Monkeypox

In my quest to expand the boundaries of human knowledge, I have polled five monkeys to see if they regarded the term monkeypox as derogatory. All five monkeys, who, I should mention in the interest of verisimilitude, were not monkeys at all but rather three relatives, a dog, and a Boston Red Sox fan—monkeys are in short supply here in our happy little burg so I had to work with what I had—declared that the term was not derogatory, although the Boston Red Sox fan said he could not be sure, which is the sort of thing you would expect a Boston Red Sox fan to say, given their general lack of intelligence. The dog was ambivalent about the whole thing as well; there is a dogpox and most adult male dogs have had it at one time or another, but the malady is not related to monkeypox in any way and the dog believed that if he didn’t have to worry about monkeypox then he wasn’t going to worry about it. All the participants in the survey, however, agreed that bacon was the greatest thing since boar in a can. 

So, the monkeys are not complaining about the word monkeypox or any other variation of the variola virus. Given the lack of interest in the disease and its terminology in the monkey community, why are people complaining about the disease's name? Apparently, humans can spread monkeypox as well and usually do so at gay raves in Europe, which leads unavoidably to the question, which of the three do we avoid now? Discriminating against gays is illegal, discriminating against raves is boring, discriminating against Europe means that we have to drink American beer all the time. Perhaps the best solution is the one proposed by a friend of mine just as a wedding party crashed into our favorite watering hole: find out who is humping the monkeys and tell them to stop doing it. An admirable solution to the problem, I thought, but this solution does not come with a billion-dollar price tag and therefore is unlikely to generate much support from the pharmaceutical industry.

 

Covid Blues, or life in our modern age

 

So, here’s the thing: I spent the last month or so dealing with the pestilence of our time, the Wuhan wet-market wonder virus, and so I have little or no time to write anything, even though the faux election of this nation’s first walking dead president provides, and will provide, I think, a never-ending supply of anecdotes to comment on over the next four years.  As to the virus, I am well now, or so the local board of health says so, but my doctor is not sure he agrees with them. Therefore, in an effort to ease his distrust of the board of health, I went to another doctor's office and have a nice Jamaican lady shove a cotton swab up both my nostrils.  I trust that the results will be negative, if for no other reason that I intensely dislike the sensation of having things shoved up my nostrils.  It is most disagreeable, as I am sure you will agree when this happens to you.  And it will.

As to the disease itself, for me it was little worse than a not too bad head cold or maybe a very weak flu.  Temperatures went from normal to weak fever to normal again within the span of a few hours, as did my desire to do hurtful things to Chinese people for unleashing this plague upon us, although calling it a plague do little else except give the virus a swelled head and make it feel much more important than it really is, in much the same way as a D-list television actor might feel if he / she / it /they / xhe / whatever landed a big role in a major feature film. Whatever the Wuhan flu is, it is not septicemic plague or the Ebola virus.  Here in this our Great Republic, we have shut down the most powerful economic engine in the world over a disease with a 99.98% survival rate.  I know that different people react to the disease in diverse ways, but I would think that protecting the most vulnerable populations, i.e., the ill and the elderly, first would be a promising idea, and then just let everyone else get on with their lives.  This makes sense to me, but I live in the Vampire State, where the reigning blue monarch will brook no dissent from his decrees about what it is good for the peasantry and will not tolerate sense if said sense does not conform with his whims. So, such is life.

I should also point out that my 91-year-old mother has the virus, and yes, she blames me for her having it, thank you very much for asking, as does my brother, whom she infected when he brought her into the doctor’s office for the test, and I must say that the decibel level denouncing the former is much higher than the decibel level denouncing the latter, mostly because that is apparently my fault as well.  My mother is doing quite well; she is not happy with not being able to do yard work, but we must all make sacrifices at this unhappy time in our country’s history; and I expect that her next test will be negative, given that her oxygen levels are in the high nineties and her appetite is slowly returning.  My brother is also doing well.  He hunkered down in his house with a year’s supply of Doritos and enough Bud Lite to float a team of Clydesdales on and watched football for the whole of his quarantine.  I suspect that his viruses were probably the happiest viruses in the state, and that his bloodstream these past few weeks was a veritable Mardi Gras of drunken viruses traveling from one of his ends to the other while wearing Saints gear and screaming hoo dat at the passersby .  After shocking the locals with their behavior—I am not sure how that is possible either in my brother's bloodstream or in New Orleans, but I suppose that there is a first time for everything—our celebrants then started puking in the street and on themselves, before sidling up to a cute T-cell in a black leather bikini and pumps on my brother's equivalent of Bourbon Street and saying, hey baby, wanna replicate?  In any case, my brother tested negative a few days ago and is already back to work.  I’m not sure how things worked out with the T-cell.

 

Just saying...

Maybe it's just me, but I am growing tired of the whole damn world acting as if we were all still in the third grade and trying to stay away from the kid with the cooties. We are being ridiculous here, people.

My next trick, or further news from the health front, most of it lousy

Well, I suppose I could sit here on my aching rump and complain morning, noon, and night, but a young French person of my acquaintance (yes, I mean you, Audrey, and don’t start disputing my use of the word young; I have socks older than you are) states that it is important to maintain a positive attitude towards life, so that is what I am going to do, even if maintaining a positive attitude towards anything for very long really isn’t me.  There are people who see the metaphorical glass as half-full and others who see the glass as half-empty, and then there are those who see the glass as a sinister tool in a contemptible Communist plot to steal Merchandise 7X, the secret formula for Coca-Cola. I count myself as one of these sober-minded citizens, and as such wonder why more of America’s secrets aren’t in the same Atlanta bank vault as Merchandise 7X? From the record, they would appear safer there than some secure vault in the Pentagon.

In any case, I am going to do the positivity thing if it kills me, so here we go with positivity. I have yet to hear from the good folks at the insurance group that handles minor civil servants such as myself.  My doctor wants me to get an MRI, which as we all know, is a prohibitively expensive procedure, and so I am waiting to find out if my plan will actually pay for this. If not, then no MRI.  It’s not like I can’t afford it, if push comes to shove. I got a nice refund from the IRS this year and I suppose I could use that if I had to, but then I would have nothing to pay the school taxes with in September, and I don’t think the teachers’ union will accept my bad back excuse for not coughing up their dough, anymore than they’d accept my diabetes and arthritis excuses as reasons for not paying.  The bastards want their money up front and they want it up front now.  I suspect that most teachers’ unions supplement their income by working as enforcers for loan sharks, but more than one person has told me that it’s not wise to bring the subject up, so let’s just say that I didn’t, okay?

I am also getting a lot of advice on how to deal with the ice pick currently wedged in my back and hip. My brother the Navy man, which does not describe him well, given that three of my brothers have been in the Navy, but let’s just say that this one was in the Navy the longest, he says that I should stand at parade rest and walk in such a way that my legs do not protrude from beneath my shoulders.  I am not sure how this is possible, unless I try to walk like Frankenstein’s monster.  This method may work well in secret laboratories in Transylvania, but I fail to see the utility in modern America.  I should also hasten to point out that it may be possible for a veteran of twenty years of naval service to stand at parade rest for a prolonged period of time, but those of us without military experience might find the prospect more than a little daunting. In short, this is not going to work and I don’t give a damn how not positive this makes me sound.

So while all the bureaucratic wheels are turning, I am living on painkillers in a house where another brother and his wife are visiting.  Since marital discord is what keeps these two together; no, I can’t explain it, either; I must listen to them argue about money, cholesterol, clothes, his weight (she’s right—he could stand to lose another fifty or sixty pounds, but I’m keeping that to myself) from early in the morning to late in the evening. This is why I am on a computer at work whining about the pain I’m in, even though I am off this week, theoretically because I am in too much pain to go to work.  It really is more than a little pathetic, isn’t it?  Well, once I get some good news I will lift all of your spirits with no end of positivity.  Hey, baseball season has started, and that’s always good news! So there you go, good news already! 

ON STANDING UP, AND OTHER MARVELS OF THE MODERN WORLD: Verticality is a trait common to most bipedal species, except, of course, on Saint Patrick’s Day, when many a young biped finds horizontality a bit more congenial, especially if said horizontality occurs somewhere near an unoccupied porcelain receptacle. Verticality is also a trait most bipeds do not appreciate until they cannot exercise it for a prolonged period of time, a position, I trust, that you will never find yourself in.

There are few things in life as annoying as finding yourself in a position you do not want to be in. Consider, for example, the case of an infantryman on a battlefield. He is clearly in a position he does not want to be in and yet he stays where he is. A sense of duty binds him to his position, as does patriotism, loyalty to his comrades, fear of having his comrades think him a coward, and, in a sufficiently obnoxious army, fear of the firing squad. Without any of these regulating factors, our young infantryman may decide for himself that the position he is in is simply ridiculous; he is young, after all, and has better things to do with his time than dying violently to advance the pretensions of politicians; and so he may quit and take the first bus home.

Similarly, many a clerk at the DMV stays at the window long after any rational human being, a semi-mythical creature like the Sasquatch but with a less effective public relations staff, would have moved on to the tax assessor’s office or to some agency that regulates the number of rat hairs allowed in a bottle of ketchup [for those of you interested in such arcana, the answer is 1 rat hair per 100 grams of ketchup. Really.] Our DMV troll may have all sorts of reasons for remaining in the Siberia of local American bureaucracy: they like lording their pathetic bit of power over a perpetually angry public, they find spiritual contentment in telling people who’ve been waiting patiently to get to their window for an hour and a half that this is the wrong line or that these poor people’s documents are not in order, or that our troll simply enjoys having an irate yet powerless motoring public scream at them for several hours a day; but all of these reasons leave the casual observer thinking that our DMV clerk is more than a little nuts, a condition common to DMV clerks in this country and I suppose other countries as well. What distinguishes our two hypothetical sufferers from our next example is that they could abandon or avoid the situation they find themselves in; they choose, however, not to.

Now, for the purposes of comparison, consider the case of one A. IRL, a poor schnook who makes his living leeching off of the taxpayers. Arthritis recently struck this poor doofus down—I should point out here, simply for the sake of information and the general edification of the readers, that this is a disease whose complete and utter suckiness, assuming that suckiness is a word, the readers must experience for themselves in order to appreciate fully. Our not so young bureaucratic drone recently spent the better part of three months flat on his back whining pathetically and wishing someone else was dead as he learned to appreciate the awesome suckiness of this loathsome malady, a situation which, like our two hypothetical sufferers, he did not want to be in and could not get out off without the schadenfreudenous assistance of his family, most of whom did not want to help at all, the lousy bastards [Mom’s been a real trouper, though.] Yes indeed, bipedalism is a wonderful thing, and something your average bipedal does not appreciate until neither of his pedals work.

This pathetic dolt illustrates this great truth perfectly. A. IRL was an avid flaneur in his day, before the ravages of disease caught up with him, a man who thought nothing of walking five miles a day, seven days a week through the admittedly not very great length and breadth of our happy little burg. On more than one occasion he even thought of walking the six or so miles between Grand Central Terminal and 475 Kent Avenue in Brooklyn just to see if he could do it, but he never did. That he never made the journey to Brooklyn shows the power of the Williamsburg Bridge to bring out the cringing acrophobic in any cringing acrophobic, and there are few people in the world who cringe as acrophobically as A. IRL, a true master of the art form. That he never tried is unfortunate, because nowadays A. IRL regards walking the six or seven yards between his bedroom and the bathroom as a great accomplishment, and to do so without peeing on himself as a milestone in humanity’s ongoing fight with chronic disease.

In a related vein, I should point out that there hasn’t been nearly enough research done on discovering why some people’s need to relieve themselves increases exponentially the nearer they get to a bathroom. There seems to be no logical biological reason for this, except in the case of women needing to use a public restroom, where, given that most architects are men, the phenomenon is explainable as indicative of the usual male’s loutish insensitivity to the personal needs of women. But the phenomenon exists, architecture or not, and it seems to me someone ought to study just why it occurs. You know, I’m not really sure how I got here from where I started; this rant was about verticality not too long ago—I remember this because I had to look up verticality in the dictionary to make sure I was spelling it right. Well, it’s been a long day’s journey into the bathroom, and a very odd journey, I think, no matter how you choose to look at it.

ETIQUETTE AND THE WORLD OF MICROBES: I have cellulitis. I’m sorry, but as look at that first sentence I realize that I shouldn’t sound so sure of myself. I think I have cellulitis; that’s actually much closer to the truth. But whatever the actual truth of the matter is, I have some form of –itis and it doesn’t want to go away. If you’ve never heard of cellulitis then do not fear; from what I understand the conditions is not contagious and to be honest I’d never heard of cellulitis before this week either, assuming, of course, that cellulitis is what I have. Doctors are like computer technicians in that they think that because they understood what they just said, everyone else must understand what they just said too. This, as we all know, is not always the case, either with bacterial infections or fractious computers. Sometimes things are not as they seem, a condition that helps incumbents get re-elected on a fairly regular basis.

In any case, I disapprove of contracting diseases that I’ve never heard of. It seems more than a little rude to me for some microbe to take up residence in my left hand without so much as asking for an introduction or leaving a security deposit. I am not in the habit of imposing myself on others and I see no reason why I should permit others to impose on me. I am not running a hot sheets hotel for bacteria here. If I am going to be sick, then I prefer to give the job to local bacteria that I know and loathe, and whose death via antibiotic I can therefore savor with a clear conscience and maybe a small parade. Contracting cellulitis, and again, this is with the proviso that the condition afflicting my left hand at the moment is in fact cellulitis and not some other altogether disgusting and loathsome disease, seems the height of bacterial presumption, something on the order of my moving to Ulan Bator for my health and then demanding the Mongolian authorities conduct their official business in English for my convenience. I can see how my relatives can impose on me in this way…well, actually, I can’t see how my relatives can impose on me in this way, they just do impose on me in this way and with very little compunction, I might add, but I cannot see how a bacterium to whom I have no known familial or personal connection can demand the right to make an equal imposition. Charity, I think, only goes so far before it becomes onerous, if not actually socialistic, and then becomes physically painful, which are how things stand with me right at the moment.

I do not wish to point fingers here, especially not with my left hand, which is really not in any condition at the moment to point at anything except the floor, but there is something clearly lacking in the education of young bacteria these days. Once, here in this our Great Republic, the citizenry could count on the public schools to teach young microbes the basic etiquette required to infect the body politic on a truly epic scale, but those days are long gone, it would seem, leaving only the anomic young masses to wander in and out of the school buildings doing as they please.

I suppose that much of this bacterial anomie comes from their condition as bacteria in a world where everyone worries about viruses. After centuries of being the terror of the world, of affecting the course of history by simply appearing in one place or another and killing a million people here and a million people there, Nemesis struck; Sir Alexander Fleming and his orange molds reduced the common bacterium to just one more easily removed annoyance in a world full of easily removed annoyances, whereas viruses have, in their own truly stupid way, stumbled into the title of most feared killer. This must be galling in the extreme for your average microbe, who must wonder if viruses are really alive at all. This is a debatable question, I think, and I am sure of the position most bacterium would take: viruses are too dumb to be alive, as are most Red Sox fans. Frankly, I would prefer that this cellulitis, assuming that it is cellulitis, would infect those people instead of me; I have stuff to do this weekend.

MY APOLOGIES, OR MORE EXCUSES, A CONTINUING MELODRAMA: Okay, folks, I realize that I gave an absolute guarantee that there would be a new piece here by last Monday. The fact that you are reading yet another mea culpa for it not being here is not through any lack of willingness on my part, but rather said lack is the unfortunate byproduct of the large scale viral invasion of my upper respiratory tract this past week. It was a wonderful invasion, as invasions go; I got to play the part of Wake Island as my immune system and the viruses fought it out for control of my destiny. I am hear to announce that, unlike the Marines at Wake Island, the immune system has beaten back the invasion and that I am now well on my way to full recovery. It still hurts when I cough, but this is a vast improvement over laying on my back and looking up at my ceiling (which is peeling, by the way; I will have to get around that shortly) and wishing that I were dead. So, let me reassure you, the readers, on a couple of points: first, there is a new piece (and no, this is not it) completely written out and about halfway typed up, and second, that this piece shall be posted to this site no later than Monday of this coming week. I absolutely guarantee this, barring a relapse or some other act of God. Then you can blame God; that's His job, apparently.

AND NOW THE STAR OF OUR SHOW, NANOOK OF THE NORTH: Nanook of the North starved to death. He didn’t mean to, of course; no one except fakirs and anorexics are actually trying to starve themselves, but things just worked out that way. Nanook enjoyed his fifteen minutes of cinematic fame, but he wearied of waiting for the right part to come along—parts for nomadic hunter gatherers, whether they are from a polar region or from a somewhat more temperate clime, being few and far between both then and now, and tiring of development hell, he left Hollywood and went home to his spacious Spanish colonial igloo on the frozen tundra, a phrase I’ve never really understood since all tundra is frozen; otherwise tundra would just be cold wet dirt trying to make up its mind about whether it wants to be mud or listen to its parents and go to medical school instead. In any case, two years after he was the hit of the documentary film world, Nanook starved to death while waiting for his piece of the profits to come rolling in. I’m not sure why Nanook abandoned Hollywood for the Arctic. I understand that for many people a big tasty chunk of raw seal blubber beats a Chicago style deep pan pizza any day of the week, especially in those regions north of the Brooks Range, but the pizza is much easier to get a hold of, what with seals being fairly elusive critters not at all willing to be the main course at a Super Bowl party, and pizza has the added benefit of not annoying various and sundry environmentalist types who think that seals are cute as the dickens, which is another phrase I’ve never understood. Have you ever seen a photograph of Dickens? There’s a lot of things you could call Charlie, and a lot of people called him a lot of things, mostly unflattering, back in the day, but let’s face it, folks, cute ain’t one of them.

Now, you may not realize this; ordinarily I wouldn’t bring it up at all, but it seems germane at the moment; but I am writing this sentence about a week after I finished writing the last sentence in the previous paragraph. For most of the past week, I have been ill with a viral infection that manifested itself in a variety of ways too disgusting for me to mention here. Suffice it to say, however, that at this juncture I have absolutely no idea what this essay is supposed to be about now. Yes, whatever it was about poor old Nanook starving to death that I thought was funny enough to start one of these screeds is now one with Nineveh and Tyre. I’ve been trying to tell myself that the reason I can’t go on with this a lighthearted poke at a starving Eskimo is that, in my own small way, we are both brothers sharing the common bond of suffering. It took my family all of a minute to shoot this theory down—they would have shot it down sooner, but they were too busy laughing at me. The general consensus of opinion amongst those nearest and dearest to me is that I am a selfish, self-pitying bastard who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the sufferings of poor old Nanook. Clearly, I will have to do something about the family, but I need to make sure no suspects me afterwards. This, I think, might be a little hard to do.

Well then, having gotten this far without a subject and little or no idea what the point of it all is, I shall have to think of something and think of it in short order, won’t I? I hardly think you are going to sit there while I wrack my brain for available subject matter and I fear that the Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton trick of describing all the furniture in the room down to what kind of cheese is in the mousetrap while I try to think of something to say is not going to work in this case. I have a movable desk, a chair, a desk light, and a mesh can full of pencils. My electric pencil sharpener is on the windowsill and my dress shirts are hanging from a rod to my left. There’s not much of interest here, even if I did start describing it all.

I am, however, fond of my electric pencil sharpener. For most of my life, the lack of attention paid to the inventor of the electric pencil sharpener has struck me as inherently unfair. The electric pencil sharpener may not have pizzazz of Blackberries or cell phones or many modern communications devices, but the electric pencil sharpener has, in its own homely way, been one of the great steps forward in the history of communications. That the inventor of the electric pencil sharpener never received the adulation of Alexander Graham Bell or Samuel F. B. Morse only shows, I think, the depth to which the blind and unreasoning prejudice against pencils reaches here in this our Great Republic.

The American prejudice against pencils is never an easy subject to speak about, even today in our much more open and Oprahfied society. Like prostitutes, pencils exist to service a societal need, and when society deems that need met, society ignores or, worse, discards the used and damaged pencils entirely. The cost of this ongoing callousness is high; every year, work and school-related accidents damage, sometimes permanently, millions of fresh young pencils, and for these victims, there is little hope for a return to complete health. There is only the certainty that a hypocritical society will throw them away and replace them with a new, untouched pencil or, in extreme cases, with a ballpoint pen, perhaps even, and it pains me to say this in mixed company, a magic marker.

You may argue, and you may have a point here, that the social status of pencils is hardly a fitting subject for an essay like this, what with the children watching and all, but how would we serve the children any better by going on about poor old Nanook starving to death, that’s what I want to know. Obviously, this whole essay would have taken a much different turn if I hadn’t gotten sick in the middle of it and forgotten why I thought Nanook’s starving was so funny in the first place. It made perfect sense at the time, I remember, but then, so did phrenology, mesmerism, and Marxism-Leninism, so I guess that’s not much of an excuse.

AND NOW, A WORD FROM OUR PROPRIETOR: First of all, I would like to thank the American pharmaceutical industry for their production runs of various and sundry antiviral medications. Antivirals are a wonderful thing, especially when you are breeding viruses like the damn things are going out of style and you really want them to go out into the great big world and get real jobs, especially jobs that do not require anyone to be flat on their back for most of the day wondering why God doesn’t like them anymore. So yes, I am feeling much better now, thank you all very much.

Secondly, I would like to thank the American media for turning President Obama’s historic inauguration into the aural version of root canal work, minus that nice pina colada tasting anesthetic the dentist gives you nowadays. Most of the commentators and bloviating pundits did their best to sound like lousy sportscasters, pounding the significance of the day into my poor ill skull over and over again until I wanted to scream with agony. In my desperate search for relief, I finally alighted on C-Span, where the proceedings came to the commentary addled viewer both live and in living color, a cultural reference only the people over forty here will actually understand, and sans the constant blather of people in love with the sound of their own voices.

As I sat watching the steady stream of people march past our new President, I wondered just why it is that we the people need to subject our new presidents to a seemingly endless parade of cacophonous kitsch, and I also wish to report that the growing Hispanization of this our Great Republic will yield one great positive result…well, two, after lots of great looking babes in tight dresses and high heels—the music in inaugural parades will improve exponentially with the large scale addition of mariachi bands to the mix, although, the truth be told, adding a squadron of drunken cross-dressing malarial chimpanzees with shotguns, kazoos, and broken beer bottles to the mix would improve the musical quality of your average high school marching band just as well. The shotguns would also do wonders for removing the musically untalented from the gene pool, but I suspect that counts as an unintended consequence.

My apologies, one and all, for the lack of posts for the past week or so. The lack of posting is not due to one of my reoccurring bouts of writer’s block nor is for a lack of ideas, time to write, nor for any one of the usual excuses I use to avoid going anywhere near pencil and paper. No, what we have here is a hellacious cold that does not want to give up its grippe on my respiratory system despite my hitting this puppy with vitamin C, fluids, and even chicken soup. As you might imagine, I am not having fun here in my corner of our happy little burg; in fact, I’ve spent a good portion of the past week wishing that I was dead, and that a large number of other people, preferably relatives, Red Sox fans, and triumphalist Democrats, were as well. Misery, as the old saw has it, just loves company.