Sculpin

Ye gods, is this ever one hell of a flu season.

Josh came home from work early on Wednesday, dazed and exhausted. I paid the cab driver and packed him off to bed. It was an amazing thing to see. He’d overheat in bed, then try to stand up for an exciting trip to the bathroom (so far away!) and immediately his body temperature would plummet and he’d shake visibly. Plus the joint aches were driving him crazy. At one point he was using a cane to get to the bathroom, just for a little extra stability, and I’m pretty sure he would not have turned down a Zimmer frame.

“This is what it’s going to be like when I’m 80, only all the time,” he kept saying.

“No, it’s not,” I kept replying. “We’re going to be tough. Like those old birdwatchers at the Audubon Society. We’re going to start taking walks every evening, and by the time we’re 80, we’re going to be unstoppable.”

“Grmph.”

By Thursday, he seemed to be on the mend, and then Friday more or less kicked him in the head. Friday night his temperature started spiking fast, from 99.2 to first 102.8 and then a bit over 103. He was starting to get pretty well cognitively addled. I decided that we were going to the ER, figuring that if his temperature had kept rising the way it’d been rising, he could be well over 104, maybe close to 105 by the time we got him in to see anybody. I felt like something of a Nervous Nellie, but it bothered me that he had a very stiff neck, headache, and sudden fever spike; I couldn’t help thinking of the kid I knew in college who got bacterial meningitis and didn’t get it treated with appropriate swiftness. (The kid lived, but I understand he’s stone deaf now.) I called Josh’s mom, who lives half a mile away, and away we went.

Well, Josh’s temperature dropped on the way to the ER. Blood tests were run, strep cultures were collected, and the verdict is that he’s got something viral. About what you’d expect: rest and fluids. (”Oh, she’s keeping me hydrated,” Josh said to the doctor. And I am. He’s starting to protest that his back teeth are swimming.) The ER staff was awesome and, it seemed, generally sane and well-balanced, so this did not much resemble any other trip to the ER I’ve ever taken.

Josh is tottering around the house today — he even managed to walk up and down the block once, though he regretted it afterward. It’s such a beautiful day, and I know he’s got a good case of cabin fever. Oh well. No bike riding for Josh today. Only rest and fluids, fluids and rest.

Personally, I’m wiped. I was pretty wiped anyway from getting up early to go to the UW. “There’s not a whole lot of slack in the system here,” I thought a few days ago, and here I am feeling that non-slack. I sure as hell hope I don’t get this bug, and if I do, I hope it’ll hold off a few days until I’m done with this stint as a standardized patient. Gah. In addition to taking care of Josh, I’m trying to get the house and garden in order so that I can be sick for a week without having the full-on Den of Filth and Plague experience. I think we’re all ready for this to be over.

I’d never seen Josh this sick before. Yow.

The box where the mail to sculpin.com lives is the same one that some of you know as eldorado.elsewhere.org, and it is toast. Right now I hear Josh muttering direly to himself in the other room as a hard-drive makes a sort of fluttery, stuttery, high-pitched grinding noise. It doesn’t sound good. Characteristically, I predict doom.

So, if by chance you want to reach me, my gmail username is eclarios. Mail at sculpin has been so overwhelmed by spam anyway that it’s probably better to reach me there all ’round.

Catenoid is my new hero.

Paul Beard’s post about “free downloads” (they’re not) reminded me of my favorite story about my father. Once, I’m told, an encyclopedia salesman came to the door, promotional item in hand. (They roamed the earth with the dinosaurs.) My father answered, and the first thing the guy said was, “I have a free gift for you!” as he held out a book.

“Thank you!” said my father, and he took the book and closed the door. The salesman pounded on it, yelling. My father calmly took the opportunity to give the man an education about the words “free” and “gift”. The salesman quit yelling, but my father kept explaining rationally and relentlessly. He could explain at you until you wanted to gnaw off an arm to get free.

At last the salesman asked humbly, “May I have my book back? It’s my only copy.”

“Yes, you may,” my father said munificently, and he opened the door and gave back the book. The exhausted salesman thanked him and left.

I learned a few things from this, not least of which is to always keep a door between me and the other person if I try a stunt like that.

On the day after Christmas, a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses showed up at my door and were swiftly sent on their way. What I wonder is this: is December 26th the most successful proselytizing day of the year for Jehovah’s Witnesses? Say you have yet another lousy Christmas with vile, backstabbing relatives and their snotty little children, neglecting none of the family’s ritual humiliations of the season. Fa la la. Then the very next day the Jehovah’s Witnesses show up on your porch. You can hardly help but think, “Hey. Huh. On the one hand… but on the other hand, I’d never have to go through that Christmas shit again.” Seriously, I wonder if there’s a spike there.

Today’s crabbiness is brought to you by the fact that the furnace still doesn’t work. Maybe tomorrow. The romance of heating with wood is somewhat overstated. And it is still too dark out there. But I’m reading all of Transmetropolitan. You know, by Warren “Eat Bear Cocks In Hell, Godboy” Ellis. It never fails to cheer me.

Hey, Canyonwren, remember this sketch?

That was fifteen years ago. Yikes.

No more only children! I, too, have known more than one man who is an only child, and the essential selfishness is insurmountable. They can’t help it, it’s who they are and what they know. Sharing and compromise are unknowns in their landscape.
– anonymous letter in response to a Cary Tennis column

Reading this reminded me of being on a crowded bus a couple of months ago, where a couple of loudmouthed college kids in the aisle next to me were hollering at each other about some mutual acquaintance whom they felt to be terribly inferior to them. (Apparently she had… dropped out of a class! And wasn’t sorry! Oh!) They informed each other, and all the rest of us on that bus, that she is an only child and therefore incapable of sharing, compromise, and common courtesy. Her character is irredeemably flawed. Gosh, don’t we feel good that we’re normal people with siblings so we know how to be good people. We hate her even more now! Squee, we’re bonding over it! We aren’t selfish! Yes, people with siblings have learned how to be polite!

“Go ahead and keep telling yourselves that, cretins,” I did not say. At first I gritted my teeth and stared straight ahead, and then I had some fun spotting the other people who were gritting their teeth and staring straight ahead: the Invisible Non-Brotherhood of Only Children.

Oh, great. Hundreds unite in march for… various stuff. Immigration rights now! No war in Iraq! Better mental health care! Save reproductive rights! And stuff! Good old Seattle organizing: concentrate on “solidarity” and “alliances” until your message is an indistinguishable mush. That drove me up the wall, back before I retired from all that crap. I can almost hear it:

“What do we want?”
(indecipherable babble)
“When do we want it?”
“NOW!”

Meet our Northwest FEMA chief: John Pennington, a former four-term Republican state rep with a diploma-mill “degree”. The guy was hired despite his having no real disaster management experience — but he was Cowlitz County’s Bush campaign co-chair in 2000. GOP star Jennifer Dunn, the state chair of the Bush campaign that year, helped snag the post for him.

At least this guy is said to have bothered to get a decent staff. Perhaps one of his decent staff could replace him. Like, tomorrow.

King County Emergency Services Director Eric Holdeman: “It’s important that you be a professional emergency manager. Walking through an emergency room doesn’t make you a doctor. Likewise, you want the people overseeing a disaster to know what it’s all about.” No shit.

Here’s a crazy thought: how about we don’t fuck up the agency devoted to responding to disasters? I understand that the Bush administration hands out plum positions right and left to the party hacks and their roommates, but are there really so many useless GOP weasels that there’s no more space for them elsewhere? Yes? Then I propose a compromise: simply start up a federal Department of Sinecures and leave FEMA (and the FDA, the EPA, and the rest of it) to people who can actually manage the work. It’d be expensive, but not as expensive as what we’ve got now.

Attention universe:

Sometimes I screen my calls, because I do not feel that I am required to be available to all people at all times. If you call me and do not leave a message, I assume you are probably someone I do not want to talk to. If I get three calls with no messages in the course of an hour and a half, I am going to guess that I am on some godforsaken automated calling list again. No power in the ‘verse will get me to answer the phone that day.

Now I am going to turn the ringer off.