Nightlights

Part of my reasoning behind being less than forthcoming about my personal life in this forum has been because of the lawsuit I've been involved in for the last couple years.  I'm sure i'll write about it at length in the future, but the short version is that my wife bought a duplex with some friends of hers about nine years ago and they turned out to be not so much friends as greedy, conniving cockroaches.  We've spent the last two years or so trying to get them to agree to sell the place (which we'd left two years ago because they'd made the living situation unlivable).  They did everything they could think of (including lying through their teeth repeatedly) to make it cost so much to put the property on the market that we would eventually cave and just sell to them.  This continued a pattern they'd established while we lived there of resorting to any means necessary to get what they wanted and just wearing you down until finally you would give in just to shut them the fuck up.  Well, we stuck it out, and while my wife's choice of business partners wasn't so hot, her eye for property was spot on.  In spite of having to read about the housing market crashing around our ears for the last year or so, the place sold for a pretty penny.  A good portion of which went to our attorney, but we still managed to come out ahead.  I can't begin to express my relief. 

Dillard also points to the current fad for "detoxing" the body by regularly getting high colonics as an obsessively unhealthy one. "This is a manifestation that a part of you is dirty," he says. "The colon has been around million of years and the wisdom of the colon predates us. This notion that we can somehow always intervene in some way so we can be intellectually or psychically or physiologically superior to this part of the body is kind of foolish."

Pulled this quote from an article on salon http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/03/12/poo/ about the latest health obsession/craze: poop.  That's right folks, seems doctor whatshisname on oprah did a show about it and there is some bestselling book out and now everyone who's anyone is peering into the toilet bowl to see what their butthole hath wrought.  Now nobody loves settling down on the porcelain with a good comic book and unwinding,  Those touting the benefits of shit staring, extoll it as a tool to let us know we need to be eating more fiber.  Well no shit (sorry about that one).  Seems to me that information is fairly available and has been for some time.  It just seems like one more thing for people to stress about, which is not going to help the quality of their bowel movements.  I know there is a long tradition in many cultures of using the stool to diagnose what's ailing people, but this is like a joke:  We are so self obsessed and scared of the world that we would rather look at our own excrement than look around us. 

Anyway, there were a couple things i liked about the above quotation.  I like that it slams colonics, which may not be a big deal everywhere, but let me tell you, they are a big deal in LA.  As someone who deals with people's digestive systems and their products as a regular part of his job, i am most appreciative to have a relatively well functioning gut.  I'm not at all freaked out by enemas, I just find the idea of them as some sort of panacea that's going to "clean out your system" absurd.  If your constipated and need a one time fix, fine, god bless. 

Just read a post on the novelist robin hobb's website about how having a blog is like attaching yourself to a vampire because instead of writing you blog and read blogs and write to people and read what they write to you and write them back instead of working on your real writing.  Good thing for me I don't do any real writing so i don't have to feel quilty about blogging.  Hopefully one day I'll have something to feel guilty about.  And I do try to not just write about what i had for dinner last night and my friends are saying about my other friends.  It may not be any less boring to read ancient stories or musings on history or philosophy or whatever else i write about on here.  But i do like to believe that it helps keep the writer wheels in my head a little more greased, makes me work just a bit harder to put something down.  My job is also one that provides me ample material besides the usual cubicle chatter, and I often required to go through some serious circumlocutions to write about what happens here in a way that respects people's privacy, which is also good practice, i hope. 

Speaking of which, when I got report on my two patients tonight i was told that they were both kept up all night last night because they said it was too loud.  Which is certainly possible, though i doubt that the one patient actually saw a doctor with no legs and one eye racing around in a wheelchair with a syringe in his hand.  I can't totally rule it out of course, since i wasn't here, but i've never seen anyone fitting that description in this hospital.  Still, hospitals are weird places, so you never know. . . Anyway, that patient transferred out and the other one has been sleeping for a couple hours and it's still early in the shift.  I'm standing guard trying to enforce quiet time.  I think i talked a few posts ago about how in the new hospital we aren't going to have the same camaraderie because we won't all be in the same central room with just curtains separating the patients, but I'm definitely glad for the patients.  I'm guessing our patients will do a lot less hallucinating and a lot more sleeping, at least i hope so. 

I suppose it's about time i added to the list of eulogies sprouting up on the web for the dear departed Gary Gygax.  Well, not a eulogy so much, never having met the man, but a reminiscence of the many hours spent in basements pretending to be wizards and warriors and thieves in the world he bequeathed to us in Dungeons and Dragons. 

I must have been only eight or nine when my uncle showed me the the small stapled rule books for the original dungeons and dragons.  I can still see the illustration of a beholder on the cover: a scaly globe with a fanged mouth and enormous eye in its center.  multiple small stalks with more eyes emanated from the top of  the creature.  Seems like it might be scary stuff to most 8 year olds but i remember being immediately captivated.  There were three little books with minimal illustrations, and i devoured them, already imagining myself as a theif sneaking around the fortress in the adventure described in the dungeon masters book.  My uncle passed the books on to me pretty quickly, he was ten years older than me and by that point, in spite of being a nerd, had the distractions of girls, cars and drugs filling up his free time.  It's funny to think of how young me and my friends got hooked.  A lot of the stuff i've read on the internet, most guys (and it was almost always guys) started playing in junior high at the earliest, but I can remember getting together with my friends as early as 4th or 5th grade at the local public library to start exploring dungeons. 

There is an algorithm chart in the latest NYTimes about D&D geekdom and where it led you depending on what conditions were met.  I'd link to it but i'm not that motivated or netsavvy.  Which is a division that showed up early, those of us gamers who were drawn to computers and those that weren't.  In the 90's i remember regretting i hadn't been more motivated in the computer programming class i took the summer before 8th grade.  It seemed like if i had just stuck with it i would have ended up a millionaire before 30.  I spent plenty of time at the library or in my room reading, but I also loved to get out in the woods with my dog and run around and pretend to be a ranger, and have stick fights with my friends.  I was just never that into technology, which is one of the reasons i dug the medieval setting of D&D, though i loved star wars as much as the next nerd. 

I started down the D&D road in grade school but it was in junior high that i really sunk into that world.  Tom and I went to grade school together and were the only real hardcore D&D players there, but in Junior high we met chris and had the minimum number of players neccessary to really have fun and establish some continuity.  That was also when i met scott, though he went to a different junior high.  There was a local hobby shop (does such a thing even exist anymore) that sold everything from model airplanes to games to i don't even remember what the hell else they sold.  it was called HisnHers Hobbies, and the owners were this sallow looking couple that i remember always sniping at one another.  i think the shop closed when they got a divorce.  But up until then they let us set up a table in the back where we could game and meet other like minded dorks and of course we bought the latest module for D&D at their store so i guess it was worthwile to them, though now that i think about it, they must have lost as much business as they gained just from the odor emanating from that table of unwashed 13 year olds in the back.  The shop was next to the local hot dog joint and right across from the local park where we would take our hot dogs and fries (when i could scam enough money to afford them) to the park for a much needed fresh air break after hours spent with pencils and dice and graph paper imagining ourselves traipsing through trap and monster laden dungeons.   Graph paper was the best for character sheets because you could organize things into different columns more easily to keep track of spells, magic items, bonuses, etc.  Man, i remember arguing with one another over who would get to buy the latest adventure, or "module" that came into the store.  Not that we had much money, but you always seemed to be able to scrape five or ten bucks together from somewhere.  i think it was easier in the summer when there were lawns to mow.  Chris, Tom and i were all aspiring fantasy artists and we worshipped the guys who illustrated the modules and the dragon magazine.  We each picked our favorite, mine being Bill Willingham, who incidentally has gone on to be a kick ass writer and illustrator in other genres.  I used to draw on everything, warriors, swords, dragons.  Gems.  We went through a period where we drew god knows how many gem encrused weapons on any square peice of blank page.  Not the thing to do if you are looking to avoid being harrassed by the other kids in school, incidentally. 

Dungeon Master was by far the hardest and most important job in any gaming group, and none of us wanted to do it for an extended period of time, it was too much work, and playing was too much fun.  So it rotated, and we were always envious of those groups we'd read about with a dedicated DM and campaigns that went on for years with the same characters in the same world.  We switched characters around a lot, and we were usually too impatient to start at first level like you were supposed to.  We depended on the modules to provide us new adventures rather than creating them ourselves, though we would embellish.  And i remember devouring those modules like novels, imagining what i would do in them as a player, what i might say, how i would solve puzzles.  The window of D&D was pretty small, like ten or fifteen years before computer games mostly took over, but i feel like it really stimulated my imagination and gave us not popular guys something to do together and obsess on that didn't involve sports. 

Freshman year in highschool we joined the wargamers club and met Seth and Jim, who expanded our little gaming group.  Which was good, since i got into a fight with scott and Tom had really started irritating the rest of us.  Seth, who ended up being a writer, was actually interested in being a DM, and he was good at it, though it took him a few years to really grow into the role.  There were a lot more girls to talk about and observe from afar in highschool, and sometime in sophomore year I decided i liked hanging with the burnouts but we still spent a lot of time in Chris' basement rolling dice, drinking pepsi and eating pizza.  By the time junior year rolled around I'd actually started talking to a few girls, and fully embraced the burnout lifestyle, which didn't leave a lot of time for gaming.  Senior year I'd mostly left drugs behind but I was trying to get my shit together to graduate and playing in a band.  The year after highschool was probably the most fun I had gaming.  We'd discovered a new game, Palladium, which was the same thing, but with better rules, and our folks didn't hassle us if we wanted to stay up until five in the morning playing it.  Chris and I didn't go away to college and seth was a year behind us so he was a senior in highschool.  He'd become confindent as a DM, and we had a good run there with the same sustained characters in the same world and there was a richness, almost like adding layers to a good story.  My character was a mind mage, someone with psychic powers, which was a blast to play and allowed for a lot of creativity, since he wasn't an offensive juggernaut, you had to be a little more clever in the way you dealt with situations.  My proudest moment was at the end of a long and challenging adventure when i was able to escape certain dismemberment by a demon through employing illusions to trick him into thinking he was getting the better end of a bargain with me and making my escape. 

Then, college, thanks to Seth cluing me into a scholarship opportunity, and my gaming career was more or less over.  Chris still plays, and I still quite enjoy borrowing the latest stuff from him when i visit where i grew up.  He plays the computer versions of role playing games too, but still digs the old school pen and paper versions, which i appreciate.  Much has been said on the net already about how without D&D you wouldn't have had the computer gaming industry exploding like it did, since it influenced pretty much all the people who created computer games.  The idea of open ended role playing was really something quite revolutionary in its way.  Not new under the sun certainly, but the incarnation gary gygax and pals came up with was.  You could argue that our time would have been better spent out actually doing things rather than pretending to do them, and there is maybe some validity to that.  But the fact is, we did do things, and it wasn't like if D&D wasn't around we would have been out socializing.  that wasn't going to happen, regardless.  i'd like to think it helped us excersise our brains and imagine ourselves as capable of great feats and sly cons.  And damn, it could really be fun. 

So rest in peace, Gary Gygax, I wouldn't be the person I am today without your creation. 

My jaw hurts.  I've been struggling to stop surfing and start writing and that seems as good a place as any to begin.  I'm in our four bed ancillary unit tonight and my patient, who is right behind me, is making noises like a zombie out of a george romero movie.  He's breathing through a tracheostomy and there is an air leak and it's not worth going into a more detailed explanation except to say that it doesn't affect his breathing, it just makes him sound like a zombie who is going to rise up and stagger toward me while i sit here blithely blogging away.  Otherwise, there's not much going on here tonight.  I have a suspicion that my sore jaw has to do with a filling I got a few weeks ago.  i think it's thrown of my bite, which is a little bit wopperjawed to begin with.  it's been going on for a couple weeks now on and off.  I'm hoping it's just stress and i don't have to go in and get my jaw wired shut or some such.  Maybe a few nights up here where it's quiet will improve my condition, my last couple shifts at work i left feeling like i'd just finished fifteen rounds in the ring.  One night, i did actually get kicked by a patient.  He'd been getting progressively more agitated and combative as the night went on, and around six in the morning he kicked me in the chest from his bed.  It didn't hurt, really, but i wasn't happy about it either.  As I was explaining to him that it was not OK to kick me, he tried to kick me again and I was able to intercept his foot and put his leg back in the bed.  I was pretty hot by that point, especially after dealing with this guy all night, but i was proud of myself for maintaining my self control, even as my reflexes took over.  The charge nurse raced over and talked to the patient and told me to walk away, which i did.  Later on, she told when she saw the look on my face when he kicked me the second time she thought i was going to break his leg.  it's weird to have moments like that at your job, especially when your job ostensibly inovles helping to heal people.  Now, it helps to know that our patients are going through all kinds of messed up brain chemistry stuff between the lack of sleep and various medications and their medical conditions, but it still wears on you to get abused for twelve hours.  Fortunately, i don't have many nights like that, but I do feel like keeping my cool is part of my job, and something i can do to help my patients.  The next night i got a transfer in from another hospital who was really sick, and that was an exhausting night in a very different way, so I'm glad to have a little peace and quiet, even if it is interrupted by zombielike grunts and the fear that a creature of the nght might be shambling up behind me to eat my brain. 

Just finished a most kick ass book, Dragons of Babel.  It's down there in my books section.  it's the kind of book i'd like to write, which is quite inspiring.  I've read lots of books i liked, but not that many where I read them and thought, yeah, this is the sort of thing that not only would like to do, but I feel like i could do.  I guess it's a combination of feeling like i share something of the author's vision and that the world they've created inspires a desire in me to take a crack at telling some stories that take place there.  It's hard to describe the world of Dragons of Babel in a way that does it justice.  It's a world where magic and technology operate side by side, with figures of legend and literature populating it.  What's cool is there is nothing gimmicky about the way the author presents things, which could easily happen.  A local ward boss, who also happens to be a haint (a sort of ghost) seems just as real as an alderman you might see on The Wire.  The spiritual, carnal and banal all exist side by side, just like in the real world, and i laughed out loud more than once when a centaur or a dwarf made some crass comment that brought a fantastic situation right back down to earth.  I think that's enough gushing, I just hope i can file away the inspiration and make some use of it one of these days soon. 

No waiting for inspiration tonight, I'm just going to plunge in see where i come up.  Looks like it's going to be a SLooooow night on the unit tonight, so maybe i'll be able to finish a thought for a change.  I was driving to work tonight listening to this am radio show that is on a sports station and I'd say they make up about 50% of the topics of conversation but the rest of the show is just these guys kvetching and talking about their lives and whatever else happens to be going on in the world.  The hosts are both about my age (mid to late 30's) and we share a lot of interests, only one of which happens to be sports and it got me to thinking about my relationship to sports and sports talk radio and how a dungeons and dragons dork who pretty much never gave a rat's ass about sports until he was 20 managed to have sports talk radio stations on the presets in his car. 

Now, it was next to impossible to grow up in chicago in the 80's and not get swept up into the magic of that 85 superbowl shuffle team, even if you'd never cared much about football before, which i hadn't.  i never played or watched organized sports, like i said, my tastes ran more towards D&D.  Though plenty of my buddies managed to be fans of both fantasy dragons and fantasy baseball stats.  I did spend a lot of time in the local forest preserves pretending to be Rambo on the run from a local redneck sherrif and engaging in staff duels with my friends, so it wasn't like i was one of those asthmatic types who shun physical activity, but i was anything but a jock.  I'd done a fair amount of Judo growing up because my family was into it, but that was about it.  Anyway, round about the time i was 20 or so, i inherited a dodge Omni from a distant relative.  It was an old man car, which meant it had very few miles on it (good) but only an AM radio (not good).  Or maybe not so not good.  See, this was chicago, and chicago had this amazing guy named Steve Dahl on the radio.  The easiest person to compare him to is Howard Stern, though steve had his own thing, and him and howard came up around the same time.  Steve did plenty of disgusting stunts, but his real talent was that he was himself, which is a lot harder to do on the radio than it sounds.  Anyway, I'll save my steve dahl appreciation for another post, the important thing for this discussion is that the show that came on after steve's was a sports show.  With the exception of this one station AM radio was a wasteland, so i left the radio playing even after steve was done.  Chet Coppick was the host, and while he was a blowhard, he had a certain charm and without even realizing it, after a few months i realized i could suddenly carry on a conversation about sports. 

I'd gone over to the house of this girl i'd recently started dating and her dad was there.  An intimidating fellow, and i hadn't the faintest idea what i might talk to him about when he cornered me in the kitchen while he daughter vanished to god knows where.  Then i saw the framed bulls tickets on the wall.  "You a season ticket holder"  He was.  "Since when?"  only a couple years, but he'd been a fan since the Artis Gilmore days in the 70's, he wasn't bandwagoning just because of jordan, he just couldn't afford season tickets before.  And so on.  It was as though the clouds opened and heavenly chiors sang.  THIS was the reason for allocating valuable brain real estate to ultimately inconsequential knowledge of sports:  When i needed to converse with other men who didn't care about kierkegaard or Coltrane or brecht,  I had access to this endless pool of stuff to discuss and argue about with nearly zero chance of saying something truly offensive (unlike, for example, religion or politics).  What was unusual about me becoming a sports fan, i think, is that it happened in this very abstract way, listening to them dissected on the radio instead of the visceral experience of playing, or even watching them.  That part came later.  As far as watching sports, it sure helped that the most transcendant player of his generation was playing for the hometown team while i was just getting interested. 

And the fact is, I've always been someone who enjoyed surprising people as far as my interests.  When i was in nursing school i used to go to hooters on sunday mornings for the early football games.  It was usually pretty empty before noon, and i could study during the long lulls between plays.  The waitresses were never quite sure what to make of me.  I had a professor call me out in a film studies class for being the only person he knew whose two favorite auteurs were Ingmar bergman and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  He also ranted many times about how we were like the Romans: good at making stuff but not very deep.  His case in point was the outsize role that sports played in our lives while the arts had to beg for scraps of attention and money, just like the games in rome gave the mob something to obsess about instead of noticing their society was being destroyed by tyrants.  He always ended these rants by noting that he watched every pittsburgh pirates game he could. 

I have the same ambivalent feeling about sports, there is so much wrong with them, not just the usual stuff they bitch about on sports talk radio: overpaid spoiled players, small market teams not getting a fair shake, etc.  No, they really do command way too much attention for their relative merits.  The greeks loved their athletes too, but Sophocles still managed to write a few plays that garnered a bit of attention.  I love watching football, but, with exceptions, most football players i went to school with lived up to the stereotype of being neanderthal jarheads who i had next to nothing in common with.  One of the things i've always enjoyed about the martial arts is that you get philosophy about life AND you get to throw punches at your opponent.  Sports are a marvelous distraction, and most of the time i spend reading about them or talking about them wouldn't be spent on something more worthy if i didn't have sports to distract me.  i'd probably just be reading about crappy movie adaptations of comic books.  I can only take so much NPR and books on tape.  But then i wonder if that's a cop out.  Maybe i'd have written a masterpeice if i had all that time back spent on people who have no real relation to me.  Would my life have been less rich if the bulls had never been good?  I doubt it.  Though there are those transcendent moments, when you see someone so in the zone that they don't even seem conscious anymore, or a team gels together as one organism and does impossible things.  Those moments are few and far between but they are worth witnessing.  I remember some actor talking about how he didn't like to watch plays or movies because most of the time the actors didn't have the same urgency as athletes competing, really giving it their all as if their life depended on it.  He said he would much rather watch boxing, where the stakes were so much higher.  That really made an impression on me.  Because that life or death quality to big sporting events really is something to get swept up by.  Of course, that is the actual watching, which i don't do a lot of in my life right now.  I guess i've been thinking more about the other stuff, the talking, the reading, the listening and whether that time could, or more to the point, would be better spent.  Because the fact is, I like to listen to people talk to on the radio, and like i said, i can only take so much NPR and the other offerings are slim pickings.  Maybe one of these days I'll get sattelite radio but until then there aint much out there.  I don't worry so much that the space in my head taken up with sports minutae could be better used, though i'm sure it could.  I remember minutae of all sorts, and neccessarily, a lot of it is not going to be relevant to anything useful or deep or having anything to do with my life, that's just the nature of the world and the way my brain works.  I manage to remember all sorts of things about all sorts of things. 

Speaking of which, i think i've squeezed all i can out of this topic for the evening.  Maybe not the deepest post i've ever written but definitely the longest in quite awhile.  I'll take it. 

Just trying to put in my time here and create a new groove even if i have to do it with my nose in the unyielding earth.  I know i'll get back to longer, more cogent entries one of these days, but i don't think it's going to be tonight.  My patient is on a ventilator and keeps having coughing fits and not oxygenating well and breathing too fast and we're having a bitch of a time getting things settled down.  I've got down time between these episodes but it's been a night of fits and starts.  Hard to establish any kind of writing flow under these conditions.  Not that expect my job to provide an environment conducive to me pouring forth and polilshing off my musings.  Still, some nights, even if you are busy, you feel like you've got a handle on things.  A series of small problems to be solved and tasks to be completed arise and you finish the evening with a sense of accomplishment.  Then there are those nights where you can't figure out exactly what is going on with your patient, and when they are doing something like coughing or thrashing around, your body has this almost involunary response and you feel like you want to cough or thrash around and you never really relax, even when nothing is happening because you keep waiting for it to happen.  This has been one of those nights. 

The prime mover unmoved.  I had to park a little further away from the hospital than usual tonight, so I went out on my dinner break to move my car, which just happened to be parked right in front of this awesomely cheap little cookie shop.  I took that as a sign that i should get an ice cream cookie sandwich, which i proceeded to eat in my car, after moving it to a closer spot.  I've been listening to the Story of Philosophy lately, when i'm not listening to NPR or sports talk radio.  NPR was boring and they were talking about nascar on the sports station, so philosophy it was.  I'm sure aristotle would appreciate my dedication.  He's the philosopher being discussed at the moment, and i've been having a hard time getting myself to pay close attention, since his stuff tends to be on the dry side.  But tonight i heard a phrase that's been percolating around in my head for the last few hours.  The prime mover unmoved.  I think the gist is that aristotle was one of the first to conceive of the universe as essentially mechanical, everthing proceeds according to various laws, and the cause of any event can be traced back through a series of events that preceded it.  But Aristotle states that there has to have been a still point, or fulcrum, on which the whole mechanism rests.  This is his version of god, the prime mover who set the whole thing in motion. 

Now, i was familiar with the concept, but i didn't know that it was Aristotle who first formulated it.  Which makes sense, as he's regarded as the father of western science, and it generally seems to be people with a scientific bent of mind who talk about God as the one who, say, provided the spark that set off the big bang, and then stepped out of the way to let things unfold.  I can understand why a lot of religious folks have a problem with this conception of god, since it might as well do away with him altogether.  Yeah, there would be no universe without him (her? It?), but it's not the sort of being you can pray to, or who judges sins, or forgives them, or sends his only begotten son down into gallilee. 

Well, slap my ass and call me Suzy!  Seems I came back to blogging one year to the day after i started.  I was just noticing that i had 50 posts in 2007 and went back to the first one, which was on february 17.  What do you know.  50 posts averages out to one a week, which is better than I thought i managed, even I tapered off the last few months there.  Enough writing about writing, but it does feel good that i've made it a year and haven't totally given up. 

Primum mobile immotum.  Prime mover unmoved.  It's catchy in latin and english and it's still running around my head.  Seems like it might make a good slogan for a T shirt.  It's like the ultimate satisfaction of the human urge to finally get down to the bottom of things. 

Well, what do you know, I'm able to type in the compose screen again.  That's good news.  Between the extra effort involved in e-mailing myself posts and my mental real estate having a subprime meltdown over the last few months I wondered whether i'd ever make it back here.  Shout out to TW for telling me yesterday that he still checks here occasionally.  I'd just about given up even pretending that i was procrastinating getting something written while i was at work.  It still amazes me what a fine line there is between writing and not writing.  Once i get knocked off the track it's a bitch getting back on.  Even tonight, it took a combination of TW's comment, an unbelievabley slooooooooow night at work and the lifting on the work imposed ban on the compostion screen for me to make it this far.  But when i'm in some kind of groove it doesn't seem like such a big deal to carve out fifteen minutes even on a busy night. 

I'm remembering some sort of vow not to write about the process of writing (or not) so i'm going to try and move on to other things here.  It's been four months since my last post (bless me father, for I have sinned), and it feels like a lot longer.  I'd say i'm doing well.  The entaglement that resulted in the lawsuit i've made vague references to in the past has a decent chance of being resolved and unentangled here in the near future, though of course I keep waiting for something new to come up to prolong it.  I heard my wife describing it as neverending a few days ago, and i jumped in and said, :"No, it's ending.  Sooner or later, it's ending."  Don't want to say (or not say) much more on that subject just yet, but i'll ask anyone reading this to send good thoughts toward a speedy resolution.  That will be a blessed day. 

I've discovered a newfound interest in business news now that the economy seems to be going straight to hell.  I was just reading a review of a new anthology of stories about love and it said that the common thread was that there was no story without obstacles to love.  I'd like to think it's the same thing with reading financial news and i'm not just a negative person who delights in the misery of others.  I do have a different perspective reading that stuff now that I'm a parent and have someone besides myself to provide for.  There was a great article in the london review of books a couple months ago that i'll try to track down that did a great job laying out what derivatives are and what a huge role they played in creating this mess that i found very helpful in giving me some perspective. 

Man, i'm bouncing all over the place here.  Finding my sea legs again, i suppose.  I'm even going to complain about the damn banner ad over there where the bottom half of the screen keeps flipping up and down and distracting me.  It's advertising the new mike doughty album, for those of you keeping score at home, and i wasn't going to buy it anyway, but now i'm going to actively discourage others from doing so.  I just heard an interview with him on NPR before work tonight and found him as annoying as i always thought soul coughing was.  I guess he was the lead singer or whatever. 

My patient tonight has been in the hospital for the last five months, most of it in the ICU.  He's older, and i don't know how sick he was when he came in, but they just can't seem to wean him off the ventilator, meaning he can't breathe on his own, meaning he can't get out of here.  Sadly, the longer that goes on the less chance there is of ever leaving this place.  He seems like he's in limbo.  He even looks a bit like a ghost to me, even though he's a pretty solid guy, much more so than a lot of our patients.  Yet he still seems somehow transparent.  I guess that sounds sort of awful, and it is, but at the same time, he doesn't seem unhappy, he actually smiles a lot.  Like the place he's in isn't so bad, and either way it ends for him he'll be OK with it. 

This can be a weird place to work, to say the least.  I was walking around before work tonight watching people enjoy their saturday night and i found myself glad to be going to  work.  Like while other people are playing, i'm sneaking in my work time, and when they are all working, i'll be free. 

"Reading History remakes the mind by feeding primitive pleasure in story"

Jaques Barzun

Well, it's been settled, it's the cocksuckers in charge of the computer network at my job who are responsible for my inability to post directly on Vox.  Like it's going to affect one iota how much time I devote to my patients, whether or not I can type stuff into some stupid website.  I just love being treated like a child by my employers.  "We're taking away your television because you aren't doing your homework."  A-holes.  I can see how they justify it, but like I said, it doesn't make me a better nurse, it just pisses me off.  My paitient is stable and comfortable and clean and asleep.  No one around me needs any help.  It's three oclock in the morning.  I suppose i could go around dusting the medical apparatus, but that aint happening, whether i have internet access or not.  Oh well, i don't want to devote too much energy to it, since it's pretty easy to get around.  At least for the moment. 

There is some kind of network problem here and i barely have internet access right now anyway, which is why i was just reading the New Yorker.  And what do you know, i just heard my patient gurgling and managed to go over there and suction out his breathing tube, in spite of the fact that i was in the mids of a post.  I must be specially gifted.  A word of advice to those of you considering going into this wonderful profession, if you have a patient with a lot of gunk in their lungs who is breathing through a tracheostomy, stand well to the side when you squirt saline down their trach, because it all comes flying back out when they cough.  This is the sort of practical knowledge you just don't get from other blogs where people write about hundred year old historians profiled in the latest New Yorker.  I may not have the deepest things to say about the sweep of history, but I know phlegm. 

When i imagine that i would be much better suited to a life as a college professor, given my interests and the sorts of things i read in my free time, I often come back to phlegm.  And shit and blood and piss and sweat and bile and all the other assorted bodily fluids I wade through on any given day of my job.  And I think that my tendency towards obsession with big ideas is what makes nursing so ideally suited for me.  It keeps me grounded in the viscera of life, so that i'm free to indulge myself in forways into the high country of the mind without the worry that i won't come back to earth.  Not that I'm a nurse purely for the sake of making me a more well rounded person, I'd like to think that the health and happiness of my patients is my primary concern and that I'm able and willing to provide them the kind of care they deserve.  But as with most things, there are a lot of facets to what i do for a living and my relationship to it. 

But i was going to say a little something about Jaques Barzun and the profile i just read.  He sounds like an incredible fellow, and his last book, From Dawn to Decadence, about the last five hundred years of western civilization, just jumped to the top of my reading list.  i remember reading reviews and thinking it sounded interesting, but my book reading leans toward what i'd call literary science fiction, unless it's an audiobook.  Anyway, the quote at the top of my post really grabbed hold of me.  "Primitive pleasure in story"  What a great fucking phrase.  And it really sums up what i've been missing since not having Story of Civilization to listen to in my car.  I really do get a visceral pleasure out of hearing well told history.  And I think maybe that primitive pleasure is why history seems so suited to the auditory format.  I suppose stuff that relies heavily on maps and diagrams and timelines wouldn't work that well, but that's not the kind of history i'm insterested in.  I like the stories, the themes, the characters.  And in the right hands, written modern history, that has taken so much research to compose, can really come together and live, a little like listening to the oral history of a people, before we began to write these things down.  And it does, or it can, remake your mind.  Gives you a sense of how we maybe arrived at the place we are now, illuminates the patterns that are there if we only have the light to see them. 

So that's my little paen to history.  I've got more snot to suction.