Black Rage Spills Out

I am white and I do not understand black rage. None of my ancestors, as far as I know, were lynched, beaten, bought and sold, refused service because of the color of their skin, degraded by a word created solely to debase and humiliate them, spat upon for being black, arrested while driving black, called boy when they were 65, and a host of other examples too numerous to list. Actually, many of my ancestors were probably the perpetrators, except for my black ancestors of whom I do not know but believe unquestionably were there. So, I know nothing of black rage.

Nonetheless, black rage exists. Not just among older blacks, like Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Barack Obama’s pastor who at 67 is old enough to have experienced constitutionally sanctioned prejudice (Jim Crow) but among black youth, especially teens who have encountered racial prejudice while growing up in a community, be it black or white. Senator Obama has experienced racial prejudice from his grandmother, so he says, and whether black rage is in the senator we have yet to find out. But, he knows about it.

Surprisingly, I agree with Dr. Wright. Even if his fame as a theologian and orator has not made him politically savvy or he would have thought about the backlash his illustrious communicant would experience after his remarks during a sermon at his church, Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s south side, he was correct in what he said. He let his rage out, and even though it is causing Obama some grief because the media have picked it up and are running with it like a fumbled football, he was right in what he said.

America has killed innocent people. Haven’t we? America has threatened citizens as less than humans. Haven’t we? America does act like she is the god of the world, striding as Shakespeare said, like a Colossus. Is that not true? Many Americans are proud of those accomplishments in the name of blessed America, but Wright knows that they come from the same place that sanctioned racial prejudice came from 50 years ago and remain today hidden in an unwillingness to end it.

Sucked into the fray, Obama is using it to urge Americans to kill racial prejudice now that it is on the table. We need to discuss it as we need to do away with it. We are Americans, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and all the other people from around the world that make our country so great and unique. We are the envy of the world partly because of our diversity, and we all need to take that diversity to heart and stamp out any prejudice that aims to destroy it.

Dr. Wright and his generation are correct in the rage against what they and their ancestors experienced from white America. Dr. Wright was saying to damn America because these prejudicial ideas still persist, and they persist because we, black and white America, i.e., diverse America, allow it. We, diverse America, are at fault. We are America, and damn us for allow something as petty as racial prejudice to besmirch us. Perhaps Dr. Wright was unwise to say it the way he said it, but he was correct in what he said.

Let us see Obama for what he is. What HE is, and not what we suppose he is because of our prejudice. Lots of Americans are looking on Obama as just another n-person. They won’t admit it, but they are. They say he is a closet Muslim. Horse hockey! They say he will take the oath for president on the Koran. A load of road apples! Obama, like his pastor Dr. Wright, is an American, and in my view one who loves his country so much that he is willing to take on the most fearful job in the world. He loves America so much he is striving to help us come together as one people, one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all. Gee, didn’t some other guy who was vilified as a hick from Illinois support that?

Ruminant’s Last Cud Chew

That I am bored with hospital discussion is probably obvious, and at this point a bit disconcerting because I really want to forget the experience. Or, at least relagate it to a small room in my mind where it can be visited briefly when need be. Like grief, I never want to forget it completely, but I do not want it to rule. The journey I am on is too glorious to be clouded by memory that is not pleasant.

It’s like remembering my deceased wife . I shall never forget her and the brilliant life we had together, but I cannot wallow in grief for her. She would be the very first to agree. I lift my glass to Miriam, long live Terry.

To say that I am interested in politics is like saying Harry Potter is fairly successful. I am a junkie. This presidential campaign is so exciting I get something like orgasm when I study it. No matter who becomes president, history will be unalterably affected; a woman will be president, a person of color (Obama is half and half) will be president, or George W. Bush will return to office disguised at John McCain, a phenomenon that, perhaps, will transform the U.S. of A. into a banana republic.

Right now, it seems to me, we may be tossing all three candidates into the air to see how they fall , and to me I think any one of them has a chance. Last night as I lie tossing in bed (I’d napped in front of the TV and was refreshed) I imagined what the administration of each would be.

Obama’s, I think, would be energetic and youthful. I see West Wingers very much like the cast of the TV show of the same name, only with a much younger Chief of Staff, one who could kick some young butts into action without the “father” image of Leo McGarry played by a veteran actor, the late John Spencer. I want to believe Obama would choose a staff that would recall Kennedy’s Camelot but one geared to now and not retro.

Hillary. Will she ever be seen as President Clinton? Uh, which one, Sidney: Bill or Hillary? 

Not that Hillary would imitate Bill. No, I think she too much her own person to do that, but Bill is a force to be respected: amazing and wonderful like the force of a warm spring day, or frightening like a tsunami. When Bill walks into a room, even one where Hillary is the key speaker, all eyes shift to him. Everyone else is reduced to spectator while Bill waves and basks. What’s she gonna do when she is president and he walks into the room? Will her office, the stature and the awesomeness of president of the United States of America upstage Bill, or will he, by force of who he was and is then, overshadow her. I mean, let’s face it: a former president who was as overwhelmingly popular for a  glorious administration as he was infamous for Oval Office fellatio stands in the background and does not get camera-time?

To be honest, I think Bill has and will draw attention away from his wife. As candidate she has been eclipsed by Bill in his remarks about Obama and in his very presence on the stage in Iowa and Kansas. She needs to put him in a closet, I think, and refer to him but not show him. He’s too much, and Bill, although I love him and admired his presidency, is the reason I have to support Obama. Another Clinton administration, I think, would  smack of Bill’s a great deal, even though it would not be identical. Maybe not, but I don’t know. Bill was good for his time, but that is not now, and I want to hope that Obama would be a fresh, unadulterated wind pushing the sails of state in a new direction, one of vigor and youthful adventure.

What can I say of a John McCain presidency. “Hello, Same Old, Same Old.” 

That’s what I say. JOHN MCCAIN IS ANOTHER WHITE-HAIRED OLD MAN. He’s just like all of the white-haired, anal old men who have screwed this country so much in the past that we are where we are because of them: on the lip of a tragic fall from greatness. A McCain administration would reek of moth balls, and we’d crawl down that same old lane leading to a South Western Texas  or Arizona) solution to everything: if you don’t recognize it, kill it. And lie yourself into the good graces of a gullible American citizenry that has the corporate IQ of a sandwich without Miracle Whip. If McCain becomes president, it is my opinion that America will become a proverbial great Dust Bowel as time goes on because it will mean that our voting population is so stupid that we deserve whatever abomination is created by the likes of McCain, whom I think is the likes of what we had in GW Bush, GHW Bush and Ronald Reagan, who crippled this nation so bad that we still haven’t recovered.

That will be by rant when I return: Ronald Reagan, the actor who PLAYED a president for eight seasons but who at the end of each day’s shoot took off his makeup and costume and returned home to Mommy.

Hospital Fare: Crud and Whey

Having been a vegetarian for three or four years, I was quite reluctant to eat meat when my doctors suggested I do so. They said I needed protein and that meat was the easiest source. I didn’t want to eat meat or fowl or fish, even. Dairy was abhorrent including eggs. Although I could not see myself as vegan, because I think it is impossible to live in our world today without contacting exploitation of animals in remote ways, I do not want something to have to die in order for me to live. I know, plants are alive, too, but we don’t have the same relationship to plants that we have with an animal. Whether or not plants feel pain is a point still being debated, but we know animals experience pain. I am not opposed to slaughtering animals for food. After all, humankind has been eating flesh for millennia or more, so as a source of food it is not going away very soon. What I object to is cruel slaughtering methods, which we know take place everywhere flesh is processed. Humans seem to love having dominion over animals and show it, many times, by being purposefully cruel. Even kosher slaughtering is cruel if you look at it carefully; the animal dies slowly. Removing brains from the list of delicacies would allow a well-placed bullet to dispatch the animal instantly. CHOP THE CHICKEN’S HEAD OFF. Grandma and grandpa did that and their chickens did not suffer. (Flopping around after decapitation is the result of nerves reacting to the separation of the brain from them. It is not a reaction to pain.) Dispatch fish the same way as chickens. Don’t allow them to drown in air. Shell fish? Well, Orthox Jews have always looked at that as trayf, so maybe it is because of the way it has to die (head pinched off, boiled alive). 

But enough about my preferences. I eat some meat now, sadly, but I hope after full recovery to go back to my vegetarian ways.  Back to hospital fare being crud and whey. That it is crud is a matter of opinion, and my opinion complies. Of course the food isn’t dirty, if you follow the definition of crud. However, it is disgusting to me.  Over cooked vegetables until they resemble whey. Hard-cooked meat, especially chicken, that needs a scroll saw to cut. Salads days old. Coffee, tea and PUDDING.

 

I emphasize pudding because it was a phenomenon, a fact whose cause is not clear.  In order to explain their pudding I have to go back in time when I was about eight years old. My grandmother bought stuff from the Watkins man, who came to the house once a month for orders. If you’re my age or a little younger, you might remember the Watkins man. He sold flavorings, all artificial, dried mixes for cakes and rolls, and mixes, especially for puddings. Pudding concoctions were mainly sugar and a thickening agent, such as corn starch, and flavoring. As I recall he had three flavors: vanilla, chocolate and butterscotch. Well, when mixed with water the pudding was akin to bathtub caulking, shiny and pliant. It had to be scraped from a spoon with your teeth, and it lingered in your mouth like some slimy peanut butter, sealing the spaces between your teeth and welding your tongue to the roof of your mouth. A bad memory for me at my grandmother’s who insisted I eat lots of pudding so I’d grown into a fine man. My dad said it would put hair on my chest, and I think that is the only reason I gagged it down. (I never grew hair on my chest!)

 

Well, guess what? Watkins is still in business, sans the visiting sales person I think, and Methodist Hospital, Indianapolis, uses its pudding mix. With proper tweaking it can be used as plaster. Everyday, without exception, I got a dessert bowel of it. Dip in the spoon and watch it coat the surface, slithering around it like some dreadful mucusie kudsu. If I hadn’t been sick, I would have been sick after the encounter with pudding a la Methodist Hospital.

 

More tomorrow of the joys of eating at hospital. 

The Return of the Non-ruminant

I took some time off from writing last week, mainly because I had so many things to do, like make Brunswick Stew for a dinner party Friday night. Terry’s son, Brian, and his family came over for dinner, and I volunteered to make supper. Big mistake for I got so tired I was a wreck during the dinner party. I forget that I am not 100% healed, and when I feel pretty good, I’ll overdo and make myself sick. Terry warns me, but since I am a male, do I listen? Is the Pope Jewish?

Back to the hospital. I guess the one aspect of being in hospital that is the worst for me is loneliness. My twin daughters, who are secretaries in ER, came to see me each day, and I so looked forward to that. But after they left, hardly anyone came in. Oh, the nurses occasionally, but they are so over-worked that I hesitated calling them even when I needed to.  A doctor drops by, perhaps, but most often a nurse practicianer, which is fine because they usually know what they are talking about. But the rest of the time is spent alone.

Reading is an option and well as writing, but I was so weak of body and mind that I could do neither. TV was out of the question because the medium is so outstandingly stupid. I mean, here is the most influential channel for world culture, and it is broadcasting game shows that only challenge severely mentally handicapped people. Or, soap operas whose only redeeming grace is they can be used in acting classes as examples of bad acting and what not to do in front of a camera. I taught acting for many years, and I dare say some of my first year students, all green teens, could act most soap performers off the tube. Soap writing is just as bad, offering inane dialogue to inane plots most always centered around some kind of sexual stimulus: either exploitation, rape, fornication or cheating on one’s significant other. Now, I’m no prude and I like a good plot centered on sex, but let’s be reasonable: not every person of any age is in a sexual rage of some kind like they appear to be on soaps.As it happens the rest of television is devoted to sports.  I am not a sports nut.  A good game of, say, football like the XLII Super Bowel yesterday was very enjoyable, and a like at least the first five laps of a auto race (the rest of it is just round and round and round ad nauseam until the end, which can be exciting sometimes.)  Basketball for me is boring from tip-off to final buzzer.  I hate hockey, golf induces long hours of deep sleep, even if Tiger Wood is competing. I mean, golf cow pasture pool: hit the ball, walk to find the ball, hit the ball again, putt to a little hole, miss, try again for a birdie, maybe an owl? Raven? Vulture? What the hell is a bogey?  Bogey! That was the name of my first grade teacher, Miss Bogey. She was a golf shot? Maybe bogey was named after her or one of her kin.  I don’t know. Golf seems nuts to me. Birdie can suggest eagle–not a long reach–but why eagle? Why not a buzzard? I mean, an eagle is two over par, which seems sort of stinky to me. Oh well, golf comes to us from Scotland, a strange country that has blessed us with many weird things, from oatmeal boiled in a sheep’s stomach to the finest malt whiskies in the world. Golf is just another Scottish peculiarity.

Enough about the wasteland of TV. I am now able to sit in a chair and escape the confines of the bed. But, being incarcerated in one room is not fun. Three times a week physical therapy people come and we walk up and down the hall once and do some exercises, but that’s it as far as getting out of the room in concerned. Stir crazy is a real thing, I learn.Two sets of privacy curtains reveal that my room is a double. Having mersa, however, gets me a private room because they consider me contaminated. Whenever hospital staff come in they gown and mask so they won’t catch it. Like being visited by mummers in some surreal mardi gras.I have a private bathroom, except the show doesn’t work. When I can I use it, but oozing comes too fast sometimes so I have a bedside commode I can get to quickly.  Shades of Miriam’s confinement: she lived with a bedside commode for years.  Adjacent to the bathroom is a large cabinet that contains linen, towels and contraptions that look like plastic jugs with huge syringes stuck in them. Later, I learn these are for flushing the feeding tube that dangles from my body. I hate that tube, but it is my only means of nourishment. Nightly, I get fed via the tube. And, every morning I wake up and puke first thing. Well, puking is not accurate. Dry heaving is accurate. Like I’d been on a toot for a couple of days and can do nothing but heave into the great porcelain basin beloved by drunks coming down. I sit on my bed and clutch a plastic basin into which I heave nothing. Nothing gets you nothing except very sore abs.As I heave into the plastic basin, in walks a doctor, first one I’ve seen in two days. We talk between heaves. When I can I tell him I think the nightly feedings are making me sick, he says, “Oh?” sagaciously.”Yes,” I gag. “They’re too fast and my stomach is too small.”He thinks for a moment, then says, “You may be right. Let’s stop the feedings altogether and see.”I agree, and the next morning, sans feeding, I AM NOT SICK.  Same doctor drops in.”I feel great,” I tell him.”Good,” he says, once again sagaciously. “But now all nourishment will have to come through your mouth.  an you do that?”I tell him that we should try, and off he toddles to refuel his sagacity tank while I dream of my first food in two months.I need a whole column to describe my experience with hospital food, so let me do that tomorrow. 

A Day in Hospital

It is 6 a.m.  Light from above abducts me from the best dream I’ve had since coming to hospital: I dreamt I was going home. A nurse says good morning to me in a voice dripping with insincerity and routine, and I want to reach through the haze of the rude awakening I feel around me, grab her face and bite it.

 ”How’d you sleep, honey?” she says, adjusting my IV tubes that have coiled around my neck and left arm during the night.

 All patients are either honey, sweet thing, baby, darling, or–my favorite–snookums. Snookums!  I heard that from a CNA one evening and lay stunned at the possible images the word could elicit.  Its root is snook, which is a large fish from the Caribbean, or a gesture called cocking a snook, which indicates contempt in what we commonly call a Bronx cheer or thumbing one’s nose. Snookums must have an endearing root, but it probably falls into that category of words created for sound and for implication. I mean, if I’m a fish, it’s not very endearing, and a Bronx cheer kind of guy? No.  I was lead to etymology, which I couldn’t access from the confines of my hospital bed, but when I could get to a library, online of course, I learned snookum is a term of endearment used in Britain for “hypothetical person” dating from around 1860.  It’s equivalent to Joe Blow in America.  Also, snooks probably dates to the Domesday Book, from snoc, which referred to a promontory, maybe in reference to a big nose.  Whatever, I’m a Snookums, endeared, evidently, by at least one CNA.

I can’t finish this today because I have a doctor appointment. He will remove this blasted feeding tube I’ve been wearing for over three months.  More on that wonderful experience later. 

Non-ruminant Continues Ruminations

Okay, I’m in hospital, it’s around 9 p.m., and I’m trying to go to sleep, which I do and am loving it when the light goes on and a CNA growls, “Vitals.”  What that means is she will check my blood pressure, my temperature and my oxygen level. Innocuous stuff, but just enough to fully awaken me.  She thanks me, leaves and I try to sleep.  However, I am now aware that my coccyx (tailbone) hurts.  I adjust my body and resume my seeking of repose.  I have to pee.  Damn.  I hate to pee in a urinal because inevitably I miss and wet the top sheet or splash and feel in run down under my butt and soak into the pad beneath me. Whatever happens, it means changing my clothes–a flimsy gown open all the way in back to reveal my raggedy posterior to the world–and changing bed linen with me in the bed, a trying procedure with me being rolled back and forth across the mattress, tangling my IV lines, pulling my feeding tube and making sure sleep won’t come for several more hours.  I can ignore the mess and wait until morning, but wet clothes and bed linen does not induce slumber.

Anyway, I grab the urinal, which is cleverly hung on the rail by my head, pull down the covers, expose Willy and place the plastic piss pot close between my legs, drape Willy over the side and commence voiding.  Far out!  I hit it just right.  But, I feel an ooze start from the porches of my anus.  I cannot stop it.  Once an ooze oozes it can’t be stopped by cutting off  Willy, so to speak.  (Cut off  Willy? Egad.)  So, there you have it.  Oozing feces, messed up clothes and bed linen.  Finish peeing, call for nurse.  Admit to brutish behavior as I watch her face cloud, her eyes dilate and darken like a cat’s.  She says through tightly gritted teeth, “Oh, that’s all right.”

Now, in walks two CNAs, big buxom CNAs who resemble iron workers, and they simply, deftly, unhesitatingly strip me and the bed naked, wiping ooze as they go.  In my pink emaciated body, not much more than penis and eyeballs are staring up at them (of course Willy is hiding in a pelvic pocket peeking pitifully out and ducking as hands pull loose skin and appendages, mopping up ooze.  Deep in their minds I know the CNAs are satisfied now that white guys are poorly hung compared to a brother.

 

Anyway, that happened about five times.  Different CNAs each time so, I guess, the entire staff could take a look at Wee Willie Wonka, the only five-year-old looking penis they’ve ever seen attached to a 68-year-old emaciation right out of Auschwitz.  I believe I saw tickets being sold.

Tomorrow, I’ll go into a day-in-the-life of me at Methodist Hospital, Indianapolis, Indiana.  I ain’t pretty. 

Ruminations From a Non-ruminant

Boy, I was sick.  I mean ill, laid up, under-the-weather, puking, flat-on-my-back sick.  Now, I am sure not too many people want to hear or read about another’s illness, and I don’t expect anyone to read much passed the first sentence.  However, I do this for me.  I can sort out feelings I had, or still have, concerning my recent infirmity, perhaps even learn from them and catalogue them for future reference, so I can give the illusion in some distant novel, short story, essay, whatever that I know what I’m talking about.  But, if anyone is curious and wants to follow along, be my guest.

 

My pylorus was occluded.  When my doctor told me, I immediately learned two things: I have a pylorus like all other mammals, and occluded means stopped up, clogged, blocked.  You see, the pylorus is the opening from the stomach into the duodenum, that first part of the small intestine immediately leaving the stomach and leading to the jejunum, which goes to the ileum, or . . . well, I could go on right down the gut to the rectum, but that isn’t necessary for this discussion.  Enough to say my food would not pass through my stomach, and I would vomit a lot, like several times a day, especially early in the morning, and I lost massive weight, which is another story I’ll get to as this blog grows.  (No, my illnesses are not all I’ll write about, but right now it’s uppermost in my thoughts since I’m still recovering.) I resisted the surgery to correct the problem for about a year.  For me the word surgery is a four-letter obscenity.

Seven years ago I was operated upon for stomach cancer and half my stomach was removed along with some inches of esophagus.  To make matters worse I contracted a hospital staph infection, mersa, probably, but mine went septic, which means I had blood poisoning.  For forty days I was kept in a medically induced coma and came near enough to death to peek in the gate.  (No, I did not see a bright light, long passages and deceased relatives and friends beckoning me to the great beyond, but I did hallucinate extremely realistically.  I mean when you fantasize you’re waiting for the Concord in London and are strapped to a gurney and it’s freezing cold outside and are later told by your wife how you shivered violently, the “pink elephant” you are seeing is palpable.  I think death is moving from one reality to another where possibly cold mountain streams are filled with 7UP and you’re so hot a thirsty you practically drown yourself in the soda; I experienced that, too.)  

Anyway after 50 days in hospital for cancer, almost dying from a staph and not being able to walk when I got sprung, you can maybe see why surgery is such a foul proposition for me.  A pyloriplasty was what it was.  It means getting in there, scooping out the bad stuff–the occlusion–and sewing the sucker back together.  Like widening a bore or a hole, reaming out a hose or tube.  Gives me shivers just thinking about it. Of course, the surgeon had to work in a tight place, surrounded by guts, or small intestine, and, therefore, because he could no help it, nicked my guts, which if not attended to can lead to peritonitis and a permanent change of residency to the land of hallucinations where I’d been before.  So, in order not to let me die, they fed me nothing orally for over two months.  I ate nothing for over two months.  Talk about losing weight: from 139 when I checked into hospital to 113 when I checked out.  Now, I do not recommend losing weight that way.  Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, or some other weight-loss plan, yes, but not the way I did it.  I left the hospital so weak I could not have whipped a crippled piss ant with a baseball bat.  Hell, I couldn’t lift the bat.

 

For today that’s all I’m going to write.  I will in days to come regale you with the nightmare in the hospital including the joy and personal self esteem building that comes from incontinence of the bowels and how it destroys any concept of privacy and modesty.