Archive for December, 2014

I’m up before eight on Monday morning.  I have an important appointment at ten.  I have a glass of ice water and check my email before showering.  As  I commence my morning constitutional, the devil himself wades in and stabs my junk over and over with a red hot trident.

This is clearly beyond fucked up.

I never make it to the shower.

I gather myself and cancel my appointment.

I wonder if it’s a kidney stone.

I call my doctor and they tell me I can be seen at two thirty.

As the day wears on, each episode of relieving myself is more excruciating than the last until just around two, when I lose consciousness and wake up on the linoleum a minute or so later.

I would end up lying about this, only to confess it a few days later.

I’m late getting to the doctor.

BP 118 over 76 and pulse normal.

Loins aching.

I’d just been in a few months before for a full work up that showed nothing but normal.  Cholesterol is cool.   Liver and kidney function well within parameters.

He’s pretty sure it’s a stone(s) and asks for a urine sample.  I tell him no way can I give him one now because I’m afraid I’ll end upon the floor again.  Plus I’m not wanting to be heard screaming like a little girl.  He’s a cautious and reluctant physician.  He thinks maybe I should go to the emergency room.  I leave with a jar for my sample to be performed at home in the morning and a prescription for some weak ass painkiller that I’m sure won’t mitigate my agony at all.

I get it filled anyway.

I get home and the wife and kids are here.  I pop three of the pills and begin to marinate in my inevitable juices.  I know I’ll have to pee again sooner or later.

Sooner or later.

Around eight I decide to go for it although I know it’s gonna suck.  It does.  There really is no way to describe it.  It really is like being stabbed in the unit by Satan with a smoldering dagger.  There is the deepest ache along with the most searing sting and the sickest, most nauseating bloom of pain that reminds me of any and all violence ever committed against my balls as well as any time I’ve ever caught my pecker in my zipper times some crazy exponential.  I manage to maintain consciousness but I’m a shaky sweaty mess when I emerge from the bathroom as my wife takes it all in.

My father is somewhat famous for a number of colorful expressions, I keep remembering one in particular.  While gulping habanero peppers like grapes he would grin and say, “Makes childbirth an absolute pleasure………”

I’d read that the level of pain when passing a stone is equivalent to what women experience during childbirth.

An ER nurse would later confirm this.

Fast forward to about one thirty a.m. and I’m starting to sweat again.  My angel of mercy is up with me because she knows and she’s trying to talk me into the emergency room before I have to go again.  I’m on the verge of panic.  Her logic prevails when she describes a scenario where they will shoot me full of something enough to make me not give a shit and I will be able to pee and they will then diagnose and treat me and everything will be better.

This finally makes sense to me and we leave in the middle of the night and it’s raining.  She drops me off at the entrance and goes to park the car.  They give me paperwork and she arrives disgusted that I’m sitting there filling it out.  So with an articulate brevity and fierceness she describes my situation to the woman behind the desk.  I’m admitted abruptly by a male nurse and my BP is whacky.  Like 102 over 98.  My pulse is racing.

My loins are aching.

Very soon they’ve taken blood and I’m on an IV of saline and ten milligrams of morphine.  Within a few minutes I’m being wheeled to the Arthur C. Clark CT Scan room.  Morphine is nothing short of awesome in an ER at 2 a.m.  That is until you gotta pee again and then you are just as sober a five year old on the first day of school.

Unimaginable pain.  Without the morphine I would have folded for sure.

They now have everything they need.  Blood, CT SCan and urine through a filter like the paper oil cone they give you at the gas station.

Nothing in the sieve.

I’m reclining in the bed having accomplished everything I came here to do.  The morphine settles its hands around my head and face again.

I like the doctor.  He is young, which is weird because it makes me realize I’m just not.  He tells me with absolute confidence the the event horizon has expired.  I’ve passed the stone or stones and I’ve been torn up pretty good.  He tells me  I’m going to experience the same kind of pain when I pee for the next 24 to 48 hours.  Fuck me.  That’s not the bad news.  The bad news is I’ve still got a sizable one sitting in my left kidney.  I’m likely to go through the same thing again and it will probably be worse.

He gives me a big ass Norco and writes me a scripts for more of that as well as Motrin and something called Phenazopyridine.  It’s about 4:30 am and I can’t fill them until 8 am and I worry I’ll need them before then.

We come home and despite the crazy amount of narcotics in my system, there’s no way I can sleep.  I’m still afraid to pee again and my angel of mercy must take our oldest to school.  Our youngest has a cold and she stays home with me.  I doze and wake up in time to get to the pharmacy as it opens. I contemplate the DUI but decide I just can’t care.

I come home and dope myself up.

I start drinking water.

Within a few hours I pee again and it’s pretty goddamn bad.  But not so bad it scares me.  It gets better through the day.

By the end of the day I’m fascinated by the neon light saber coming out of my johnson.  The doctor told me the Phenazopyridine would make my pee crazy orange.  My wife and I marvel at the beautiful color against the background of our white porcelain commode.  I had to call her in and show her.

So I’ve still got one waiting in the wings. My left kidney. Between 6 and 7 millimeters translates to an asteroid potentially big enough to destroy the earth and wipe out civilization as I know it.

I imagine that it will just be about the time I stop thinking about all this every time I pee when that asteroid launches from my left kidney and makes it’s way on a collision course for my planet.

Drinks for my friends.

I know this kind of deceitful seduction has been a part of American politics since our republic was born.

But my mind is made up.

Up until now, as cynical as I am, I bought into it.

I hoped.

I did.

I’m guilty.

But what I see now is a breach of trust that threatens to, and probably should, divide the democratic party in the same way the tea party has divided the GOP.  In some ways for the same reason.  Purity.  The only real difference being that the tea party is developmentally challenged and real democrats can breathe through their noses.  It’s a fundamental difference but it doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

So yeah, a last minute must pass spending bill.  We’ve seen this movie before.  Republicans were tolerated and even encouraged to shut down the government over what, health care for people who couldn’t afford or otherwise couldn’t get it?  That’s why they did it and they were fucking proud of it.  It cost their party nothing.  They were lionized.  Heroes were made.

What we have here is spineless democrats who won’t even consider shutting down the government to prevent big banks from doing the same things they did to cause the second greatest financial disaster in American history.  They won’t do it to keep the taxpayer from hanging his ass in the wind for a $300 trillion gamble instead of the the filthy rich who clean up when the ridiculous risk pays off but lose nothing when all is lost.  They  won’t even consider doing it to stop the moneyed from being able to spend seven to ten times more to buy the politicians that make it even more convenient to do it again.

Seven to ten times more.  Think about that.  It makes whatever you and I might contribute completely meaningless.

They refuse to make a stand for what are supposed to be the core principles of what the democratic party is supposed to be about.  The defense of the middle class, the protection of the poor, minorities and the disenfranchised.  It cuts another $93 million for food assistance.  The amendments to this spending bill, written by Citigroup and overtly lobbied for by the likes of Jamie Dimon, are insanely avaricious and nothing at all else.    The democrats can’t even consider the threat of shutting down the government as a symbolic gesture over things they goddamn well know that no average middle class citizen could eat without puking.

Even if one were able to carefully explain these issues to the average bible thumping God and guns neanderthal republican, he’d come up swinging.

If democratic leadership is unwilling to draw a line in the sand here, for these things, then what good are they?

The democratic party now audaciously begs the question, what is the difference between them and the evil empire?  Obama, Harry Reid and company are no longer content with merely being the resident poltergeist.  They are now shamelessly complicit, more than willing to meet the devil at the crossroads in broad daylight and sign over the soul of America in the form of the “cromnibus”.

They sold us out.

Maybe we should just hasten our demise, vote for Mitt or Jeb or any other flavor of corporate fascist with a ridiculous first name and get it over with.

Be done with it.

What’s the goddamn difference?

I’ve never quite owned this feeling before.

The feeling that no matter what we do, we’re fucked.

Drinks for my friends.

Virtually no one in America had ever witnessed such a horrific event live and free on television until then. It was simultaneously more violent, more chaotic and more disturbing than maybe anything we’d ever seen.  A handful of burly peace officers bearing down in concert on a very large, black man who lacked the sense to merely stay on the ground.

Yes, Rodney King was high as a kite and it was incredibly hard to watch.

The digital age of instant information, gratification, persecution and judgement was ushered in by the video tape of those cops beating the living shit out of Rodney King.  The flooding of our senses and sensibilities, the  numbing of our brains, expectations and perceptions by a stream of profoundly disturbing sensory information like a a continuous pyroclastic flow, had begun.

And they didn’t even kill him.

Every time it happens and there are no consequences, no indictment, no charges, no trial or no verdict, it all gets reset.  Even now, when we’re barely able to manage a breath until the next one.  It’s not that things are actually occurring more often.  That hasn’t changed.  What has changed is how often it’s broadcast and just how anaesthetized and inured at least half of us have become.

So for the very latest, we are witness to an actual murder of an unarmed black man who had done nothing at all.  Nothing.  The whole thing on video.  The coroner even ruled it homicide.

A grand jury still fails to indict anyone for any fucking thing at all.

And Peter King, a sitting congressman, is allowed to say it was Eric Garner’s fault for being overweight and out of shape without being pilloried, tarred and feathered and run out of town.  I hate this prick.

Sean Hannity managed to somehow link the travesty to Benghazi while “technically” objecting to the term “chokehold” by virtue of his experience as a martial arts student.  Idiot.  Giulani spared no decency in characterizing Mayor de Blasio’s unusually articulate and compassionate response to the grand jury finding as “racist”.  Dumbass. Rand Paul waltzed with the absurd in saying Eric Garner’s death was somehow the fault of an unfair tax.  Dipshit.

This the modern, post racial GOP.

Tone deaf, stupid, bigoted motherfuckers.

“Get away [garbled] … for what? Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it. It stops today. Why would you…? Everyone standing here will tell you I didn’t do nothing. I did not sell nothing. Because every time you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me (garbled) Selling cigarettes. I’m minding my business, officer, I’m minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone. please please, don’t touch me. Do not touch me.”

” I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,”.

Sheezus.

Seriously.

What the fuck?

With Trayvon Martin there was no video and and not any “credible” witnesses.  Trial, but no conviction.  He was a thug and George Zimmerman was a hero.

With Michael Brown there was no video and plenty of witnesses, but none of them “credible”.  No indictment, no trial.  Brown was a thug and officer Wilson did society a favor by getting rid of an animal who caused him to fear for his life even though he had no documented injuries and chose to exit his two ton vehicle to be better able to take aim and fire ten more shots and gun him down from somewhere between twenty five and a hundred plus feet away.

They never measured.

What the hell are they going to say 12 year old Tamir Rice did to deserve it?

Cliven Bundy faced down all kinds of local, state and federal authority with his very own “well regulated militia” and not a shot was fired.  He committed actual crimes.  He still owes the taxpayers over seven figures.

A single white man, armed to the goddamn teeth, opens fire in a theater in Aurora Colorado, kills twelve and injures seventy and he is taken alive.  No video, lots of witnesses and lots of innocent people dead, injured and otherwise emotionally scarred forever.  He was taken alive and unharmed.  Afterwards the commentariat asks what happened to this fine young man?  What went wrong?

Now these are hardly original thoughts on my part.  They are on the lips of a lot of people.  But so is the question, WHAT THE FUCK?

http://aattp.org/tim-wise-pens-brilliant-editorial-on-ferguson-most-white-americans-are-completely-oblivious/

Drinks for my friends.