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Debate Part Dieux?

I only want to say a couple of things about the debate (which I also did not watch, but have been listening to and reading highlights from all morning).  So, like…Obama won, did he?  Huh.

Romney, however anyone feels about him as candidate of choice, apparently had to do a lot of backpedaling and saying things that he’s going to have a lot of trouble with if elected.  Particularly about women.

Never mind the “binders full of women” remark, which is the kind of unfortunate remark anyone might make under pressure.

Here’s the problem with Mitt Romney.  As president, he will be the head of the GOP.  The Republican Party has a number of things they put in its platform that are inimical to women’s progress toward full equity in this society.  Romney, in order to follow through on some of his disclaimers last night, will have to turn around and tell his party that, no, he won’t support those things.

If the GOP retains its relative numbers in Congress—or gains control—just how likely does anyone think it will be that Romney will buck them?  (I’m asking here, I don’t know.  He does not strike me as the sort to go against his board of directors, though.)

While it may well be a minority of the GOP that actually believes some of the nonsense that’s been spewing from their collective gobbit of recent days, the fact is that this same minority has been wagging the dog for some time now.  Romney will have to disavow them, fight them, and stand up and be forcefully reasonable in order to actually protect women’s rights.  Something he apparently gave little actual substance to last night.

Yes, yes, I know, I should not pronounce on what I did not witness.  Fair enough.  But I’m not talking about last night per se, I’m talking about the last several months of campaigning.  Romney started losing women according to polls and modified his campaign rhetoric to compensate.  The problem is, the modifications run counter to the retrograde momentum of a great deal of the Republican Party, and that is where the problem lies.

The other part of this is the simple fact that no matter what he says, if he gets elected, everything will change.  Obama pointed some of it up last night over the public land licensing for oil and coal.  These are the kinds of details and difficulties you can’t always predict before you sit in that chair.  Once actually in office, things Are Different.  (That is why every president ever elected has disappointed some segment of his supporters.)

I’m delighted Obama got feisty.  Romney may well want to win the election, but I wonder if he actually wants the job.  He wants the job he thinks he’s running for, not the one he’ll actually have.  Obama still wants to be president after four years.

But who knows?  My point here is that the presidential election this time is far more about what the opposing Parties will do rather than the candidates themselves.

I’m cutting Obama a lot of slack on the economy, because frankly he told us it would take a long time to recover.  Things are recovering.  Naturally a lot of people are unhappy and not without reason—times are difficult—but he didn’t say it would be quick, which is usually what people want.  (And people with jobs and some security will of course be more patient than those without.)  Romney claims he knows how to create jobs.  Neither man has that kind of control over what is ostensibly a free market.  So as far as I’m concerned, it’s the rest of what Obama has been about that I’m concerned with.

And on that score, it’s a mixed bag.  But just two things: Bush left this country with one of the worst international reputations it has had since Vietnam.  Obama has been carefully rebuilding that.  We simply cannot act unilaterally in the world today and Bush thought he could (“I don’t do nuance.” Indeed) and subsequently pissed everyone off pretty much across the board (except Israel).*

The second thing really is the women’s rights issue.  What many people seem not to get is that this is not “just” about women, but about people—because if you can treat one segment of the population “special” and curtail their rights (pay, self-determination, personal dignity and security of person) then you can do it to any segment.  The Right has more or less successfully made it appear that any time measures are taken to redress inequity for a given group that such measures are Special Treatment and “privileges.”  Gotta hand it to them, they’ve been very, very good at this kind of 1984 newspeak.  But it’s not so and until they stop letting the right wing of the party dictate their flight path I will vote against them.  I don’t want to return us to a Leave It To Beaver world.  No, I don’t think they actually can—social engineering is never so neat and precise—but the attempt to do so, even partially successful, will result in unintended consequences that will do damage to lives that should never have been so harmed.  (Yes, some of these people I do see as the moral equivalent of the thugs who shot Malala Yousafzai. I very badly want these people out of office.)

So.  One more debate and everyone will vote the way they were likely to in the first place.  But I believe we should be clear on why we’re doing so.

Back to work, now.  Thank you for your attention.

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* It may seem like a fair charge that at some point we should stop beating up on what the Bush Administration did, and in principle I agree.  We should move on.  But let’s be honest—the right wing of the GOP has been carping and complaining about the Johnson Administration since Nixon took office.  Not, perhaps, in name, but their entire direction has been more or less dictated by trying to undo what LBJ did.  Well, in my view, W did one hell of a lot more damage, so forgive us if we still point that out from time to time.

Art

Some Thoughts On SF, Nostalgia, Words

This past weekend I attended our local convention,  Archon.  It’s a St. Louis convention that’s not actually in St. Louis, for many reasons too convoluted to go into here, and this one was number 36.  Which means, with a couple of exceptions, I’ve been going to it for three decades.  (Our first con was Archon 6, which featured Stephen King as GoH, and thus was something of a media circus.  I met several writers, some whose work I knew and loved, others of whom I just then became acquainted—George R.R. Martin, Robin Bailey, Charles Grant, Joe Haldeman, Warren Norwood. Some have passed away, others are still working.)

I go now to meet up with friends of long acquaintance, in whose company we have spent relatively little actual face-time, but who by now have become touchstones in our lives.  It’s odd having people who feel so close that you see at most one weekend a year.  Granted, the internet has helped bridge those gaps, but it’s still a curious phenomenon, one which I kind of dealt with this weekend on at least one panel.

This year, the novel that seems to have garnered the most awards was Jo Walton’s Among Others. It won both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award, both times beating out what I considered the best science fiction novel of perhaps the last decade, China Miéville’s Embassytown.  

Now, please don’t misunderstand—I thought Among Others was a marvelous novel.  I enjoyed it thoroughly, was, in fact, delighted by it, and certainly being delighted is one of the chief pleasures of reading.  I do not here intend any slight on the work.

But it took two awards that are supposed to honor the best science fiction of the year, and Among Others was barely fantasy.  (One of the things I admired about it was the line Walton danced around separating the fantasy from actual occurrence and simple perception on the part of the characters.)  It is in the long tradition of English boarding school stories, written as the diary of a girl who is somewhat isolated, who has run away from her mad mother (who may be a witch) after a tragic loss of her sister and a crippling accident.  Living with her father now, she is placed in a boarding school where her love of science fiction is one of her chief methods of coping. The novel then chronicles the succession of books she reads over a year or two, many of which were exactly the books I was reading then and loving.  It is in that sense an overview of a particular period in SF, one I found myself reliving with immense pleasure.

Embassytown, on the other hand, is solidly SF built on a very meaty idea that plays out with intensity and provokes a great deal of thought—everything SF is supposed to do.  It is also marvelously well-written and to my mind was hands down the best of the year, if not, as I said, the last decade.

But it lost to the Walton.

Why?

So I proposed a panel at Archon to discuss the power of nostalgia in a field that is presumed to deal with cutting edge, next level, philosophically stimulating ideas.  It’s supposed to take us new places.  Granted, most of it no longer does—instead it takes us to some very familiar places (after eight decades of definably “modern” SF, how many “new” places are there really to go?) and in the last couple of decades, it’s been taking us to some very old places, alá Steampunk and alternate history.  I’d never given much thought to this before as a nostalgic longing because in both cases the writers are still proposing What If? scenarios that ask questions about the nature of historical inevitability and technological destiny.  The story might well be set in 1890, but it’s not “our” 1890 and we have to come to grips with the questions of why “our” 1890 has preference in the nature of human development.

But Among Others didn’t even do that.  It was just a recapitulation of one fan’s love of a certain era of fiction.

Again, absolutely nothing wrong with that and I say again, Among Others is a fine novel, I unhesitatingly recommend it.

My question in the panel had to do with the potential for exhaustion in SF.  Paul Kincaid talks about this here in an examination of two of the best Best of the Year anthologies, Dozois’ and Horton’s.  In my own reading, I’ve noticed a resurgence of old models—planetary romance, space opera, etc (Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey for instance)—where we’re seeing writers take these comfortable, familiar forms and rework them with more contemporary sensibilities, broader perspectives, certainly in many instances more skillful prose.  But the “cutting edge” seems to be occupying narrower slices of the collective SF zeitgeist.  (William Gibson, to my mind still one of the most interesting SF writers, has all but given up writing SF in any concrete fashion and is now doing contemporary thrillers from an SF perspective.  Is this cutting edge or an admission that there simply isn’t anywhere “new” to go?  Likewise with Neal Stephenson, who opted to go all the way back to the Enlightenment and rework that as SF—taking the notions of epistemology and social science and applying them to the way a period we thought we knew unfolded from a shifted perspective.)

Kincaid’s piece talks about insularity in the field, which is not a new criticism—arguably, the recent upsurge in YA in the field is a direct response to the ingrown, jargon-laden incestuousness of the field in the 80s and 90s, where it seemed that if you hadn’t been reading SF since the early Seventies you simply would not understand what was going on—but I’m wondering if a new element has been added, that of an aging collective consciousness that unwittingly longs for the supposedly fertile fields of a previous Golden Age in publishing, an age before Star Trek and Star Wars and cyberpunk, when it was easier (supposedly) to write an almost pastoral kind of science fiction and you didn’t need a degree in physics or history or cultural anthropology to find your way.  (I suspect the tenacity of iconic worlds like the aforementioned Star Trek and Star Wars can be explained by a very common need for continuity and familiarity with a story that you can access as much through its fashions as its ideas.)

Having just turned 58, and feeling sometimes more behind the curve both technologically and culturally, I’m wondering if, in a small way, the accolades given to a work of almost pure nostalgia is indicative of a wish for the whole magilla to just slow down.

(The trajectory of my own work over the last 20 years is suggestive, where I can see my interests shift from cool ideas, new tech, stranger settings, into more personal fiction where the internal landscapes of my characters take more and more precedence.  And many of them are feeling a bit lost and clueless in the milieus in which I set them.  Not to mention that I have moved from space opera to alternative history, to more or less straight history and into contemporary…)

The panel was lively and inconclusive—as I expected, because I didn’t intend answering my own question, only sparking discussion and perhaps a degree of reflection.

SF goes through cycles, like any other art form, and we see the various subsets rise and fall in popularity.  There’s so much these days that I may be missing things and getting it all wrong.  The reason I brought it up this time is a response to the very public recognition of a given form that, this year, seems to have trumped what I always thought science fiction is about.

I confess, there are many days I look back to when I first discovered SF, and the impact it had on my adolescent mind (and the curious fact that when I go reread some of those books I cannot for the life of me see what it was about them that did that—no doubt I was doing most of it for myself, taking cues from the works) and when I first thought about becoming a writer.  It does (falsely) seem like it would have been easier “back then” to make something in the field.  Such contemplation is a trap—you can get stuck in a retrograde What If every bit as powerful as the progressive What If that is supposed to be at the core of science fiction.

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Yes, It Is My Birthday

I take partial responsibility.  After all, my parents had more than a little to do with it.

I usually forget my birthday until the week before, when everyone starts reminding me.  This year, though, I’m paying a bit more attention because, well, I’m here to have one.  That was, for the first time ever, more than an academic question recently.  So for that I am grateful to many people, most of whom I do not know and may never see again—doctors and nurses and even some folks who thought good thoughts without my knowing—and for the love of my friends.

I have pretty much everything one could ask for out of life.  The one thing that would make this just super cool would be to have some publisher offer me a significant amount of money to publish one of the books I have on offer.  I trust that will come eventually.

I’m most especially pleased that I have Donna.  Still.  Always.  She’s one seriously wonderful human being.  I love her and I am still baffled that she loves me.

So, to everyone, thank you for your birthday wishes.  You strangers out there who read this, if you want to do something more than wish me happy birthday, go buy one of my books, read it, and rave about it on your own blog or on Amazon or wherever. (If you choose REMAINS, you’ll make my publisher happy, too.) But even so, thank you, thank you, thank you.

I’m going to a convention now.  Have a great day.

Celebratin’
Art

My World of Tomorrow

This weekend I’ll be attending the local science fiction convention, Archon.  I’ve only missed a couple of these since 1982, when Donna and I went to out very first SF convention, Archon 6. Stephen King was guest of honor and we got to meet many of the writers we’d been reading and enjoying, some, at least in my case, for many years.  Until that year I hadn’t even known such things happened.

Science fiction for me was part of the fundamental bedrock of my life’s ambitions.  Not just writing it or reading it, but in a very real sense living it.  It is difficult to recapture that youthful, naïve enthusiasm for all that was the future.  The vistas of spaceships, new cities, alien worlds all fed a growing æsthetic of the shapes and content of the world I wanted very much to live in.

I’ve written before of some of the aspects of my childhood and adolescence that were not especially wonderful.  My love of SF came out of that, certainly, but it was altogether more positive than merely a flight response from the crap of a less than comfortable present.  I really thought, through a great deal of my life, that the world was heading to a better place.  I found the informing templates and ideas of that world in science fiction, in the positivist philosophy underlying so much of it.

And I liked that world!

It was not a world driven by bigotry or senseless competition for competition’s sake.  It was not a world where deprivation was acceptable because of innate fatalism or entrenched greed.  It was not a world that lumped people into categories according to theories of race or economics that demanded subclasses.

True, a great many of the novels and stories were about exactly those things, showing worlds where such attitudes and trends dominated.  But they were always shown as examples of where not to go.  You could read the paranoid bureaucratic nightmares of Philip K. Dick and know that he was telling us “Be careful, or it will turn out this way.”  We could read the dystopias of a Ballard or an Aldiss and see them as warnings, as “if this goes on” parables.

You could also read Ursula Le Guin and see the possibilities of alternative pathways.  You could read Poul Anderson and see the magnificent civilization we might build.  You could read Clarke and glean some idea of how people could become more than themselves.

You could see the future.

And what did that future offer?  By the time I was eighteen I knew I wanted to live in a world in which we are all taken as who we are, humans beings, and nothing offered to one group was denied another just because.  I recognized that men and women are equals, that our dreams and ambitions are not expanded or diminished by virtue of gender.  I understood that building is always more important than tearing down.  I discovered that Going There was vital and that the obstacles to it were minor, transitory things that sometimes we see as too big to surmount, but which are always surmountable.

Sure, these are lessons that are drawn from philosophy and science and ethics.  You can get to them by many paths.  I just happened to have gotten to them through science fiction.

I envisioned a world wherein people can engage and interact with each other fearlessly, without arbitrary barriers, and we can all be as much as we wish to be, in whatever way we wish to be it.

So imagine my disappointment as I watch the world veer sharply in so many ways from that future.  A world where people with no imagination, avaricious or power hungry, people of truncated and stunted souls are gaining ground and closing those doors.

There is a girl in Pakistan who may yet die.  She’s 14 years old and she was shot by the Taliban because she dared to stand against them.  She assumed her right to go to school, something the Taliban refuse to accept—females should not go to school—and rather than engage her ideas they shot her to silence her.

In our own country we have men in places of power who think women shouldn’t have the right to control their own bodies, others who opine that maybe slavery wasn’t so bad after all, others who deny the legitimacy of science because it contradicts their wishes and prejudices.

This is not the world I imagined.  Why would any sane person deny anyone the right to an education?  How could the community around this girl even tacitly support this idea?  This is so utterly alien to me that it is incomprehensible.  This is evil.  This is not the world of tomorrow, but some kind of limpet world, hermetically sealed inside its own seething ignorance that, like a tumor, threatens everything that I, for one, believe is worth while.

So I write.  I write stories and I write this blog and I write reviews and I write and I talk and I argue.  It is disheartening to me how many people use their ignorance as a barrier to possibility, to change, to hope.  I can’t help sometimes but think that they would have benefited in their childhood from more science fiction.

I still have hope.  It still comes from the source well of my childhood imagination, that we can build a better world.  If that’s naïve, well, so be it.  Harsh reality, unmitigated by dreams of beauty and wonder, makes brutes of us all.

See you at Archon?

 

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Restraint

I went back to the gym this morning.  First time in almost two months.

For those just coming upon this site, I suffered an attack of appendicitis on August 10th.  Three weeks later, there were complications resulting in another hospital stay and further weeks of recovery.

The surgical wound is now, for all intents and purposes, healed.  So sayeth my primary physician.

But the doctors at the hospital said no lifting anything over 10 lbs for six weeks.  Donna decided that the second visit for the complications reset that clock, though most of the physicians involved disagreed.  Well, I have to live with Donna, so…

But this morning we walked the dog—one mile (we have a pedometer now)—and went to the gym.  Donna watched me like a hawk.

Yes, I lifted more than 10 lbs, but not by much.  Compared to what I was doing in July, today’s workout was pathetic.  But I got through a truncated routine without injury.  We aren’t going for records here, folks, just reestablishing a routine and carefully, oh so carefully, working my way back to something like good shape.

It hasn’t hurt that I dropped 21 lbs since surgery.  My stomach has shrunk as well, so I’m eating less, and I intend to keep it that way.

It’s hard.  I’m feeling better, so naturally I feel like I can do more.  And my appetite has definitely returned.  Keeping myself inside new limits is difficult.  The urge to do more, do as much as I think I can, is very strong, and I know I should not.  I should listen to Donna, who has been very good about taking care of me.  And I am.  I held back.  I restrained myself.

This is not natural for me.

I’ve been told that it takes the better part of a year to fully recover from major surgery.  There are times I believe it.  But I also believe that you have to push yourself a little.  Becoming comfortable with limits that should only be temporary is a sure way to lose ground, to settle for less.

Not gonna do that.

But, hey, I went back to the gym today and nothing hurts!

It’s a start.

Absurdity

Stats

I downloaded a new plug-in for my blog Wednesday, a little something called Jetpack from WordPress.  I’d seen other sites with a traffic bar showing visits, and I wanted one.  The urge to know, not necessarily who, but how many people are reading your stuff runs deep.

The first day of its existence was both gratifying and slightly disappointing.  So far this morning, no one has come to visit.  Oh, well.

But I ran almost immediately into a snag last night.  I received the notice on my task bar of an update for Jetpack, so I dutifully clicked it—

—and promptly lost the whole thing.  It informed me that the upgrade failed and the plug-in had been deactivated.  I couldn’t find it in my list of available plug-ins, so I tried to reinstall it.  Which it also would not let me do.  It kept informing me that the folder already existed.  But I couldn’t find the folder in order to expunge it, so I was locked out of downloading the new version of Jetpack.

Not to worry.  I found something else very much like it, but with fewer features—which is fine, I only wanted the stat function.

This has happened before.  With maybe two exceptions, every time I’ve changed my blog theme it has been because an upgrade has been offered and when I accepted it, it trashed my files and I lost my theme and had to go get a new one.  This is most annoying, because an inevitable consequence has been that attempts to reinstall the trashed theme result in the “you already have this” message, which bars me from having a theme I really like.

I have sworn off accepting upgrades.  The only ones that work (knock on particle board) have been the WordPress upgrades.

I wouldn’t mind so much except there’s this little reminder on my task bar when I have one of these pernicious thingies waiting and I feel annoyed and irritated because I can’t find a way to just say No to them and make the reminder go away.

If there is one thing about the computer age that is one of the most irritating and cost-inefficient—and hugely expensive for business, I might add—it is this continual upgrading.  I know progress is important, I know things get better with work, I know improvements are made all the time, but damn, give it a rest!  I wonder how many people not directly involved realize just how much systems upgrades and changeovers cost in terms of time and lost productivity.  Even a tiny, tiny enterprise like mine, one guy writing stories.  Hours have I wasted when finally forced to change a software system or configure a new machine or learn a new template.

The other day I complained about MicroSoft Word.  I dislike Word.  I’ve been using WordPerfect for almost 25 years and for my money, WordPerfect 5.1 is still the gold standard.  Simple, intuitive, did everything I wanted or needed.  Why fuck with it?  But I am now on Version 11.

The problem is, the publishing industry operates on Word, which is not nearly as easy to use or intuitive.  And there are translation problems converting WP to Word which annoys my agent.

Also, I am still using Windows XP, which seems to be a very stable platform.  (I still wonder what was so wrong with Windows 98—please, no litany of its sins, it was a rhetorical comment.)  I am told we are now up to Windows 8 and some day I will be forced to junk my current machines, buy all new, and learn a new system.

Give it a rest.  I mean, seriously.  I know we have to keep the economy going, but this is ridiculous.  It is not the same as the automobile industry.  You can still drive a ’38 DeSoto on today’s roads, and having learned to drive that you can, with one or two minor adjustments, drive a brand new car.  Your old model does not cease to function because the new upgrade won’t allow it to interface with other drivers.

Still.  I manage.  I’m just cranky.  This is not Luddism, do not for a minute think I am anti-cool tech.  But I also do not have a cell phone*.  What I resent is the overcomplications involved in getting “up to speed” with what it au courant.

I have to go back to work now.  At least English doesn’t go through upgrades that require us to learn, from the ground up, an entirely new language.

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*Yes, it’s true, I have no cell phone.  Donna has one, but it was purchased exclusively for emergencies when she took a job in West Jericho.  I refuse.  When I’m not home, you don’t have to reach me.  This may sound selfish, and I agree to an extent, but we managed quite well being “disconnected” for significant parts of the day.  I realize eventually I will have to cave in, but for now I will not participate in the Tech For Tech’s Sake culture.  You want to talk to me, send me an email or leave a message on my answering machine, I’ll get back to you.

Art

Still Plodding

I’m finally able to sit in front of my computer for more than five minutes at a stretch.  (Nothing painful, just really uncomfortable.)  I suppose I’m progressing. My patience abandoned me weeks ago, but since I have almost no energy, it’s not an issue.

Next Tuesday I have my follow-up at the various clinics to see if I’m doing well enough to be “unplugged” and go on my own.  Which only means that afterward I have to be vigilant for a couple of months in regards to fever, etc.  Last night I discovered I’ve lost 15 pounds, which under normal circumstances I wouldn’t mind terribly much.

Meantime, I’m doing some reading.  I have a few books going at the same time.  I’m finally reading the first Aubry/Maturin novel, Master and Commander.  This has been recommended to me by so many people whose taste I trust and I have been so utterly put off by it till now that I feel a bit embarrassed.  The big problem is the plot—which proceeds at a snail’s pace.  But I’ve given it the major attention it clearly deserves and I can appreciate what O’Brian was doing.  Not sure I’ll continue on with it, but I can now declare that it is indeed a fine piece of work.

A couple of history books, and I’m reading Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow.  Yes, this is a reread, but since my first time was forty-plus years ago, it’s virtually a new book, and I guarantee I missed a lot back then.  I’ll be doing a long post about it soon.

Anyway, I’ve booted up my novel again and I’m noodling with it.  I’m only three or four chapters from done with it, which makes this past month a real annoying waste in my mind.  But the downtime has given me the space to rethink a couple of things, which is all to the good.  A better book will emerge from this.

So, till later…

“Rides”
Absurdity

Two Steps Forward….

Well, things slid backward this past Monday.  I had a low-grade fever all weekend and decided if it was still there Monday morning, call the doctor.  Events took charge and I ended up back at Barnes with a soft-tissue infection in half the appendectomy incision.  They did a CT scan to be sure that was all it was and lo!  I have an abscess.

So another day in the hospital having a drain installed, which is really annoying.  I’m home now and I have a nurse visiting everyday to make sure things track the way they’re supposed to.  There’s a twice-daily routine to go through which is unpleasant but I’m sticking to the program.  I want this over.

The nurse is cool, a chipper, upbeat woman named Dawn who is both very sociable and very efficient.  I’m not leaving the house till next Wednesday for a clinic visit.  Fingers crossed, in two weeks all the plumbing will be removed and things will resume some form or normal.

That’s all for now.  I’m getting reading done but not much else.

Art

Plodding Along

For those who may be interested, recovery continues.  I know things are improving because my memory is fairly clear about how bad things were.  Last week, the week before.  But, as is the nature of the critter, we tend only to focus on the present and how crappy it may be.

But I am getting work done.  I’ve completed the first few prints I intend to exhibit in this year’s Archon art show.  Done the critiques of the short stories for the workshop I’m conducting then.  And just about finished two chapters in the current project.  (About those chapters, it is with wry amusement I note that I was about to doggedly go down the wrong path in one of them when this nonsense struck.  Between the time off and the percocet hell, I realized the mistake I was about to make and corrected it.  Always look for something positive, you know?)

Other things are better.  Not great.  I seriously doubt I’ll be back to the gym for at least another month.  And my body seems to have entered another phase of healing, because around noon or one o’clock I seem unable to stay awake.  My sleep is deep.  I’m assuming my body knows what it’s doing.

Part of my reticence involves a growing lack of patience.  I’m getting well enough to start chafing under the restrictions.  I would really like to walk my dog by myself.  I would like to go to the grocery store so that Donna doesn’t have to.  So on and so forth.  I’d like to be able to say I’m catching up on my reading, but that hasn’t been a notable achievement.

In any case, I’m still alive and that’s the best part.  So till my next entry here, I’ll leave you with a new image and a hope that the rest ofyour summer is just fine.

 

Sugar Steel Mill
Home

Gravity

Sometimes you just come to a sudden stop because the universe puts a wall—or a floor or a ceiling—in your way and you bang into it.  I am for the foreseeable future in recovery mode.

Let me explain.

Last Wednesday, August 8th, I finished up for the evening and started getting ready for bed.  I confess to preening.  I’ve been hitting the gym pretty hard and pretty regularly and things were beginning to show for all the effort, so I was checking out my torso in the mirror, noting a small bit of belly definition I have never had much of but is—was—beginning to show.

As I twisted around, something kind of “moved” inside.  An almost-cramp.  Ripples chased around my abdomen.  I stretched, didn’t think more about it, and went to bed.  But I got up twice during the night for unexpected visits to the toilet and the funny clenching was still there.  By morning I thought I might be getting stomach flu.  Great, I’d intended another morning workout and then a few hours downtown working for Left Bank Books.  Instead, I was moping around the house feeling thoroughly blah.

But no fever.  No diarrhea.  Just this generalized muscle cramp.  By Thursday afternoon, my hindbrain finally told me something was wrong.  I called my doctor, who was gone for the day, and the nurse practitioner was vague and unhelpful, but suggested I go to the emergency room.  That was three o’clock.  Donna would be home by 5:30, I could go then.

But it got markedly worse, so I called her to come and get me.

We staggered into Barnes ER around five and I was having a full-blown attack of appendicitis.  Despite the fact that it seemed to take forever, they got me in and on pain killers pretty quickly.

Cut to the chase, they removed my perforated appendix early Friday morning.  Had I gone in a few hours earlier, they likely would have been able to remove it laproscopically, which is out-patient surgery and rather neat.  Instead, I now have the classic three-inch appendectomy wound.

But…three hours or so later, I might not be writing this.  Or anything.

I have to say right here that if you’re going to get sick and need ER service in St. Louis, go to Barnes.  I was treated by a string of the most professional, pleasant people I have ever encountered in a group, especially considering what they have to deal with daily.  I felt very cared for.

I also have to say that irony seeps through this.  We’d been discussing terminating my health insurance.  Bottomline, money.  We’re at that point where it’s becoming untenable for me to carry it, even though in a couple of years I’ll have to.  But we didn’t and now intend hanging onto it at least for a while.  Because although this is fairly standard surgery and the costs are well-defined, there is no way we could have afforded this out of pocket.

What I’m dealing with now is recovery.  It’s going to be a while before I can do any meaningful exercise and this is the first writing of any length I’ve been able to do since coming home, mainly because of related intestinal issues making it impossible to sit in front of the keyboard more than a couple minutes at a time.  Issues I’m still dealing with.

A note on medication.  They put me on percocet for the pain.  Marvelous drug, that.  Shuts the pain down magnificently. Shuts several other things down, too.  But also opened a door in my brain for a series of the most razorsharp, crystalline-clear, hallucinogenic nightmares I have ever had.  I was reluctant to close my eyes after a couple of days.  Unbelievable.  I have stopped taking it.  I can put up with physical pain, but not that.

I thought I’d post something to let you all know where I’ve been and how I’m doing.  Needless to say I won’t be preening anytime soon.  All that wonderful definition is gone, replaced by a flaccid, doughy puffiness that annoys me.  All that work.  But that just means I get to climb back up out of the gravity well—once they let me lift more than ten pounds.  Fortunately, right now the only thing I feel like lifting is an idea and a coffee cup.

Take care.