Yoga will help, as will Tai Chi, Qigong. And Twister.

Hello, Beloved Readers, and welcome, those of you new to Marlinspike Hall, ancestral manor home of the Haddock clan, and one of the premier architectural creations of [the] Tête de Hergé.  Within the Tête de Hergé, we are located to the west of the famed Lone Alp.  Locally, we're neighbors to labs and farms dedicated to the smaller cutting edges of animal husbandry -- miniaturists, they are -- and to a Cistercian monastery also, we are neighbors, offering secret shelter to its beleaguered abbot and opportunities for Christian fun and pagan insights to successive classes of postulants, novices, and the occasional weary long-professed.  The Crack Whore has taken up residence hereabouts, as well, bringing a much needed diversity to our slightly stuffy country lanes -- she's quite nice and we hope she'll one day join the, er, um, "Haddock Family Enterprises Addiction Center."

Sigh.

I had hoped for an easy Saturday evening entry, bringing you all up to date on the fascinating goings on -- a belated, some might say, series of disciplined protests and legislative appeals by Marlinspike Hall's genetically indentured Domestic Staff, designed to implement parity of wages and benefits among the various genetically pure (not engineered, please understand, but guarded by careful counseling and occasional forced sterilizations) families and houses.  I've tried several times to explain the Haddock forefathers and foremothers intentions in creating the various lineages of servitude, their happy, happy intent, but always I fall short.

Meant to create harmonious groups of highly specialized happy, happy families, guaranteed work, shelter, and provisions of unusual opulance, what could go wrong?  The Domestic Staff family dedicated for several centuries, for example, to the care of Caravaggios, would never stray from advanced studies of varnishes, dwarves, gilt, and twisted royalties -- until young Rodrigo stumbled upon a stray copy of The Order of Things (the world does have its ways), turned gay, and began an avant-garde fashion internship in Rome dedicated to exotic black leathers and turtlenecks.

Genetic anomalies, evolution, the Hand of God, whatever one invokes as Author of Change, occurred in every family meant to remain pristine in its work, its intent, its happy, happy happiness.  There are rumors of the Haddock penchant for miniatures leading astray some of the less scrupulous Haddocks, more attracted to scientific shortcuts  -- or, opines a growly Captain Archibald, some "disgruntled employee, led astray by outsiders, and... Rodrigo." Note that he never questions what nefarious influences converged upon The Manor when, as a young explorer and navigator, he discovered and exploited the Worm Hole Marina in the Moat surrounding Marlinspike Hall!

Ah, well.  Enough of our Labor Troubles.

Back to the Crack Whore.  She's perfectly made for the Haddock Family Enterprises Addiction Center.  The origins of the Center are humble and tied in to our system of genetically indentured Domestic Staffing.  I wrote it this way, once, when times were financially tough and the Captain had been inexplicably missing for longer than was usual:

...we scrape the underpinnings of the more modern furniture, mostly reproductions, in The Manor's public vending areas and grateful that the miniature families on the domestic staff willingly sift the silty bottom of the moat for spare change.  We split the haul, fifty-fifty, because square is square. 

You'd be amazed at the number of people who think that throwing things into the moat is an acceptable romantic substitution for tossing pennies into a well or euros in the Trevi fountain.  Of course, given that we sometimes attract a crowd heavily into the religious life, here more for our next door neighbors, The Cistercians, or equally heavy into heroin, hoping to score an inpatient bed at the posh Haddock Family Enterprises Addiction Center, headquartered in our barn -- we don't always come away rich in cast off coinage.  

I didn't want to confuse you with haphazard detail, but most of those who drop by the Haddock homestead are also somehow related to the carnival, and are, in fact, often carnies.  Fred thinks its because we exude some sort of Rabelaisian exuberance, that we are, in short, relentlessly robust.  Fred obviously knows nothing of my time spent weeping and the suggestion that that might be one of the chief occupations of his boudoir would shame him.  

Fred likes the more complicated explanations.  Me?  I'm all about Occam's Razor.  We attract addicted Catholic carnies because the Haddock Corporation opened a detox/rehab and decided to headquarter it in our barn, next to its tantalizing rope structures (connecting to the Manor proper via the Computer Turret), which fairly sings to those with gymnastic training, which is most everyone.  Oh, right, and we are smack dab next to Abbot Truffatore's Internet Office Supply Center, cleverly disguised as a rather ancient monastery. 

Ah, well.  Let's just say that our former silly Saturday night pot luck neighborhood suppers have become polarized affairs, whole long tables divided by potato salad recipes and biotechnology ideologies.

Within it all, Fred, Bianca Castafiore -- the Milanese Nightingale -- and her accumulation of friends and paramours, lately a troubling va-et-vient between Sven Feingold, Keeper of the Maze, and his son, something of a Rodrigo, Cabana Boy... Well, anyway, within our slightly fictional environs, we thrive, we fail, and we survive, happy, happy, happily enough.

I, the Retired Educator, the Prof-de-Rien, am required by Universal Laws (which I am, you may be sure, constantly appealing) to dip my fugly purple toes into your reality on an almost daily basis, am primarily sad.

Which is a vast improvement!  Remember the many stories of being sad and in pain?  Sad and disappointed?  Sad and confused?  Sad and desperate?  Sad and half-way liking it, as it requires so little of one's self, if you allow it an "and," a depressing companion of some sort.

But leave sadness unpaired, and pure -- and it's not a bad thing.  Pain, disappointment, confusion, desperation, self-pity: these are the demons with which you don't want to live or die.  Each a separate, winnable fight, and sometimes not so much a battle as a shrugging-off.

I am sad at the suffering of those I love and know;  I am sad at the suffering of those I love and will never know.  I am less and less sad for myself, suffering through each day, thoughts and dreams more and more taken over, like some rippling silver pensieve for the excesses of those I love, by what is happening to dear Lumpy, the Mother-Units, the dear brother of the West, tumbling, tumbling all.

The tumblers and the tumbling include many others, the past beloveds, which we all know last forever, and the tumblers and the tumbling are often as hilarious and sweet as they are fast and tragic.
It's as much a prolonged fit of the giggles in a pew on a long ago Sunday as it is an image of concentric infoldings of nausea and confused effort.

But I try now, in the public eye, to smile, and to ask my serious things by wrapping them in filmy rustling tissue papers and raffia.

I do miss the organic pig farmer from across the way.  She wasn't a Crack Whore, quite, but maybe that to which a Crack Whore might aspire.  She first made her way into the blog, officially, at least, in January 2013, about which we reminisced in January of this year:

Do you remember our neighbor, the Organic Pig Farmer?  With pure poetry, I introduced her here exactly one year ago: 

In other local soap opera news, we are never at a dramatic loss these days thanks to the vocal stylings of CrackHead Lady Across The Way, who turns out to be a very well-known organic pig farmer.  She steals the limelight with soliloquies to her Ugg boots and curious crowds gather -- mid-morning and again at midnight -- to watch her use the muddy pits of the hog lot as an exfoliating (yet wonderfully moisturizing) body wash. 

Even then, something told me that trouble was afoot, and I swear I hold no prejudices against muddy crackhead exhibitionists.  Plus, bacon is "the" ingredient in haute cuisine, and we were thrilled to have such luscious pigs so close by, flavor on cloven hooves.  On her clear days, we were working with her and our resident geneticists on creating a tasty pig that ruminated -- which we figured would have burst open a world of consumers hungry for bacon, even if they wanted to be snooty and call it pancetta, which is hog, excuse me, pork belly cured with salt and peppered with peppercorns, fennel, nutmeg, and what have you. In Italy. 

 Harrumph.

But making a ruminant of a single-stomached pig was proving more than our animal husbandry and genetic experts were able to accomplish within a single season, and capturing the attention of the crack whore organic pig farmer, genius though she was, was nigh unto impossible.  The Jewish people shall not know -- with hearts' free of oppressive judgment -- bacon in 2013.  Don't believe the fast talker who tells you its easy to increase salivation, thereby increasing the microflora necessary to the decomposition of cud, or that making a pig's teeth incessantly grow to accomodate all that chewing, is easy.  That person is a ruminatory fool.  In any event, we'll miss her, and the promise of bacon. 

[....] She was evicted about two months ago. 

Well, I suppose SOMETHING in this blog post needed writing.  What exactly, I cannot say.  Perhaps I will throw myself on your mercy, Dear Readers, new and old, to discern what it might be.  Beware science?  Beware genetics and its environments?  Love your neighbor?  Be your brothers' keeper, but accept and respect their keeping rules.

Yoga will help, as will Tai Chi, Qigong. And Twister.




SUN LU TANG (Sun Tai Chi Chuan)
Zayayuma 
Uploaded on Jan 30, 2008
http://www.suntaichichuan.com


Martial Arts Therapy


© 2013 L. Ryan

"Testimonials don't lie," and Other Lying Lies

For those people who keep contacting me in hopes of converting me to being a believer in the "testimonial" method of explaining the miracle of CALMARE / Scrambler Therapy for CRPS, I would like to share with you the type of "testimonial" video that does, but still only to a degree, have an impact on me.

This is Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick, director of the only CRPS / RSD research center in the world so uniquely dedicated (The Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Treatment Center and Research Institute in Tampa, Florida) and his post 3-day continuous subanesthetic ketamine treatment interview with a patient with longstanding CRPS as well as sciatic nerve injury.

Subanesthetic ketamine treatments did not work for me, but I do not then go out and give negative "testimonial" diatribes about it.  I understand the science behind it, and knew going in that my protocol was not the optimum one (I couldn't reach the desired dose; I was fighting a very active osteomyelitis; I was going through a period of severe spasticity; plus, success in longterm sufferers is harder to achieve).

My insurance covered the treatments, something they won't do for CALMARE.  I did outpatient treatments, roughly 3-4 times a week.  At the end of this several month-long effort, we attempted to approximate Dr. Schwartzman's famed protocol, which he was kind enough to send me.  I even weaned myself off of methadone and percocet -- fast and by myself (not the recommended way, but I wanted to afford myself every chance of success, and Dr. Schwartzman wants all those glial cell endings available for reprogramming!).

My point is that the CALMARE snake oil pitches are vague and full of, frankly, nonsensical statements. Compare this video by Dr. Kirkpatrick with what is offered by Dr. D'Amato.  Then try and tell me, as a recent reader did in a comment, that "Testimonials don't lie."*  Puh-leeze.


3-Day Ketamine Treatment for Complex Regional Pain Syndrome
uploaded to YouTube by dockirkpatrick

VS.

Calmar Pain Relief Therapy - Nancy's Testimonial
uploaded to YouTube by CalmarPainReliefcpr·

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* Kelly Ann Sipes (Phillips) said...Actually Bianca, there is evidence that supports the Calmare/ST, and the workings of the "non pain" signals that are emmitted from the machine replacing the "painful" nerve signals(which is CRPS). All of this nerve pain and mis information of signals to the brain then trigger the autonomic response and wind up leading to the swelling and color changes, hair/nail growth and microvascular issues that cause the osteopenia. My daughter had the severe color changes and dystonia and when she was hooked up, after he found the correct placement of the leads and the correct "non pain signals", her color returned to normal and her toes are starting to become less dystonic. I have been in the medical profession for over 20 years and have never witnessed anything like it before.
There is no cure to CRPS only treatment and all the other therapies are for the most part invasive, have side effects and for our situation did not work. The blocks, the ketamine, the SCS, the medications....The negative far outweighted the slight amount of relief if any that she would get. You need to get to the root of the problem and that is the nerve pain and how the brain is "mis-interpreting" these terrible signals and causing the myriad of other issues. Dr. D has 2 books of testimonials of before and after treatment and gets permission from his patients to record their progress. He has had some patients that were bad, they looked as if they were going to loose a limb. It is hard to discount that 90% of his patients have improvement. That is a huge number, and scientific research or not clinical trials or not it is a moot point. It works. Testimonials don't lie. Not everyone will respond but 9/10 are not bad odds. I would reconsider and look into it. And before you go and bash someone and call people names and accuse them of something that they are not guilty of you should have your "research" done and done correctly. It would be ashame if someone was to base their treatment choices on your lack of personal experience.
Best of luck. [emphasis mine]

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This is where I am supposed to blithely slough off a remark like... "different strokes for different folks" or even, I dunno, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Or "a TENS unit by any other name would smell as fishy."

Instead, I think I'll post this cool graphic I stole from Daily Kos yesterday. I knew I'd want to use it one day but didn't think I'd be prodded to do so this soon!

© 2013 L. Ryan

"Outside of a Small Circle of Friends"

good evening, i am going insane.  would you like to come with?

my eye surgeon opined, last week, that i was having an unusual inflammatory reaction in my post-op right eye.  this was no news to moi, as i experienced schizophrenic weeping:  one happy, bright eye;  one red, upset, hysterical eye leaking in much the same manner as my brain.

she got all scientific and crap, actually visualizing with her many shiny toys the aforementioned inflammatory cells.

[i make them nervous.  all of that ocular equipment is expensive, fragile, and often hanging around the exam rooms in odd and unexpected places and ways.  so in i come in a wheelchair, wielding a cane, doing wheelies, waving my shoulderless arms around like a spastic spastic person, losing my balance and reaching out to grab stuff -- anything, even expensive, fragile ocular equipment -- to avoid falling...  okay, so it's not anywhere near that bad -- but you should see their eyes, the fluttering of their hands.  they actually end up more on the twitchy end of the continuum than i am.  it's a gas.]

so... tuesday, we careened back over there, really giving them the heebie-jeebies because in addition to my usual ineptitudes, i was either having an extended asthma attack or developing a rapid pneumonia.  my pressures were elevated, which any layperson could have explained was the result of the hacking and wheezing with which i had replaced normal respiration.  i had called good old doctor go-to-guy and his supernurse, and arrangements were made for me to head over to get a chest film after getting my eye pressures and breaking the priceless ophthalmologic doodads.

no pneumonia, no asthma, just a rapid onset bronchitis, also right-sided, for which an equally rapid antibiotic was added to my collection of jewel-toned pills and capsules.

however, starting yesterday, the joys of hacking and one-sided weeping were augmented by the left eye kicking in, majorly.

i'm sure the surgeries were successful and that i can see again.

it's just that i can't see.

too busy dealing with bugged-out sclera and fuzzy, burning TEARS.  i asked tuesday whether any of the eye drops could actually get into an eye that is forever weeping, and got a throat-clearing sort of answer. doctors need to stand in front of a mirror and practice saying, in a normal, confident voice, "i don't know." who would think any less of them?  not me!

so i religiously apply the medications, and they all immediately join the downstream flow of salty goodness. they'd have a better chance of making it to mine eyeballs if i put them in mine ears.

in the realm of "too much information," phlegm chromatics have shifted from yellows to greens, and i can't remember, or care, whether that means something good or bad.

in other news, i played plumber's helper today as sven labored under one of the manor's thirty-two kitchen sinks.  it was a case of the doohickey not functioning and the plumber's clay or goo or whatever it's called having dried up.  a small leak.  but small plumbing problems still mean having to take apart major bits of pipes and whatnot.  i held the flashlight and turned water on and off when so instructed.  believe it or not, i actually made several small suggestions that were helpful, too.  sven was good-humored, my hand was steady, i felt like a wheezing, histrionic rock star doing community service.

i did a lot of reading, which clearly was stupid, but -- i ask you -- was it worse than spending the day curled up under a quilt listening to music?  there are many chores waiting but my body wasn't having that today. helping sven quell the drip-drip-drip was my best effort.

anyway -- my favorite segue -- one of the things i read was about how the online version of popular science magazine -- something i actually do read -- had reached an editorial decision to no longer allow online comments to their articles.

oh, i bet you think you know me.

"hmm," thought i, in a perfectly reasonable fashion, as i dabbed at my crimson orbs with a fresh kleenex.  "i wonder what brought that about."

knowing it to be a reasonable publication, knowing it, by deduction alone, to be science-based, i figured they had a good reason.  no, i did not phone, email, text, tweet or holler for the ACLU to come defend trampled free speech.  there was no wailing -- couldn't if i'd have wanted to -- about "big brother" coming home to roost, yet again, among my favorite chickens.  [i dunno, i just wrote it, i don't know what it means.]

the reason is sad, and it is one that all of us will understand:

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

for me, as an always correct progressive sort, this was a prophetic ringing of the bell.  i've been driven to distraction by otherwise intelligent people who want to so manipulate archaeological, botanical, geological facts, and other forms of substantiated historical record so that jesus had the opportunity to forgive the dinosaurs while lunching with sinful neanderthals -- just before the start of world war two and that whole charade of a story about the holocaust...

these same people can be shown facts about the frightening sang froid of the bush-cheney-wolfowitz-rumsfeld invasion of iraq by means of deliberate, repeated lying and manipulation of a grieving citizenry and a watchful but essentially trusting group of allied nations... and within minutes, these folks are parroting the lies again, but now they're also impugning your patriotism as an added lying lie.

i could start on the political right and the same process of regurgitating lies about obamacare, the economy, the ecology of the planet, or the overt racism of their entire endeavor -- how dare that smartass, dumb kenyan jigaboo socialist claim the right to try and govern the greatest country on god's formerly green earth?

and i think popular science magazine has it right.  this is grotesque aping of a very sick media culture that feeds jacked-up pop rocks to the brains of already slightly-twisted thinkers.  there's this woman whose tweets i read (because i generally care for her well-being) who grows apoplectic but also eerily HAPPY when she explains how obamacare puts the control of patient care under the devious thumb of insurance companies. you see, before now, her doctor rang up the insurance company and told them how he wanted things done, and the insurance company said, "yes, doctor... of course, doctor."  she thinks obamacare is behind insurance companies' drug formularies -- that they never existed before this black man dreamed it all up.

she is, of course, an isolationist and a fan of us/them constructions, but especially of "not me" verbiage.

her grasp of foreign affairs ends at the end of shock jocks' thought organs and smarmy rants,  and she's simply orgasmic over anything amenable to a conspiratorial story line.

facts, proof, science -- forget about it!  being a lying liar with no responsibility to transmit truth is just plain more fun.

she's not the best example, and far from influential -- i just sometimes despair over the death of common sense, science, critical (and original) thinking in ordinary people.  you know, the salt of the earth.

it makes me want to weep, except that i'd do most anything right now to stop crying a river.

i love political back-and-forth and am guilty of over-the-top yapping just to keep the shuttlecock flying until closing time... but i am, in truth, fiscally conservative, naive about political intentions, a slave to history and yet a poor student of it, and, oh, i could confess my own knee-jerk sins for far too long.  but i research the "other" side of issues as much as i can, and question my self and my opinions sans cesse.

there is also a guilt that i think only a prof, a teacher, can feel -- a sense of truly having failed at one's job, even if that job amounted to nothing but foreign language skills and the literature of "different" people.  every prof, every teacher knows that the mastery of critical thinking and stuff like logic, communication, and learning skills (for a forever plastic mind that forever thrives at learning) are the real objects of our labor, be we football coaches, french profs, or charged with special education.

by the way (another fan-freaking-tastic segue) -- did any of you follow the story of the 80-something year old adjunct french professor who dropped dead from the accumulated effects of lifelong systematic abuse and relentless poverty?  hmm?

[see "The Sad Death Of An Adjunct Professor Sparks A Labor Debate."  you'll be mumble-humming the refrain to "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" before the end of the third paragraph. I've seen estimates ranging from 45 to 75% as the rate at which adjuncts are bearing the undergraduate teaching load at universities these days.  When I taught at UC-Berkeley in the haze of a far distant past, the number was already abominable.  This is why Brother-Unit Grader Boob breaks into frightening bizarro laughter when an angry student throws the ultimate retort his way upon receiving a bad grade:  "yeah, well, i guess you're just in this for the money..."]

if i had any voice at all, i'd be singing some dear old pete seeger piece.

or phil ochs. lately, i've picked up that old fascinator again.  not that i'm calling phil ochs an odd bit of millinery.

why not... let's finish this evenings weeping and coughing up of lung with... "outside of a small circle of friends"?  it has just the odd divergent lightness of tinny piano and tone with the rock-in-the-stomach ring of truth that this whole post has been struggling so to convey.

© 2013 L. Ryan

Weathering Fights

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, October 26, 2011:

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Weathering Fights - Science: What's It Up To?

Science claims it's working to cure disease, save the planet and solve the greatest human mysteries, but Aasif Mandvi finds out what it's really up to.