… and no antibiotics yet.  Do please excuse any delay in responding to emails.

I’ve been reliving my youth courtesy of YouTube.  There are MTV Unplugged shows, vintage music videos — it’s awfully cool.  YouTube hasn’t been on my radar until recently, but it’s a nice incorporation into my life.  So, for nostalgia, I watched the Stone Temple Pilots MTV Unplugged show, and, as I will be transitioning from “thirty” to “thirtysomething” in a couple of weeks, I thought I would pause and reflect.

Here is “Plush” Unplugged.

Usually YouTube comments are impossibly inane.  I, of course, am not the first person to note this:

But I was oddly heartened by an exchange on the comments page:

Wrestling BC:  It sucks that I have to be in my 20s during this shitty decade.  I would gladly give away anything good about this time period … which is basically only the advancements in technology, if it meant I could go back in time an see these guys and others in their prime.

Calicsta:  I feel just the same.  I would give everything to be a part of this x-generation.

Years ago, I saw a defense of people of my generation.  The argument went like this: “We might not understand Woodstock, The British Invasion, free love, LSD.  But there’s plenty of stuff Boomers don’t know about: Tina Yothers, TrapperKeepers, etc.”

And I thought: “Yeah.  That’s not a very good trade.”

But that, of course, is not the real legacy of “Generation X”.

When “Generation Y” was first introduced some years back — I first encountered it in maybe 1995 — I thought it was kind of odd.  It bins my brother and me into different generations.  I’m at the tail-end of Gen X, he’s at the head of the subsequent generation, and that seemed somewhat ludicrous to me, even though it was reassuring to a teenager to be told there was a fundamental generational gap between you and your younger brother.

I was born in 1978.  I went to college when I was 16, which put my classmates as 1976ers, and the upperclassmen more solidly into Gen X.  Thirty is young to be reminiscing, but when I started college, we were one of the first classes to have email.  We used pine on a DEC Alpha.  Google?  Hell, there was no Altavista.  No one had heard of Amazon.com.  Yahoo! was run by a staff of volunteers.  Internet Explorer was but a gleam in a predatory company’s eye — I remember transitioning from Mosaic to Netscape Navigator.  There were people sincerely wondering whether “The Internet” was better than AOL.  Cell phones?  Blackberries?  Gah.  But, no, that’s not the biggest generational gap, either.

I graduated college in 1999.  My brother started college in — help, Dave?  2000?  I was a working adult when 9/11 occurred.  High school and college had been spent under Clinton, when American thought that a scandal was a blow job in the Oval Office.  My brother — Generation Y, remember — was 19 when the Towers collapsed.  His college days were drenched in Bush, in the worry of international terrorism, in illegal wars and unlawful presidencies and all the scary, scary shit that will take well into Generation Z++ to undo.  And, of course, there’s instant messaging.  There’s that.

So the X/Y division seemed oddly … prescient.  If it wasn’t real at the beginning, it sure as hell was true when the inhabitants became adults.  Dave, agree?

Back to music.  I’ve wondered over the years if this weren’t generational bigotry, but my first year as a teenager, here is a partial list of albums that were released:

• Nirvana “Nevermind”
• Pearl Jam “Ten”
• Guns ‘n’ Roses, “Use Your Illusion I” and “Use Your Illusion II”
• Metallica, “Black Album”
• REM, “Out of Time”
• Queensrÿche, “Empire”
• Tori Amos, “Little Earthquakes”

That’s.  Partial.  I’ve tried to convince myself that anyone’s albums when they were 13 would seem as seminal, but, no, sorry.  This was different.  These were seminal.  And — oddly, utterly oddly — grunge was a fad, which brought celebrities with bipolar disorder into public consciousness more than at any time since, maybe, Chopin.

Rant, here.  If you look back on grunge as a fad: bless you eternally.  For real.  You are truly blessed.  I’m bipolar.  I have been for lots of years — as usual, symptoms showed up when I was a teenager, years before it was diagnosed.  If you listen to Nirvana’s “Lithium” and think, “cool bassline!” rather than “wow, Kurt, you fucking nailed what being on lithium is like”, seriously — utterly seriously — good for you.  It really isn’t our fault that people with severe dopamine disregulation problems find that strong opiates work better to make us functional than anything that’s been approved by the FDA for treatment.  If you listen to Stone Temple Pilots’ “Atlanta” and it doesn’t immediately occur to you that Scott has nailed what trying to stop opiates as a bipolar feels like — well, I’ve said it.  Bless you.  It’s a blessed accident that I didn’t become a heroin addict, and, frankly, it’s still something I have to be super-careful to not do.

I don’t think that intrusion of mental illness into popular culture has really been duplicated.  Do people with rage disorders think, “wow, nu-metal legitimizes us”?  Do despicable homophobes think Eminem (gods, that man is talented, I just wish I didn’t have to delouse after The Eminem Show) stands up for them?  Well, maybe.  I don’t really know.

So, I’m switching from 30 to 31.  I just had my ten-year college reunion.  I’ve been married, and been divorced.  I watch the Unplugged shows and think, “Holy shit, I’m older than all of these guys, and, holy shit, I used to think their hair was long” (mine has now passed the middle of my back again).  And — yes — I still look in the mirror in the morning, with somewhat-ratty long curly brown hair, jeans, a rock band t-shirt, and an open flannel, and think, “Hey, I look good”.

Hey, do you know what?  I think I do.  I may be stuck back in 1991.  But, seriously, there are worse times be stuck.  Grunge forever.  Better bipolar medications now.  I’ll shout both from the rooftops.  I hope you’ll join me.

I’m really sick right now.  Vedder Tuesday and the 15th of the Month Portfolio will continue, but I’m just too exhausted right now.  Sorry.

» Disability Doc

I just went to my state-appointed disability doctor today.  Different one from last time.  This doctor actually seemed to care.

The nurse had taken my blood pressure.  It was high.  Without health insurance I have been unable to afford medication out-of-pocket.  The doctor went about explaining it to me:

Doc:  Your blood pressure is very high.  It should be [switch to kindergarten teacher voice] One.  Thir.  Tee.  Oh.  Ver.  Nine.  Tee.  Or lower.

And I’m thinking, What the fuck, doc?  I was in an on-the-job accident, I didn’t have my frontal lobe removed.  Quick, I thought.  I need a shibboleth.

Joshua:  It’s the diastolic that’s especially bothering me about that.

And a light goes on behind her eyes.  Gooooood doctor, I think.  Maybe we can talk like adults now.

» A Levenshtein Edit Distance of “maybe pay attention to the computer”

I was pretty sure that I was going to spell “shibboleth” and “diastolic” correctly in that previous sentence.  And I seemed to.  So I tried appending a ‘q’ to the end of each, and Firefox recognized the modifications as errors.  I have to do this because of an apparent bug in Firefox in which the spell-checker will sometimes turn off without warning, leaving me wondering if there are false negatives.  Which leads me to a story that:

My ex-wife was/is one of the worst spellers I have ever met.  She makes my father look like the O.E.D.  When she was first telling me where her parents live, and where [Redacted.  Gawd.  The casual reader has no idea how much shit I redact -- how much shit I unilaterally redact, as far as blogs go -- about the divorce.  I believe that discretion is the better part of valor, but I can't even allude to the fact that I'm being discreet without losing valor.  So I'm going to spend one whuffie on this rather innocuous story that I'd probably tell about anyone, and one more on this very allusion to valor.  If that's enough to send you on your way, happy trails.  Nine fucking years.  Aargh.]

Anyway.  She emailed me her parents’ address, and I was going to drive down there with my mother.  My mother was looking up directions on Mapquest.  I read the address from my email, and said “The street is ‘Vangard’.  Without a ‘u’.”  Good thing for fuzzy matches.  The street is, of course, ‘Vanguard’.

So at one point in our marriage, Jenn had left a printout for work on the coffee table and my eyes caught a few words moving past it.  There was a glaring typo.  I said, as meekly as I could, “Hey, do you want me to edit this for typos?”  She said “yes”.

So I’m reading this document, and it’s just riddled with misspelled words.  So I fix them with a pen.  And, to help, I tell her, “There’s a setting you can turn on in Microsoft Word so that it underlines typos in red as you type them.”

And she says, “Oh, it’s on, the computer is just wrong a lot of the time.”

Thank whatever that she caught the typo on the tattoo artist’s essay for her second (and fucking huge) tattoo with a line from a friend’s poem surrounding it.  She didn’t let me copy-edit that.

OK, maybe that was more than one whuffie.  I don’t care.

» Macintrash

I’m typing this — once again — one one of my Mom’s MacBooks.  Firefox had slowed to a crawl.  I tried quitting it to restart it, but, no, you apparently can’t restart an application through the application menu if it’s stopped responding.  But I also couldn’t do anything else on the system; full freeze.  So I hard-power-cycled it (thank you, Steve, that the OS did not override that), the computer restarted, and: Firefox is gone from the quick-launch menu!  I thought I was missing it but, no, it just wasn’t there.  Then I realized I was being foolish: of course when an application crashes you should remove the ability to restart it quickly it in the future.  Doing otherwise would be ludicrous.

(Yes, I know I’m typing this on that very Mac.  To avoid hypocrisy — as far as can be avoided after this post — I’m turning it off as soon as I hit “Publish”.)

(And yes, I know, I’m in a terrible mood.  Sorry.)

Offered to me:

My name is Joshua McGee.  I am a 30-year-old disabled American citizen.  And I do not have health insurance.

Many of you know me, online or offline.  Unless you found this page through a keyword search, you may be a Facebook friend or a Twitter follower.  You may have found me through a list of links for a topic that interests you, or through a link from the site of someone you respect.  You may have subscribed to the site because you have enjoyed or been moved by something I have written in the last nine years.

I have chronic conditions, many accident-induced, that are disabling.  Maintenance prescriptions for me, if I were paying cash, would cost $1,000 per month.  If a few of these were to become unavailable to me, I would likely die.  As it is, I am unable to afford some prescriptions, and every day the lack of these is contributing to a likely early death for me.  One way I would become ineligible for county-subsidized prescriptions would be if I were healthy enough to go back to work, and did.  If the job were not to have excellent benefits, $12,000/year of my income would be zapped away by the medicines I would have to pay for.

But that will likely not happen.  My accident injuries are crippling, and surgeries to repair them will cost at least $25,000, and probably more.  I will not be able to afford this.  Until I receive these surgeries, I will remain disabled.  This means that without major health care reform I will probably be disabled for the rest of my life.

I am not a crack-head.  I am not lazy.  I am not ignorant.  I have a college degree.  My standardized test scores are well past the 99th percentile.  I paid my taxes for over a decade at a job paying much more than the national average.  I became disabled on the job in a fashion that could happen to you.  To you.  I cannot qualify for meaningful commercial health insurance because of preexisting conditions.

When you hear or read arguments that ignore the people who would be helped by health care reform, picture me.  When politicians more-or-less-directly disparage those who do not have health care coverage already, picture me.  When a rich person worries that his standard of care will go down if others are helped, he is talking about me.  Me.

I am one uninsured American.  There are millions more who do not live in counties as helpful as Los Angeles.  There are millions more who cannot receive necessary treatments to save their teeth, their health, their well-being.  Their lives.

We are not anonymous.  We have names, lives, families, hopes, and dreams.  We all have stories.  There are people who love us, and we love other people.  We are ourselves people.  Real people, real citizens.  Real Americans.  Keep this at the front of your mind.  Picture me.

Please contact your Senator and your Representative.  Please pass on the email, or retweet, or thumbs-up, or Digg, or social-bookmark, or whatever to get this out there.  Please argue with people who would prevent me from receiving medical treatment.  Please stand up for people’s rights.

My name is Joshua McGee.  I am a 30-year-old disabled American citizen.  And I do not have health insurance.

From Paul Bergner’s review of The Complete German Commission E Monographs: Therapeutic Guide to Herbal Medicines:

The arcane rules and regulations of the commission have led to a book with bizarre contradictions and inconsistencies.  Echinacea purpurea is approved for use.  Echinacea angustifolia, the stronger herb in practice is not approved.  To make matters more confusing, although Echiancea angustifolia is not approved, it is listed as contraindicated in autoimmune diseases because it might aggravate them.  Which is it?  Either it is an ineffective medicine or it is safe, it can’t be both.

Which is it?  Um … that it’s … not … safe?  E. angustifolia is not approved and … um … they list it as contraindicated in autoimmune disease?

The only way I can make sense of this is if Bergner thinks that by listing it as being contraindicated with patients with autoimmune diseases, that it’s OK for every other patient.  Compare a possible statement of “hemlock is contraindicated in patients with liver problems” or “cocaine is contraindicated in patients with heart arrhythmia”; it may be an especially bad idea for those people, but probably still not a good idea for everyone else.

This person is apparently “Editor, Medical Herbalism journal”, according to the Amazon profile.  I think I’ll go ahead and skip that publication.

Applying an antibiotic ointment just now to a burn on my abdomen that scabbed over, broke open, and started to bleed profusely (yeah, ouch), I was reminded of a Neosporin TV ad from some (many) years ago.  It showed a woman’s index finger, apparently the same finger, on each side of the screen.  There was a similar cut on the fingers in both frames: on the left, it was almost healed, and on the right, it was infected.  The voiceover or caption said something like “after five days, the cut with the Neosporin healed much more quickly.”

OK, so, a couple of options.  One is that they faked it: that the cuts were clever bits of makeup, and, therefore, clever bits of lying.  But otherwise?  Think about the call sent out to talent agents, which would have to be something like this:

Needed: Adult female hand model.  We will cut the model’s finger, apply an ointment, then photograph it five days later.  We will wait for the wound to completely heal, then we will cut the model’s finger again, apply no ointment, allow it to get infected, and then photograph that wound.

What was going on?

You know what’s great?  25 year old Highland Park Single Malt Scotch.

You know what I haven’t had in a trillion years?  25 year old Highland Park Single Malt Scotch.

Do you know why Highland Park 25 is so expensive?  Lots and lots (and lots) of the spirit evaporates from the casks, leaving less ethanol (== money) in the cask.  This, in a fanciful turn of phrase, is called “The Angels’ Share”.

Do you know what I want those angels to do for me?  Sing me to my rest.

Do you know why?  Six mm disc herniation at L5/S1 and impossible-to-fill prescriptions.

See you on the flipside…

I remember when it used to not be a big deal to fall.  Ah, nostalgia!

Combine equal parts: can of shaving cream lying on side in doorway; two stairsteps down to ground; bare feet.  Step until oh, fuuuuuuuuuck.

View Larger Map

(Email subscribers, be sure to visit the site.)

In possibly related news, about halfway through the walk until about two hours after my return home was the first time I wasn’t thinking about a shot of Dilaudid in I-don’t-know-how-long.  A certain course of action suggests itself.

A former colleague of mine had once written an expert program to help physicians diagnose different sleep disorders.  He thought the coolest (his word) occurred most frequently in otherwise healthy young men from Southeast Asia.  I don’t remember the name, but by his description, it is a degenerative neurological condition in which the sleep center of the brain is slowly destroyed.  One gets progressively more severe insomnia until the sleep center is gone, then is incapable of sleeping and dies (from lack of sleep) within a week.

The only sleep disorder I’ve found in Google that is correlated with being a young Southeast Asian man is SUNDS, but the details don’t match up.

SUNDS, though: “Sudden unexpected nocturnal death syndrome”.  That has been associated with an extension of the heart’s QT interval.  And I’m on medication that can cause lengthening of the QT interval, such that I have to have regular EKGs.

So yeah, panicked insomnia is fun.  I think, “Oh my God.  I am never going to be able to sleep, and I’m going to die.”  Completely rational, right?

Thought so.

I just knew that there had to be another reason for resenting being Southeast Asian — something other than Henry Kissinger alone.

Think the United States will start supporting the ICC when that fuck dies?

Thought not.

Wikipedia’s list of war crimes.  I think they forgot to list one of the possible crimes against peace: WAR.  Damn.  Am I missing something?  Isn’t war by definition a crime against peace?

Yeah, yeah, blah blah blah, aggression, treaties, blah blah.  Can a country (the U.S., to pick one at random) really sidestep this by claiming that another nation (pick one) is trying to weaponize a particular metal?  A metal of which the first nation has already weaponized and deployed approximately 1.86 trillion times as much?  And actually fucking used those weapons on Real Live People?

I did finally get to sleep yesterday, and slept my normal 3.5 hours.  You know how you can cut your foot on a piece of broken glass, and only then realize just how many steps you take in a day? Insomnia is like that.  We tend to take sleep absolutely for granted, like breathing.  And then we forget how to.  Fun stuff.

So, that was a fun night of soul-crushing insomnia.  As opposed to sole-crushing, which are already flat, whether you’re an icthyologist or a podiatrist.

I had begged for four more hours of sleep to augment the 3.5 hours I had been getting.  Like the old joke about the fortunate Russian balloonist, something got mangled in the transmission, and I actually got 4 fewer hours of sleep.

Yes, I had a night of -0.5 hours of sleep.  Or, as my Pentium claims, -0.499838 hours, which is apparently close enough for non-scientists.

As you can see, negative sleep leaves me in a state in which my only means of conversation is bad jokes (”Did you hear the one about the priest, the rabbi, and the dude wearing lederhosen?  You see, the dude wearing lederhosen thought the golfer thought himself to be Arnold Palmer.  He absolutely had no grapes, though, which is funny because horses named Thorndike can’t talk.”)

Successively blunter mechanisms — we are now at “cinder blocks” — have been wished for to pound my brain into submission.

Sigh.  Which is actually more characters in HTML (<b><i>Sigh</i></b>) than ””Sigh””, but is paradoxically much easier to remember.  I don’t want to hack Wordpress right now to give me four actual straight single quotes around that, so please use your imagination.

A certain patient Mississippi Penguin will wonder whether I succeeded in finding legal papers in the allotted interval.  The answer is, “No, that would be absurdly responsible.”

””Sigh””.  That’s “double-secret-bold-italic”.

Have I gotten a joke in for all my subscribers?  Answer: No, not close.

Quick, what’s the difference between a duck!?  Answer: Mohammad Chung.

III.I.72, which is entirely different from the cryptic percentage at the bottom of my sidebar that has been so far incomprehensible to readers, although if no one else, Karina should get it.  Entirely different.

Behold sentence fragments. Another.  Good device.  Will be used more later.

As Alan Ruck would say after being handed the phone: “Oh, darn….”

♪I had negative sleep, negative sleep, negative sleep, and I’m profoundly not stoned.♪

Shame on your browser if you see something different (and uglier) than the musical notes above.

Check the Passing the Torch post for what is actually more intelligent writing than this.  Give me four more hours: I’m going for Outlaw’s record, which I will rehabilitate with a eulogy for a dead hamster.  A mixed-race hamster.

Maybe it’s time for the serious stuff: a memorized Eddie Izzard DVD.

(My guess: the Russian balloonist is bothering you most.  Should we have a contest to determine who is most conversant in bad jokes?  The answer is not found in Mission: Impossible, but it’s worth entering anyway, as I’ll snail mail something bizarre from my apartment to the winner.  Honorable mention [and imaginary prize] to the person who successfully counts the number of obscure references in this post.)

Three days ago I cut myself on a clean, dry, stainless-steel knife.  The wound was on the deeper side of superficial.  I have been applying Neosporin several times per day, and there is no obvious sign of infection.

I have been experiencing moderate to severe joint pain in my left jaw joint for 24 hours.  I also have sensitivity along the vein adjacent to the cut, reminiscent of post-surgical vasculitis I once had.

I believe my last tetanus booster was no more than six years ago, when I was already an adult.  I expect that I have a minor cut and that I’ve been clenching my jaw due to qvibepr-related stress and that the other pain is unrelated.  But a part of me is worried.

I currently have no health insurance.

Thoughts?

So, I’ve kicked pain meds for the second time in my life.  This time was much, much harder than last time.

I did it by myself, with pretty much everyone I know on vacation or otherwise out of town.  I was dosing with Klonopin to keep from seizing, and I made it through.  This time, I went from 60 – 100 mg Oxycodone a day to zero.  I thought going down to 5 mg would be the hard part.  Turns out the hard part is 5 mg to zero.

Scary stuff.  And no fun at all.  Weird.  You would think that writhing in agony on your couch in cold sweats in an air conditioned studio apartment would be enjoyable.  But no, it’s not.

I have a feeling that in, oh, say, fifty years, we will look back at opiates (especially long-term) for pain control as we do leeches and bloodletting.  But it’s not fifty years hence, and we don’t, and doctors still prescribe them.

I had tickets to three successive nights of Eddie Izzard at the Kodak Theatre.  On the first day I had tickets, I stopped the pain meds.  I couldn’t drag myself to the bus to go see him on the subsequent nights, and he’s my fave.

So I’m in an interesting position, should I be in another major accident.  If I am taken by ambulance to the hospital, what then?  Do I tell them, “Hold the Dilaudid, I’m a former addict”?  What will they give me?  Naprosyn?

Anyway.  Yeah, I hurt less now that I’m off the pain meds.  I guess that my body would signal pain as a trigger to take more pills.  I’m not peachy-keen yet.  I’m not ready to go back to work yet.  But I’m better.  Thinking more clearly, more energy, alert enough to notice that my apartment is really horribly messy.

Sleep is still hard.  Regular readers know all the troubles I’ve had with sleep anyway, but sleep once one is off of Oxycodone is well-nigh impossible.  So I’m keeping weird hours, napping when I can, trying my best — trying my best — trying my best.  I have some friends in Australia.  That helps.

So, kids?  Don’t fuck around with Oxycodone, OK?  I’m not some stoner loser here.  I’m a college grad, computer wizard, 148 IQ, 99+ percentile mega man.  I’ve never even smoked a joint.  And these prescribed meds got me.  OK?  Think you’re too smart to get addicted?  Think again.  A brain is a brain, and a reward center is a reward center, and addiction has nothing to do with intelligence.

Seriously.  Avoid.

That is all.

Be well.

I’m going to the hospital tonight, after doctor’s orders.  I have a wound on my injury site, and they are worried about a bacterial infection tracking down to my dura.  I’ll check my email on my T-Mobile MDA (HTC Wizard).  If you want and don’t have it, email for my phone number or mobile email address.

I don’t believe in prayer, cosmic vibrations, or wishable luck, but if there is some action that would help you feel like you’re doing something, please go ahead and do it.  You have my blessing, and my thanks.  No sacrificing of animals, please.

My shoe is off, my foot is cold
I have a bird I like to hold
My phone is off, in bed I've rolled
And now my story is all told

I got the pharmacy troubles straightened out, and I’m feeling much better, so I deleted the last post.  I should be relatively human again.  I get to see Niall on the weekend.  I’m still in constant, terrible pain, and found out I will probably need spinal surgery, but I’m better.

Thanks, everyone.  I should be back to posting now.

There’s an eBay lot that I really, really want.  The auction closes in less than one hour (4:40 a.m. PDT is probably some sensible time in Johannesburg, where the seller resides), and the bidding is at 14% of my high bid.  I would love to get this lot for 14% of my high bid.

I can’t sleep, as you can probably tell, so I’ve been fiddling (they call it a “one tweak loop” in computerese) with the sidebar.  Let me know what you think — if you can tell the difference.

Firefox did not complain about the word “computerese”.  Wow.

Sunday, I lay down in the early afternoon, about 2 p.m.  I wake up, and look for about five minutes for my tiny, hard-to-find glasses.  I look at my phone, which said it had updated itself for DST.  It said 4:30.  I went to my computer.  It said 5:30.  Neither made sense, as it was dark outside.

I went to time.gov (bookmark that one) and found out it was 5:30 — the following morning.  So I slept for about 15.5 hours.

Kind of scary — weird things happen when you are sick — but a good way to accumulate shows on your DVR.  I started watching a Law & Order: CI episode I had previously given up on.  It’s a Logan episode, starring David Cross and, they said, Kristy Swanson.

I like David Cross.  I like his writing, I like his stand-up, I like his insight.  But I think it’s fair to say that he has no dramatic chops.  If we find out he’s the killer and has been lying about everything during the episode, it may be better, because the fact that I don’t believe a single one of his motivations could be viewed as a choice.  The episode is dreadful.  And Kristy Swanson?  Kept looking for her.  Beautiful, beautiful Kristy Swanson from when I was in high school.  Here is how I remember her:

Here are three more-or-less NSFW images.  SFFD fans, remember to check back when you are home.

Finally found her: she’s playing a bottle-blond floozy.  A latter-day Marilyn Monroe, a comparison they keep making more and more explicit.  And she’s — how to put this gently? — obese.  Not Monroe-by-today’s-standards-big, but obese.  Maybe some of it is a fat suit, and she certainly looks worse because of the Playboy-style caked-on makeup and garish lipstick, but her upper arms looks like they weigh as much as she used to in total.  IMDB reports she’s almost 40, now.

Really unfortunate.  I’m speaking as someone who has put on 120 pounds (British: 8 1⁄2 stone; Bushman: very much; elsewhere: 54 kg) in the last ten years, so I know this can happen, and I know what I’m talking about.  But this is really, really unfortunate.

Episode is half over.  I’m going to go drag myself back and try to finish it this time.

I am ill.  I am under the weather.  I am out of sorts.  I am avec cold.

I am sick as a dog.  And I am miserable.

I am having trouble breathing, have post-nasal drip, headaches, cough, pre-cankerous blooms inside my mouth (which are going to get much worse before they get any better), massive allergic symptoms, whole body ache (different from normal), fever,  and — get this — pronounced knee and thigh pain.

Niall has a constellation of symptoms strongly correlating to mine, including the leg pain, bizarrely.

We each started showing symptoms on the same day: two days ago, on Wednesday.  We had spent the preceding weekend together.  There is no solid proof of who infected whom, but assuming it was one of us to the other of us, and given that I spend my days immersed in high-tech culture while he spends his days immersed in germ culture, it is not difficult to surmise who is more prone to rhinovirus and influenza, and who is more prone to Michaelangelo and Concept.

I’m actually sick enough that I’ve asked Jenn to keep Niall with her over the weekend.  There’s no way I can be single parent and keep up with Niall this weekend feeling like this.

If I were not already disabled, I would have taken today off work.

Blech.  Ouch.  Blech.

I really hate insomnia, but never more than when it promises to decrease the joy I can have with my son the next day.  Er, later this day.  In about two hours.

Short sleep last night, no nap, a couple glasses of wine — I thought I was sitting pretty for a long winter’s nap.  But I have barely blinked.

If anyone has been calling me, by the way, I can’t answer it.  My phone was lost, then disabled as a security precaution, a replacement was ordered, the passive voice was used, and then the missing phone was discovered — which now belongs to the insurance company.  I’m wondering exactly how many days I should wait before someone miraculously “returns my missing phone” to me, to send it to the insurance company, so I won’t look like a total wanker.

I’m not hurting too badly right now.  I can probably take some more ibuprofen for the mild discomfort.  But I really wish I could just lie down and become unconscious.  Restfully, REMmingly, unconscious.  I’m writing train-of-thought right now, and hoping it will tire me so that I can go and collapse into bed.  I’m not actually alert enough to do anything really thought-intensive, like code or write cogently, just alert enough to stay awake.

Thanks to everyone for your support of late.  It’s much needed, and much appreciated.  So much so, that you can consider this a personal letter to you.

I’ll even sign it,

- Joshua

I refilled my ten-day pain med prescription today, exactly (almost to the minute) ten days after my last one.  For ten days I get 120 pills.  I finished my course with one pill left.  This may seem like nothing, but to me, it’s a Big Deal^®.

I also gave in and bought an adjustable cane.  My sciatica⁄pride ratio reached the tipping point.  Between that and the retro cap I wear (which looks vintage, and covers my hair color), I look like a (huge) old man.

OK, let’s run down my week so far:

1. Wife left me and took Niall (my fault)
2. Got dropped from the interview process of the job for which I was applying (my fault, essentially)
3. Worker’s Comp claim was denied, so I will have to sue the WC insurance company (not my fault)
4. Ditzy HMO doctor whom I saw twice while out of work due to work-related injury claims I never told her I was off work, and refuses to sign my disability slip (fuckin’ not my fault)
5. Paid over $100 (that I didn’t have until friends opened their wallets) to file my taxes (my choice)
6. Ran out of meds (that said ditzy doctor forgot to refill) and for which I don’t have insurance anyway (not my fuckin’ fault)

So, today:

7. Computer crashes (shit happens)

You’d think with my whole professional and educational life spent living at the whims of computer hardware, I would have a top-of-the-line backup system in place.  You’d be wrong.

I fixed it.  The computer, and recovered the data.  It took some effort, but I did it.  I’m doing a full backup tonight.

Next step would pretty much have to be “blindness”, right?  I’d say “death”, but that’s not always seeming like such a bad alternative this week.

I have a drinking problem.  A literal, mechanical drinking problem.  I choke on any beverage I try to imbibe.

It hasn’t always been this way.  I used to be able to drink a glass of water without drowning.  But now, probably about half the time, I’ll end up in a wheezy coughing and choking fit as the liquid tries to go down my trachea.

I don’t know what’s changed.  A year and a half ago, I thought this would be fixed by my Chiari decompression surgery.  It wasn’t.  I still cannot drink properly.  It might be weight-related — that’s my best guess at the moment.

There are all sorts of programs and support groups for people with alcohol dependency.  There are almost none for actual drinking problems.  So I guess I’m going to have to deal with this myself.  Ideas, other than “Drink more slowly”?

I had a fantastically real-seeming dream about publishing a book and having it printed on the most luxurious paper I’ve ever felt.  It was printed on the processed fibrous bark of some bush that doesn’t actually exist.  The paper was dense, smooth, almost velour-textured.  It gave crystal-clear impressions to the ink deposited on it, and was luxurious to fan through.  It was almost warm to the touch, naturally dyed (kind of taupe-colored), and exceedingly sexy.

This is one of the few multi-sensual dreams I’ve experienced, and the first exceedingly tactile, almost erotic, dream I can recall that did not involve strategic female fat deposits.  In other words: I had a booby dream about paper.

And now I’m on a search for ultrafine papers.  I use 28 lb. Crane’s Crest cotton paper in my regular correspondence.  This dream paper made that feel like 300-grit sandpaper.  Pointers?

It’s Saturday.  I was driving around town around noon trying to find a place that could fill a prescription, and I felt like crap.  I began a mental checklist of whether I had forgotten anything.

I got to “food”, and I thought about the last time I’d eaten.  It wasn’t Saturday.  It wasn’t Friday.  It wasn’t Thursday.  It was some time before then.  I think I’ve had some wine and energy drinks in the interim.

I told my mother the last time I’d eaten, who asked, reasonably, “Why are you doing this to yourself?”

I responded, “I’m not doing it on purpose, I’m just not remembering to eat.”

“Sounds like your meds need adjusting,” she answered.

Niall has been sick with a bad cold.  I took him to the doctor on Friday.  He was absolutely perfect, with tea party manners.

Dramatis Personae:
N: Niall
Dr: Pediatrician
J: Joshua

(Doctor enters)

N:  I am here today because I have a cold.  Is this the right doctor for a cold?

Dr:  Yes, this is the right doctor.  I’m Dr. Musavelar.

N:  My name is Niall.  That’s spelled N-I-A-L-L.  How is your name spelled?

Dr:  You can call me “Sadah” [ph].  That’s spelled S-A-D-A-T.  (Holds light up:)  Do you know what this is?

N: ???

J:  Remember, it’s to look in your ears.

Dr: May I look in your ears?

N: (Timidly) OK.  (Clenches face, squeezes eyes shut, and grits his teeth, but remains absolutely still.)

OK, precious enough?  On the ride home, he saw a sign that said “Dentistry” (he’s four.)

N:  Daddy, do you know what a dentist is?

J:  What is it?

N:  A dentist is a kind of doctor who counts your teeth.

He has signs of the early onset of pneumonia in his right lung, BTW.  If you post here, I’ll pass on your best wishes.

Are you aware that hypergraphia is a symptom of clinical mania?

I’m pretty much going to be grouchy like this all day.  I never slept for more than ten minutes at a time last night, and not at all until after 7 a.m.