sick

caution: graphic portrayals of mundane diseases. not for the weak.

today i am sick. many of my insides seem to be trying to get outside and my outsides hurt. i am a baby when i get sick and i am pretty sure i learned this from my dad who has never put eyedrops in his own eyes and cannot function if his throat hurts. today my throat does not hurt although my voice would suggest that it does. my head hurts. and my stomach. and all my skin. plus my knees and all the other joints i use. when i get sick, my body responds the way a small child's does. it gets a rash. no kidding. it curls around my neck and down my back and chest to my stomach. it is very dramatic.

when i have to stay home i get bored and angry pretty quickly. i turns out i've drawn my own terrible suffering quite a few times, starting with a rash experience many years ago. i have often wondered what goes through the minds of those guys who yell "hey, baby" at women. do those interactions ever pan out? does the guy ever get a woman who screams back, "i've been waiting for a total stranger to pretend to be more familiar with me than i'm comfortable with! take me away with you!" but on this particular day i was sick- red, snotty nose, puffy, bloodshot eyes, hideous rash. who hits on a diseased woman?


a short time later there was the pepto accident. there are lots of ways pepto- bismol will keep your insides inside and your outsides feeling happy, too, but it does not prevent vomiting. in fact, if you take it for that, all you get is terrifyingly pink vomit. if you have a cat you should note that vomiting sounds are fascinating to them. they are very creepy animals.


it is interesting to note that in these two images, drawn several years apart, i am dressed exactly the same. this is especially unusual because i have not owned a purple dress in my entire adult life. although my shoes really do look like that. normally, the dress curlicues would be pretty. when i'm sick, i guess they're supposed to reflect my terrible suffering so everyone will know and be very, very sad.




the nature of my disease artwork has developed over time just as i have. these bits of scribble chronicle my limited variety of hairstyles and fashionable dress. i got new glasses a few years ago and that's how i can tell recent misery from more distant suffering. constant throughout is my ridiculously angry response to being sick and the absolute refusal of my lungs to even try to get along with me. they are jerks. they were jerks when i was born and have been a thorn in my side since. if there's a respiratory infection out there, they rush to get it. they always want to have the newest thing. it doesn't help that i spend all day with ninth graders whose parents have not taught them things like throwing away tissues once they are used, coughing or sneezing into something other than a teacher's face and washing hands whenever possible.

some people are angry drunks. i am an angry sick person. i'm sure my anger is compounded by the fact that most over the counter cold, flu and allergy medications send me into a world generally inhabited by people in restraints. allergy medications double my heart rate and make me weep hysterically. cold and flu medications make me dizzy and disoriented. i get nauseous and paranoid. i shake. my motor skills deteriorate to those of a toddler. i cannot think, type or communicate. and i weep hysterically. my parents must have known this when i was small because my dad gave me whiskey and honey when i had a cough. i didn't buy it at first, but with a doctor's blessing, it is the only thing i use to treat snot and lung related illnesses. we have bourbon in this house- a little smoother in my opionion. mix in a spoonful of honey and it will calm whatever tornado is swirling around in your lungs. if you're feeling elegant and have a gracious caregiver, you might even request a toddy. my own variation is bourbon and honey in hot tea with lemon. if you're feeling especially achy, add a pinch of cayenne pepper. i'm serious. i am told i have inherited my taste for alternative medicines from my great-grandpa, who had a toddy most evenings when his lungs threw in the towel after years of work in mines. my great-grandma made these drinks under duress and under "strict doctor's orders". how many other things have survived four generations without the fda, ama or someone else debunking them?

dragon

there is a small nephew and now also a smaller one. the small one is seven and is incredibly thoughtful. the other day he called to request something for his new cousin- a sweater for fall with circus images all over it. because we live halfway across the country from each other, most of our interactions are by phone. his uncle and i have semi-mythic status (well, his uncle does at least) since we are not around all the time. i love the phone conversations because they are always unusual. he is unusual.

so he wants this sweater for the baby with the circus covering it. tigers and elephants, if i remember correctly, and a woman on a trapeze. when he says "trapeze" i make a mental note to ask his mom if he's got calder's circus by maira kalman. he will need it to read to the smaller nephew at some point and he will love alexander calder. he figures this sweater will take a while and is asking now so i'll have it ready for the baby by fall. he is a smart boy to know to plan this far ahead. this is a wonderful gift. i am trying to imagine knitting tiny animals in a million colors onto a sweater for someone who only weighs a few pounds.

i tell the nephew on the phone that although that sounds like a wonderful sweater, i'm not sure i can do it. i suggest he think about it a while and choose one image to put on the front of the sweater. he is sure i can do better than that. he is also very persuasive. and focused. he is sure the baby would like some variety on the sweater and that anything under three images on it would be unacceptable. i have spent the better part of the last fifteen years manipulating the minds of other people's children. i once gained control of a cluster of fourth, fifth and sixth grade boys with a batch of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. i have convinced a gang member or two to write some nice fiction and once a child gave me a knife he brought to school. i didn't even have to ask. he just knew he ought to. i routinely separate ninth graders from cell phones and blackberries in my class. i have finely honed persuasive skills. i summon my best persuasive teacher tone and tell him he should choose three images, spend the week deciding which one he thinks the baby would like best and then call me next weekend. "look, i'll email you," he says, his frustration with me just barely in check. he does not want to hurt my feelings but he thinks i'm being ridiculous. just before hanging up he mentions he could use a nice sweater or t-shirt with a dragon from pokemon on it. he says the name of the dragon several times but because he is seven and i don't already know the names of these creatures i am unable to decipher it. he is not sure how someone he loves is capable of such frustrating behavior and he resorts to what works. "i'll email you!"

he has been busy this week being a first grader (it seems like he is in second grade, but i have been wrong in the past) and a big cousin so i've decided to find this dragon and see what i'm up against. you'd think it would be easy. i'm intelligent and internet-search savvy. every time i clicked something on the pokemon site there was confusing music or a game opened up. wikipedia was a little more helpful. there are quite a few dragons, it seems. there is, in fact, a class called "dragon". just like there is a class called "middle". they have fire or water properties and some fly. it seems that all dragons use claws and breath in their dragoning. they are overpowered by ice, evidently, and many can evolve. according to pokefolk and wikifolk, this has made them and other pokemon creatures enemies of the christian church. just wanted you to know.

possible dragons i might end up knitting include dragonite, kingdra, salamence, giratina, dialga and palkia. it seems like the one he wants might be dialga.

dialga can control time, which is very cool. he does not evolve, which should please the church, but i think that is because he is already mighty fancy. he is made of steel and his underbelly "is reflective like a mirror" according to wiki. he looks like a cross between the loch ness monster and a swiss army knife. he has many pointy bits and is about eighteen million shades of steel blue. he is a knitting nightmare. knitting him is not my biggest concern. i am already thinking about how to condense eighteen million shades of blue into three or four. i am already looking for the largest, most detailed image of dialga i can find to put into the knitting pattern generator. my biggest concern is that if i accomplish this, which i very well might, i might have to do it again. "my friend," says the small nephew, "would really love one, too."

saucer, yarn, books

the flying saucer is a very good place to spend an afternoon. come up out of the ground at the atlantic terminal in brooklyn. walk up atlatnic toward the water past shops selling incense, oils and prayer rugs, past hank's saloon where i know for a fact they put hot dogs on a grill right on the sidewalk in summer, to a part of the ave that's on the edge of hip but wasn't two years ago. if you're not paying attention you will pass the saucer and will end up in a sea of boutique bakeries and antique shops. you could also stop by a decent yarn store- but head back to the saucer.

the furniture is busted yard sale but the soups and sandwiches are sassy and they make good tea. if you are lucky you will get there when the cookies re just coming out. there's a cranberry orange one whose name never even suggests the butteriness that might send you back to the counter more than once for just one more.

it is a good place to knit and i go there with other knitting fiends mostly but today i had a yarn emergency and ended up there after all by myself. if you sit in the big couch you can watch the world through the front window. if you sit there with yarn and needles, folks feel the need to chat with you or at the very least stare. today a boy was sitting in the window, maybe sixth grade. all by himself on a barstool leaning against a plank counter gazing out the window or down at a book. he had to have come from quite some bit away because there aren't any schools right nearby. when his dad showed up, they planted themselves on the couch opposite mine, dad with a coffee and the boy with a sandwich.

sometimes when you buy yarn it's in a loose hank and you have to wind it into a ball, which is what i was doing because i left my needles at home and if you're a knitter you know that buying yarn without having your needles with you can make you sick, can make your skin hurt and the backs of your eyes prickly. so you have to interact with the yarn some way to keep breathing and rolling it into a ball was just fine to keep me from hyperventilating. when i looked up from my winding both dad and child were reading. sitting within an inch or two of each other, silent, heads bowed. they have the same eyelashes, chin. dad's book is a hardcover that looks libraryish, which immediately makes me want to thank him. the boy's is a new paperback, something with castles or fantasy. i go back to my work and every time i look up they are exactly the same, side by side. every time i look i notice another similarity. the man is maybe 40, not quite like most hipsters his age who come in, but clearly "of the city". the boy is not the sort his peers would consider "cute" but he will grow up to be fascinating. you can tell.

quite some time passes and the two look up and at each other at precisely the same moment. they get their books and go. i resist the urge to pounce on them and tell them about how it nearly makes me cry to see a man and his child reading in public like that, how i wish every student in my class had a dad like him. i want to heap so much praise on him he will blush because what he's doing is so huge and i keep thinking of what a gift he's giving his boy. as they leave together i see the way he looks at his child, like he is seeing a mythical creature, like the boy might disappear at any second. the boy is giving just as spectacular a gift, being such a beautiful thing, loving what his dad loves with his eyelashes hanging over the pages exactly the same way.

superfantastic supernatural nephew

babies are small. all the babies i know right now are extremely small. this does not stop them from exploring what sort of rare creatures they are. the following photos are of my new nephew alex. he is still exploring his supernatural abilities (see earlier entry). it seems he's got some sort of shape/substance shifting skills and also some possible night light skills. his parents posted a few black and white photos on their blog, but this doesn't even begin to capture how spectacular he is. here's their b&w first. the real photos (and his true nature) follow.





this is his bas relief skill. he can just hang out on the facades of buildings, looking for crime to fight if he feels like it. he can also get into museums free this way. he's a pretty smart guy.









this unusual photo captures the split second when alex is rearranging his particulate matter to change from solid to liquid. i know you're jealous. who wouldn't want to be able to swim around with squids and sharks and starfish and let them swim right through your insides?



here he is in his liquid form. this may not seem like a very impressive ability, but here he's 99.99999% liquid with only a thin membrane much like a jellyfish keeping him all together. this allows him a great deal of flexibility so he can pretty much seep into or out of any situation. right now he doesn't shift into this form very often. the diapers present a hazard with their extreme absorbency.





here he's in ghost form. i thought that one seemed a bit silly, but in this form he can fly all over the world, dropping in on the dreams of evildoers, terrifying them into turning their lives around. i know he doesn't look terrifying here, but he's still a baby. he's still working out the kinks.

this last is my favorite. to regular humans he shows his human form because it would be too overwhelming to see what he really looks like all the time, like staring at the sun or having an endless supply of chocolate. you should only glimpse it for a bit, but it's worth a look. in his natural form all his supernaturalness swirls around him and he glows.

chair lift

this entry is under construction and will contain quite a few more images of my mom suffering at some point, but i couldn't make folks wait while i tried to capture the ridiculousness of this story.

my mother subscribes to a logic that is completely indecipherable to normal humans. this is not entirely her fault. moms move within a world defined by selflessness and the protection of helpless small things. i think that for some, when the helpless small things grow up, this motivation warps in on itself and makes many moms into completely baffling creatures whose every move is subject to a new scrutiny that includes hysterical laughter and howls of "i can't even begin to understand what you were thinking!" from the children. this is, obviously, when mothers are at their weakest and dutiful children wouldn't dare capitalize on that weakness. sorry mom. you raised me to seize an opportunity...

a while ago my mom fought a pitched battle against two cruel foes, sheet ice and her calcium-poor bones. perhaps if she hadn't been wearing clogs on the ice in the middle of winter, but that's another story altogether. my dear, sweet mother is legendary for her ability to go from vertical to on her butt (or shoulder or probably even her head) in under a second and for her inability to wear shoes appropriate to the outdoor weather (or any shoes, half the time). this combination of skill and decision-making left her less than victorious against the ice. she ended up with a broken femur and a new appreciation for my dad’s personal assistant skills. although she is mending, she still needs a little help from a wheelchair when she’s out.

just so you know, my parents raised three daughters whose careers center around working with people who have disabilities. we see things like crutches and wheelchairs and even some dogs as tools to help folks do the things they want to do when their bodies have had difficulty. so our mom’s strange attitude about her own wheelchair is not something she learned from us.

we raised her better and are beginning to question those coffee and danish consuming thugs she spends time with at the food court of the mall.

back to the present. a few days ago, the parents were out driving around and had a flat tire. now, you should probably know about the times they’ve run out of gas and all, but I don’t have time for the whole story, so for now we’re at the flat tire. they got their sassy van towed to goodyear and several attempts to patch the tire were failures. they had to buy a new one. no problem. dad picked out a tire, paid and drove the van onto the lift. he got out. mom didn’t get out.

now, to be fair, she claims dad told her they’d only be waiting five minutes and she figured it would take more than that to get her out of the car and into the chair. however, this is not likely. she had to insist. she had to go way beyond insisting. the guys at garages do not allow people to be in the cars when the cars are on lifts. try it. see what you get.

when her children were in school mom kept herself out of trouble by being a substitute teacher. for reasons none of us can figure, she tended to be beloved by evil little boys, the kind who grow up to be written about in the police blotter on a regular but boring basis. we’ve considered that maybe she used some sort of hypnosis on them, but we know for sure she has power over a certain part of the population nobody else seems to have power over. for instance, people who work at toll booths or the returns desk at sears, or even guys operating the lifts at garages.

no one will ever know how mom controls the world, but it doesn't really matter. what does matter is that she spent an entire thursday afternoon on a lift in the goodyear shop, gazing out above the heads of all the grease smeared goodyear guys while my dad sipped coffee and read the paper in the climate controlled waiting room.

the absolutely true story of my new nephew without any embellishment whatsoever

my baby sister had her kid. you can read the version of things she and her husband concocted here: becomingabunch.blogspot.com. or you can find out the sordid truth right where you are. read on. first, in a shameless bid for attention predictable in the youngest of a set of siblings, my sister conspired with her unborn child to create a frightening, dramatic arrival. this arrival involved sharp instruments, a briefly external uterus and a short stint in n.i.c.u. both are resting happily at home with a very giddy dad now, so don't fret. however, any information you read on their blog is a smokescreen to hide the true facts. the child is, well.... supernatural. there. i've said it.

it shouldn't come as a surprise. his older cousin is supernatural as well. when that child arrived he was unable to ingest human milk, formula or cow milk. he began to get very sick and was slightly terrifying. his parents finally consulted an oracle living in the crashed space ship in their backyard and began feeding the child a combination of crushed meteorites, stalactites and copper wrapped in cheese. he now gets stars and happy faces on all his papers at school.

back to the new one. if you've visited their blog, you'll see him in those goggles and will read their claim of a mildly lemony child. those of you who have been to sedona, area 51, spooklight or our fine new chud sanctuary will be fully aware that they've figured out he has a vision skill. now, supernatural babies are just like other babies in that they don't necessarily have control of their skills. if they did, they wouldn't need diapers. he was born with legs but will have to learn to control their movement so he can walk, run, swim and fly. likewise, whatever is behind those goggles isn't yet entirely under his control and his very responsible parents are goggling him to protect the world from potential accidental laser beams or levitation. personally, i am hoping his vision skill involves being able to move lumber from one place to another and assemble it in a pleasing manner because we need a new fence here and the wood floors are going to need to be replaced soon.

he called the other day and although i have not yet been able to decipher his supernatural language, i think he said, "i will be coming to visit in late may. get me a ticket to that levon helm show you're seeing." it might have been, "why didn't i get any angel pants? mine have a pointy tail!" the smaller dog who lives here thinks it was, "saddle up the dogs! i'll be out in september for a nice fall hike!"

and of course i told him, "come on out. bring the big cousin. we've got the bunk beds up and the dogs are saddled. there's plenty of cheese."

post office train station

first off, a kid in class today called me a fucking pussy. i kicked him out of class for something else and he was mad and muttered it as he walked past me. generally, i deal with evil language in the classroom. it is rare that kids say anything directly to me, but when they do it's usually "you're such a bitch". my response is generally "i'm well aware of that. do you have anything new to contribute to the class?"

after school i went to the post office to mail a package. i did not go to the post office in my neighborhood because i have considered whether i could get away with stabbing someone each time i've been inside the place. so i went to another one. three people in line. two people behind the bulletproof glass. evidently this is a stressful ratio for the postal folk. ten minutes later the little bell dings and the arrow lights up pointing left. i go left. the troll behind the glass snarls, "i''m closed!" i say, "but the bell and the arrow..." as i am saying this, the bell dings again and the light points left. i point at it. there is no other clerk on the left and she has to be pushing the button to signal the bell and light. she does not address this issue. "i'm closed!" she howls. i attempt, through three more bells and lights, to explain that her hideous self is sitting at a window that says "open" and the stupid bell and light keep saying she's open. the other clerk has been with the same person since i walked in. eventually, i walk out in disgust.

i turn a corner and see a woman teetering on ill-fitting high heeled boots. she's maybe 40 with a bag full of groceries and a horrible pleather coat. i walk behind her half a block before the faceplant. it sounds horrible. bananas, cucumbers, onions, papers everywhere. i help her up. she is physically fine but is nearly in tears. she thanks and thanks and thanks, says she fell a few weeks ago. once she's standing i help her get the food back in her bag. she only lives a block away. it isn't likely she'll make it home.

post office two. three clerks and fifteen people in line. the clerks are rowdy, yelling across the room to each other, cackling. one calls everyone baby. the old men like this more than anyone. this is my second favorite post office. although it is wild, i know i'll be out in ten minutes, even if the line is out the door. i am finally second from the windows when the woman in front of me sees a package on the table. she asks the woman at the window if it's hers. it isn't. we look. it is a small item in a padded envelope. small but fat. it has an address in very weak handwriting with no zip code. there is no return address. the envelope is poorly sealed. the woman in front of me is uncomfortable. i am a paranoid person so i am even more uncomfortable. i get tunnel vision. we come up with the same solution at the same time. we talk loudly about the unclaimed package sitting a foot from us at chest level. we wonder loudly what it could be and who might have left it. we live in a town where people are still slightly on edge. we don't think of ourselves as on edge, but this morning someone exploded a small bomb somewhere around times square and we felt uneasy coming to work on the trains. there is nothing really to be done about it, so we don't go all out. we don't panic. we just keep a reserve of unease and suspiciousness. finally, a clerk says, "some man stole a guy's wallet and now he's trying to mail it back to the guy. i ain't about to touch it". i mail my package and am out in ten minutes.

subway platform. it is about five pm on a southbound underground platform in brooklyn. there is a woman on my side of the platform who looks like a soccer mom with an unsuccessful bid to bring back the early eighties, at least in terms of fashion. she is heavy, but only through the hips. they are three times a wide as any other part of her. this does not help her look. she is muttering across the tracks angrily. her target is a man who makes me question miles davis' death. he doesn't look like the man. he is. right down to the suit. the hair. the shoes. her muttering intensifies and she screams "DON'T YOU KNOW ABOUT IMMIGRATION?"

i get on the train, tired because i've been up since five am, mostly standing and talking. nobody screams. nobody shakes. nobody slaps a child in the face. there are no terrifying lectures about jesus, the trains or impending doom. no homeless people near death. nobody is whispering about bombs,guns, knives. the train is not even crowded. only a few of us are standing. i lean against the pole, rest my head on it. a man get up and gives me his seat.