Strange Day

I got up early today so I could go off and get a resupply of my antibiotic before my next scheduled dose at 9:00. When I got to the Dr. G's office, though, they hadn't been able to find any. While I waited the two nurses went on several quick expeditions within the building, always reporting back that nobody had any. The drug company was no longer leaving samples. They started calling other offices, finally locating a doctor's office in Santee that had a supply.

Following the directions they gave me, I eventually found the well-concealed clinic they had directed me to. It looked more like a 1950s rocket test blockhouse. All of the windows were black glass, there were no signs (except an occasional "Private"), and many of the doors were locked. However, I eventually got in, explained my errand and got the goodies. I then headed for Costco to have a prescription refilled.

I was told I would have to wait over an hour. I got tired sooner and checked. My stuff was ready. I headed over to my barber for one of my rare haircuts.

I hadn't known it, but she had taken a two week vacation in Taiwan. All of her regulars were catching up on their haircuts. The place was packed. She made everybody take a number because there were too many for her to keep track of. She said she didn't want any hurt feelings. I suggested she wanted to avoid a fight which she would have to use pepper spray to break up, causing the mob of clients to panic and get caught in a jam at the single exit. She hadn't heard the story of the Chicago night club disaster but the other regulars were happy to pick up on my hint and fill her in. It made for a lively discussion.

Pretty soon my cellular phone rang. Delia was very upset. She had received a number of calls from telemarketers, some of them quite rude about accepting "No" for an answer. Then she had received a call she thought was yet another telemarketer and she blew the woman off. She got a reply like, "Fine, I won't bother you again." Suddenly Delia realized she had blown off Derek's boss, on vacation in San Diego, who Derek had asked us to visit the Zoo with.

Oops!

Delia had called Derek before calling me. He didn't have his boss's cellular phone number, so there was no way we could call back and explain the mistake. Derek sent a recent photo in an email message but he sent it to my regular address, which only has a monochrome laser printer, instead to my address on the upstairs computer with the color printer on it. I had to go downstairs and forward the message upstairs so I could print her picture in color.

Okay, it is the middle of the week in the middle of winter. There are only a few thousand visitors to the zoo today. Finding one person wandering around this 174 acre park shouldn't be impossible, right? Difficult, yes. Impossible, no.

We could make it easier. We could look for the whole family: man, woman (Derek's boss), two kids (one about four years old), plus we had a photo. They would probably ride the bus around, so Delia first started looking at people getting off of the bus. Too slow -- one bus every fifteen minutes. Move to where the bus passes and where lots of people walk, near the entrance. Better, but still slow. While Delia was watching buses pass, I decided to check out the Children's Zoo. Lots of good places to hide there, but no sign of them. When I got back, there was no sign of Delia either.

Delia had gotten impatient when I didn't appear immediately after disappearing, so she followed in my footsteps. She immediately ran into the people she was looking for and they all spent a long time getting acquainted. I was standing near the reptile house when they all emerged from the Children's Zoo.

Yes, Derek, we met your boss and she said some very nice things about you.

Blood In the Water

The sharks are preparing to feed. Those belonging to the city of Chicago claim the club had been ordered closed. They have to make such a claim, whether or not such an order was issued and not countermanded, to keep the sharks belonging to the victims from eating them alive. But the sharks belonging to the club have been claiming an exemption, claiming that they were given permission to open the club, had even asked the city to provide additional protection. Well, they have to say that; otherwise, all of the other sharks will eat them alive.

And the other sharks? Oh, damage has been done -- but not to the sharks. The sharks are opportunists. They see a chance to feed well. They sense blood in the water, no matter how thin the trace might be. They hope to feed -- and feed well -- perhaps letting some small scraps fall to the victims and their families, to justify the whole thing.

It really has little to do with the victims after all. They just provide the first blood.

Reality vs. Fantasy

Perhaps as I was writing the entry on levels of illusion, inspired by my viewing of the movie "Chicago", a tragedy was taking place at a club in Chicago. Fantasy killed 21 people.

A fight had broken out. The guards hired to protect the club used pepper spray to break up the fight. Pepper spray does more than make your eyes sting. It also makes you feel as if you can't breathe.

A general panic took hold of the 500 people in the club. Fearing that they were going to suffocate, or simply feeling the fear communicated from others, they all stampeded for the single exit. Those who fell were crushed, about fifty being injured seriously and 21 being killed.

The illusion of danger created the reality of danger, but a different danger.

Now the lawyers begin their tapdance.

Levels of Illusion

Interview

Taken from "The Onion Girl" by Charles de Lint

Extract from an interview with Jilly Coppercorn, conducted by Torrane Dunbar-Burns for the Crowsea Arts Review, at her Yoors Street studio on Wednesday, April 17, 1991.

What do you think it is that makes you different from other artists? That makes you so welcome among so many disparate disciplines, untouched by maliciousness or gossip?
[laughs] Well, I think there's plenty of gossip.

But it's not mean-spirited. Whenever I hear you talked about, it's as though you're a mischievous little sister -- even to artists many years your junior.
I don't know. Maybe it's because I don't want to rule or serve, only to be allowed to go my own way.

Isn't that the ambition of all artists? To make their own mark?
Is it? It seems to me that people make art for all sorts of different reasons. I'm not interested in leaving a body of work behind. But I am interested in promoting communication between everybody -- and not only through the arts. And I'm determined to show through my art that there are alternatives to the way the world is these days.

You mean by showing us that there are faerie and magic?
The magical beings in my paintings aren't the point. The point is that we're not alone. That we're surrounded by spirit and spirits. I truly believe that if we do our best to live a good life, to treat each other with kindness and respect, we can make the world a better place. The faerie are a representation of that betterness -- is that even a word?

It is now, if you want it to be.
The Faerie represent the beauty we don't see, or even choose to ignore. That's why I'll paint them in junkyards, or fluttering around a sleeping wino. No place or person is immune to spirit. Look hard enough, and everything has a story. Everybody is important.

"Death makes equal the high and low.
What's that from?

John Heywood, I believe.
Too bad we have to wait for death to make a balance.

Isn't that the truth. But to get back to the faerie and the other magical beings in your paintings ...
They're just how I tell the story.

So the faerie aren't real?
[Smiles.] I never said that.

Chicago

The Movie Musical

Not the city, which is all too real.

What a wonderful mixture of illusion and reality.

The story is told in a series of parables, mostly overwhelmingly lavish and loud. We are shown just enough of the real world to keep from getting lost. First our heroine is unfaithful to her husband. Then she kills her lover. When hubby won't take the rap, our heroine gets hauled off to jail. Eventually she obtains a lawyer. Between them they begin creating elaborate new fantasies.

Our heroine's life depends on the fantasy she creates for the press. This fantasy is what will pay for her legal services. But it is heady. It becomes habit forming. She constantly needs a fix of publicity in order to feel good about herself. Other murders, other murderers, must not be allowed to dominate the news or to attract attention away from her situation, even if it requires inventing a baby.

But the very practice of law, we learn, is fantasy, illusion. The best illusionist wins. It isn't the interpretation of words in dusty books of law by dusty lawyers in front of a nearly sleeping judge, with the final decision to be made by the twelve people so uninspired they were unable to concoct a sufficient excuse for not serving on a jury. It's a three-ring circus, opposing clowns performing before the small audience they both try so hard to confuse and distract.

The verdict comes in and reality with it. Fantasy dries up.

The life-sustaining attention our heroine enjoyed is gone.

Or is it?

The Real World

The world is full of illusion. Mostly we ignore it.

Politics is almost completely illusery. Whatever they say or do, that isn't what's really happening. Read your local newspaper, watch news on television, read news magazines ... you're being trapped in a web of illusion. Oh, they show many of the basic facts, but they leave out a lot and they put in a lot of spin on what they do show.

And if politics is fantasy, what about entertainment? Take the music industry as a particularly bad example. They create music groups or take individuals, not necessarily especially talented, promote the hell out of them, sell their recordings and shows at great profit while sharing as little as possible with the artists, then scream bloody murder when somebody either shares their music without paying or, more recently, makes use of technology that could be used to duplicate their works without paying for having the ability to make copies, whether used or not. And the sports industry has gone in a slightly different direction but are just as unreal as other aspects of entertainment.

Then there's physics. Quantum foam, superstrings, worm holes, black holes -- all the modern playthings of today's physicist are fantastic.

But only humans are aware of the possibility of illusion. Only the human mind can conceive that we might be fooled, that there might be more than we can feel and sense through the sensory capabilities we share with other animals. And, aware of the illusion, only we can choose to ignore it, either temporarily or permanently.

Relax and enjoy it.

Boil Update

Because You Like Me to Gross You Out

It isn't that bad.

The antibiotic the doctor gave me wasn't doing anything. The package indicated that the normal dosage was double what he had specified, so I called to double check. Sure enough, he had made an error. Hey, at least he admitted it. The medicine was new to him and he hadn't been sure of the dose. Each little package contains two horse-chokers, each with 1,000 mg of medicine. It's easy to believe this would be a full day's dose ... but I can imagine that one 2,000 mg tablet would have been nearly impossible to swallow.

Anyway, I had taken half the correct dose for a full day and my boil had turned black with a red ring of inflammation extending an inch above and below and 1.75 inches to either side of the lump containing the black boil. And it extended down inside the leg, into the muscle, causing pain when I moved and cramps when I didn't.

That was yesterday. Today there is no blackness. The redness is much reduced. The lump is much reduced. There is a small white head, probably an accumulation of pus, but I'm not about to open it to see. I haven't checked for fever but I don't feel feverish or unwell. There is much less pain.

Cathy is slightly better today, too. She got up, medicated the hell out of herself and went off to work. That was probably not the smartest thing in the world to do and she will probably collapse into her bed as soon as she returns, but it is promising.

Poor Delia. Valentine's Day is normally such a special day for us -- we met on Valentine's Day 32 years ago -- and I had completely forgotten what day it was yesterday. Delia claims that she forgot, too, but I'm not so sure. It would be too uncharacteristic of her to forget. But she couldn't do much with Cathy and me both so ill.

Infection and Fever

Last night at 23:00 I noticed that I had a boil at the top of my right leg, near the groin area. The area around the boil was all red and inflamed. Lots of blood vessels pass under the boil's location, so it worried me. I had an appointment to see Dr. G today at 11:00. Otherwise I would have started calling doctors first thing this morning. As a diabetic, I cannot afford to ignore infection, especially in such a delicate location.

Dr. G confirmed that there is more infection than just the boil. I was running a temperature that didn't show up on my thermometer, which apparently reads 1.5 degrees low. He checked to be sure the lymph glands below the groin weren't swollen, then gave me an antibiotic to take for the next ten days.

The lab work done three weeks ago was basically negative. It showed that my sugars have been high, which I already knew, but everything else was normal to good. No hidden blood. My chest X-ray was clean. Nothing wrong with the knee I banged up apart from slight narrowing of the joint.

I mentioned that Cathy had brought home some kind of flu that caused me chills for a week and was trying hard to pass along her current cold to me. Dr. G told me to stay away from Cathy as much as possible.

Anyway, between the fever and the antibiotic, I felt pretty rotten this afternoon and so decided to take a nap. The telemarketers know! I should have disconnected the telephone first.

ISP Problem

During the creation of my last entry I had connection problems, as mentioned in a remark I left following the entry. I had the entry set up as private ... but people were able to leave comments anyway.

How did that happen?

Oasis Museum Trip

This morning I attended an Oasis presentation at the San Diego Museum of Natural History titled "Ocean's Oasis". The subject of the lecture, slide show and movie was exploration of some of the wilder parts of Baja California and of the Sea of Cortés.

This lecture was scheduled to begin about an hour earlier than most Oasis lectures, at 9:15. To complicate matters, when I woke it was raining. It had traffic at a standstill, so I decided to allow some extra driving time. By the time I was ready to depart, traffic was moving again, however slowly. It continued moving at least 20 mph on the freeway, for which I was thankful, and I arrived at Balboa Park about half an hour early, plenty of time for me to walk from the Organ Pavilion parking lot, where mine was the third car to park, up to the museum. By the time things were supposed to start there were about twenty of us standing in front of the museum wondering why they hadn't opened their doors.

As it turned out, they changed the entrance to the opposite side of the building two years ago but there was no indication at the old entrance that it was no longer in use. One of the four doors had a "Use Other Door" sign, but that was all. Somebody finally came to get us and expressed surprise that there was no sign explaining the change.

We quickly signed in and entered the museum lobby, where we stood around waiting for what seemed like a long time. Finally we were allowed into the theater, which was like a smaller version of the Imax theater at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Center. That is, the rows of seats were sloped up at an extreme angle so they seemed to be one atop the other and the giant screen, when moved into place after the lecture, occupied just about our entire field of view.

The lecturer had a laptop computer that allowed her to control a series of slides and text screens, which helped her presentation considerably (especially the maps). She covered some of the different geology present in the area, from small mountains to flat islands, then described the diversity of living creatures that resulted from the multiple habitats and relative isolation one from another.

The expeditions made in 2002 covered two areas of the Baja peninsula that were particularly remote and isolated, areas with few occupants. The expedition planned for 2003 is for an area even more rugged, remote and isolated, almost uninhabited.

After the lecture, the doors were opened to allow a couple of hundred kids to enter, to watch the movie. They were a bit confused in finding their seats but were generally well behaved and quiet.

The movie was visually impressive. It showed lots of neat marine animals, from whales to nearly microscopic shrimp-like creatures as well as some impressive scenery. It was, however, a little short on information. I suppose they figured that once they caught your interest they could always provide the information later.

Afterwards I wandered around the museum for a while. Their special exhibit at the moment has to do with the domestication of dogs and the relation of dogs to other canines. It was a rich source of information and the displays were appealing and interesting. On an upper floor there were several volunteers with small exhibits of an "up close and personal" nature, like snakes you could hold or pet. There was also something whose presence I am unable to understand: a miniature golf course.

I had lowered my insulin dosage last night because I knew I would be getting plenty of exercise, both in the long walk to the museum and in walking around the museum for, as it turned out, two hours. My fasting level in the morning was still low, 125, so I wasn't surprised when I started showing symptoms of low blood sugar a bit earlier than I had intended to leave. I had some shopping to do (I needed syringes for my insulin), but I thought it prudent to head home early and get something to eat before going on. It was my good fortune that Delia had prepared one of her good chicken soups, with plenty of potatoes and carrots in it.

Gettin' Gas

Delia hates to put gas in her van. It amounts to a phobia for her. She also has problems with ATM machines and for much the same reason that she does poorly with computers ... they are not intuitive to her. And she keeps forgetting to tell me about it when I can do something about it. For example, she told me she was absolutely out of gas last night at 23:00. I wasn't about to get gas at that hour.

This morning I was checking my calendar and noticed some gas receipts, which reminded me of the gas problem. I quickly got ready. I mentioned to Delia that I needed to get bread and some other stuff too; she also wanted some stuff. She said I had plenty of time. I hurried anyway. It didn't help.

I got my gas at the Market Street Costco, where I also did my shopping. When I walked in I decided the place was inhabited by some kind of pigs. However the pig is a fairly intelligent animal, which these weren't. Some other form of lowlife must have escaped the zoo, then. Many of them would have looked quite natural with "Goodyear" stenciled on their flanks, though, particularly the sows and young.

I first headed for the bread, then for the freezers. I got my hamburgers, then Delia's meatballs and chickens. I also got some chicken nuggets, menudo and peppers. Then I tried to leave. Costco has found a new way to slow down the checkout process. They take each shopping cart and turn it around to face backwards before filling it, transferring goods from the customer's basket to an empty basket. In addition to slowing everything down, this takes extra personnel (looking for work, anybody) and takes up lots of space. It also confused the customers, who weren't the brightest bulbs in the package to begin with.

I took about an hour longer than expected. Unexpectedly, Delia wasn't the least bit upset. She immediately left for work, having a guarantee that she could get there and back without running out of fuel.

Health Concerns

Steve (Grioghair) asked "What is your considered opinion [about flu shots] for a 48-year-old man, who[se] health is not that great - do you think that it might make a positive difference to my resistance against illness?" A few years ago, flu shots were as much a danger as they were a help. The danger has been much reduced. The benefit is not just resistance against illness. If your body has already been weakened, by age or by a chronic illness like my diabetes, what could be a mild infection for a healthy person could do organ damage, further weakening the body.

In terms of risk, the risk of getting the shot has been greatly reduced while we have learned that the risk, for some of us, of not getting the shot is much higher than previously believed. And there is some indication that the protection extends beyond just the flu it was intended to protect against.

As for my recent bout of what may have been flu, my recovery is continuing. I continue dumping water and, despite lowering my Lantus (insulin) dose again, my blood sugar levels dropped again, this time to 80. My hands were shaking this morning this morning when I woke and I had to get some food into myself quickly. I'll have to cut back on the Lantus again tonight.