RevSpork

George Clooney was conspicuously absent there, too.

I found myself at the emergency room this morning.  And I mean early this morning.  The trip there was only half the fun: the cab driver, ignoring instruction, dropped us off at the main entry of the hospital, which of course at 5:15am was closed.  Imagine this: it's 5:15 in the morning, cold, drizzly, and the man, coughing more than breathing, fever, aches, chills, high blood pressure and pulse, staring at the locked doors as the cab drove away.  (As Tori put, "I'm glad I undertipped him."  So am I, sweetie.)  As it turns out, the emergency room was over a block away, diagonally across the street from the main entry.  So Tori (remember Tori?  She exited the doctor's office the day before with the news she had an upper respiratory infection.  So keep in mind: she's illin' too) and I, sick as dogs, wandered and wheezed about until we found the emergency room.

You'd think that at 5:15am, the place would be empty, and I'd get a doctor relatively quickly.  You'd only be half correct: Tori and I were the only people in the waiting room, but it took over a half-hour for a nurse to call my name.  In the meantime, Tori and I sat in the waiting room, watching CNN American Morning, a program so annoyingly puerile, it makes Good Morning America seem like C-SPAN.  John Roberts boasted his best frowny face for the topic at hand, which was: the swine flu pandemic.  Yes, I'm hacking out my lungs, feverish, sickly, and there's this 50-inch screen TV blaring the pandemic at me.  The number of Americans sick with the flu just doubled!  They're finding it in the Carolinas now!  It could pop up EVERYWHERE! 

In the middle of this lively special report, little Johnny Roberts brought in an expert who blithely informed the early-morning audience that those little face masks zillions of people have begun to wear on the telly don't really work; viruses are much smaller and can pass through the masks.  I stared at Tori, mask on my face (provided by the emergency room) and sardonically coughed.  At the front desk, one of the employees coughed violently, pulled out a mask, and clumsily put it on. 

Finally, after what seemed to be years, a nurse called me over, took my blood pressure, and harangued me about not taking Motrin.  "If you're in pain, why aren't you taking Motrin to make you feel better?" 

"I was popping Advil," I mumbled.

"Oh.  Well, that's the same chemical."

That's nice. 

Over the next hour, the cute doctor, the really hot nurse, and the not-hot-at-all second nurse took a couple of chest x-rays, my blood, and gave me this cool tube which I could breathe in chemicals with.  I inhaled the medicine, and exhaled out of the tube.  With the steam coming out the other end, I looked like a half-naked Star Trek alien. 

I made sure my worried wife was well-entertained.  I tossed her my finest eyebrow flirtations, sang through my breathing tube, and complimented the fine, round ass belonging to the first (really hot) nurse.  She was properly dismayed by my behavior, which was my way of telling her that I'm okay, and that people taking out my blood and x-rays and giving me chemicals to breathe in and my hacking copious amounts of infected phlegm into dozens of tissues was not getting me down.  Married couples gradually develop a secret language during emergencies when oral communication isn't available, and I communicate through obnoxiousness. 

The whole ordeal seemed to take longer than usual (I'm guessing they wanted to make damned sure I didn't have the swine flu), but eventually I was cleared to go home.  My malady was what I had expected: bronchitis, an illness I've battled on and off since college, and is triggered whenever I get hit with a nasty cold, which I've suffered from for the past week.  I was given antibiotics and an inhaler to open up my bronchial passages.  Problem: I've never used an inhaler in my life, and I've rarely (if ever) smoked, so I have not a clue as to suck in chemicals from my mouth into my lungs.  I'm doing my best.  The way things are going, my tongue will never be congested again. 

So that's my trip to the hospital.  I'm still sick, my tongue is covered in steroid, and I have to go back to work tomorrow, no matter how sick I am.  Anyone have a cool tube for me to breathe chemicals through? 

Burning Questions - Sick and Cranky Edition

1. Remember Simon and the Land of Chalk Drawings?  I wonder what he's drawing now?  I worry that the Land of Chalk Drawings is a seriously fucked-up place now.  I'm thinking a mix of Grand Theft Auto and Fritz the Cat. In chalk. 

2. Why does my wife so determined to dig through my family history in ancestry.com?  Is she bored with her family?  I like her family.  She should dig there more. 

3. Why do the most popular shows on Oxygen and WE - both channels aimed at women - feature the most fucked-up, neurotic, mentally stunted women on earth, women who take negative feminine stereotypes to unbelievably ludicrous extremes?  How on earth can these shows be so popular with women? 

4. If I said you had a beautiful body and then vomited in your lap, would you hold it against me?

5. Let us posit (yes, posit!) that when you die, you live your life over again.  Let us also posit (again!) that we carry with us into our next run of life no memory that we had done all this before.  However, let us posit (one more time!) that God got bored and decided to offer each person who dies one minute of their life's memory (in the form of a particularly powerful dream or a strong sense of deja vu) to take with them on their next run, in the hope that one can make an adjustment to their life.  What would that minute be?

6. Have Burning Questions lost its usefulness or interest?

7. Do you think I care?

8. Now go to bed.  NOW, dammit!

"StreetWise!"

Chicago newspapers are in bad shape. Both major newspapers - the Tribune and the Sun-Times - are in Chapter 11. Our major alternative newspaper - the Reader is in similar straits. Now comes news that StreetWise, the little newspaper hawked by homeless folks on Chicago's street corners, will close by June if they can't raise enough money.

Every Chicagoan (or tourists taking in the sights) has heard the simplest of sales pitches, "StreetWise!", emanating from some grizzled vocal cords on a street corner or in front of a store. In fact, there are over 200 of these folks, all of whom rely on these newspapers to pay for rent, food, and other necessities. Most of us ignore them as we walk past, but every once in a while we're in that certain giving mood and we pony up the two bucks for the magazine, which we rarely read, and ends up in the recycling bin fairly quickly.

These hawkers need more folks in giving moods, and fast. The magazine is suffering from the same symptoms as our major local newspapers: decreasing sales coupled with a nasty slump in advertising dollars. Worse, their foundation support is down by over half this year. In 45 days, a 16-year tradition of "StreetWise!" calls will be silenced, and those over two hundred hawkers will most likely return to a much more desperate life: jockeying for prime space on major streets with a styrofoam cup in their hand.

So next time, when you hear the call of the StreetWise vendor, you may want to hand him or her a couple of bills and grab a copy. You might not have the opportunity in the near future.

While you were out...

However, I've managed to get some cleaning done around the house.  Yesterday, for instance, I washed four loads of dishes.  And today - wow, man - I cleaned the oven.  You naysayers out there may feel the right to taunt me - he cleaned an oven; big deal! - but really, an oven is damned hard to clean, especially since we have owned the oven for a year without so much as dusting its insides.  And this is the first time I've ever cleaned an oven.  Yes, in my thirty-ninth year, I cleaned an oven for the first time, industrial oven cleaner and all.  As I scrubbed away at the bottom of the broiler pan, I realized why the self-cleaning oven was such a cool invention.  Dirty oven?  No problem: crank that mother to a thousand degrees and carbonize every bit of organic matter in there.  No muss, no fuss.  In my oven, there's still some baked-in bits o' black in there, but I'll save it for another time.  The oven cleaner might be lemony-fresh scent, but we're talking oven cleaner here; something tells me industrial chemicals that smell OK are probably just as bad as the evil ol' odor stuff.

Next up: cleaning the stove.  I might wait until tomorrow for that one, depending on if I work or not.

That's right: I don't know if I'm working or not tomorrow.  The technical school assignment I signed up for was a six-to-eight week gig.  Friday marked the end of my eighth week.  This week is spring break, when all the students and most employees are off, but after that everyone is back...including me?  I don't know.  The instructors don't know.  In fact, when I talked to my boss about the matter over a week ago, *she* didn't know either.  I was to find out this week if I was to be retained after this week.  Fair enough.  But what about this week?  I was supposed to find out last week, but unfortunately my boss was gone the entire week due to a family emergency.  She wasn't going to check her e-mail, and I'll be damned if I, a temp worker, call the boss during a family emergency as to when I work this week.  So I'm stuck.  I don't blame anyone, least of all my boss, but it's difficult to plan one's week if one doesn't know his job status. 

One of the instructors advised that I should just go in anyway tomorrow.  If I'm told I'm not needed, I'll go home and resume my nap or stove-cleaning or whatever.  If so, I'll work.  No muss, no fuss, right?

Man, everything's all topsy-turvy since Tori left.

An update

Not too long ago, I posted about gays and lesbians in Iraq being targeted for murder.  I hesitate to state the situation has gotten worse, namely because it couldn't possibly get worse.  Let's face it, if you're an Iraqi and gay, you're marked for death, period.  This is not an issue of American presence in Iraq; this is an issue of religious doctrine taken to its murderous extremes. 

According to cnn.com, six Iraqi men have been gunned down in the last week and a half.  These murders were not ordered by the government, but they are tolerated and implicitly supported.  These assassinations are ordered by tribal chiefs, who also ordered a cafe frequented by gays to be burned down.  This incident and others like it are not random attacks; these are part of a general program, quietly supported by the state, to destroy the slightest vestige of GLBT life in Iraq. 

As occupiers of Iraq, we have a responsibility to the Iraqi people, and that includes those in mortal danger from their own countrymen.  Contact your representative and demand they reintroduce the Responsibility to Iraqi Refugees Act of 2007, including a provision to allow Iraqis of the GLBT community to seek asylum in the United States.  As long as our nation occupies Iraq, we have a responsibility to all its people.