Fresh-From-The-Farm

It’s so peculiar. I’m miserable, I can’t stop coughing, my life sucks, why me, wild coughing fits scare the bejeezus out of me…waah!

I guess if you speak just loud enough, something might actually change. Like a swath of my medication. Between Friday afternoon and Monday morning no less, I made these docs get off their loathsome, spotty behinds (I can’t take credit for the latter…it’s Monty Python) and haul ass. I didn’t know I could do that.

Yes, Chip made the phone calls, sent the faxes, and did the follow up, but after I had had enough with the status quo. My status quo stinks. I’ve actually become sort of, kind of, a little bit used to losing my breath to the point where everything that can, exits at the closest orifice. (Before I do my hallway laps, I sit on the crapper for so damned long to get whatever I can out. I’d rather my waste material exit where it’s supposed to rather than while I’m sitting my goddamned wheelchair into which I collapse after a “lap.”

I lied.

When I’m beyond out of breath, I’m only dealing with waste products. Once, with chemo, everything said bye, bye. (I’m insane. I’ve walked two blocks and, strangely, I become nauseated until I urgently need to vomit. (That’s not supposed to happen. I shouldn’t feel the effects of the chemo until four hours have elapsed.) I’m at 77^th and 3^rd. What do I do? All the cars were parked fairly close together. I couldn’t, heavens, mess up the sidewalk! But I kept in for a few valuable seconds what turned out to be the best projectile vomiting experience ever! Depending on how you define “best.” Boy, did that stuff fly!

The nuclear explosion of vomit remained inside my pathetic self until I found a suitable spot between two parked cars. By choosing this particular spot, there would be no evidence of the carnage in front of any of the car doors. I really hate stepping in dog shit (or cat shit as the case may be), and I really hate walking into some stranger’s vomit. It’s plain disgusting. That night I could sleep easy knowing that I didn’t subject anyone to my expectorations. I, even, with the help of my beloved friend, Dr. Audge, who keeps a million bags on her for her daughter who invariably gets carsick, kept the cab that took me home clean. That took some doing, but it never would have been possible without Audge’s bag. Bless you, Audgela.

But yes, I do try and excrete all I can before attempting exercise. Because if I’m going to pee in my pants, it better not be more that a drop or two. So far, that’s been the worst of it. I despise not being able to breathe, but I now accept the fact that it will never come back. As you know all too well from my last post, the damned coughing scares the shit out of me.

Man, this morning the pulmonologist prescribed this fresh-from-the-farm gel caps (“pearls”) that stop the coughing mechanism. You still are able to cough when you need to, (you won’t choke to death) but you won’t when you don’t. Woohoo! So far, so good. Dr. Pulmonologist also changed one of the drugs in the nebulizer, so I can have relief all day. We have improvement.

Charlie, you are beyond right. You have to be your own advocate, because your doctors aren’t going to give you the heads up about new drugs that may help you live another day. Or live a better day. Right now, all I want is to have a life that I would choose to live given all my obvious limitations. I want my conscious moments to be as pleasant as they can be. I think after this wild weekend (for me) of change this may yet be possible. To be continued.

Which leads me back to my beloved Maggot Brain. “Maggot Brain” is a remarkable guitar instrumental that leaves me breathless, speechless, and awestruck every time I listen to it. It begins with a word from god or at the very least, the guy who is the disembodied Voice at The Hayden Planetarium if he were a black dude.

But no. I think it’s George Clinton speaking to us all from somewhere out in the galaxy. (Forget the end of The Moody Blues Days of Future Past. That’s just plain silly and pretentious. George Clinton may be too. But I don’t think he’d mind if you told him so. I think he would shake his head internally knowing that you just don’t get it.) He says:

(static, echo)

Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time

For y'all have knocked her up


I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe


I was not offended


For I knew I had to rise above it all


Or drown in my own shit

Amen.

Tutti Frutti

Fear is corrosive. I had a full-fledged panic attack and then relived it the day following, because the scene was the same, I had a cough, and I was constipated. Not much to panic about. (Does anyone remember Dyan Cannon in Heaven Can Wait scream after she thinks that the husband who has been murdered has apparently not been murdered? Charles Grodin, the husband’s lackey and Dyan Cannon’s lover, is quick on the take? He says, “She just saw a mouse.” Warren Beatty is looking around quizzically for said mouse. Grodin thinks quickly, She relived it.”)

Well I relived the “The Coughs From Hell” that I described all too vividly in my last post. Oh my god, I can’t breathe. Just heading back to the john where the initial panic occurred was more than enough to send me into a tailspin. Like a soldier on his first stint back in Kandahar where his buddy was blown to bits. Well, now he’s back in Kandahar again. This time, no one gets blown to kingdom come, buddy or otherwise, but that poor soldier might as have lost his best friend. He suffers as if were happening again. In real time.

Fear eats you alive.

No more playing with oxycodone. Not that was ever my intention though it had become tempting of late. Fuzz the fear. Now who can find fault with that? Everyone, that’s who. If I made oxy my new best friend tempting though it might be. So far, no evil reactions to the huge increase in Effexor. And I must live through whatever panic attacks come my way. And trust me, this is not like the nauseating butterflies before a major exam. (Yeah, I never had any perspective whatsoever. So I would always worry excessively (and needlessly) before exams. Using the tired joke yet again, when I hear the whirring helicopters, I’m back in ‘Nam.)

I inadvertently discovered why mucous was clinging, glue-like, to my throat, causing what I now know were bronchial spasms. I hit a big, fat emotional wall at around eleven last night. I’d had enough. I had to sleep. That’s my only means of escape. Fuck brave, strong Franny. No, she doesn’t exist. C’mon, I’ve been telling y’all I’m a wuss for months. Please believe me. I am a coward. Hey, if I weren’t, I’d probably be dead, so I suppose wussiness has its benefits. (Glass half full again. What am I thinking?)

In my hurry to get to bed and snuggle down with my Lunesta. (Don’t you just love those gentle butterflies? The ad agency should get a bonus for them. I buy into the whole butterfly/tinkerbell concept completely. And that was even before I started taking it. Now, hands off my fucking butterflies, or I’ll break your face.)

I went to bed without medication that dries me out. (Since ARDS, I’ve produced way too much mucous. Spiriva solved that one.) But I found, on waking up this morning, there was no more glue in my throat. When I coughed, the damned things were productive. Say what? Spoke to my allergist (who seems to know more than all the damned pulmonologists combined). He put me on a nebulizer containing Albuterol and Pulmicort. Fuck if I know anything about this shit except it will stop the spasms that have, until now, caused me to cough uncontrollably…

I love this man.

So I sit here listening to Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti wishing it had been recorded with his original lyrics:

Tutti Frutti, good booty

If it don’t fit, don’t force it

You can grease it, make it easy

Fucking awesome.

It's Nixon, By A Nose!

Have you all forgotten me? No, sweet ones, you haven’t. I wish I could. No such luck. Damn. The oxy saga finally comes to a flaccid ending. (If endings can be such. Well, they can now. You wanna argue with an extremely pissy, ill, menopausal woman? Are you crazy?)

I never felt comfortable using the oxy as my “anti-suicide pill” or as my “mood enhancer” though it performed the latter function with aplomb. My mother, of all people, was so happy to see her usually miserable daughter so gregarious, so social, so relaxed. I suppose, if my choice were that or nothing, depending on my mood, I might as well go for the narcotic that would quickly have me addicted and wanting more. Not a good look.

My psychopharmacologist missed last Thursday’s phone appointment to solve my conundrum: misery or not giving a shit, salut! What the fuck was that all about? Chip thought I didn’t want the appointment rescheduled, didn’t reschedule it assuming that everyone agreed that oxycodone was everyone’s drug of choice. I knew that was no solution, and I was shocked that Ira (the psychopharmacologist) would go along with this. We had our belated appointment yesterday. I was only taking the oxy when my back was not happy and was yammering for a hit of something, thank you very much. And that’s what I did.

Ira thinks that last week’s walk to the very edge of the precipice may have been partly caused by withdrawal from those few measly pills I’d taken, I thought, so prudently. So I thought. I’ve since gathered, best to take it regularly, on a schedule, for as long as necessary, and them wean yourself off the stuff by cutting your dose little by little. I know this shit. I just haven’t had to deal with this all that often in my life.

Yes, I know you can’t go cold turkey on psychotropic drugs, as my internist so lovingly refers to them. I’ve been weaned off those before. I know the drill. But getting weaned off anything is pretty unusual these days. It feels to me that I just keep adding drugs and upping dosages. Nothing fun, mind you. But perhaps life saving, so I shouldn’t complain that they don’t have me doing the hula, cannula, tubing and all, in my living room. Though wouldn’t that be fun if I had the urge? Hmmmm. Oxy, oxy, oxy.

Resolved after my appointment with Ira, Effexor has been upped by fifty percent. (Effexor just kills sex drive. Whoopee. One more thing to look forward to.) That’s a whole lot of Effexor. I should know in a day or two if I can tolerate that high a dose. If so, I’ll need some time to see if I hop back from that precipice and contemplate dancing the hula. (Sorry, y’all, that’s the best I can do.) If I spent last week being proverbially kicked in the nuts from oxycodone withdrawal, I’d really not like to go there again.

I’m no longer in excruciating pain. That’s one reason I can be so blasé about dropping the oxy. Slowly, achingly, my back improves. Maybe, I can get by with Alleve. (Glass half full.)

I can’t catch a break. Just when I think its safe to go back in the water…(Actually, I wonder when that might be. I love the ocean. I even love swimming pools. Being wheeled along Long Island’s gorgeous beaches comes in second, though just by a rather large and eminently caricature-able nose, to Richard Nixon walking along the beach in a suit and wing tips. I’d be ridiculous. (Though he wins the ridiculous contest, no question. Certainly not in my mind.) And impossible to push along- at least on the dry sand. What a nightmare.

No today, and it has been happening since the heat has poured out of our radiators, my throat and sinuses are filled with a glue-like mucous (Nasty but healthy mucous. No funky colors. When that happens, no if that happens, then I’ll be up shit’s creek.) I can’t get the crap out without ever more violent coughing. I was coughing like that when I first came out of the hospital. That’s when coughing was responsible for two fractured ribs. Albeit hairline cracks, but cracks just the same. That’s not normal. That’s fucked up. This time around, my hearty pecs protect my ribs and allow me to breathe through the scarred wreckage that are my lungs. (Yes, I worked on the pecs some, but they really appeared without any conscious help from me. Amazing what the body can do when forced to. I love those damned pecs. They’re seriously multi-purpose. They also keep my sagging middle-aged breasts a bit less saggy than they would if left to their own devices.)

So I’m coughing again. Instead of cracking ribs, these coughs mostly throw my back out of joint. The clavicles are a nice easy target that my coughs toy with regularly. I also get lumps on my back just about anywhere you slice it, and I point them out to Rachel, my very fine masseuse, as if she’d miss them on her own. Oy.

Today, I had finished stretching my neck when I was overcome with Coughs From Hell. Those are the ones that fail to move much of anything, go on for what feels like an eternity, and make it impossible for me to catch my breath. Oh shit. I can’t catch my breath. I panic, because besides making me a fine set of pecs, my body panics all on it’s own with no help from me. During a tiny respite, I take my four o’clock pills twenty minutes early, because that batch contains a Klonopin. I thought that was clever of me to do that, don’t you? Too late, I was already in the thick of it.

The best cough suppressant is oxycodone. I swear. If I hadn’t quit Brownies I’d make a Brownies promise to you all. Just when I thought I had this one figured out, no more oxy, the insidious drug calls out, “Wait for me!” (“ Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in.”) I have to wait and see. If this fucking cough is what I have to look forward to all winter, it’ll be…long time no see, Mr. Codone!

The Ghost Map

I’ve been low. Really low. Wish I were dead now. But wishing isn’t doing, and I know I’m not there yet. As a doctor is wont to ask if you say you no longer have any interest in living, they counter with the question, “Do you have a plan?” I’ve received this line from two docs, so it must be part of their Official Training. I’m not sure if it’s meant to throw you or for them to do a quick and dirty evaluation as they check out your response.

No, I don’t have a plan.

It’s really not important why I feel this way. But I’ll tell you a few anyway. I feel like a burden. I think chemicals are doing me wrong. I am finally grokking that I’m not going to feel much better than I do now. I still require tons of sleep- because I’m ill? Because sleep provides me with a means of escape? Getting up earlier than I do (feeling chipper and bouncy) necessitates a complete personality shift. I’ve never been chipper and bouncy though on occasion I might have appear as such. I promise you, it was only an illusion. Well, maybe not all of it. But after being slammed by a two by four (ARDS and its aftermath), I think that part is gone for good. Or it’s twisted into something I don’t yet recognize. The twisting part I get.

My friend Audge recommended to me The Ghost Map- the telling of a real-life story of two men and their search for the source of a cholera epidemic in 1854 London. She knows me all too well. Of course I was into it. She warned me, the author can get a bit redundant but he writes so beautifully, he can be forgiven. I forgive.

He prefaces the book with a passage from Walter Benjamin from Theses on the Philosophy of History. I was clueless as to who he was and found out he was a twentieth century German-Jewish intellectual, philosopher, translator…Ugh. He and his sister were literally steps ahead of the Nazis. They had obtained travel visas to cross the border into Spain which they did with the intention of heading to Portugal and from there, the United States. Bless Franco who cancelled all transit visas, and Benjamin was to be sent back to France. He killed himself in 1940, with an overdose of morphine, before the Franco regime could make good on its promise. |

Shit. I swear I didn’t know about his suicide until I just read up on the guy. And what a guy. What a mind. I was going to check him out, because I fell in love with his concept used almost word for word by Laurie Anderson in her song, “The Dream Before” dedicated to him right under the song title: “For Walter Benjamin. ” I just never noticed the credit before. Laurie certainly placed it front and center. Impossible to miss. But too long ago for me to simply Google the name and find out who the hell he was. The song is off her 1989 album Strange Angels. (Utterly, completely wonderful.) Here is Laurie’s pithy version but carefully using the same words as Mr. Benjamin:

What is history? 


History is an angel being blown backwards into the future 


History is a pile of debris 


And the angel wants to go back and fix things 


To repair the things that have been broken 


But there is a storm blowing from Paradise 


And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future 


And this storm, this storm is called Progress

When I bought the album, this passage moved me with such force that I tried to pass on my excitement and awe to friends I thought might feel it too. I was beyond passionate about it. Benjamin’s/Laurie’s words still do it for me. And to find it as the preface to The Ghost Map was as unexpected and so read with power as if I had never seen it before the very day Audge left the book for me.

I guess the fact that I so wanted to share the passage with you means there's life in the old girl yet. Fuck, l'm not ready to call it a day. Who knew?

Bravo Walter Benjamin!

Brava Laurie!

Brava Audrey!

Maggot Brain

I’ve been feeling really low. Oxy makes me constipated, which makes me nauseated, which makes me not eat a damn thing. The oxy may also be helping out with the nausea as narcotics are wont to do. The killer: the oxy not only helped ease my back (or head or neck) pain, it also me more relaxed. More gregarious. Happier. It gave me a quality of life when before I had none. What to do? I freely admit to all my doctors and therapists that a measly five milligrams of the drug changes my life for the better one thousand fold. Except for the nausea.

My oncologist has sent me an email with this whole mess of over-the-counter remedies for constipation. He wants me to take the oxy. No caregiver wishes to deprive me of the oxy. I will take it again but with massive amounts of trepidation. And make sure I have every goddamned constipation remedy on hand. Stuff to be taken at night, will be taken at night. Morning drugs, in the morning. Stuff to mix in liquid will go directly into Gatorade. (I find everything goes down just peachy with a glass of Gatorade. Original, naturellement.)

I’m not ready to begin the bowel clinic this evening. Tonight, It’s weed toast. I prefer rye myself. I’ve just ingested it. It is remarkable how it instantly dissolves nausea with one toke. (No tokes ever again for me with one quarter lung capacity!) The toast takes a bit longer to work but when it hits, it hits hard. (Good) No nausea tonight, but I’ve been feeling that life isn’t worth living and this should help me brush that thought out of my mind. I know it worked beautifully with the nausea- better than any legal anti-nausea drugs. Did it clear up all the nastiness? I don’t remember. That means it either worked perfectly, or it doesn’t and the rest just doesn’t matter anymore. So. I may spend the rest of my days stoned off my gourd. Hell, my short-term memory has turned to shit post ARDS, what the hell’s the difference? I just will no longer care and still remain smiling.

I finally received Maggot Brain from Amazon today. (Along with Let It Bleed to get SuperSaver Shipping. I’ve never been nuts about Let It Bleed, and I’ve been a stubborn cunt about getting the thing on cd. I have it on vinyl. Okay in a little more than a year I’ll be fifty. I think I’ve proved my point that I care less about this album than the others from their period of greatness. Gimme Sticky Fingers and Beggar’s Banquet any day. I can now have “You Got the Silver,” which I have always loved. And Susan Tedeschi does a terrific cover of it on Hope and Desire.)

The title track to Maggot Brain is one of the most beautiful pieces of electric guitar I’ve ever heard. I have now listened to the entire album, about four times in a row. There will probably be a fifth. There’s no bullshit. The album was released in 1972. One of the songs on it is “Whole Lot of BS.” Led Zeppelin II came out in 1969 with the smash “Whole Lotta Love.” Coincidence? I don’t think so. I think it’s hysterical. This is great music, and it’s intelligent. (Imagine that!) Funkadelic doesn’t ask you to buy into the whole rock star nonsense. Because it’s crap. And those later incarnations of Funkadelic, Parliament, and P-Funk with their wild space-age costumes...they're funny. Over my little head, foolish girl that I was. They were smarter than we were. It’s parody, but it works straight, too. Fucking brilliant. If I were only so smart way back when. But I’d still be locked in this apartment waiting for kingdom come. Now wouldn’t I?

(Scene: guitar is crying as Maggot Brain plays in the ears of the disabled, stoned gimp.)

P.S. I have used the "c" word to describe only myself. It makes reference to no other women in the universe even though some may actually deserve this designation. And I will never use it again except when I believe it describes me perfectly. Certainly the word is offensive, but it's what tripped off the fingers and what I've learned post-ARDS, follow the fingers. They know more than I do. Bottom line: women, you are all safe from me.

I asked Chip if he could think of any alternatives to the "c" word I liked as well, and none felt quite right. I figure, what's really obscene about this post is that I haven't felt there's any reason to go on living. Not my use of the "c" word.

Hiroshima, Mon Amour

I had my first real, honest-to-god freak-out when I was twelve. The date was August 6, 1974. It had to be a weekend day, because Dad drove the lot of us to the Mid-Island Nathan’s for dinner. (I guess Long Island had at least one thing going for it. One of those ginormous Nathan’s that offered everything you could imagine. You know, pre pre-fab franchises: corn on the cob, lobster rolls, shrimp rolls, pizza, “Ipswich” clams and god knows what else. I always got the same thing. Hamburger pickles and grilled onions. With ketchup of course. And those fantastic crinkle cut French fries.

I wasn’t feeling well at all that day and as we are now well aware, queasy doesn’t sit well with me. I was the Queen of Car Sickness. It was especially acute driving home from Grandma’s on the Belt Parkway. My brothers haul-assed to opposite end of the back seat- squished together as tightly as possible. (Actually, they made me sit in the middle seat for the most part, so they must have suction on their fingertips so they could glue themselves to the backseat windows to leave as much space between me and them when I said the magic word “…mommy….” Battle stations men, immediately! I was the equivalent of a canister of mustard gas or at the very least a land mine. One false move and you’re toast.

Now being my little precocious self, I knew that the United States dropped atomic weapons on Japan completely destroying two cities to end World War II. August 6 is the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing when “Little Boy” was dropped on the unsuspecting city. (I suppose that was the point. I think the possibility of dropping the bomb on Mount Fuji was discussed to give the Japanese an opportunity to capitulate before the destruction of cities and the death of thousand upon thousand civilians. But what if the bomb dropped on Mount Fuji didn’t work? What then? Wouldn’t the Japanese be more determined than ever to continue the war daring us to invade? We didn’t want that. Get those boys home.)

That queasy afternoon, I flip on the TV in the middle of a program commemorating the Hiroshima bombing. I tuned in just in time to watch color footage of a man kicking at rubble that moments before had been a living, breathing city. The voiceover was testimony from survivors of what they saw. Arms and legs. Heads. And a whole lot of nothingness that once before was a living, breathing city. Just like the New York City where I wanted to be so badly I could taste it.

So you twit of a precocious kid, this is what you were talking about when so blithely referred to the atomic bomb in class. (How we got there in sixth grade is a mystery to me, but somehow we did. For a nanosecond. And I was Miss Smartypants.) On August 6, 1974, I flipped out. This was my first face-to-face with my mortality and the possibility that I could be vaporized at any moment. The ground was no longer steady. There was no longer any damned thing I could think of to hold on to. Not when we’re “on the eve of destruction.”* In a nanosecond. There was no longer anything I could call a sure thing.

I remained queasy through dinner at me beloved Nathan’s. Later at home, someone turned on a movie I have since learned was a British film called The Angry Silence from 1960 starring Richard Attenborough as a factory worker who refuses to participate in a wildcat strike. All I remember from it from that day was that Attenborough, for being his own man, and his were threatened with violence if he didn’t comply and join his fellow workers (some of whom were already bullied into taking part).

But the only actual scene I recall in appalling detail is Attenborough looking frantically all over crummy post-war London for his little boy who has gone missing. He finally finds him in what seems to be a disgusting public toilet, perhaps only a privy. The child is sitting on the seat. His legs, from his feet to the top of his short pants, were covered in tar. I was petrified. Could things like this actually happen? (My, my did I live a privileged existence.) That a mob of angry men can resort to tarring a little boy’s legs? For what?

Still nauseated (or by now, well beyond queasy), I headed off to bed. The next day I experienced my first panic attack. Three whole days it lasted. I could not stop shaking, How could I when every plane I heard overhead was carrying the bomb that was coming to incinerate us?

Sure I remember friends’ families having fallout shelters in their basements. And those ridiculous air raid drills in school where sticking your head under a desk or lining up on our knees in the hallway, hands over our heads was going to protect us from Armageddon. I think we all recognized their stupidity at the time. (I seem to remember lots of giggling during air raid drills. How could we not? And if we tykes knew that diving under the desks wasn’t going to save us from nuclear incineration or from just plain old run-of-the-mill bombs, can you imagine what any adult in his or her right mind thought? Were these people crazy? Okay, fire drills made sense. Air raid drills were so insane it’s a wonder how the teachers’ could keep a straight face while trying to force us to behave.

My mother was very gentle with me during those three awful days. Without using the term M.A.D., she explained the concept to me. I got it. I lived through my panic attack and now could continue living knowing that the United States and the Soviet Union could destroy the world any times over. And what the hell would I do about it anyway?

(Irony of ironies. Three days after August 6 was the bombing of Nagasaki. Thank goodness it hadn’t occurred to me it was now the ninth of August. And thank goodness I didn’t stumble on a television program commemorating Nagasaki dead. If I had, I think my poor mother would have had to send me to a rubber room at some hospital. And I bet the food there was beyond bad. Not worth flipping out if it only leads you to really bad eats.

Postscript to all of the above. One night senior year of high school, I hung out at my buddy Martha’s house till about five in the morning. All we did was chat and watch old movies. The first one we saw was really creepy. Black Narcissus. Trust me, it’s creepy as hell. Maybe not in the middle of the day, but in the middle of the night, it scared the crap out of me. We then start watching a Richard Attenborough movie about a factory worker…holy shit…Martha…There it was, it was as depressing and as frightening as I remembered it. But no, we watched them back–to-back, tough chicks that we were. As I slowly moved my ass to go, a moth the width of my head has flattened itself smack in the middle on the outside of the screen door I was to walk through moments later to get to the car. We both screamed. I guess we disturbed Mothra and while it was pondering its next move, I got my ass out of there as fast as I could, into the car, out to Port Washington Blvd., and headed home. I’m here to tell you, if any of you had any question, I escaped without injury and I lived.

*I had never heard “Eve of Destruction” during elementary school when we were good doobies and did our air raid drills albeit while giggling.

The Cats Stay Indoors. Period.

You don’t participate on Facebook, no cookies for you. I owe responses to an awful lot of people. (Maybe not so many, but even a few are a daunting prospect.)

The (sort of) big news: I received an email yesterday from a literary agent whose name was given to me by a high school friend of Chip’s but is slowly (and magically?) becoming one of mine. No deep and meaningful conversations have arisen unless you consider a tête-à-tête about the fact that Debra Winger no longer looks like Debra Winger deep and meaningful. String enough of these chats together and something happens. (Or it doesn’t as the case may be.) I think something is, and it was she who gave me the name of a good friend who is a literary agent. I can now say that I have my very first response to my query letter for Since When. She’d (the agent) like to talk to me over the phone. I’m not getting my hopes up, but I could sure use good advice and I have a hunch she will be happy to supply me with that. We just have to wait and see. But having a friend in the making is really nice. It feels awfully good. Thank you!

I am on more of an even keel today. Hormones on the wane? Perhaps. Or maybe my big crash of the day is yet to come. Oh goody. That and the finale of America’s Next Top Model.

I’m reading what seems to be the book of the moment (or was the book of the moment), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It was a gift. All my gifts are books, because besides listening to music, reading is pretty much all I can do. I’m enjoying the book. I don’t read much fiction, but this one’s intelligent and so far has kept me interested. Works for me. But I just hit a snag. The mutilation of animals. (Which had been discussed as a very Bad Thing earlier in the book. As we all know, children who hurt or kill animals will do much much worse once all grown up.) The nice red cat had been left at the door completely and utterly mutilated. I did not sign up for that.

A few years ago, before the Hodgkin’s Disease, before the ARDS, I cracked up. (“I don’t think it’s funny no more. Cracking up.”) Popped the cork. Walked the plank. Crapped in my shorts. Spat up the popcorn. Guys, I went nuts. Really blotto. And the stuff that set me off without fail were atrocities committed to children or animals. One of my little mini-sessions with the psychopharmacologist instantly digressed into an uncontrollable bout of sobbing babbling about the frozen cows in a Montana blizzard. And did I forget the drowning of kittens? (Brought to you in oh-so-graphic detail by the aptly named Judy Blunt in a book called Breaking Clean. Her discovery that she cannot, would not live as a Montana cattle rancher’s wife.) Fuck, I don’t blame her. There is no romance about life on the ranch. It is brutal and ugly and back- and spirit-breaking. Yes, it is a powerful book. But too powerful for me.

I stopped reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay after they shot their dog, For the hell of it. That’s it. Game over. No, I can no longer watch the Shackleton footage of his ship iced in and crushed in the seas surrounded Antarctica. To survive, he and his crewmen killed their beloved dogs one by one. Shackleton was a decent man, and he didn’t do this without a heavy heart. Every human made it out alive. But the dogs…That’s why I’m never going to Antarctica, and my cats will always stay indoors. They’re very happy here in the apartment. They are relaxed. They feel safe. They don’t need any more romping room. And they’ve both been fixed so there’s no issue of kittens to drown. (Good god.)

Hey, I can see adults drawn and quartered. Murdered. Mutilated. Tortured on the rack. (In movies, TV, and books of course.) Civil War battles. No problem. The aftermath of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Not so much. Actually, no fucking way. Seen more than enough of that. Beyond horrible. But don’t make me read about tortured pets who didn’t ask to be put on this earth. Or on a voyage to Antarctica. And don’t make me look at that little girl screaming, her clothes ripped off because she was hit with napalm. You get the idea.

I hate people.