I’m a little tea pot

(I thought I would mull over this for a while, especially the last part, but I don’t care anymore. Enjoy.)

Naturally, there is much to say.

This is an image from my bowels, around the colon, taken during a colonoscopy. The procedure was prompted by an episode of nausea and vomiting, which the physicians attributed to a “dilation” of my lower bowel tract. If I am imagining this correctly, the dilation must have been something like a prolonged contraction that interrupted the normal function of the intestines.

I never thought to ask about the source of the pain associated with the dilation. I can see how the pain might have been caused by the contraction itself, but I can also see how the pain might have been a result of the contraction, particularly from the retained abdominal gases and feces.

In any case, the episode went like this:

10/25

i) I ate a large meal and became drowsy, napped, and awoke to a pressure near my groin, around the bladder. The pressure at this time was very faint and did not strike me as unusual.

ii) I produced a small bowel movement (about the size of a pea pod) and noticed that the abdominal pressure did not diminish. Over a period of a half hour, the pressure increased, and my gut appeared to distend, slightly. I freed the first button on my trousers.

iii) A period of painful cramping began. I immediately suspected food poisoning. I recalled that in the past, I had experienced similar cramping after eating bad potatoes. I waited for a purge, but no heaves came, so I could not decide what to make of my symptoms. I began pacing. I suspected appendicitis.

iv) I vomited profusely. Between two of the purges I broke into a cold sweat. After vomiting, the abdominal pain increased, contrary to my expectations. It began to pulsate and make its way through my torso. At times, the pain almost seemed to behave like a soundwave, as it would become localized south of my sternum, briefly disappear, and reappear near my spine, like it was bouncing off the walls of my rib cage.

v) I wrapped myself in a blanket. I got through the night in a state between sleep and alertness, yes, like that state a bad flu can put one into; waking dreams.

vi) I took the public bus service to the hospital and walked into the emergency room.

It was nice to become hydrated. While waiting to see a physician, I took notes on the sounds of the emergency ward. The lines below amount to thirty seconds of the ER ward:

oh baktaaaaaaomigoda ct scan is arabic and grandma dommt speek anglish at all are you normally like that you got to urinate real often beep beep beep ring er ward gimme milk i want some milk

After an hour, a phyiscian appeared.

“Well, let’s see here. What’s been going on?”

“Last night, I noticed a pressure in my abdomen. It grew, became painful, and then I vomited the contents of my stomach. My bowel movements have been insignificant.. I have not produced a bowel movement since yesterday.”

“What color were.. uh.. your stools?”

“Colorado brown, naturally.”

“Uhh.. now, have you been having any weird sex?”

“Um. Well, um, no.”

“Okay, so we will order an x-ray and get you on some antibiotics.”

Later, the surgeon came in.

“Hi there, I’m Doctor D.”

“Hello, I’m Robert.”

“So, I hear you have been experiencing nausea and vomiting, haven’t been able to go to the bathroom.”

“That’s right.”

“Soo.. have you.. uhhh.. been putting anything unusual in your butt, have you been having any rough sex?

“Uh. No. I haven’t had any sex in months as a matter of fact. You know, even rough, kinky sex would be nice.”

“Haa.. so.. We’ll have you drink this tracer stuff and we’ll see what’s going on. We are probably going to monitor you overnight.”

“How long do you think I’ll be in?”

“No telling. We might have to operate.”

“Fantastic.”

After drinking the barium, the radiology people performed an intial x-ray. Then some kid wheeled me to my room. My parents were away, in South America. I contacted my sister, and we decided that we should not contact them. I occupied myself by studying.

Simon visited on the third day. I wrote about this in my notepad, but I have lost it. As usual, he had something interesting to say.

On the 28th, a Dr. S. appeared. He was one of those very animated fat bear men. S remarked that before my discharge it would be smart to do a colonoscopy to look for abnormalities.

“But you’ll have to drink this really nasty salty stuff - a laxative.”

“Bring it on.”

“Really?” (I don’t understand why he reacted this way - he was in a state of disbelief.)

“Fuck yeah.”

I actually thought the laxative was really tasty.

The next day, they wheeled me down to the colonoscopy room. As I laid in my gurney in a holding area, I could hear an old man moaning.

An adjunct told me she would administer fentanyl. I watched as she routed the syringe into my IV and punched the plunger home. I tried to fight it.

Dr. S. appeared and said something.

“When you put the camera in my ass - I would like copies,” I said.

After this, I can only remember thinking of something very hard. My concentration broke, and I realized I was back in my room, watching Animal Planet.

Fentanyl will always be my drug of choice. There is simply nothing else like it. The oblivion it produces cannot be paralleled. I think Ingmar Bergman liked it too. Once, during an account of a hospital visit, Bergman mentioned that a nurse injected him with something:

(roughly)

“To exist.. and then to take this something.. to exist, and then, to not exist. This non-existence is.. is wonderful.”

This level of anesthesia has always given me a feeling of privacy that I have never been able to attain otherwise. And there is an anonymity, like I have disappeared, or if I have not disappeared, then that I have become a dumb object without worries or responsibilities. There is an almost unimaginable womb-like warmth, totally encapsulating and fuzzy, but strong and impenetrable, like an armor.

When I wake up, I usually wonder why people put so much effort into other novelties, other external things that cannot rival this opiate. I usually draw a blank.

Two years ago, during a conversation with the family doctor (and a few days after a dose of fentanyl), I made similar remarks. The doctor noted that he thought it was unhealthy for me to think that way, and said that he suspected depression.

But I do not think this is the case, per se. It is just the expression of a preference, the act of pointing out something good when one sees it. My life has been kind of like a cartoon for the past few years. There are pictures that move around, some sounds. I can’t control them, they just happen. People come into my life and leave. No control, it just happens. I’ve got a body that I cannot really control. Things just happen. So, I worry a little bit. But there is a state in which there is no need to control, because nothing happens.

So much for fentanyl.

10/30

A female physician found a protuberance in my bowels after the colonoscopy, during a final radiological procedure. Before I underwent this procedure, Dr. D told me that he would be very surprised if they found anything in the locus they were surveying. I do not yet know what the protuberance is. I never scheduled my post-discharge checkup. I was too busy with school. I like school. It is practically the only thing that I enjoy.

“You know, there are a number of things I never told X.”

“That’s surprising. Why not?”

“I didn’t think X had good intentions.”

“Who has good intentions, Simon?”

“No one is pure.”

And my friend was right. There have been times that I have deliberately tried to damage him - when he has opened to me with the utmost of his honesty. I became insecure. I took honesty for truth. I said, Well, look at this Simon. You were wrong here. He who is without sin should cast the first stone.

We’re all too small. Too few stones have been cast. Too few bones have been broken.

“Since all who work on behalf of the interests of animals are more than a little familiar with the tired charges of being ‘irrational’, ’sentimental’, ‘emotional’, or worse, we can give the lie to these accusations only by making a concerted effort not to indulge our emotions or parade our sentiments.”

-Tom Regan

“M stands for magical, miraculous, mystical … mad.”
- Colin McGinn

A Ratha Yatra is an annual tradition in some of the many Hinduisms. To put it in the most respectful terms, devotees make two or three figurines redolent of anime characters, stick them on a peaked cart and pull them down the street like pack animals. Then some funny little brahman gets word around that if one is crushed by a cart wheel, the wheel of dharma will fall from its tracks, releasing one from the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Some hapless Dalit’s smell a good deal, and stick their heads under the wheels. The ensuing sound, to the surprise of everyone, sounds remarkably like a man stepping on a snail.

Thus the word “juggernaut” (ultimately from Sanskrit Jagannatha and the cart festival at Puri) was introduced into the English language by an observer guilty of comparing an overwhelming and unstoppable force with an event physically equivalent to a tricycle mowing down a kitten.

Two carts bearing a Jagannath murti. Venice, CA: the Calcutta of the southland. Be careful where you step.

I would like to congratulate ISKCON on the 30th anniversary of the Los Angeles Ratha Yatra. The people of your organization found it in themselves to create a dignified carnival atmosphere, which at times also reminded me of a circus; your personnel resembling the players of a sideshow.

Though I am a friend of the faith, I have some suggestions for future functions, which I hope you will not take as jab from a repellent contrarian, but as a loving offering at the god’s red feet.

But first, the auspicious mantra for help in the endeavor:

HARI KRISHNA HARI KRISHNA
KRISHNA KRISHNA HARI HARI
HARI RAMA HARI RAMA
RAMA RAMA HARI HARI

The first observation and suggestion concerns the layout of your function. I often find it useful to prepare for formal criticism by imagining the subject and then abstracting from all content, almost as if I am contemplating a mandala.

The problem with your layout was that you had crap scattered all over the place. When you have a rug and you are treating it with a brush, it is usually helpful to apply strokes in a single area and work outward, to thoroughly shake off the dust. Substitute curious visitor for rug,
baldheaded minion for brush, and gelt for dust. You have grasped the very idea.

ISKCON arranged a number of educational displays for review by acute members of the public. This one is about how dudes turn into different things, or something.

Some sophisticated Socrates once posed a question about reincarnation: “If the only thing that floats through the reincarnational ether is the sum of all souls, how the fuck do you explain population explosions?”

Answer: Insects and microbes! Since around the 19th century, humans have taken great strides in the sciences of agriculture and medicine. As time passes, medicine annihilates an increasing number of microbes and other tiny buggers. Agricultural pesticides take care of the relatively big, juicy buggers. Insects and microorganisms are then reborn as human babes.

This explanation is very elegant because it accounts for the decreasing quality of human beings while firmly cementing our queer Eastern dogma.

This display questioned evolutionary theory. I could not read any of the panels in depth because I was chased away by a stocky man with a sloping forehead and enormous brow ridges.

Low right: an extant example of Cro-Magnon man.
Special comments: Odor like curry, but definitely not curry.

Jagannatha is represented by the black face (right) set on the green ribbon. I haven’t a clue as to the identity of his buddies, but they are probably some obscure north Indian gods with relatively few worshipers.

ISKCON, in its usual scrupulous fashion, seems to have transformed Jagannatha into a mode of the ghee-eating Krishna. I imagine this served as ISKCON’s excuse to put on this ridiculous fund-raiser, which depressingly lacked the gore of its Indian predecessor.

In a Russian monastery.

Maximov.

There are peasant women here, too, now. There, sitting on the ground near the wooden veranda. They’re waiting. And for the ladies two little rooms have been built on top of the veranda but outside the hermitage wall. You can see the windows up there. The elder goes to see them by an inner passage when he feels well enough. But, you see, it’s still outside the wall of the hermitage. There’s one lady waiting there now with her sick daughter. Mrs Khokhlakov, a Kharkov landowner. I expect he must have promised to come out to her, though lately he’s been so weak that he’s hardly gone out even to the common people.

Fyodor Karamazov.

Oh, so there is a secret passage from the hermitage to the ladies! Please, holy Father, don’t think I’m suggesting anything. I’m just making a statement of fact. You know, on Mount Athos - you’ve heard of it, haven’t you? - not only women but any creatures of the female sex are not allowed - no hens, no turkey hens, no calves…

Good for a hearty chuckle, I thought.

I stow entries for a number of reasons. Chief among them are sloth and irresoluteness. Sometimes, though, I find myself composing an entry which cannot conceivably interest a reader, perhaps because the subject is so extremely pigeonholed and tedious that it could only be pursued by an autistic. Some entries are just stupid.

But on Sunday, I found that behavior that is ordinarily boring may become captivating by turning attention to the mania which causes it.

The previous Wednesday, I purchased a South African succulent known as Stapelia gigantea. I selected a plant with a large, diamond-shaped flower bud redolent of a Chinese paper lantern, knowing well that the bud would not emit light, but the dank stench of carrion. I noted, however, that like the Chinese lantern, which is known to attract throngs of children, the bloom would attract a swarm of iridescent flies.

I placed the Stapelia in my solarium, and left the house for the better part of two days, checking in every morning to see if the “egg” had “hatched”. I received a phone call on Thursday night confirming a bloom.

“The egg has hatched. It is very beautiful.”

“But does it smell like rotting flesh?”

“It is stinky, but you have to put your nose inside of it.”

I remembered reading earlier that the traits of S. gigantea have been called “highly variable”, and I realized that my sought after stink had been drowned in the sea of genetic variance. I was so disappointed. U.S.S. Stapelia floundered in my murky memory, to decay in some chasm like a rusty trombone.

Yet as everyone knows, there is much in the seas: they tend to hide disturbing oddities under a poker face of familiarity. Seas will take the crustiest and most interesting denizens of any realm into their welcoming arms, because no practical amount of filth can poison them, save for tons of phosphorus leached from leaky poo plants and storm drains.

The same holds for the sea of genes, which has given us those fruits of the race: Corky and Caligula. Novel phenotypes are hidden in a jumbled sea of genotypes! They wait, intensely frustrated, for an outlet of self-expression! And sometimes they are not even noticed.

* * *

On Sunday morning, I caught the cat squeezing a hirsute octopus, digging with its claws for squeaks of pain to oil the wheel of play.

This is not the first time the cat has dragged in an exotic animal, I thought. But this is more novel than the time the cat brought a baby opossum into the house, which the dog summarily scooped into his mouth and swallowed, I thought.

I seized the hairy mollusk from the cat, which hissed at me in fury.

“I’m going to drop an anvil on you. Get out of here before I put you on a rotisserie.”

And it did, with every ounce of defiance one would expect from a fat, swaggering yellow cat.
(Miraculously I was able to drive myself off the spit before the cat had a chance to light the fuel in his great earthen pit.)

I turned my attention to the octopus once again. I will now admit that it was a complete shock to me, that the “octopus” was not a sea creature at all, but something much more mundane. It was the shriveled bloom of the aforementioned Stapelia, which had fallen from the plant and into the playground of the fat cat.

Without thinking at all, I began to pet the flower eagerly. I found its surface pleasantly fuzzy and mammalian, but regretfully unpleasant to the sight, because it resembled the purple-veined noses of the elderly with its lavender bands and jutting hairs.

I resolved, then, to close my eyes, and explore its exotic surface with my fingertips.


After several minutes of such exploration and without conscious effort, I began to draw analogies between the surface of the flower and the organs of the human body. I noticed, particularly, that the ridges on the flower’s external surface were much like human wrinkles.

And then with my fingers, I breached a sort of canal holding a mass of black pollen, all of which, I found, had been jumbled up into a kind of button surrounded by a mane of erectile hairs.

At this moment, it occurred to me that to only indulge my sense of touch was to indulge myself insufficiently and to limit myself unnecessarily. I then took it upon myself to insert my nose into the canal.

The scent entered my nostrils and, dare I say, extruded a memory from some part of my brain. It was a memory of a text which concerned itself with the “irresistiblity of a piece of rancid cheese”, and while its source escaped me, I thought immediately of that agreeable character, Président de Curval.

After exhaling (and perhaps in a state of intoxication) I thought, You, fine flower, do not resemble an octopus at all, but a languid starfish. I will call you Curval’s starfish. In time you will wither away, and I will build you a tomb. You can be sure I will never forget you. And you, dear starfish, I hope you will never forget me.

For a moment, possessed by Curval’s spirit, I reasoned that if to touch but not smell was an excessive restriction, then to indulge only the tactile and olfactory organs was to do great injustice to my other senses. I resolved, again, to indulge those senses.

And in the passion of enjoyment, it occurred to me that such order, such an agreeable correspondence between my senses and the sensual properties of this flower could never in any probability spring from the Darwinian sea our scientists have postulated.

On the contrary, the beauty of this complementary union could only have been created by a great Demiurge; an Intelligent Creator.

A note from the 15th:

I stepped on a bee today. I don’t have many run ins with the hive dwellers, which is probably what made the pain of the sting so surprising. I assumed I had stepped on a nail or a shard of glass. The stinger twitched in the joint of my tender little toe until I bravely extracted it, along with a writhing bundle of venom pumping innards. With my teeth.

(after, of course, killing the bee with a jackknife)

The toe has puffed up into a mass of flesh that looks more like a mongoloid’s nape than a digit.

No rose without a thorn, but many a thorn without a rose.

Jun. 25th

8AM

Just when you think you have sustained the worst possible sting, some greater power smirks, knowing something greater can be thought.

This bite is just incapacitating. It is an obstacle to all comfortable living. Plus, I have to explain it to my housemates to dispel the easy assumption that it’s conjunctivitis.

12PM

My housemate Kevin took a look at my eye and proceeded to tell me a story. He once stayed in a paralytic rehabilitation center where a service worker sustained a bite of the same species.

The worker casually walked through the rec. room to the shock of some relaxing quad’s.

“It’s the size of a golfball!”

“I’M GONNA POP THIS MOTHERFUCKER”, said the service worker, intent on adding some flavor to the day by seasoning it with his juices.

And he darted off to the men’s room, tailed by several squeaky wheelchairs, whose occupants trembled in anticipation of the squashing.

He then stood in front of a mirror thronged by patients, and slapped the bulging eyelid between two open palms. This forced a quick spurt of gore through the bite hole, which was immediately corked by a gooey green string.

This green eye slime caused the service worker to faint, but this fainting episode also meant that an aghast paraplegic would break his fall, resulting in a collapsed wheelchair and a renewed and forceful ooze from the bite hole.

Kevin dived to the worker’s rescue, wad of toilet paper in hand. He applied pressure to the leaking eye, which pulsed between his fingers, a pulsing that he thought signified the eyeball’s imminent expulsion from its socket.

8PM

But just when you have the bite that than which nothing greater can be thought,

you discover that there is something greater that than which nothing greater can be thought.

Which is impossible.

Now everything in the room goes into the washing machine or the incinerator. I have changed my clothes and I want nothing more than sleep or a merciful lightning bolt from the Deity.

9PM

The ridiculous summer heat is keeping me from sleep and the bites are still coming. I have stripped down to nothing, and now I will sleep in the nude with nothing to cover me.

11PM

I am freezing and all articles of cloth are suspect. This is the last resort: The Emergency Blanket. I don’t know whether the things that prey on me jump, fly, or crawl, but I’ll suffocate them or steam them to death in my sweat, wrapped in this shimmering robe of death.

Jun. 25th

9AM

A text message from: Ecce homo
To N. Castillo:

One flea (?) bite along my waist (consequently exposed to the pressure of my trousers) is over four times the size of a quarter.

3PM

I just received a single cellphone ring from Natalie.

Which I guess means that she returned my call as a reflex before she realized she had no desire to talk to me. =p

I promptly sent her a text message, which practically obligated her to call again… And she did.

She referred to me as “buddy”, told me that a flea bite four times the size of a quarter might very well be infected, and advised a dose of Benadryl.

The really funny thing is that I received the impression that she just called to chide me for neglecting myself.

4PM

Whatever is pictured above has evolved into some kind of random swelling that I can’t really laugh at anymore. By random swelling, I mean swelling that appears on remote parts of the body without any apparent connection with other swollen regions.

There is something greater than something greater that than which nothing greater can be thought.

Which is impossible.

6PM

Now my ears have become so swollen that they have lifted off the side of my head. Now they point forward, with my eyes, instead of pointing to my sides, toward my shoulders.

I’m convinced that instead of some dread allergy, these dramatic physical changes actually occasion my metamorphosis into a large monkey.

I realize that the swelling is not evident in this photo. It eventually became severe, with my ears swelling to about twice their size (eliciting Dumbo comments from dad). My eye also swelled shut.

My mother worried that my throat would soon follow, so she whisked me off to the hospital.

(I on the other hand, warmly reflected on the prospect )

Robert,

Simon

He who knows where the nest is has the knowledge. He who robs it has the nest.

Von: Marissa Jackson
An: Robert Jackson
Betreff: Re: hello
Datum: Fri, 24 Feb 2006 16:50:24 -0800

Today mom was in this store and she was like,

Oh, I guess they are.