Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Medical Equipment I Have Seen

The HLS-500 Halogen Light Source.

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Septoplasty

There were morbid moments that had the air of ceremony. On the form: List your next of kin. And the small, mustachioed man at the intake desk asking, Any particular religious preference? Funny way to ask that question. Like he was asking what vodka I wanted in a bloody mary. Whatever's fine, I should've said. But I said, emphatically, None at all, and his reaction was like that was precisely what he wanted and expected me to say. And when the surgeon handed me a form and said with a forced chuckle, This makes people nervous when we ask them; it really shouldn't, but we have to ask anyway. It was consent to receive a blood transfusion, should the need arise. Initial here. It didn't make me nervous. Once, the litany of questions asked again and again by various parties—Do you smoke? Do you drink? How much? Do you take drugs? Any allergies?—took an abrupt turn when recited by a clipboard-carrying nurse: Are you a Jehovah's Witness... at all? She stumbled a bit at the absurdity of it. I think that's why she added "at all," as though I might be one just a little and that may still pose some sort of problem. I'm thinking about it... I'm almost one, frankly. But I reassure her no. OK, because they don't take blood transfusions, she said quickly, and hurried to the next question.

Do you drink? the kindly, motherly Asian nurse was asking me. Do you smoke? I had not yet been submitted to the indignities I knew were to come, the donning of the assless gown and padded sockies. In fact, there was a weird dignity to my present circumstances: I was seated in a high-backed chair against the wall, half-drawn curtains separating me from similar stations on either side. There was a thronelike quality to the chair and its position, its role in this ceremony of deference. A robotic-looking blood pressure machine stood like a sentry to my right. So this is what it's like to be king for a day. Any allergies?

Before long I had to go to the changing room and pile my clothes in the gunmetal gray locker. I was given two gowns and told to wear them each way. One forward and one backward. Go both ways. One way is life and the other is death. I took note of the pattern of rubberization on the soles of the beige ankle socks: It was a striation that could almost but not quite be termed decorative.

I padded around the waiting area in my beige socks and both-ways gowns. No one seemed to have an immediate agenda for me. There I was a few feet from the desk, a few feet from the chairs. Neither coming from nor going to. Like one of the undead. Nurses clutching clipboards gossiped and fussed with paperwork and looked through me for awhile. Sit over there, I was finally told, and so I sat in the third row of an impromptu gallery of plastic chairs facing nothing, the kind of arrangement you see in a small-town DMV. I sat there and read New York magazine for a long, long time, an article about a memoirist who might be lying, as others around me came and went and I began to wonder whether I'd been forgotten or whether the whole thing had been some kind of mistake, some complete and hilarious misunderstanding: You thought what, sir? You thought you were getting surgery!?

Then very quietly someone came over and got me.

The surgeon greeted me and escorted me to a place behind the doors. You were born exactly ten days before me, he said. I think I said that's funny. He instructed me to lie on a wheeled bed.

The anesthesiologist was tall and had a heavy accent. Eastern European, I thought. Romanian, Bulgarian. Do you smoke? No. Do you drink? Yes. You don't take any kinds, you know, illegal drugs or what.

Of course not.

To my left a young Asian doctor introduced himself, shook my hand, and plumped up the crook of my elbow for a good vein. You're going to feel a pinch. And I did feel a pinch: the pressure of my entire being escaping into the world at large. Suddenly my circulatory system was connected to the cosmic ether. I felt vaguely idiotic and serene. Whatever may go in me, may go in me. I'm in the blood and the blood's in me.

The surgeon grabbed my bed by a railing at the foot and wheeled me down a series of halls, around corners, through doors, cheerily greeting colleagues along the way. It was impossible to overlook the infantile aspect of the experience. Or a dream where your bed is a car.

At the end I was asked to get up and I felt a vague irritation at this - wasn't I in bed already? I'm stricken, for Christ's sake. I have on backwards-forwards clothes and my body's hooked up to a plastic bag. I stepped gingerly through the swinging doors and into the operating theater. There was a forbidding padded plank in its center, with masked figures all around. Remove the top gown, I was told. Lie down. Put your arms out like this - that's right, like that. It occurred to me that I'd crucified myself - my arms were outstretched on the lateral extensions of the cross and all there was to do was drive the nails.

The anesthesiologist rematerialized. You comfortable? Good. Now we gonna give you something to relax you little bit.

It dawned on me to ask him what it was. What is it? There was a beat or two of pause. This was not a question he was accustomed to answering.

It's valium and, um, morphine.

Good, I said, and I tried very, very hard to focus on the high, to know the high, to get inside of this high now, right here, now, this high right now, I watch the ceiling, feel it, to be high, to feel it, feel it, feel it, feel...

I woke up with a shot and no idea where the fuck I was. Why, what, light, who? OK, surgery. I just had surgery.



Illustration by Louise Asherson

Septoplasty - 4

The surgeon greeted me and escorted me to a place behind the doors. You were born exactly ten days before me, he said. I think I said that's funny. He instructed me to lie on a wheeled bed.

The anesthesiologist was tall and had a heavy accent. Eastern European, I thought. Romanian, Bulgarian. Do you smoke? No. Do you drink? Yes. You don't take any kinds, you know, illegal drugs or what.

Of course not.

To my left a young Asian doctor introduced himself, shook my hand, and plumped up the crook of my elbow for a good vein. You're going to feel a pinch. And I did feel a pinch: the pressure of my entire being escaping into the world at large. Suddenly my circulatory system was connected to the cosmic ether. I felt vaguely idiotic and serene. Whatever may go in me, may go in me. I'm in the blood and the blood's in me.

The surgeon grabbed my bed by a railing at the foot and wheeled me down a series of halls, around corners, through doors, cheerily greeting colleagues along the way. It was impossible to overlook the infantile aspect of the experience. Or a dream where your bed is a car.

At the end I was asked to get up and I felt a vague irritation at this - wasn't I in bed already? I'm stricken, for Christ's sake. I have on backwards-forwards clothes and my body's hooked up to a plastic bag. I stepped gingerly through the swinging doors and into the operating theater. There was a forbidding padded plank in its center, with masked figures all around. Remove the top gown, I was told. Lie down. Put your arms out like this - that's right, like that. It occurred to me that I'd crucified myself - my arms were outstretched on the lateral extensions of the cross and all there was to do was drive the nails.

The anesthesiologist rematerialized. You comfortable? Good. Now we gonna give you something to relax you little bit.

It dawned on me to ask him what it was. What is it? There was a beat or two of pause. This was not a question he was accustomed to answering.

It's valium and, um, morphine.

Good,
I said, and I tried very, very hard to focus on the high, to know the high, to get inside of this high now, right here, now, this high right now, I watch the ceiling, feel it, to be high, to feel it, feel it, feel it, feel...

I woke up with a shot and no idea where the fuck I was. Why, what, light, who? OK, surgery. I just had surgery.



Illustration by Louise Asherson

Monday, November 24, 2008

Septoplasty - 3

I padded around the waiting area in my beige socks and both-ways gowns. No one seemed to have an immediate agenda for me. There I was a few feet from the desk, a few feet from the chairs. Neither coming from nor going to. Like one of the undead. Nurses clutching clipboards gossiped and fussed with paperwork and looked through me for awhile. Sit over there, I was finally told, and so I sat in the third row of an impromptu gallery of plastic chairs facing nothing, the kind of arrangement you see in a small-town DMV. I sat there and read New York magazine for a long, long time, an article about a memoirist who might be lying, as others around me came and went and I began to wonder whether I'd been forgotten or whether the whole thing had been some kind of mistake, some complete and hilarious misunderstanding: You thought what, sir? You thought you were getting surgery!?

Then very quietly someone came over and got me.
I turned the TV off tonight at the very moment that a bomb blast, seen from above the clouds, was radiating from ground zero.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

I was walking down Madison Avenue about near Madison Square Park yesterday and from halfway across 29th Street I spied a tall woman standing beside the New York Life Building. It seemed odd that she was standing still - there was nothing to stand next to and she wasn't lighting a cigarette. She wasn't doing anything that people do when they suddenly stand right where they are. The wall was honeyed with the late afternoon sun. I walked past the Halal cart. "Best Halal in town." As I got closer I saw that the woman was doing something with her hands. They hung normally by her side but she was fluttering her fingers, the way a typist might loosen up her fingers before she types. She was beautiful, well-dressed and well-made-up. As I walked closer someone to the right barked a command and suddenly she was walking, and at once a battery of photographers took aim and shot her from a gallery at the edge of the sidewalk, crowded with lighting equipment, production assistants and hangers-on. I swerved between her and the others and looked back to see her stop, turn and walk back to her mark.

Septoplasty - 2

Do you drink? the kindly, motherly Asian nurse was asking me. Do you smoke? I had not yet been submitted to the indignities I knew were to come, the donning of the assless gown and padded sockies. In fact, there was a weird dignity to my present circumstances: I was seated in a high-backed chair against the wall, half-drawn curtains separating me from similar stations on either side. There was a thronelike quality to the chair and its position, its role in this ceremony of deference. A robotic-looking blood pressure machine stood like a sentry to my right. So this is what it's like to be king for a day. Any allergies?

Before long I had to go to the changing room and pile my clothes in the gunmetal gray locker. I was given two gowns and told to wear them each way. One forward and one backward. Go both ways. One way is life and the other is death. I took note of the pattern of rubberization on the soles of the beige ankle socks: It was a striation that could almost but not quite be termed decorative.

Friday, November 21, 2008

Septoplasty - 1

There were morbid moments that had the air of ceremony. On the form: List your next of kin. And the small, mustachioed man at the intake desk asking, Any particular religious preference? Funny way to ask that question. Like he was asking what vodka I wanted in a bloody mary. Whatever's fine, I should've said. But I said, emphatically, None at all, and his reaction was like that was precisely what he wanted and expected me to say. And when the surgeon handed me a form and said with a forced chuckle, This makes people nervous when we ask them; it really shouldn't, but we have to ask anyway. It was consent to receive a blood transfusion, should the need arise. Initial here. It didn't make me nervous. Once, the litany of questions asked again and again by various parties - Do you smoke? Do you drink? How much? Do you take drugs? Any allergies? - took an abrupt turn when recited by a clipboard-carrying nurse: Are you a Jehovah's Witness... at all? She stumbled a bit at the absurdity of it. I think that's why she added "at all," as though I might be one just a little and that may still pose some sort of problem. I'm thinking about it... I'm almost one, frankly. But I reassure her no. OK, because they don't take blood transfusions, she said quickly, and hurried to the next question.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

The Nader

We were sickened when Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the election in 2000. We get chills imagining what a better world we'd inhabit if Nader had been just a bit pragmatic and thrown his support to Gore. We're outraged, now, at Nader's central claim - that there's no difference between Democrat and Republican, that it's like Coke and Pepsi, a Chomskian false choice. What profound differences there are, and would have been manifested these past eight years: on the environment; on the Constitution; on diplomacy; on governing, period. But there was always a part of me that respected the purity of Nader's views. His resolute stubbornness. His refusal to abandon principle even as a means to an arguably better end. It's the same part of me that whispers, Become a vegan or Throw out your TV. It's a faint, meek voice, masked by a thousand louder sounds, but daunting in its cold moral authority nonetheless.

So now it's sad to see Nader wonder out loud whether Barack Obama would be an Uncle Sam or an Uncle Tom (a point of view which was, poignantly, echoed by Al Qaeda in a statement by Bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahri). Fox News's Shepard Smith scolded him for it in words that drip with smug, sanctimonious reproach, and Nader did a pretty good job of calling Smith out as a typical TV news bully and defending his view (Obama's got a history of siding with corporations, supports an increase in the defense budget that's desired by the military-industrial complex, has a tax plan that doesn't address the needs of the poor, etc.), but there's something very depressing about seeing this cranky old idealist becoming more marginalized by the minute and lashing out like a petulant child.

Ralph, after all this time, all this effort, all that it means and may yet mean for Barack Obama to become President of the United States, can you please just drop it for a second? For one second, man. Be generous. Lift your perpetually hunched shoulders, that gray face, and say something positive, something. The weight of your dourness, of your sobriety - it's too much to bear. We've appreciated your tireless rages on our behalf, your fuck you to the man, your secular sainthood. But something's passed you by now. You're not helping this world anymore.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Spent the day prone on our couch, developing dull aches and cramps in my ass, neck and spine, the mundane curses of the indolent.
Getting lots of spam from Manoj Pmanoj lately. All in succession so it looks like this:

manoj pmanoj
manoj pmanoj
manoj pmanoj
manoj pmanoj
manoj pmanoj

That'll be a name to remember for a villain in a novel.

Friday, November 14, 2008

It seems to me that Bob Dylan's principal achievement was to be bold and imaginative enough to take the history of American folk music by the balls and make it his prison bitch.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Transition

The assembling of the cabinet, the ghostly authority exerted from a nebulous place. The sex-segregated White House tour. The ritual revelation of Secret Service code names.

Monday, November 10, 2008

Allentown

We were told to park at the international headquarters of Mack Trucks on Mack Boulevard. This was across the street from the UAW hall where the Obama campaign had set up tables in the parking lot, which in fact was only half-filled. We later learned that this was by design: They wanted people driving by to think that volunteers might still be needed, and so be tempted to stop and lend a hand. And so we found a space behind a row of gleaming new Mack tractors, and it felt good and fitting to have this brand - powerful, workmanlike, essentially American - quietly on our side.

There was a big bulldog on the wall of the headquarters and it lit up at night.

At the volunteer station there were hundreds of sandwiches in boxes on a table: ham and cheese, turkey and cheese, roast beef and cheese. Shrinkwrapped twelve-packs of bottled water. The utilitarian in abundance. Victuals, like those of a well-supplied resistance movement in wartime. I took a turkey sandwich and, along with about a dozen others, almost unthinkingly gravitated toward one of the organizers, a heavyset man named John. He thanked us and told us what we were out there to do: Get people to vote. We know we have the vote here, we know the polls support us. All we have to do is make sure people vote. And what if we see McCain supporters, or McCain volunteers? We don't want any arguments, we don't want any fights. Tell them have a nice day. Remember: This is their sad day. No need to make it worse.

They armed us with flyers and doorhangers and a map with our territory marked in Hi-Liter, and we went back across Mack and up the hill to the car. Our destination was a street of decrepit, broken-down rowhouses with peeling paint and cracks in the floors of porches. We saw two older white men and asked them what we'd been asked to ask everyone: Did you vote? Their manner was dismissive and ambiguous: It was unclear whether they had voted, or whether they were going to. One of them said, "I always vote." They seemed to support Obama, but maybe not. They were union guys, working guys. Lifelong Democrats. They indicated that everyone in the neighborhood was voting Obama. "Big surprise," one said, rolling his eyes. I knew at that moment that this was not strictly a poor white neighborhood.

For two hours we knocked on doors, then went back to get more maps and knocked for three hours more. Often there was no one home when we knocked, or maybe they didn't want to answer. Can't really blame them I suppose. Once I knocked on a screen door and could see straight down a debris-strewn hallway and into the kitchen, where a figure stood facing the other way. I knocked again. The figure remained, impassive, for a few more seconds then walked out of my sight at that deliberate pace with which we all move when we're in our homes and we know that we're alone.

"There's someone in there and they're ignoring me," I said to Sara, who was at the neighboring door.

"C'est la vie," she said.

Sometimes maybe the place was abandoned or condemned. Sometimes it was hard to say. I hesitated to knock on one door because it was so starkly forbidding that I was certain no one had lived there for months or maybe years. But it opened and a black face peered at me from the darkness.

"Did you vote?"

"Oh yes! Obama!"

Again and again, people told us they had already voted for Obama, or were about to go out and vote for Obama, or were waiting for their wives or boyfriends to get back home so they could both go vote for Obama. The day took on an air of celebration. People hooted at us from their cars, from across the street:

"Obama!"

"Obama baby!"

"Obama, Obama, Obama!"

A big, gruff, white biker type: Already voted, Obama. A white kid, dressed black in a bandanna, gold chain and oversize jeans: Obama. A middle-aged Hispanic couple: Just came back from voting Obama.

We met a fat, young white guy in a death metal T-shirt, arms covered in tattoos. He wanted Obama pins so I gave him mine. He'd voted but we urged him to tell other people to vote, his friends, anyone. A small woman who barely spoke English walked up and asked for directions to the polls and he told her.

We chatted with a middle-aged black woman who had just come back from voting.

"He better win. If he don' win there's gonna be..."

"Riots?"

"There's gonna be riots, that's for sure."

"I think he's gonna win."

"I sure do hope so, I sure hope so. Thing is, somebody's gonna try to, you know, go after him."

"I know. I think, I really think he's going to be well protected."

"I sure do hope so."

As people walked by she shouted out, "You vote yet, honey?"

"Obama!"

A white woman told us she wasn't registered to vote and seemed particularly jaded about this particular cycle. I tried to make the case for Obama anyway, lamely alluding to his tax breaks for the middle class.

"He's working for middle class people, working people," I said. I was afraid to say the word "poor."

"Middle class people? What about poor people like me?"

"Poor people too!"

She mentioned that she's a nurse and all her black coworkers are voting for Obama. Her eyes rolled like the other man's. She was a bit begrudging, almost like she didn't want black people to get a president. That somehow they'd capitalize on the situation and live the Life of Riley, undeservedly. Then her daughter and her daughter's friend came down the street and suddenly she brightened:

"My little girl loves Barack! She and her friend, they made T-shirts of him and wore 'em to school!"

She was glowing with pride, evidently immune to irony. I took a picture of her daughter (who, interestingly, looks a bit Hispanic) and one of her daughter's friend in their homemade Obama T-shirts, each one covered with the signatures of dozens of other kids like them.

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Maybe now the Republican Party will fragment: Its more reasonable members can become Libertarians and the rest can form some odious faction akin to France's nationalist party or Germany's NDP. Is it not time to explode the two-party system anyway? Let's have a handful of vital ones while some fade like dead stars and some burst into being like the Big Bang. Let's elect Greens and independents and parties previously unimagined.
The American people have passed their test.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

George W. Bush Is Willy Loman

An article in the Washington Post about Bush's disheartened lackeys made me realize that he's a sad fucking Willy Loman figure, bewildered that he's not liked, idiotically uncomprehending of his toxic affect upon the world, an all-American tragic figure.

The Sorry Dance

I descended into the depths of the Duane Reade on 59th and 8th, looking for where they might sell money orders. Amidst the aisles and aisles of candy, paper towels and soap. Around a corner, I nearly ran into a middle-aged black woman with short hair and glasses. I feinted to my left; she to her right. We were momentarily suspended in space and time. Finally we do-si-do'd.

"Sorry!" she said. "Dance."

It was a funny interaction and a funny thing for her to say. It got me thinking about other sorry dances.

Like Larry Eagleburger being forced to apologize for criticizing Sarah Palin. He'd originally told the truth - that she is obviously not ready to be Vice President. He didn't savage her - he's a Republican, after all, and often cited by McCain as one of five former Secretaries of State who support him (not that he can remember them all ) - but he made a very sober and lucid assessment of her obvious lack of preparation and know-how. Transparently, someone from the campaign then dressed him down overnight, read him the riot act. I don't know what they might have said to him. He doesn't have a political future - he's 78 years old. Did they torture him? In effect, they cut off his cock. They forced him to humiliate himself on Fox News, to bow down low, to sweatingly and haltingly take back everything he'd said in serene sincerity the day before. It's suggestive of dissidents of authoritarian regimes being forced to recant or die. The Nazis, the Soviets, the Khmer Rouge. The Spanish Inquisition. Convert or die. Confess or die. Those demonic - worse than demonic, really - bargains. You sell your soul but get nothing in return. Honestly, what did they tell him to scare him straight? Or is he just that weak?

So that's the sorry dance. It's the jangly dance performed by a fool when those he's desperate to please pepper the floor beneath his feet with bullets.

Fortunately, a stranger's riding into town.

Obama will win big today.

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Three days to go and there seems to be an eerie lull. Not much news, polls holding steady. No messages from the Middle East. No unseemly associations, nor unsavory deeds, dredged up from the past. What's gonna happen on Monday?