So, night before last, I had a good night. I got a lot of writing done, I was in relatively little pain, my chest didn't feel tight for the first time since the heart attack, things were good.
So last night, as I started to realize the implications of my impending good health, I had a meltdown.
Fear and I don't have a complex relationship. In fact, we have a fairly simple one. Fear hangs out, a small kitten mewling at me from behind the door, and I ignore it (and occasionally trip over it as I am ignoring it, but I ignore that too). Now, unfortunately this kitten can occasionally (like, once or twice a decade) inflate itself into a giant, angry lion capable of ripping my fucking head right off, eating and digesting it, with a cheshire-cat grin before crapping it out onto my lifeless corpse and then turning back into a kitten, peeing on the remaining mess, and skittering off.
That happened last night.
You take the good with the bad.
I have been, while recuperating from my near-death heart experience, missing enormous chunks of my son's life.
My son really likes me, he likes doing things with me, he likes hanging out with me. He likes doing the things I like doing, and he likes doing them with me. He likes almost everything about me.
Last night, for the first time since he discovered talking, I realized how important I was to him, and it knocked me on my ass. While I have been bitching and moaning about how fucking sick I am and how lousy I feel, he has been relentlessly growing, learning and imitating ME.
I have never been as responsible for something, not even me myself, as I am for him, and last night, I broke. The whole thing. Tears, feelings of complete helplessness before overwhelming responsibility, feelings of complete incompetence.
99.999% of the time, I DEFINE arrogance. Look it up in the dictionary and my sneering face should be staring back at you. I LIKE it that way. I am the smartest person I know. I present, as well as I am able, the image of somebody who, in time of need, could easily kick YOUR ass, rip your heart out of your chest with my bare hands and eat a big chunk of it, cholesterol be damned. I take a perverse pride in having almost no formal education at all, yet still knowing more about any subject I care to than the experts, and making them KNOW it with ease in the first thirty seconds of our meeting. I LIKE it that way, even tho it is almost all a cleverly constructed exaggeration.
Ending up quivering on the bed, crying, hugging a pillow and wishing for nothing more than a big-ass hug from somebody who can make it all better is humiliating to the extreme.
And, as it happens, quite necessary. Writing it down and publishing it where it can be read by close friends and complete strangers alike is humbling, to put it mildly, but also quite necessary.
Hey, world. I am mortal, small, insignificant and terrified. Like everybody else.
And, as it happens, healing. Slowly, perversely and painfully, but healing indeed.
I suppose, in a wierd and weird way both, last night was a good night too.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Anthrax
First, let me be very clear, I am not a lawyer.
This is not a place where I like to play out my morbid and obsessive infatuation with politics.
I have been, for the last three days, posting and absorbing responses about the current anthrax investigation, and my posts have generated a bit of e-mail and some nice hits to this blog, as well as some uncomfortable questions that I have refused to answer in other places and have promised to answer here. This is the post I promised.
I am interested in the subject because a friend of mine was tangentially involved in one of the attacks, like literally hundreds of thousands of other people in Washington D.C., Newsrooms in many locations in Florida, and New York and many other places. (no, his name was not in the news and is not important to this discussion)
I am not a doctor, and have no personal knowledge of the case outside what is available publicly. And no, I don't wear a tinfoil hat, believe in Elvis sightings, Astrology or God.
I also don't believe everything the government tells me about anything.
ANY examination of the publicly available evidence adds up to one thing: "Trust us, Ivins did it, because we said he did it, now go away, nothing to see here." on the Government's side, and literally thousands of well-reasoned questions that have no answers on the other side.
I have only one thing to contribute from personal experience with drugs and the people who do drugs, stretching back for my entire life: It is incredibly easy to self-medicate yourself to death and never actually commit suicide. It is the sudden end of careless or irrational or uneducated self-medicating, and it happens all the fucking time, and it is only through fairly relentless self-control and relentless self-education that people who explore self-medication DON'T end up killing themselves. It is dangerous buisiness and it is fatal a lot of the time.
A bottle of good vodka and ten tylenol can be a ticket to bye-bye very very easily. If you have a dead guy, a bottle to vodka and a bottle of tylenol #3 and no note, there is no way you can call that suicide without knowing a WHOLE lot more, like when the script was written, how much he had been taking regularly and the condition of his liver. You can die from as little as a gram of tylenol (That is between 2 and 6 pills) if you are on a good bender, and that is WITHOUT a compromised liver. Throw in a few cough pills and BANG, you can check out. That is one fifth of Stolie and a SMALL handfull (not even a recreational dose of codeine) of the big bad 3, and it is liver necrosis within twenty hours, sometimes a LOT less.
These are things drug counselors know, and a few of the better cops that work with chronic users, and any good e/r doctor knows, but you will not find in a PDR. You WILL find people in detox with tracks up their arms who will tell you just how easy it is to lose control of a very small habit and end up cold and dusky blue.
So if the government is telling you that a suspect who drinks and has had the FBI breathing down his back for more than 2 years checked out with an overdose of TYLENOL and by the way, there is no autopsy, and did we tell you he was the mastermind behind the most sophisticated bioweapon attack in history that we want you to accept the suicide as proof of guilt about, you aught to be very very skeptical.
Our government lies to us about almost everything, we are believing this exactly why?
Not a doctor, not a lawyer, not a shrink, just a guy with a LOT of real world self-induced biochemistry knowledge, a high IQ and a good self-education.
Now, back to socially meaningless ramblings, demented poetry and bad fiction.
This is not a place where I like to play out my morbid and obsessive infatuation with politics.
I have been, for the last three days, posting and absorbing responses about the current anthrax investigation, and my posts have generated a bit of e-mail and some nice hits to this blog, as well as some uncomfortable questions that I have refused to answer in other places and have promised to answer here. This is the post I promised.
I am interested in the subject because a friend of mine was tangentially involved in one of the attacks, like literally hundreds of thousands of other people in Washington D.C., Newsrooms in many locations in Florida, and New York and many other places. (no, his name was not in the news and is not important to this discussion)
I am not a doctor, and have no personal knowledge of the case outside what is available publicly. And no, I don't wear a tinfoil hat, believe in Elvis sightings, Astrology or God.
I also don't believe everything the government tells me about anything.
ANY examination of the publicly available evidence adds up to one thing: "Trust us, Ivins did it, because we said he did it, now go away, nothing to see here." on the Government's side, and literally thousands of well-reasoned questions that have no answers on the other side.
I have only one thing to contribute from personal experience with drugs and the people who do drugs, stretching back for my entire life: It is incredibly easy to self-medicate yourself to death and never actually commit suicide. It is the sudden end of careless or irrational or uneducated self-medicating, and it happens all the fucking time, and it is only through fairly relentless self-control and relentless self-education that people who explore self-medication DON'T end up killing themselves. It is dangerous buisiness and it is fatal a lot of the time.
A bottle of good vodka and ten tylenol can be a ticket to bye-bye very very easily. If you have a dead guy, a bottle to vodka and a bottle of tylenol #3 and no note, there is no way you can call that suicide without knowing a WHOLE lot more, like when the script was written, how much he had been taking regularly and the condition of his liver. You can die from as little as a gram of tylenol (That is between 2 and 6 pills) if you are on a good bender, and that is WITHOUT a compromised liver. Throw in a few cough pills and BANG, you can check out. That is one fifth of Stolie and a SMALL handfull (not even a recreational dose of codeine) of the big bad 3, and it is liver necrosis within twenty hours, sometimes a LOT less.
These are things drug counselors know, and a few of the better cops that work with chronic users, and any good e/r doctor knows, but you will not find in a PDR. You WILL find people in detox with tracks up their arms who will tell you just how easy it is to lose control of a very small habit and end up cold and dusky blue.
So if the government is telling you that a suspect who drinks and has had the FBI breathing down his back for more than 2 years checked out with an overdose of TYLENOL and by the way, there is no autopsy, and did we tell you he was the mastermind behind the most sophisticated bioweapon attack in history that we want you to accept the suicide as proof of guilt about, you aught to be very very skeptical.
Our government lies to us about almost everything, we are believing this exactly why?
Not a doctor, not a lawyer, not a shrink, just a guy with a LOT of real world self-induced biochemistry knowledge, a high IQ and a good self-education.
Now, back to socially meaningless ramblings, demented poetry and bad fiction.
Why I have a cat
I am pounding it out on the keyboard, actually sweating (slightly, or it would be actual work) as I type, my protagonist is about to break through into the hollow cavern in the asteroid that holds the-
a pink tongue licks my nose
It is connected to a small black thing, somewhere between being a kitten and being a cat.
She climbs up between me and the edge of my desk, and her little black head slightly obscures the lower left of my screen as a series of "k" stutter across the screen.
I tell her that I am an artist, a picaso (hey, I'm alone in my office at 3AM writing sci-fi, delusions of grandeur are a morale boost) interrupted in mid-stroke.
She purrs silently, and licks my nose again.
I tell her that if Tolkein had had an annoying small black cat, Pippin's name would have been pippppppppppppppppp and then where would the world be? before I remember that Tolkein probably had a manual typewriter that would have turned me into finger-sore goo in about 20 seconds.
She is unimpressed by either my delusions of competence or my wonderful memory.
But she watches me type, and licks my nose a few more times, and curls up next to the keyboard and falls asleep, still purring silently.
a pink tongue licks my nose
It is connected to a small black thing, somewhere between being a kitten and being a cat.
She climbs up between me and the edge of my desk, and her little black head slightly obscures the lower left of my screen as a series of "k" stutter across the screen.
I tell her that I am an artist, a picaso (hey, I'm alone in my office at 3AM writing sci-fi, delusions of grandeur are a morale boost) interrupted in mid-stroke.
She purrs silently, and licks my nose again.
I tell her that if Tolkein had had an annoying small black cat, Pippin's name would have been pippppppppppppppppp and then where would the world be? before I remember that Tolkein probably had a manual typewriter that would have turned me into finger-sore goo in about 20 seconds.
She is unimpressed by either my delusions of competence or my wonderful memory.
But she watches me type, and licks my nose a few more times, and curls up next to the keyboard and falls asleep, still purring silently.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)