the mainstream, I thought. And only now, the idiots are acting surprised that it’s sometimes rough language. Satire. Angry politics on there. Some will actually go back and review the record: it’s hardly neccesary. All these media heros like Brokaw, Russert, Dowd, etc. loved Don Imus until this little straw that broke the liberal back.
I think what did Imus in was a gwen ifil op-ed that was in the times on tuesday. He’d years ago referred to her as the clinton white house’s “cleaning woman”. Which, as an NBC correspondent at the time, no doubt she fing was, if you remember how they bent over backwards deflecting or delaying reporting each new clinton scandal.
But Gwen Ifil has been on Mcneil Leher now for five years or so. That is as an exalted position/ chair any news reader could possibly get. To offend her, to draw her voice out in dignified protest, means you are in serious trouble.
I can just imagine what those Leher Hour essayists like Roger Rosensplattt have been saying this week. “It’s time America finally has a discussion about race.” ha!
I think it’s time we finally have a discussion about race hustlers. And if they are going to be so stupid as to review everything Imus has said since 1996, they might review everything Sharpton DID over those years, too.

You should see the video of Imus visiting Sharpton’s camp. Sharpton kept saying something like “i admire your courage coming down here”. And then, most chilling, Sharpton brought his college age daughter out to stand in front of Imus, and basically challenged Imus to call her a “’HO”. While the girl stood there, arms crossed angrily, hips jut. It was like two gangsters, only Imus is a comedian and not a gangster. Sharpton is a thug and nothing else.

it’s been my guilty secret that i usually preferred Imus to cspans washington journal since I got msnbc...

Some people are saying this is terribly portenteous. Things to come. I don’t know about that, right now I will just miss my show... I used to set my clock, if Imus was on I’d get up a little earlier.

dam dam damn!

Asthmatics Beware

I always disapproved of Primatene for cornering the market. Maybe a competitor wouldn't clog up so easily. An obvious improvement would be to sell it without the opaque coating, which prevents your seeing how much medicine you have left. Of course it's scary, the prospect it might get clogged, or ---surprise!--- in the middle of the night you discover it's empty.

But you thank heavens it exists. You can run down to the 24 hour grocery store and buy a new one for $18. I always know where I stand, as far as my supply goes. Or, I thought I knew where I stood until a month ago.

This story is from ABC News, dated January, 2006. That's more than a year ago.

"A U.S. Food and Drug Administration committee voted 11-7 today to recommend that certain over-the-counter asthma inhalers, such as Primatene Mist, be taken off the market over concerns that they contain chlorofluorocarbons that could harm the environment."

Yes, that little puff goes into your lungs, but you read correctly. It's a threat to the ozone layer.

And "certain " OTC inhalers? As far as I know, Primatene is the only OTC inhaler in the U.S.A.

The story continues with a unexpected twist:

"Chlorofluorocarbons have been associated with depleting Earth's ozone layer, which can in turn contribute to global warming and skin cancer. But another issue at hand, according to health experts, is that Primatene Mist may do patients more harm than good.

"The recommendation now means that the FDA will vote whether to keep over-the-counter inhalers on the market, said FDA spokesperson Laura Alvey."

Now in 2007, at Wyeth/Primatine site there is a mysterious statement.


Note the peculiar unwillingness to explain why the product is disappearing. It is "as a result of an interruption in supply from our third party manufacturer."

Today, this story from In-Pharma Technologist.com:

"US legislation to rid the market of CFC-based inhaler propellants will be good news for the environment, not such good news for consumers' pockets, according to a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

With chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) based propellants currently used in albuterol inhalers (one of the most commonly prescribed medications in the country) to be banned after 2008, hydrofluoroalkane (HFA) alternatives are gradually being brought onto the market. "

This is why Primatene is disappearing, apparently. They have not come up with a new formula using the HFA propellant.

So I'm looking who to hate. The environmentalists, or the idealistic doctors who want to force all asthmatics back to specialists.

I've depended on this poison since I was eight years old, and since Primatene is apparently slow converting to an environmentally friendly inhaler, I've lost my emergency back-up for an asthma attack.

I have the new Albuterol (the price has doubled or tripled thanks to the new propellant) and will use the preventative Flovent, but Primatene has always been the ultimate, seemingly guaranteed lifesaver. It's raw, it's dangerous by today's new safety standards, but it's a remedy. Sometimes the only remedy.

Now it is gone, and no one is sure whether it is going to be illegal, or if it's going to be years before it returns, available over the counter.

I've never known life without my "puff" and hardly ever think about my asthma. (Yes I know that may be the problem some doctors are noting, and I should see a pulmonary specialist now and then, to report all is stable and ask "what's new?")

It's like your eyeglasses: you think about how in reality you're quite blind, and it's good to have a backup pair.

In certain ways, we're not fit to live, some of us. Only in modern times would this body have made it to age 45. Now I'm being messed with.

Nobody seems to know us anymore. Where is Dr. Caudell? I imagine he was 70 when I was eight. I remember when he gave it to me he called it a "puff". On a return visit I called it a puff, naturally, and he laughed as if he'd never heard that.

"Oh, like Puff The Magic Dragon?" he asked.

Primatene asthma inhaler

It has its perks

Here, we talk so much of mental illness rather than life.

What's gone haywire, who has lost their reasoning, the unlikely tragic (that in retrospect ___); our forgotten original projects. We exchange ideas about how to cope with the fearsome zealotry of our day and age; we discuss crime, illiteracy, head injuries.

If we talked of life, we would discuss everything that is progressing or unfolding and our strategies for managing. Our conversations and reporting would be about, say, our childrens' daily conundrums. We'd confabulate our own memories of childhood. We'd wonder together at the old encyclopedias and we'd marvel at new science.

We wouldn't wish to escape. No one would want to scream.

Sports. Finance.
In boredom, the weather.

No talk about art or religion, though. Not when we're talking about life. I think those subjects only come up when we're talking about mental illness. (I'm stifling some bitter laughter here.)

Is art only understood or accepted as self-expression now, a way to make shadow puppets to represent our own personal angels and demons that possess us? And is religion now somehow about self-expression too?

Just about everyone will either beg your pardon or, the other way, reassure you that they are spiritual, not religious --- heaven forbid and please understand!

Religion is displaced from life's discourse then, (and may as well be under the subject headings of mental illness). If it were only science which displaced religion, I wouldn't climb to this roof top and pretend I'm asking questions.

I, blogger, was just about to condemn blogger. I halt. I stop short for a moment to think. Forgetting entirely what I was about to write here, now I charge ahead:

To be divorced from generations and generations of tradition and religious belief, in this shudder-inducing isolation, leaves us transparently flimsy, unprepared for earthquakes, fire or flood. Deep, fundemental ignorance is a sub-section of mental illness here.

So I will talk about traditions and religion, some days.

But never mind the calamaties so large they skip generations at a time. They can be denied, their possibility must be denied. Nurse that denial.

I'm talking about day to day conversation.

I wanted to remark that I seem to wholly exclude myself from normal conversations about day to day life, and then it struck me.

"What, blogger?"

It's no wonder I sometimes want to escape, and no wonder that I also prefer to stay. We talk art and religion. Listen to Dylan...

Also, I have been so long in either addiction or recovery, it's best I only listen when people talk about life.

Ma and Za

I took this home, back when, --- on one of those endless, decaying days when I was the drunken uncle, and Ma Kettle had the kids praying for me. At the time I felt merely flattered, or even morosely proud, that a child had decorated my name and this was mine and I could hang it on my wall. Now I am still a shallow man but maybe not so much, almost two years sober. Now it rightly unsettles me, but when I am well, truly recovered and safely sober, I'll have the proper feeling, and look at this with a light-hearted smile.
I wonder at how children are grown over by themselves, almost as if lost or forgotten. This is sweet, this is where our heart- memories come into present day focus and amaze us. It wasn't any dream, and of course children improve, into their own right. I'm fortunate this child may someday realize that she witnessed a metamorphosis, just as I was witnessing her swift and stormy changing.