Never Enough Health Updates Department

St. Thea, my partner, is recovering nicely from kidney stone surgery. Yes, surgery--they couldn't get at the stones with ultrasound, so they had to cut a hole though her back into her kidney and then guide a laser probe into the hole, to blast at the stones. She's still in remarkable pain but it's manageable--far more so than the stones were. One of the stones was about 2 cm (0.79 inch) big and so wasn't about to pass on its own. As far as we know, a lot of her pain that we chalked up to endometriosis or IBS might've been the stones, all along.

It figures, though, that we got snow the day that we were told the ultrasound wouldn't work and on the day we went to the hospital for the surgery.

As for myself, I got a case of the crud. I'll try not to cough on the blog.

Way Enough Custody Setbacks Department

You might've heard that Rev. Magdalen--Rachel Bevilacqua, the mother whose child was taken from her in part due to her involvement in the Church of the SubGenius--won her custody battle.

More accurately, she won round one; the father is appealing and managed to get the judge to issue a stay against the order to release Magdalen's child back to her. More details on Rev. Modemac's wiki.

Never Enough Global Warming First Blood Department

"Never Enough"!? I take that back--this is too much to start with. A damn shame it will only get worse. I wonder how long until Seattle's underwater?

Never Enough Yuletide Sneers Department

Courtesy of WFMU's Beware Of the Blog:

Christmas is an inherited holiday about a theoretical peace for all of humanity. There is no national or social necessity to believe in this. However, we can present it as a holiday of actual domestic national peace... If we make visible the blessings of this actual peace, along with its foundations and requirements, then "Christmas" doubtless can be a high point in the course of the political year. Both according to popular custom and popular view, the Christmas holiday can justifiably be seen as a festival of the nation.

And some might wonder why I don't approve of this "War On Christmas" myself, humbug I may well be. I still prefer celebrating Y'all amongst the 273 different holidays celebrated between Thanksgiving and the New Year.

Me, I was thinking of playing Krampus this year. Life got ahead of me.

Oh, and if you must get a "live" tree next year, keep it watered. (Also courtesy WFMU)

Never Enough Prophet Insights Department

The wisest words I've read in Wired yet:

Prophecy, I've come to realize, is a complex meme. When prophets provoke real trouble, bring confusion to society by sowing reverberant doubts, spark an active, opposing consensus everywhere – that is the sign they've hit a nerve. But what happens when they don't hit a nerve? There are plenty of would-be prophets in the world, vainly peddling their provocative claims. Most of them just end up lecturing to undergraduates, or leading little Christian sects, or getting into Wikipedia edit wars, or boring their friends. An unsuccessful prophet is not a martyr, but a sort of clown.

I can only add one thing to this, but you can't hear me honk my red nose from here.

Never Enough Gender-Bending Bulldada Department

Courtesy of Boing Boing, here is a weird story of woman-clubbing cavemen and misogyny and an absurdly strong and sexy hillbilly amazon and some interesting gender-bending angles. I'm still not sure what to make of it, but I must admit there's something wonderful about it all.

Never Enough Medical Surprises Department

"Well now, if I gave 'em my money, I would be a SubGenius."

"Yeah, I guess so."

"But what would happen when I woke up the next morning and started breathing?"

HA HA HA.

You may have heard that old recording of the guy calling into the talk show in the 80s when Stang and Drummond were on as guests. And maybe you laughed at his comment. But I bet you didn't fully get that last line. "Started breathing"? Huh? I know I didn't get that bit.

Until now.

St. Thea urged me to go to the doctor because I had a lot of symptoms of sleep apnea, a disorder where you stop breathing while you sleep. It's actually fairly common, but most people have a fairly mild case of it. But in more acute cases, it can lead to lethargy, trouble handling stress, depression, anxiety, and a dozen more symptoms which sounded disquietingly familiar.

So it was that I let a cute Russian girl glue electrodes to my head, tape them everywhere else, and install special straps to measure chest activity, leg motion, and blood oxygen levels. And I slept--or tried to--while in this get-up. Oddly enough, it was the *pillow* that made it hard to sleep.

The next morning, Thea was comparing the glue in my hair to the aftermath of a bukake filming, for which she suffered mightily, giggling despite herself. Or maybe BECAUSE of herself. Hard to tell with that gal, some days.

Two weeks later, I had the results. Boy howdy. They showed me the graphs of my breathing, brain activity, pulse, etc. And then they showed me the average number of times I stopped breathing in my sleep, per hour.

EIGHTY. 80. LXXX.

Every 45 seconds, as I relax into sleep, my windpipe closes up, and my brain has to jolt me "awake" enough that I open up my windpipe again and resume breathing. Then I try to relax again, and get zapped once more. Relax--ZAP. Over and over. Based on that, it's a wonder that I've ever had a good night's sleep.

EVER.

Explains a lot, doesn't it?

Well, the proof is in the sleeping, and for the time being I have become partly cybernetic, wearing a soft silicone mask over my nose while a CPAP machine maintains air pressure--not so much that it's uncomfortable, but enough that the windpipe never closes off. Your lungs get a workout the first few nights, and then you hardly notice it, beyond the fact that you have a mask strapped to your face, and its tendency to make you make weird noises now and then. More on that later as experiments permit.

But LO: I can wake up and not feel like I've been buried under warm Silly Putty. I can wake up without threatening all annoyances with endless suffering. I can deal with issues without feeling overwhelmed. Most importantly, I can decide NOT TO TAKE CRAP FROM ANYONE. It's not perfect yet, but it's been utterly amazing how much easier it has been to NOT act like a total emotional mess, just in the past week since I started using the CPAP machine.

And maybe it's just all the oxygen I'm suddenly breathing, but it seems like I'm bobbing lazily in a warm, clear ocean of slack, IN COMPARISON.

It makes me wonder if I should rewrite that "Misanthropes Anonymous" bit I wrote almost a decade ago.

...NAH. Humans still suck.

(Slightly edited version of my alt.slack post on September 20.)

Never Enough Blunt Talk Department

DemFromCT got it right on the DailyKOS front page. We're not dealing with terrorists that are easily demoralized with a single show of force. Indeed, our own failures to live up to our own promises of swift victory are more inspiring to them than any extremist rhetoric. We said that we'd have Iraq "liberated" quickly, only to find ourselves having to dig in. We said we'd make Iraq into a model for the entire Middle East, only to make it the worst possible example. WE did this, not terrorists or insurgents. Our elected officials--who we elected, as a nation, no matter who you individually voted for in 2000 onwards--make pie-in-the-sky claims without any backing in reality, and we act surprised and disgusted at how it turned out. WE as a nation are to blame for enabling extremists to call us on our own bullshit. We say it'd only take a couple years; they say that they'll make it last a decade. We admit it'll take a decade, and they say they'll make it last half a century. And on it goes. Why not? The very people inspired to fight us in Iraq are generally impoverished with bleak prospects and a future rife with oppression and brutality, in part because of our enabling their leaders in the name of "realpolitik"--itself as much a conceit as any neocon pipe dream. They have nothing to lose, but we do.

Cut and run? Sure--cut our losses and run for office.

Never Enough Absorbent Meditations Department

This morning on the bus I saw a man read a book with this chapter title: "The First Meditative Absorbtion". He was highly distracted, looking around any time anyone so much as adjusted their buttocks on the seat. I guess he needs it. I get into trouble when I do that at home, mainly because others are usually talking at the time. I can't help it if I'm a natural for First Meditative Absorptions, especially first thing in the morning while in the bathroom. I do find, however, if I do it at work, people don't seem to mind so much.

Never Enough Resurrections Department

And you thought I was gone forever, no?

No--just a huge chunk of my data, and my ever being able to trust any web hosting company willing to let WebHostPlus buy them out.

On the other hand, I have been starting to produce audio again. I'm almost tempted to start a podcast, but not quite. As is, later on I should be posting links to various new works. Or, check out http://myspace.com/foolspress for some fast relief.

Pardon the mess, BTW.


Lil