Well, there goes the neighborhood.
Meanwhile, what in the actual fuck?
Category: Illness
MRE-ow
much better than his hand.”
Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment), is a stout fellow and a resolute trencherman.
So when a crook gut puts His Excellency off his feed, as it did Friday evening, it’s a matter of utmost concern for the general staff.
He retired to his quarters, leaving orders not to be disturbed, and stayed abed throughout Saturday, refusing both food and drink.
An expedition to the emergency room was considered, and rejected. He prefers his personal physician, who is unavailable on weekends, and the ER is not a secure facility, especially when His Excellency is being treated. Anything might happen to anyone at anytime. When under stress the grizzled old soldier takes his tactical cues from the late Richard Pryor’s character Mudbone: “If somebody get hurt in here, I ain’t gonna be the last one.”
So we waited.
Finally, come evening, he agreed to take a soupçon of nourishment. An inspection tour of the litter box followed. And after a good night’s sleep, His Excellency greeted the morning with a substantial breakfast and the traditional nip at the hand that feeds him.
What won’t stay down, must come up
Well, this has been quite the week.
Herself the Elder came to town Saturday with Beth, the eldest daughter, and the next few days were your basic whirlwind of activity: getting her settled in the assisted-living place; acquiring and configuring a TV that was too smart for anyone’s good; rounding up an adjustable bed and all the other bits that make a room a home; doing battle with the medical-industrial complex; and meeting the staff and other residents.
It was going pretty smoothly, all things considered, until Monday evening, when I contracted some variety of nuclear gut-rumbler, and the less you know about that, the better.
Then Herself got it yesterday, which meant she couldn’t go to work this morning or drive Beth to the airport at 3:30 a.m. In the rain. Because it always rains at stupid-thirty when a fella who has spent the last 36 hours cuddling the commode suddenly finds himself drafted to drive to the airport at 3:30 a.m. In the rain.
Anyway, Herself the Elder and Beth seem to have dodged whatever floored me and Herself, so, yay. We are taking light refreshment and shambling around El Rancho Pendejo like the living dead. And I finally got caught up on HBO’s “Watchmen,” if getting caught up means continuing to wonder just what in the sweet holy motherfuck this thing is about.
Now I have to catch up on the news, which likewise. Pray for me.
A nose for noise
I’ve been dossing down in the guest bedroom for the past few nights while I try to shake this bug (hack, cough, ptui, repeat) and last night I was dreaming that I was in some concrete condo/apartment house shithole, the prototypical American multifamily dwelling pioneered by the East Germans, a cheerless vertical warehouse with all the charm of a Stasi penitentiary for political offenders.
In the dream, as in “real life,” I couldn’t quite drift off to a proper sleep. I kept hearing this repetitive sound that was driving me batshit: Pok. Pok. Pok. Sounded like someone bouncing a tennis ball off a concrete wall or floor, over and over again.
Pok. Pok. Pok. Etc.
In both planes of consciousness it had been days since I last enjoyed a solid night’s sleep. And in the dream I was starting to get seriously pissed off because for the first time in a good long while I wasn’t enduring any coughing fits and thus nothing should have been keeping me awake.
Pok. Pok. Pok. Etc.
I couldn’t localize the sound — inside my apartment, upstairs, downstairs, in the hallway — and I was on the edge of bounding out of bed to get medieval on someone’s ass, as soon as I got a fix on where the fuck was it that they were.
Pok. Pok. Pok. Etc.
And then I woke up to find that the sound — Pok. Pok. Pok. Etc. — was my own nasal exhalations bouncing off the sheet and blankets, which I had tugged over my head.
Black Lung Friday
Gah. I seem to have collected a bug from some’eres. Woke up way too early this morning making sounds like an emphysema ward getting tear-gassed and had to relocate to the guest bedroom unless I wanted to have a heart attack (there was a strong chance that Herself, who enjoys her Zs, might attack it with a nail file).
The guest room was chilly and the bed under-covered, but I figured that if I got back out of it to go hunting a better blankie, I’d either wake all the way up or have a cat sneak in for a nap on my head. So I curled up and endured.
Cycling thus seemed like a real bad idea today so I consulted with my man Hal Walter on his latest book project and went for an hourlong walk instead.
Pretty much everybody in Albuquerque had had the same idea, so I didn’t lack for companionship. I was the only one who sounded like the ghost of Leonard Cohen impersonating Tom Waits from inside an alligator crawling through a culvert, though.
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