Maybe there is hope, but hie, hie!

Maybe there is hope.  

I promised Fred that I'd wow him with productivity today, beginning with dealing with financial misdeeds, my favorite thing.  So I filed "cow udder balm" under The Castafiore's "operatic make-up products" (for which The Troupe reimburses us biannually).  So I managed to reroute the deposit of my automatic PCIP premium payment to my dear friend President Obama's "Hit List Necessities" (drone maintenance, mainly, and hostess gifts) -- with occasional faulty landings in the National Debt Fund morass.

Buddy the Freakishly Large Kitten, who, at age 2 is having another growth spurt (damn Maine Coons!), complete with a reappearance of his affinity for chewing wires, woke me.  He'd overheard the "productivity" comment and was going to be my aide in seeing it through.

Trouble was, I couldn't straighten my right leg, and who the heck knew where the left one even was?  My right arm was also misplaced, though I could definitively testify that the hand at the end of that arm was swollen and vcry cold.

"Pain pill," thought I, "and a cat with thumbs and whatever other attributes are necessary to the making of a good italian roast in my newly cracked cafetière, and once made, poured over the precise -- in measure as in temperature -- jigger of milk into my ugly green mug and brought to my thirsty lips... and not spilling a God-damned drop because I did manage to mop our wing of the Manor's West Extension yesterday, before falling into a coma."

And, again, as many times before in this blog, I long for a Pensieve.  ["The Pensieve is primarily a device for storing memories outside of one's own head."]  How many other bloggers do you know who long for a Pensieve?  Oh, hush up, Fresca.  (I miss Fresca.  We've never met, yet I miss her!)  Some people are just good people without the requirement of hoops, psychometrics, and disclosure of voting history.

See?  Now, YOU, too, wish for me a Pensieve.  And coffee, and such cats as are necessary to that coffee's procurement, and two 7.5/325 Endocet.  A veritable Peace Train of things.

Aha!  Never mistrust this mind, no matter how far gone, how medicated, how self-pitying, how covered with what appear to be moss-and-lichen twigs -- the lichen we attribute to my funkalicious osteomyelitis and ill-advised skinny dips in the moat during the off-season;  the moss can only be due to my crusty celadon-green Naturalism.  (Naturalism, where the Tea Party was meant to end up, those Baggers!)

But as Brother Yusuf Islam's vintage Peace Train now took over my brain, and its humming eradicated the harmonics of my pain and the displacement of my limbs, and the cats miraculously did manage to hoist my ugly green mug and precise coffee demands to my bedside table -- and after a mere 20 minutes of waiting for the meds to kick in... I grabbed the laptop to see how the world was.  And Peace Train went from thought impediment to badly gurgled half-tones to a full-voiced joyful rendition.  Feel free to join in:


Now I've been happy lately, 
thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be, 
something good has begun

Oh I've been smiling lately, 
dreaming about the world as one
And I believe it could be, 
some day it's going to come

Cause out on the edge of darkness, 
there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country, 
come take me home again

Now I've been smiling lately, 
thinking about the good things to come
And I believe it could be, 
something good has begun

Oh peace train sounding louder
Glide on the peace train
Come on now peace train
Yes, peace train holy  roller

Everyone jump upon the peace train
Come on now peace train

Get your bags together, 
go bring your good friends too
Cause it's getting nearer, 
it soon will be with you

Now come and join the living, 
it's not so far from you
And it's getting nearer, 
soon it will all be true

Now I've been crying lately, 
thinking about the world as it is
Why must we go on hating, 
why can't we live in bliss

Cause out on the edge of darkness, 
there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country, 
come take me home again


Why are you singing, all belly-free and without an inhibition in sight, much less on your shoulder?
Because even before I could locate the information necessary to determining whether the world had made it overnight, my eyes spied the title of an editorial:  "America’s Retreat From the Death Penalty."

Your voice is further buoyed by the small fact that it isn't a signed guest op-ed, or even a signed regular old tired op-eder.  It's a full-fledged New York Times editorial board piece.

There's not a brilliant bit in it.  There's no new information.  There's just the recognition that the whims and moods of America, as determined by its sorta-elected judiciary, have always determined the death penalty policies of this country.  But if you talk to Most People, Most People believe that there is a standardized, measurable, referable, repeatable standard that we keep in the Judiciary Closet -- something like units of measure that are convertible to any bloody, murderous circumstance.

It's true!  Once a decade or so, depending, we fight and tousle, then we remember the Judiciary Closet, where we have stored our imaginary Standards of Legal Measurement, and we all finally gather at the corner pub (or Applebees, if there be no corner pub in what used to pass for your neighborhood) to salute the good King Edwards of the 13th and 14th centuries:

When the Roman Empire passed into history about six hundred years after the time of Christ, Europe then drifted into the Dark Ages. For six or seven hundred years mankind generally made little progress with regard to standardizing measurement. Sometime after the Magna Charta was signed in the Thirteenth Century, King Edward I of England took a step forward. He ordered a permanent measuring stick made of iron to serve as a master standard yardstick for the entire kingdom. This master yardstick was called the "iron ulna", after the bone of the forearm, and it was standardized as the length of a yard, very close to the length of our present-day yard. King Edward realized that constancy and permanence were the key to any standard. He also decreed that the foot measure should be one-third the length of the yard, and the inch one thirty-sixth. King Edward II, in 1324, reverted back to the seed concept of the ancients and passed a statute that "three barleycorns, round and dry," make an inch. 

What?  Oh, I forgot to tell you.  The "Dark Ages" is just code for "hie, hie -- hie unto your metaphors!"  In case you're having trouble following, and who wouldn't, unless she had the assistance of Amazing Felines, Pharmaceuticals, and superb Italian Roast, the standardization of measurement based on what is purely arbitrary has links to both power and the most boring of everyday stuff (barley corns and ulnae), and on these standardizations we build domes, skyscrapers, knickknack shelves, and our opinions about the death penalty.  That last item means, you poor caffeine-deprived, bed-ridden sufferer, life itself.  Toss in the Pyramids and Chichen Itza, as well as most preserved Mayan architecture, and you'll agree with me -- we are some lucky sons-of-bitches, to have such divine wonders born of arbitrary forearms and the relative humidity of a seed.

Before I die, and I do believe this is going to be my year, finally, I'd love to see the Mayan "ruins." I don't know, though, whether they've been rendered handicapped accessible.  How it would suck to make it to the bottom of all that brilliance, only to find no wheelchair ramp.

I feel a  "We the People" Petition coming on.  I'm sure that  "We the People" Petitions cover USAmerican civil rights beyond the borders as well as within.

Anyway, we have stashed away, thanks to people like Napoleon, Jefferson, and Galileo's pendulum, brass bars as arbiters of the standards dissent that falls upon We the People from time to time.  Carry the metaphor over to the Judiciary Closet, and you'll see the main reason we fail at even discussing the Death Penalty with any reasonableness whatsoever.

That's why I stopped discussing it, unless bullied into it.  I mean, I once wore the tiara of DP Abolitionist for a small but brave-hearted Amnesty International group (we even managed to free a Prisoner of Conscience, upon which occasion we drank wine from wax cups).

But somehow, overnight, the editorial board of the New York Times realized that Right is Right, and published this, of which I'll give you a salivary striptease:

America’s Retreat From the Death Penalty 

When the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, it said there were two social purposes for imposing capital punishment for the most egregious crimes: deterrence and retribution. In recent months, these justifications for a cruel and uncivilized punishment have been seriously undermined by a growing group of judges, prosecutors, scholars and others involved in criminal justice, conservatives and liberals alike. 

A distinguished committee of scholars convened by the National Research Council found that there is no useful evidence to determine if the death penalty deters serious crimes. Many first-rate scholars have tried to prove the theory of deterrence, but that research “is not informative about whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates,” the committee said. 

A host of other respected experts have also concluded that life imprisonment is a far more practical form of retribution, because the death penalty process is too expensive, too time-consuming and unfairly applied. 

The punishment is supposed to be reserved for the very worst criminals, but dozens of studies in state after state have shown that the process for deciding who should be sent to death row is arbitrary and discriminatory. [Please click HERE for the remainder of the op-ed]

I almost feel that scoping out the rest of the world and what was done in it while I slept is unnecessary.  Over the cliff or not, who cares?  Aleppo, more dead, less, whatever!  Mitch McConnell grew a chin?  It was covered by his health plan and will help him govern more effectively. Hillary Clinton has faked yet another illness? (What do you expect from an hysterical female?  She probably couldn't hold an aspirin between her knees long enough to earn the Presidential Fitness Award.)

None of it matters.

Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace trainOh peace train take this country, come take me home again

I know, I'm being a gullible rube again.  Leave me to it, at least for the afternoon.  Let me be capricious in my generalizations of a Bunch O'Words, if it makes me happy.  Words matter.






Upcoming Scheduled Executions in the U.S.

All scheduled execution dates cited are tentative. A number of circumstances exist that can change the date.
To write a letter to stop any of the scheduled executions, please use this directory of government officials to direct your letters.


January
1/16/2013 Robert Gleason Jr. -- Virginia
1/16/2013 Ronald Post -- Ohio
1/29/2013 Kimberly McCarthy -- Texas
February
2/20/2013 Britt Ripkowski  -- Texas
2/21/2013 Carl Henry Blue -- Texas
March
3/6/2013 Frederick Treesh -- Ohio
3/21/2013 Michael Dean "Spider" Gonzalez -- Texas
April
4/10/2013 Rigoberto Avila -- Texas
4/16/2013 Ronnie Threadgill -- Texas
May
5/1/2013 Steven Smith -- Ohio
July
7/31/2013 Douglas Feldman -- Texas
August
8/7/2013 Billy Slagle -- Ohio
September
9/25/2013 Harry Mitts, Jr. -- Ohio
November
11/14/2013 Ronald Phillips -- Ohio
January
1/16/2014 Dennis McGuire -- Ohio
March
3/19/2014 Gregory Lott -- Ohio
May
5/28/2014 Arthur Tyler -- Ohio
October
10/14/2014 Raymond Tibbetts -- Ohio
January
1/7/2015 Warren Henness -- Ohio

To the CRPS Community -- Ramping Up the Petitions

The "We the People" Petition Movement created by Djinni at the White House -- something akin to second string elves at the North Pole -- struck me, a former teacher, as brilliant Busy Work.

And then, during a few hours of intense pain following the obligatory "it's-almost-2013" house-cleaning onslaught, I found myself wanting to write an end-of-the-year letter to my buddy, my friend, my president, Barack Obama.  I landed on the "We the People" Petition Movement page, and having essentially no attention span, stared at it for a bit.  "How does it work?" wondered some part of my brain.

All right, yes, I was itching to start a petition.  It did not matter about what, I just wanted to be a petition author.  Go out in a blaze of importance.  "Profderien, her?" -- people will say -- "Didn't she write that comprehensive, reader-friendly, and yet incredibly stuck-up final petition of 2012?  The world is going to miss people like her."

Yes, but...

Damn the "[y]es, but"s of this world!

There is a very neat little box-like box on the webpage that says:

Creating a duplicate or similar petition will make it harder for you to get an official response. Instead, sign and help promote the one that has already been created.

They, the White House Djinni, call it "a helpful hint," the bastards.

But what do you do when you finally focus enough to figure out what you'd be willing to fight for, and do a search of extant petitions, only to find one, and only one, and to find it... insufficient?

The CRPS community (and again, one day I'll do the long-promised post on illness "communities," but for now please allow BLECK to suffice as commentary)...

Ahem.  Do-over!

The CRPS community is not all that large, not at all cohesive, and like any group, not nearly as homogeneous as petition-writers, petition-signers, pollsters, and politicians love to assume.

This, in short, is the only active CRPS petition in the queue at the "We the People" website -- that I was able to find.  There may be others, perhaps grouped with other "pain" issues or [financially] orphaned diseases:

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:Teach Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy in all Medical Schooling
Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy is a nerve disease that effects millions of people in the USA . This disease is legally diagnosed & accepted by the Social Security Administration .We need a bill passed to teach RSD/CPRS in our Medical Schools & Facilities . Common mistakes to prevent ,Early detection , less suffering , Pain & financial loss , for the individual & the financial status of the Goverment. Please make this awareness as the patient amount sores in numbers . Thank You, Author Deeann Elizabeth Pavlick
Created: Dec 20, 2012

It lacks roughly 23,900 signatures to meet the threshold date of January 19, 2013 and hopefully won't make it.  I signed it.  I felt browbeat by the little admonition against creating dueling petitions.
I felt that I owed it to Deeann Elizabeth Pavlick, the author.

But my fingers are itching to begin drafting a new petition dealing with CRPS.  It would not contain "RSD" within its body except to attempt a one or two line explanation of why that term needs to be done away with, especially if we are talking about medical school education.  And may God let that shift in scientific thought trickle up, down, and all around, and mostly into the brains of CRPS patients.

CRPS patients need to stop making it about "oh, how we suffer." We need to stop fighting the puppet shadows on the wall because Jose Ochoa and his minions have to all die off, eventually, and fighting them simply gives their backward self-serving pseudo-science another hearing.  The legitimacy of CRPS as an illness, and perhaps as one pain syndrome among many related to neuroinflammatory processes, is no longer at issue.

Treatment algorithms based on up-to-date research, coming from what looks to me now like a three-pronged group of excellent medical advocates, need to be promoted -- and their promotion needs to REPLACE all of the "awareness" nonsense that we, The Freaking Community, have been caught up in.

Do you know what brings awareness?  Not celebrities fighting the same disorder.  Not one more doctor able to stutter out a correct depaction of CRPS or, God forbid, RSD.  Not ribbons, not slogans, not obliteration of the pain scale (nor endless citation of the McGill Pain Scale) -- nor any other sort of pain catastrophizing that the Community can promulgate.

Money.  A pipeline of profitability.  Big Pharma.  The possibility of a pill.  The possibility of an actual deep brain surgery, or the discovery of a CNS Reset Button just derrière the Belly Button that requires eight pre-op visits for Botox injections that must be administered by a plastic Cosmetic Surgeon certificated in Belly Button Resetting and Reconstruction Within the Context of Central Nervous System Dysfunction (BBRARWTCOCNSD).

That's what makes stuff worthy of the medical school syllabus.  Money.

I'm racking my brain to make this work across the disciplines.  I may have to consult my Brother-Units:  the one, Grader Boob, who breaks into a rash at the very word syllabus, and who knows that whoever wrote the primary text for the course in question controls the syllabus;  the other, TW, who knows more about the Truth of Stuff and what ought to be on the syllabus, but who maybe doesn't have the callus or scarring peculiar to academia that would lend his syllabus creds.  (I don't really know and should ask.)

Heh-heh.  I just accomplished one of my resolutions for 2013 -- to use "creds" and to use it so coolly and so hip-a-lushishly that it would just flow off my fingertips onto the keyboard and from there to my monitor, to ultimately land, lightly and naturally, on yours.  Just don't tell me that the Urban Dictionary is no longer hep, happening, fashionable, stylish, trendy!

1.	creds	32 up, 8 down
	Credentials earned in life by experience. Credit given. He talked about being in prison like it gave him creds. buy creds mugs & shirts by Willy Gee Jul 22, 2005
2.	creds	2 up, 3 down
	Money you pay to a prostitute for their sex. Advice: 10-20 up front, the rest after the fact. Person 1: Dude, I just paid 100 cred for that girl! Person 2: Waaaaaayyyyy an overpay man, she only is worth 55 creds at max. buy creds mugs & shirts street cred cred money dough creed by Hamcracker Jun 2, 2011
3.	creds	3 up, 8 down
	Phone credit, i.e. money to make calls with. Bob: "I'll get some creds, talk later" Kyle: "See ya, balla" buy creds mugs & shirts credit cash credz phonemoney dredit by triedit Dec 27, 2009

Yeah, so I guess this post, despite its constitutionally-inspired beginnings, has steadily gone downhill.

Am I promising a new CRPS White House Petition once this one has died, or even once this one has achieved much success?  Yes, I am.  

I will hold myself to it.  It's either the carrot or the stick that will get me to January 19, 2013.  Believe it or not, I promise to bring to the effort consultation with others wiser than myself on the involved topics, to put aside snark and the unnecessary, and, mostly, to think first of the real CRPS community.

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with a sequential carrot or stick to draw things out to at least, say, mid-February.  Your job, too, to unpack the idiom as you see fit... for I had no idea it was such a point of contention.  (Yes, when I was a worker bee, words -- idioms, cognates, parts of speech -- were a big ol' part of my job.)

courtesy of NPR

  

Luciano Pavarotti and James Brown - It's a Man's World

this is one of those times i'm pretty sure of being the last person on earth to have heard this! well, at least #5,711,271.

pretty freaking awesome, and all those other words.  cool.  wondrous.  far out.  rock me on the water, bay-bee.

("rock me on the water, bay-bee."?)


 


uploaded to YouTube by 0NeSsE0 on Sep 15, 2007

We all must do the best we can 

And then hang on to that gospel plow 

When my life is over, I'm going to stand before the father 

But the sisters of the sun are going to rock me on the water now 

Rock me on the water 

Sister will you soothe my fevered brow 

Rock me on the water, maybe I'll remember 

Maybe I'll remember how 

Rock me on the water 

The wind is with me now 

So rock me on the water 

I'll get down to the sea somehow

"rock me on the water, bay-bee."?

note to self:  where do our expressions of wonder, the ones no one else might understand, come from?  

"But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, 

of pain really come from? Where must it come from? 

Isn't the true poet or painter a seer? Isn't he, actually, 

the only seer we have on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, 

most emphatically not the psychiatrist."

brothers, boxes, and just enough ladles: merry christmas!

oh, this blog entry is gonna be all over the darned place.

you'll love it!

well, you'll love it if you love me, if you know me.  if you've just wandered in, looking for CRPS research abstracts, or elogies to pain... oh, damn, here we go.  "elogies." excuse the heck out of me, but i am going to substitute the french "éloges" because i certainly am not referencing some down-in-the-mouth funeral oration or the light fiction of an obituary.  and see?  see?  see how my own darned self has killed any natural momentum to the act of writing by an obsession with words?

only one dictionary of the three consulted listed a definition having to do with praise, and that dictionary underscored the "archaic" nature of that meaning.  none would have appreciated, were dictionaries capable of appreciation, mine own irony.

i just finished mouthing off to some important people in my life, and my mouth did it -- again and again.  that these people love me back is one of the great mysteries of the universe.

to TW, the subject line might have been a canary sufficient to the coal mine:  "i have so much to say..." but he is far, far from timorous, and probably read on to the opening of the elucidating message text, even as the little bird fell like a ten pound rock to the bottom of her newspapered cage:

...and yet i can't.  damn that samuel beckett.  [i can never remember whether he ends his last name with one T or two Ts, so i look it up, and every time, google suggests "bucket."]
so i will stick to the stuff that matters.

it turns out that "the stuff that matters," judging by the relative subject-weighting as distributed in this morning's anemic oxygen-debted febrile communiqués (for which spell-checker demands "communism"), is dehydrated vegetables.  more specifically, how to use them in a stew.

a stew that is rich and deep, melded by something part gravy-with-sheen, part viscous broth.  all of which will be ruined by chicken.  (i have emergent need of protein.)

a missing detail:  TW has been intimate with these vegetables, having sown, overseen, harvested, and dried them -- before gifting us manor squatters with their dessicated, concentrated goodness in the traditional Celebratory Box.  the beautiful history of TW's Boxes can be found in some of this mass of earlier posts or more quickly captured at the first's box arrival, HERE.

it's a weighty issue, and by that i mean that i am talking about dehydrated vegetables again:

for instance... can i treat the dried maters like sun-dried maters -- as in DON'T dilute their intensity?  or should i rehydrate everything before using, in which case, what happens to cooking times?  if i wanted to make a stew... can dehydrated veggies stand up to crock pot treatment or does that just wipe out their beautifully preserved virtues?

you may be thinking something along the lines of "i wonder if anyone ever actually gets to EAT at Marlinspike Hall, deep, deep in the Tête de Hergé?" yes, smartass, when i cook, there is plenty of eating in the aftermath, usually with great praise.  born of starvation, perhaps, but great praise, nonetheless.

in any event -- a favorite phrasing -- this is kind of a belated christmas post.  or winter solstice party, quieted by a blanket of snow.

because as i cast my eyes about -- and sadly, i can -- i note that, once again, it is TW's gift, his plain brown boxes, that is the gift truly given, and -- finally, today, or any minute now -- truly received.

fred just inquired, all polite and all, "ummm, is there an ETA on that stew or should i go ahead and eat a little something now to tide me over?"

i love it when he whispers sweet nothings in these ears.

lest you think kindly of me, or even consider a revision in that direction, here's another epistolary extrait to a dear friend earlier this morning, mid-first cup of coffee, and after the dehydrated veggie soliloquy (she's a good cook), an extract having to do with me and my various bitchy attitudes at Christmas time:

bitter and fed up?  me? 

i kept thinking:  my stepmom, stepsister, and brother grader boob are all gathered at the beach, celebrating xmas the way i grew up celebrating it... i actually have a family that might welcome me... and here i am, doing THIS. 

yes, i about fell out of bed -- i got an email from my mom and stepsis, and one from the boob, separately.  they were nice, friendly, sweet.  it's like all anyone was waiting for was for dad to croak.  it reminds me of when he did his in-country service in vietnam -- that was the happiest year of our lives.

how ugly and crass is that comment, hmmm?  and yet i made it, and repeat it, here.  the feeling in my stomach the day he returned home had nothing to do with the joys of reunion, but the reignited fears of failure, and grief over the death of freedoms and lightness, the death, the agonal breaths, of lightness.

so, john lennon, yes, this is christmas... and what have i done?  nothing yet.  but i am getting ready to do the most ancient form of the freestyle crawl, not out of primordial slime, or even out of algae-flowered moat water, but out of this blasted bed, into the power chair, with a stop to freshen up, so as not to scare the genetically indentured domestic manor staff* on duty this fine afternoon -- finally heading out, smiling and humming, to one of my favorite kitchens in this wing of the place. (it has the cleanest spit and many shiny, copper-bottomed cookware, with just enough ladles hanging about, for ladling, and usually with sven and/or cabana boy hanging about, as well, for company.)

ETA on the stew?  ha! your guess is as good as mine.



* i've yet to publish the definitive documentation, nor have i made a clear explanation of how the genetically indentured domestic manor staff came into being, for i kinda fear for my life should i do so, but i did dip a toe in those waters, briefly, at the beginning of the infamous Looking Up the Garderobe Chute post.

LATE-BREAKING ADDENDUM:  We are proud to announce the successful creation and consumption of a delicious stew.  It had depth.  It had just enough heat for a first go-round with the beautiful peppers and chiles and tomatoes.  Two huge bowls, normally dedicated to pasta dishes, were consumed per diner, and more might have been eaten were it not for the necessity to finish off the remains of Fred's various birthday cakes.  For my brethren and sistren stewmeisters, I used a potato-onion-tomato-cream base and built from there.  Booze was involved, also chicken (Did I mention an emergent need for protein?  Fast and easy protein?  Think "protein whore, protein skank," and whaddaya think?  CHICKEN!), plus roasted, shredded, beautifully crunchy brussels sprouts, diced sweet, sweet carrots.  As for spices, I was a bit boring -- sage, rosemary... but mostly thyme.  No matter what flavor profiles were considered, my mind kept returning to thyme.
Next attempt -- probably next Wednesday, on behalf of the Militant Lesbian Existentialist Feminists (and darling Fred) for their Wednesday night supper, when I will be aiming for more heat.  I am training those women to have asbestos palates.  It's a necessity in this new millennium, this new world.

My Seasonal Under-Seasoned, Non-Reasoned Side Dish

This is not exactly a "vent," according to the technical requirements of venting, nor is it a pot pourri, as defined many times in this blog.  You can refresh yourself of the sad history of rotten earthenware on elle est belle la seine la seine elle est belle by fecklessly clicking HERE.

As for "venting," I'd go there in a heartbeat -- perhaps it's all I ever do -- but the thought of passing gas in the midst of a gastrointestinal bleed that cannot decide whether to resolve or seep, well, you understand.  And if you don't, well God bless your sweet little heart and maybe you should consider hanging out elsewhere, hmm?

It's an upper bleed, born of my need for anti-inflammatories.  See, Ma?  I told you it wasn't the crack and the meth and the fentanyl or the percocets that were gonna bring me down!  It's the Mobic and the ibuprofen, not to mention that fiendish aspirin protocol, those deceptively sweet little 81 mg aspirin doses meant for gurgling, chubby babies. Those fiendish back-alley drugs sold by tottering toddlers in droopy diaper drawers.

While I am blessing simpler minds and hearts, let me also praise the television and the brilliance of its offerings today.  You see, changing the channel has become difficult, much as standing, sitting, rolling over, and begging for bonita flakes have become terrible tasks.  Of course, I may be slightly confused, as my O2 sats are averaging a whopping 84.  I don't beg for bonito flakes.  Buddy begs for bonito flakes.  So where the television was when it was extinguished in the wee hours is where it stayed, mostly, today, under the terse glare of my double vision.

I watched three Dirty Harry movies in a row.  I'd never seen one before, not in its entirety (there's a clue for ya!).

Being a member of the simpler-minded set, the "dirty" in Dirty Harry began to bug me.  I started to itch.  Putting on my thinking cap, and vaguely wondering what-the-hell-is-that-musty-odor? -- I began to calculate, by counting backward through the momentous events that mark my days, when last I showered.

Hmmm, thought I, the Mathematician.  I knew The Calculus would serve me one day.  A liberal arts education is not yet bereft of all use!  And do you remember the guy who tutored me, O My Goodness.  Joe the Football Player and Math Whiz.  A cutie-pie.  A sweetie-poo.  His jeans weren't in style but they fit well, and we liked each other.  I hope Joe the Football Player and Math Whiz had a good life.  He surely deserved one.

Umm, yes, well, anyway, it turns out to have been the morning we went dashing through the rain to the Emergency Room... last Monday.  No... that's not right.  It was the Monday before THAT, 10 December.

Upon which realization, I made showering the sole goal of my day, to the relief of Fred, the Feline Triumvirate, and the Cistercian Brotherhood (apparently there has been a freakish shift in wind patterns, lo this past fortnight).

I must insist, as I have before, that I am not dirty.  I bathe daily, just not in the confines of a bathtub or shower.  Judicious use of a well-stocked half-bath, often two to three times in a day, keeps me as clean as your average person.  But we all know there's nothing like a shower, and certainly nothing feels so good as warm water streaming down an accursed bowed back.

This time, I refrained from scrubbing my feet, as that proved to be such a distraction to the medic-types in the hospital.  "Ew... your feet are bleeding." They even called in the Wound Care Team, which consisted of two timid young folk, quivering at the end of the bed, saying: "Ew... your feet are bleeding."

Moving right along, the shower is done, and the Dirty Harry marathon, as well.  I made a stab at changing the channel and hit upon, in sequence, The Sound of Music and The Return of the King, last of the trilogy.  Thank you, Peter Jackson.  Pippin just sang a plaintive tune to the finger-licking Denethor, Steward of Gondor.  That's one messed up Daddy -- though the influence of Mordor can do that to a man.

Which brings to mind a hilarious series of tweets, strung together by Todd Zwillich some time back.  I love 'em and know you will, too.  It was his moment of personal insanity over the often insanity producing topic of the bleeping "fiscal cliff."

Todd Zwillich ‏@toddzwillich

Know who else went over the cliff to his demise? http://twitpic.com/bjwzks 

 Retweeted by profderien

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7 DecTodd Zwillich ‏@toddzwillich

Know who ELSE went over the cliff to his demise?? http://twitpic.com/bjwzzx 

 Retweeted by profderien

 View photo

7 DecTodd Zwillich ‏@toddzwillich

Know who !ELSE! went over the cliff but survived? http://twitpic.com/bjx0cg 

 Retweeted by profderien

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Todd Zwillich ‏@toddzwillich

Know who ->ELSE<- a="a" class="twitter-timeline-link" cliff="cliff" data-expanded-url="http://twitpic.com/bjx0jf" dir="ltr" href="http://t.co/jqFTeQd8" nbsp="nbsp" over="over" style="color: red; text-decoration: initial;" target="_blank" the="the" title="http://twitpic.com/bjx0jf" went="went">http://twitpic.com/bjx0jf 

 Retweeted by profderien

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7 DecTodd Zwillich ‏@toddzwillich

Know who ELSE went over the cliff but was stronger for it?!http://twitpic.com/bjx179 

 Retweeted by profderien

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[i *totaly* messed up that slick copy and paste maneuver, apologies!]

I can't go to movie theatres anymore -- that's right, I've been universally banned -- so The Hobbit being out is about killing me.  Have any of you Dear Readers seen it?  Was it wonderful?

I made it through this day, plan to do well tomorrow and actually sally-forth from behind Manor walls for some Christmas cheer and shopping.  I'm whipping up a ginger and honey carrot dish for Fred to offer the few Militant Existential Feminist Lesbians who will gather for a meal on Christmas day.  I'm planning to sneak some fresh cranberries, cooked just to the point of popping, to the dish, and think it will be beautiful as well as tasty.  

When I dropped the bomb about having been granted DNR status and offered Hospice palliative care during this last hearsepital stay, I thought there'd be an uproar.  Instead, there's been a studious refusal to discuss it.  I am in a quandry, as I don't feel much like talking about it, either, but really, really would be angry were it to be screwed up in application... so I am trying to figure out the right time to broach this oh-so-celebratory topic.  All I know is... bless one Dr. Montgomery, who helped me NOT to go to pieces but to articulate my wishes in a sane and sensible manner.

So I am thinking the best time to spring the discussion on the old Loved Ones is between the Yule Log and the popping of the 2013 cork.  And to cross every available digit in the hope that nothing happens between now and then.

As usual, not the post I set out to write.  Not a vent, not a pot pourri, not even something I'd choose to proof or edit.

It turned out like some kind of underseasoned, overthought side dish.

Needs salt.