So tomorrow I’m going in to have a crop of Human Pearls™ removed. Yes, this was supposed to be BONANZA DAY, wherein I’d sell said pearls for thousands, perhaps baJILLIONS of dollars, and be set for the rest of my life. Instead, I find out that they no longer give you your gallstones back after they’ve taken them out, they crush them all and test them for cancer, thus destroying my business model and my dreams.
My silent partner and I are now looking into other humano-agrarian activities including but not limited to sperm farming. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Please do not accompany your application with a sample.
Anyway, depending on what they give me for the pain, my next blogging could get rather loopy. One of the drawbacks to not having internet at home and not drinking as much is that my drunkblogging has greatly suffered lately, to the point where I’m getting complaints from my readers via email. I promise, if they don’t give me something entertaining on which to blog, I’ll at least write up that restaurant review-style comparison of all the different drugs they’ve given me. Although it’s no secret there’s a strong favorite:
Well, it seems as if just EVERYONE is talking about me, all up in my bowels, including Old Dead White GuyAlexander Pope. Still, although this dude has been dead since 1744, he’s all up in my biznass and up on the facts, so it would seem, for this does indeed explain a great deal.
Memorable Audiene of the 19th of February, 1789.
Illustrated by
The NEW DOCTRINE of FUNDAMENTALS,
or a
Metaphysico-Medico-Political Comment
On a Passage in St. Paul,
“The Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies.” St. Paul Epist. to Corinth. x. 22.
~*~*~*~
My friend Dr. Purcell, understands by the term slow bellies, that the Cretans seldom went to stool, and, that thefaeces reacting on their blood, put them into a bad humour, and made them EVIL BEASTS, ill-tempered brutes. It is very true, that a man who seldom goes to stool, will be more choleric than another. His bile does not flow ; it is boiled over again, and his blood grues adust.
The morning that you have a favour to ask of a VICEROY, or his SEC. inform yourself particularly on the state of their bowels. If they have a free passage, it is the mollia tempus fandi.
Every one knows that a man’s character and disposition depends entirely on his intercourse with the necessary-house. The late Lord Sackville would not have urged on the American war at such a sanguinary rate, had he not been troubled with haemoirhoides in his intestinum rectum, which indurated the faeces. The Princess Dowager of Wales used to call him Rotten A—e. This nickname redoubled the acrimony of his bile, and probably cost Mr. Laurens his liberty, and Dr. Dodd his life.
That immaculate paragon of political and moral excellence, the present Premier of Great Britain, is habitually costive, notwithstanding the Bishop of Lincoln’s (Dr. Prettyman) prescription of an Ounce of Rhubarb every morn. It is very probable, that the Rt. Rev. Doctor, when SEC. to Mr. Pitt, sometimes experienced the effects of this fundamental bondage in the latter, as I have been told by Captain J—n who used to amuse the D. of Rutland with the story, that Dr. P’s first question to Mr. Pitt’s valet was, “Well! what news from the water closet?”
Many yet remember that famous Phillippic pronounced by the present Marquis of Lansdown, shortly after a difference with his quondam coadjutor and pupil, in which, amongst other strokes, we find the marquis recommending to Mr. P’s serious attention the caution of Mentor to Telemachus on, “the predominance of humour” and proposing that it be transcribed and placed at the bed’s head of every Minister in Christendom. Thus making it of equal import with the recollective rule of Philip of Macedon, in whose chamber a Lord was in waiting for the whole purpose of reminding his Kingship when he waked in the morning “That he was a man”—But to resume, if we could recur to Mr. Pitt’s diary at the time above alluded to, we she [sic] should doubtless find a ready solution to the Marquis’s counsel.
It is said our present magnanimous and generous Chief Governor ; (whom God long preserve!) is sometimes so plugged up,— that he is obliged to have recourse to Bartlet’s horse purging balls! This much transpired from his groom of the water closet, who lately bought a large quantity of Mr. Magee, who is in expectation of an exclusive patent for the sale of this valuable Apertive. It were to be wished that the day the two Houses went up with the Address, that his Excellency and his posterior’s had made a few detachments to the Water closet ;—perhaps the Lords and Gentlemen would have then hit on the mollia tempore fandi!
Temple Spectacles! A Tale For Seventeen Hundred and Eighty Nine. See ****** damn’d to everlasting Fame. Pope. By the Author of the Prelateiad. Dublin : printed for H. Chamberlaine and Heery & Co., [1789?]
Library Company of Philadelphia
O Eng Temp Spec 1789 15615.O.5
Latest HumanPearl news: Had a lightning-strike gallstone attack resulting from eating the best part of a half-box of Toffifee while under doctor’s orders to avoid fat (sugar, I knew, but who knew caramel had butter in it?). It hit at 2:05, a cold-sweat-inducing 8 on the pain scale and I was out of the hospital, home and on Dilaudid at 3 on the pain scale within two hours.
a pretentious little quadrangle, with overtones of morbid obesity
Still too woozy from my latest hospital visit to do a useful post, but very soon I shall put up a restaurant review-style comparison of the multifarious psychoactive substances the wonderful Canadian healthcare system has been doling out to me gratis. Not sure whether to rate them on overall experience or just quality of hallucinations, but definitely in there somewhere.
Today the Emergency Room doctor told me my Demerol space cosmonaut monkey hallucination was “totally awesome.” I think it made his day. God knows, it made mine.
Yes, it’s another in our popular series, “Horror Stories of the Gastro-Intestinal System” starring none other than moi. But you’ll like this one: it is considerably less splenic and considerably more amusing than the previous installments (really? I don’t have a “gallbladder” tag? Seriously?).
This morning I was woken up in my least-favorite way, which is at 5:30am by a loud, tinny alarm clock I am not immediately well-coordinated enough to shut off quickly, and then the cat came over and farted on my face. I guess she just thinks that’s the best way to start the day, so tomorrow I intend to start mine by waking up at leisure, walking over, and farting on HER face. I sure hope she isn’t smoking at the time or this could get epic REAL fast.
My favorite way to wake up, by the way, is being sung awake shortly before noon in an isolated cottage on the beach at Not-Ucluelet: the song is a langourous Portugese fado, and the singer is: Jake Gyllenhaal, Viggo Mortensen twenty years ago, or Hugh Jackman. Or maybe Prince Caspian, but not the one from the movies, the one from the books. If the song hadn’t woken me, the smell of the fine double espresso (16-second shots) he immediately brings me would have. There are biscotti: pistachio, chocolate-dipped biscotti. There are red-and-black mackinaw-plaid blankets that feel like cashmere and look like what Kurt Cobain sleeps on in Heaven. Oh, what the hell, Kurt is there too, having kicked the heroin and skank habits.
But where was I, besides coming down from a Demerol high? Oh, right, explaining my day. Or rather, my gastro-intestinal system’s day.
The day which started so insanely early, because I had to catch a suburban bus to be on time, and they’re like every six weeks or something if you’re out in the boonies like I am right now. And I had to be on time, because my appointment was for a very high priority chimney sweeping of my bile duct, it appearing that my liver was slowly being poisoned by a backup of bile (and how odd is that, really? I mean, anyone who reads me knows I don’t keep the bile to myself but like to spread it around as freely as Rihanna spreads herpes!) and that if I didn’t have the procedure, I’d essentially poison myself to death in a few weeks, although not before giving myself an orange tan the likes of which the Jersey Shoreites would kill for. And god knows, I hate being tanned, so that was NOT an option, hence the bus ride to my 7:30am appointment for said chimney sweeping.
Actually, it was supposed to be more “sharks with frickin laser beams on their heads” than “prancing Dick van Dyke,” but it seems that my obstruction was more in the nature of clay rather than rocks, and so the sharks remained in their tank while the doctors conked me out with something and proceeded to drag a basket-like device up and down my bile duct, clearing things out considerably. I imagine it was something like the big round brush that goes over the whole car at the car wash, only with rhyming Cockney slang.
The Chinese doctor was very businesslike. The Irish one ignored my medical chart and picked up the book I’d been reading, Masterpieces of Murder: the best true crime writing from the Greatest Chroniclers of Murder, and said, “well, whatever else she’s got, she’s got good taste.”
And that is my kind of doctor, I’m telling you.
So, they wheeled me into the room, which was in Radiology for some reason, gave me a green, snorkel-like thing to bite on, stuck an oxygen tube in my nose, and put something in the line in my arm so I was OUT, like BLAM, GONE. They’d assured me most people don’t remember a thing, although it’s not technically a general anaesthetic. I woke up towards the end of the procedure, quite confused, on my belly with this masky thing in my mouth and breathing tubes in my nose and a big hose coming out of my throat, or it might have been several of them. Well, what would you do if you woke up in that kind of disoriented, context-free environment, with your arms tied down quite securely?
I can tell you what I did, deep in the tentacles of a Demerol daze: I immediately concluded that OF COURSE I was one of those monkey cosmonauts that the Soviets had shot into space back in the 60’s. Well, makes total sense, right? And I couldn’t see the control panel, which was of course supposed to be right in front of me, because there was this stupid TOWEL in front of it, so I think I tried to smoosh it out of the way before the nurses put it back, and then I don’t remember anything except waking up in the recovery room feeling healthy for the first time in weeks, and very, very loopy indeed.
For the next few hours I remained rather as likely to walk at a 45degree angle to the ground as a right angle, but other than that and the Great Cosmonaut Monkey illusion, I can’t say Demerol was much fun.
Hell, on the antibiotics they gave me I’d seen a pair of three-foot ravens, a dachshund that did not exist that was being walked by a couple who obviously DID, a ghost lurking on the porch, and a huge glob of Elmer’s glue that dropped from the ceiling to the floor right in front of my eyes and which also was not there.
On morphine, I’d become compelled to explain the ethnobotany of the Haitian Zombie (and HELLO what the fuck kind of podunk spellchecker doesn’t have “ethnobotany” in it, eh? I ask yez) to the nurses AT. LENGTH. To the point where they’d go out in the hall and flag down other nurses, going, “you HAVE to hear this!” I also saw the angels surfing on the rays of the setting sun over English Bay, and St. Peter actually winked and gave me the thumb’s up. I didn’t realize till after I’d gotten out of the hospital that the room I was in didn’t have a view of the sunset: it didn’t have any windows at all.
Anyway, since I’m on a clear liquid diet, that’s as close to a restaurant review you’re gonna get from me. Demerol ***, antibiotics **, Morphine *****.
Also, if you want to know what I was going through these past few weeks, try watching this video. I’m serious: watch it all the way through. Your guts will ACHE, I guarantee it. Also: be sure you’re wearing waterproof mascara. You’ll need it.
raincoaster 