Igor Stravinsky - 8 Instrumental Miniatures

Signifying. . . nothing?

Medical stuff is a poor topic, I know, but lately I’ve become  preoccupied with it. And this in spite of the fact that I hate seeing doctors and very rarely feel that I am being listened to or taken seriously.

I’m in that grinder of tests that everyone is fed into when there are any sort of symptoms at all.  So far I’ve been safely spat out the other side, given the all-clear. I WANT this to be over with and I WANT to feel entirely OK.

And I don’t.

I won’t recount what the “symptoms” are (and how I hate that word, as it implies “this person must really be sick”, when the “issue” is finding out if I am even sick at all.). They’re boring, “signifying nothing”, as Hamlet used to say on one of his bad days. But whatever they are, or aren’t, they won’t go away, not yet anyway, though I know they will be gone tomorrow morning and never be back.

I can’t go in. That’s what I told my husband today. I just can’t. The thought of “going in” stirred up an ice-storm of panic that sucked me up into some sort of whirling white vortex, and all I wanted to do was get OUT. I haven’t called and I haven’t made an appointment because I know there is nothing wrong with me, so there is no point.

Then how to ignore the swirling forces of “whatever” that I can’t seem to get away from? It’s probably nothing. I’m not bleeding to death, hey! I can walk. Sometimes I find it hard to walk fast however and don’t want to, or have to sit down.

I never get sick, and if I do they throw me out anyway. I am never listened to. This is one of these dysphoric, self-annihilating realizations that jams my face down in the mud of mortality. Have I had a good life? Have I felt wanted? And just what have I contributed, anyway?

It could have been worse, I suppose, could have ended me in my mid-30s, though I jumped clear just in time before the locomotive ran me over. But in the midst of the high of turning 50, at the very peak of my happiness and productivity, it happened again. This one was truly wicked and seemed to indicate demonic forces that I could barely grapple with. At the same time, I completely lost my faith.

I understand self-destruction, too well, but I refuse to do it. I’ve been pared down pretty far in the past few years, though you’d never know it to look at me (for I’ve gained at least blblblblt lbs.) I cling to the tattered remnants of my ambition, realizing that the playwright Clifford Odets was so so right when he said, “Success is the jinni (genie: playwrights can't spell) that kills.”

Another playwright from the same era, George S. Kaufman (whose wife Beatrice was BFF with Oscar Levant) said, “What makes you, unmakes you.” If you understand this at all, then you are already unmade.

But aren’t we ALL unmade in the end, like some great tumbled tangled psychic bed? Trees fall and rot, and so do we, though the medical profession tries very hard to beat back the flames (sorry for the mixed metaphor). I wonder why we scramble so hard to stay alive for as long as we possibly can.  Don’t we all end up in pretty much the same place?

I know that sounds bleak, and I would gladly give an arm and a leg and both kidneys to anyone in my very small, very close, very dear circle of family. I wouldn’t even have to think about it. But I just can’t see it in general. As Charlie Brown once said (speaking of great playwrights of the 1920s), “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”

I’ve missed the comrades who’ve fallen, and there have been too many of them: wise Gerry the benevolent patriarch, quickly consumed by cancer; beloved Peter, the best friend I ever made in two seconds, who seemed to be gone in another two; Glen the journalist/poet who fled from the psych ward and committed suicide; Ken the devoted cynic and constant presence in my church choir, who literally dropped dead in his tracks. Then – weirdly – Kathleen, who never should have died at all, who cannot be dead because it just isn’t possible.

There’s another one or two in there, and I can’t remember who they were. Now this is weird. I thought there were six, at least. How could I forget a whole person?

I just recently started nosing around in the work of Dylan Thomas again, remembering that he sometimes wrote “shape poems” (concrete poems that took the actual shape of objects or whatever-the-hell. Childish, really.) All I could find in his poetic imagery was mortality, and more mortality, rot and death, mixed in with some pretty ghastly sexual images. The guy ended at 39, self-ended I mean, awash in alcohol: the innocent baby-bird look of his youth had grown puffy, slur-eyed, deathward, with a large bulb for a nose. A tragic or pathetic or even disgusting clown. Poets seem to off themselves early, one way or another, hating life, seeing through it, or hating themselves. Robert Frost was one of the few who escaped that fate, though I remember reading somewhere that his son committed suicide.

So what does all this have to do with not wanting to call the fucking doctor?

I know I will call eventually, or maybe I will not, because nothing’s wrong anyway. I’m just all caught up in this stuff and have to get away from it. I am now in my 60^th year, for fuck’s sake, and though I don’t feel old, time has whipped by in such a blur that it shocks me sometimes. I was sitting in a restaurant across from my son at my birthday dinner last night, and thought to myself: he looks almost middle-aged. His hair is thinning and he has lines around his eyes and mouth. He looks great, is very buff, bulky with muscle as he never was in his boyhood when he generally got sand kicked in his face. He’s a superb athlete who has a good chance of reaching 90 because his habits are so much better than mine. But still. A receding hairline? I remember the night I gave birth to him.

And here are these two Nordic-looking blonde grandgirls who surely must have inherited their startlingly blue eyes and cornsilk hair from my side of the family, though several generations removed: I just helped push the blonde genes along. I noticed Erica’s hands as she did a magic trick with crayons, and I was shocked to note that they look like her father’s, which look like mine.

Well, you can’t bail on THAT, can you? My time with them is timeless, a complete absorption in giggly fun and a wash of unconditional love. Do I need to stay around to be the conduit for such love (for surely I am not the “source” but only the conveyor)? Or, like everyone else, will I stay because of the same primal urge to survive that has overpopulated the earth to the point of near-catastrophe?

Post-blog: Actually, I think it was Macbeth, that "signifying nothing" bit I mean.  I've always liked the Scottish play, and the "life's but a walking shadow" speech is just about the only Shakespeare I can recite by heart. I'm the life of the party, can't you tell?

Let's Play With Shapes!: or, the concrete poetry of Dylan Thomas

Who

Are you

Who is born

In the next room

So loud to my own

That I can hear the womb

Opening and the dark run

Over the ghost and the dropped son

Behind the wall thin as a wren’s bone?

In the birth bloody room unknown

To the burn and turn of time

And the heart print of man

Bows no baptism

But dark alone

Blessing on

The wild

Child.

Now

Now
Say nay,
Man dry man,
Dry lover mine
The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor,
Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust,
Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.

Now
Say nay,
Sir no say,
Death to the yes,
the yes to death, the yesman and the answer,
Should he who split his children with a cure
Have brotherless his sister on the handsaw.

Now
Say nay,
No say sir
Yea the dead stir,
And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow,
He lying low with ruin in his ear,
The cockrel's tide upcasting from the fire.

Now
Say nay,
So star fall,
So the ball fail,
So solve the mystic sun, the wife of light,
The sun that leaps on petals through a nought,
The come-a-cropper rider of the flower.

Now
Say nay
A fig for
The seal of fire,
Death hairy-heeled and the tapped ghost in wood,
We make me mystic as the arm of air,
The two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the cloud.

Ceremony After a Fire Raid

I
Myselves
The grievers
Grieve
Among the street burned to tireless death
A child of a few hours
With its kneading mouth
Charred on the black breast of the grave
The mother dug, and its arms full of fires.

Begin
With singing
Sing
Darkness kindled back into beginning
When the caught tongue nodded blind,
A star was broken
Into the centuries of the child
Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone.

Forgive
Us forgive
Us your death that myselves the believers
May hold it in a great flood
Till the blood shall spurt,
And the dust shall sing like a bird
As the grains blow, as your death grows, through our heart.

Crying
Your dying
Cry,
Child beyond cockcrow, by the fire-dwarfed
Street we chant the flying sea
In the body bereft.
Love is the last light spoken. Oh
Seed of sons in the loin of the black husk left.

   If I were                tickled by

  the rub of love      a rooking girl

    who stole me for her side why then

    I might be able to write them shapes

     just the way Mr. Dylan Thomas could

       do, that is when he was not too sou

       sed by Divine Inspiration which has

      soused many a good writer into

     an early grave. If I were tick

      led by the rub of love, I

       might now have ear

        ned a little mon

        ey from all

          this non

           sens

            e

FLEE! FLY! FLO!: the Fe-M@il version

Flee!

(Flee!)

Flee Fly!

(FLee Fly!)

Flee Fly Flo!

(FLee Fly Flo!)

Fista!

(Fista!)

Cumala Cumala Cumala Fista

(Cumala Cumala Cumala Fista)

Oh nononono, (not) a vista

(Oh nononono, (not) ca vista)

Ennyminey desaminy punana warraminy

(Eeny meeney deci meeny oo na na walla meeny)

Yip belly wapum bapum bobo wa hipum

New Style New Style we got the new style,

Freestyle Meanwhile sister got it by a mile,

Lifestyle, girls smile, we can do it all the while.

Telephone dialing, rub-a-dub styling.

On a really cool tip, You can be a part of this trip

All you gotta do is this, I said, All you gotta do is this. 

(Ooooooooooooh!) Read my lips!

Cumala Cumala Cumala Fista

(Cumala Cumala Cumala Fista)

Oh nononono, (not) a vista

(Oh nononono, (not) ca vista)

Ennyminey desaminy punana warraminy

(Eeny meeney deci meeny oo na na walla meeny)

Yip belly wapum bapum bobo wa hipum

Watch me do it, you can do it this way

North and South and East and Westway

Monday to Sunday, gotta be a funday

We don't care what anyone's gonna say

On a really cool tip, You can be a part of this trip

All you gotta do is this, I said, All you gotta do is this.

All you gotta do is this, I said, All you gotta do is this.

Flee!

(Flee!)

Flee Fly!

(FLee Fly!)

Flee Fly Flo!

(FLee Fly Flo!)

Fista!

(Fista!)

Cumala Cumala Cumala Fista

(Cumala Cumala Cumala Fista)

Oh nononono, (not) a vista

(Oh nononono, (not) ca vista)

Ennyminey desaminy punana warraminy

(Eeny meeney deci meeny oo na na walla meeny)

Yip belly wapum bapum bobo wa hipum

Oooooooooooooooooooh! Re-fry this!

BLOGGER'S NOTE. It was only a matter of time until I found alternate versions of Flee Fly Flo. This is a great one, and I was all set to post a video of it as an example, when I read "subtitles" which said things like "fist my lips" and "don't fist your girl friend". As far as I can tell, fisting is a rather repugnant sexual practice which I don't associate with a wholesome, upbeat song like this one. So I didn't post it, then realized the subtitles were a hoax. Or at least I hope so. Maybe a dirty mondegreen, who knows.

Anyway! I found this other version, the original, which is pristine and has no mention of inserting bodily parts where the sun don't shine.  I like pop versions of these old things because it gives them an extended life in kids' minds. Immortality, if you will. The Clap-Clap song brought back to life my old "rubber dolly" rhyme, along with "three-six-nine, the goose drank wine," which for some reason reminds me of "down by the bay".

I also love the way the lyrics are set up, in word-sculptures, sort of like certain poems by Dylan Thomas (which I'll have to find. . . oh dear, there goes my afternoon).

This is one of those nights when I can't stop laughing

Is it just me, or is this the funniest shit I've seen in years? It isn't what they do, I guess, but the way they do it, and their characters, so hopelessly inept we all feel just a little bit better about ourselves. As the poet says, this is "an ecstasy of fumbling". 

I couldn't stop laughing myself teary-eyed all the way through this, and my husband came in and asked me if I had gone nuts, and I said, no, but you HAVE to see this, so I didn't delete it off the PVR but I don't know if he'll watch it or if he'll find it funny. Maybe you hadda be there.

I've always loved L & H, in their simple little low-budget Hal Roach early talkies with the same music playing in a continuous loop in the background (the same music as in the Our Gang comedies, I might add, which I also slavishly watched as a kid, though for some reason we called them the Little Rascals.) 

After seeing the condor flailing around on the ice, I was already prepared for an ecstasy of fumbling.

YOU MUST SEE THIS: Disaster at the hockey arena!

This needs no explanation, but I'll explain it anyway: somebody decided to bring a real condor to a Bakersfield Condors hockey game and make it sit regally on a perch in the middle of the ice. FAIL!! I've seen this three times and it just gets funnier, especially when they give up and roll up the red carpet at the end.

The colour commentators are funny enough by themselves, sounding as if they might have gotten into the wacky tobaccy.

Oh, no, no, no. . . it can't be. . . but it IS!

Why do these things come into my head? Today I was walking in Mundy Park, freezing to death on a dank damp trail and feeling a little sorry I'd come, when I heard something in my head.

Something from the past.

It.

Was.

The

Sound of clapping.

A lot of people clapping.

A lot of people clapping at recess. In a circle. Mostly girls, and along with the clapping they were chanting a very strange sort of song.

The words (I'll have to reproduce them phonetically) sounded something like:

Coom-la, coom-la, coom-la feast-a
Ah, nah, nah, na-na-nah feast-a
Eenie meanie etcha- meanie
O-walla walla-meanie
(repeat)
A-nit-nat-natty-naughty-nit-nat-naught
(shhhhh)
FLEE!
(flee)
FLY!
(fly)
FLEE-FLY-FLOW!
(flee-fly-flow)
FEAST-AHH!
(repeat until school bell rings).

I don't even remember if I was part of the clapping circle or not. Probably not, as I was never included in anything - not that I tried very hard to be included. But I do remember it and it struck me as very odd, and then it sort of went to the back of my mind into that foggy place where you can't tell if things are real or not.

I honestly doubted that it happened. I never thought about it anyway.

Then. Today on that trail, not feeling very well, suddenly along with the clapping (quite rapid clapping, by the way, really ripping along), I seemed to hear:

FLEE!
(flee)
FLY!
(fly)
FLEE-FLY-FLOW!
(flee-fly-flow)
FEAST - AHH!

It was probably something like those old TV shows I could never find anything about (though if you revisit YouTube a couple of years later, you almost always find something). I tried googling "coom-la coom-la coom-la feast-a", and got exactly nothing. It didn't occur to me to google Flee-Fly-Flow, which is the actual name of the song (though I seem to remember we sang it in reverse order). But eventually, burrowing around YouTube, I hit on the above video and thought it came closest to the spirit of the song, if not the lyrics I remember (which shift and change with every version, like any good folk song). I wasn't a Brownie or a Girl Guide and never went to summer camp (God, I was a freak), so didn't realize that, along with Found a Peanut and 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, this was a  favorite and was sung seemingly everywhere.

I was pleasantly surprised when I recently heard my nine-year-old granddaughter Caitlin chanting some clapping/skipping songs from the schoolyard. They weren't like mine, but they were cool, with the same sort of infectious rhythm. Hell, I was just glad to hear that girls still skip! Most of them weigh 350 pounds, so probably have a hard time getting off the ground.

I shared some of my own decrepit clapping/skipping rhymes with her, minus chunks of lines that escape me, These were met with that "are-you-out-of-your-mind?" eye-roll that I know so well:

I was standing on the corner, not doing any harm
Along came a p'liceman, and took me by the arm
He dragged me round the corner and rang a funny bell
He (something, something, something) and put me in my cell

(Something, something, something) I looked up on the wall,
The bedbugs and the cooties were having a game of ball.
The score was ten to nothing, the bedbugs were ahead,
The cooties scored a home-run, and knocked me out of bed.

This probably isn't too exotic, as I was easily able to find it on the net (though it was under Songs of Southern Michigan, for some reason. Never mind, I lived near Detroit.) Others seem very old to me because the imagery is from another time (and another form of manufacture):

My Mama told me
If I was good-y
That she would buy me
A rubber dolly
My unkie told her
I kissed a soldier
Now she won't buy me
A rubber dolly

(Please note, this came BEFORE it was incorporated into the "clap-clap" hit song and was sung to a completely different tune. We always said "unkie" rather than "auntie", for some reason.)

And there was another one that had dance steps to it, I remember. No tune, just rhythmically chanted:

Charlie Chaplin went to France
To teach the ladies how to dance
First the heel, then the toe,
Right, left, and away we go!

I kind of doubt that ten-year-olds today know who Charlie Chaplin was, but you never know. WE did, because there was actually a Charlie Chaplin show on TV every Friday night, right after the Addams Family: a couple of his early two-reelers. I remember hearing kids discussing it on Monday.

Compared to these primitive childhood war-chants, Flee Fly Flow is beginning to sound like La Traviata. So who wrote this, where did it come from? Some say Latin America - which is quite plausible, because some interpret the second line as "oh, no, no, no, not da Vista" (whatever that means). Other sources claim it's African. The nit-not line, which always struck me as very silly, is probably wrong, somebody's "mondigreen" version. And in fact, this entire song may be a mondigreen (a mis-heard lyric: see previous post).

Like "a ram-sam-sam", it might just be a bunch of nonsense syllables strung together in Jabberwockian fashion.  But it's fun. And it actually exists.

Post-post: That formidable brick building, pictured below, is MY SCHOOL: McKeough School in Chatham, Ontario, which I attended from 1959 to 1964. I don't remember it looking so much like a federal penitentiary, but I guess it did. There was a girl's side and a boy's side and we were not allowed to mix. Almost all the teachers were elderly spinsters, and our principal Mr. Robertson was an ex-navy man who ran a tight ship. We marched in to military music in the morning (I remember especially "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning", which turned out to be by Irving Berlin), and every so often Mr. R. would come and inspect the troops. We had to stand at attention until he said "at ease" (no kidding - no one ever believes this). Once in a while we had a treat: we all got to troop down into the nightmarish basement of the place to watch a "fillum". This would usually be a National Film Board educational fillum on hygiene, though we were still too young for warnings about VD. I do remember one about head lice and hygiene (i. e. it only happens to filthy reprobates). This school still functioned up until a few years ago. I don't know what the status is of it now: ghosts probably roam the hall, including Mr. McGuinness, the scary old janitor who was half out of his mind, and the Reverend Russell Horsburgh, who was COMPLETELY out of his mind. Oh, my childhood.

The perfect picture (does it get any better than this?)

Elephant trampoline

It's my colon, and I'll write if I want to

I wasn’t going to write about this, I swear I wasn’t. NOTHING is more boring or more elderly than someone writing about an operation or a medical procedure.

But it’s Friday and I'm a little short of ideas, so. . . 

There wasn’t a lot of evidence I had anything wrong with my colon, except vague symptoms. I don’t even want to call them symptoms, because that word implies there is some sort of evidence of disease, and how do we know we have the disease if we haven't had the tests yet?

It’s something proven backwards, like menopause. “When did you go through menopause?” a (younger) friend of mine recently asked me.

“Uh. . . “

I had no idea what to say. What exactly does it mean to “go through menopause”, since “menopause” is so vaguely defined?

You can only conclude that your menses have permanently ceased if you have had no menstrual periods for one year. Does that mean you are “going through menopause” during that year? Or has menopause already ceased  (since, whether you know it nor not, you're done with periods forever)?  

How do you know, anyway? They could start again at any moment. Or not. 

And what about the five to ten years of turbulence before that permanent cessation that marks the “end” of menopause, or at least of your fertile years? (And by the way, a woman my age is always described as “menopausal”, no matter how many years have elapsed since that elusive "last" period). What about the hot flashes, the mood surges, the rollercoaster of missed and erratic periods, the the the -

I'm a little off-topic here. I am now well past all that, but now new “symptoms” (or thingamabobs, things that bother me at least a little bit) are emerging. Things that seem to be happening in my belly, or should I say lower down, in my gut.

Isn’t that kind of where we all live? I’ve heard there is more serotonin in your gut than in your brain. I have also heard the theory that there is a second brain in the gut, a sensor or reactive network of nerve endings that is so responsive, it practically has the capacity to think.

Does it also make decisions? Such as: "OK, your time is up"?

I’ve also heard all the theories about unresolved this and unrequited that. I suppose it’s got credence. My life, at least professionally,  has pretty much been an exercise in frustration. Though I know I have talent as a writer, I have had barely any recognition, and no money. This is not supposed to matter, by the way, because I am an “artist” who doesn’t need such things. And wanting it is crass and egotistical.

Meantime, every other talented person I know in every other field is accomplishing rings around me, and making good money, and I’m not supposed to mind!

I suppose this might cause some turmoil somewhere, in my brain at least, but in my gut? Maybe.

Some call this “the revenge of the unlived life”. I have never been able to place my work with anyone/anywhere where it can fulfill its potential, or what I think is its potential.  I doubt if I have enough time left to do so. It’s not a question of “gee, I want to be a writer” or writing one chapter of something and ditching it, or getting one rejection (boohoo into my pillow, get drunk, and quit). I'm not a chipper, folks. I'm serious, and I have been for my whole life.

What this has to do with getting a camera shoved up my bunghole is mysterious, but it might relate somehow. Or not. It fascinated and repelled me, the idea of this sewer snake, this Roto Rooter exploring all those twists and turns inside me. But I had become frightened by possibilities that I did not want to think about, and I was surprisingly willing to have the "procedure" done, if only to allay my anxiety.

A close friend of mine shed some light on all this. “Cancer is so out there now,” she said. “It used to be in the closet, and nobody ever mentioned it. Now it has jumped out like a jack-in-the-box and is in our faces every minute." Not only that. . . since there’s money in it, it’s being exploited – no, people’s fears are being exploited right, left and centre. Cancer has become an industry. 

Just this morning, my husband’s favourite magazine, Consumer Reports, arrived in the mail, with a cover story called “8 Cancer Tests You Don’t Need”. It was quite a revelation and reflected the fact that the medical community performs diagnostic tests on patients, not because they need to or the patients need them, but just because they can.

They have all this expensive equipment, for God’s sake, so how can they let it gather dust in the corner? So people are terrified into thinking they have cancer just because the technician (never a doctor) performs a test on them which is meant to screen for cancer.

Like “going through menopause”, it’s a backwards sort of thing. You’re having a “cancer test”; therefore you either have cancer, or MIGHT have cancer and should be worried, if not terrified, that you do.

Anyway, the hardest part of the procedure was the prep, which I’ve already written about in another post.  Fasting has never been my thing, and I don’t remember ever feeling that hollow. I won't write about the dreaded Pico Salax, which I kept calling Pico Iyer in my mind, though they don't look much alike, do they?

The day of the procedure was sort of dreamlike. I found, to my surprise, that I wasn't nervous, or not particularly. Like a dog at the vet's, I had relaxed into the inevitable. The hospital had been torn to pieces for some unknown reason, the inevitable turmoil that afflicts airports and other such public facilities so that you can never get anywhere on time. Then there was the massive water leak that had flooded the emergency ward a few days before, and was threatening to start up again.

For all that, I got there early (husband in tow: I was not allowed to leave the place without an escort to carry me in case I fainted from an anaesthetic hangover), and they let me go in right away. “In” meaning another snaking tunnel of corridors and “little rooms” with big machines in them. People came and went, either nurses or technicians, but none of them doctors. Doctors don’t belong in a hospital any more.

I was asked to take everything off except my shoes and socks, which seemed very odd, and put two gowns on, fore and aft. This was much better than the old idea of one gown which was open all down the back, a ludicrous and completely avoidable policy that was in place for 50. . . oh, skip it.

I was expecting a long wait, the “hospital wait” that seems to put you into another sort of time zone, but pleasantly enough, it didn’t happen: very soon, people started bustling around me and doing things. I sat next to a friendly elderly woman with a European accent (we were in a sort of waiting area for some reason, perhaps because the “little room” was flooded) and chatted about this and that while the nurse (technician?) draped a warm blanket over my arm. Pleasant, though I had no idea why it was there. Then she came back and said, “I’m putting the IV in now."

IV?! Oh God. Sqeam, went my guts, squeam. I remembered all the times that technicians couldn’t get blood out of me and sometimes became almost hysterical, blaming me for having “difficult veins”. So what would happen with something this intrusive, this horse needle? 

“Do you faint when you have blood taken?” 

“No.” I lied; it had happened once when I was pregnant a million years ago and they couldn’t find a vein.

She began to work on the back of my hand, which worried me even more. I didn't watch, as I never do: I don't see why I should. Strangely, after the usual one-second jab, there was no pain at all. Another nurse (technician?), who seemed to be just sitting around with a clipboard, said something like, “Good one!”, so I felt better. I also felt something running down my hand. “Oops, better wipe this up in case a patient sees it.”

Ye gods.

While all this happened, the lady with the European accent told me that she had a very low threshold for pain. I had the impression she had been ill for a long time. Her husband, who was French, sat across from her, looking much more nervous than she was and biting his nails.

Then it was time to go clomping into the room with the weird machine in it.

I lay back on a bed which seemed to be constructed of chrome bars. There followed a surreal few minutes in which I felt like Whitley Streiber in that Alien novel: several people were swarming busily around me, putting an oxygen thingie in my nose, sticky things for a heart monitor (heart monitor? For a colonoscopy??) on my chest, putting a blood pressure cuff on my arm and connecting my hand to the tube-thingammy for the anaesthetic. I felt a weird, cold, creeping sensation on the back of my hand.

Speaking of Whitley Streiber, they wasted no time on the “probe” which quickly went to its mark. The first few minutes were not pleasant at all, and the hard, almost violent pokes made me jump and even yelp a bit. “Breathe”, the technician (nurse?) said.

I breathed. After a while I sort of lost track, went into a dreamy state. This is not total anaesthesia, but a sort of twilight state in which you can still answer questions (“Is God real?”), but can’t just jump up off the table and leave. It seemed that only about five minutes had elapsed before I heard a “There,” and was “unplugged” swiftly in all five places with no pain at all.

Those aliens really know their stuff.

Then I was wheeled out of that little room into a sort of curtained-off place (which is what hospitals are now reduced to: not long ago the media discovered that Vancouver General Hospital was placing beds full of emergency patients in a doughnut shop adjacent to the hallway). It was nice, nice. I was just lying there, thinking, it’s over, then someone put Bill in a little curtain-y place beside me (he had stayed out in Reception, thinking he wasn’t wanted, which he wasn’t until I needed to go home). He said hi, then went back to where he was supposed to go.

I just lay there thinking, it’s nice.

Then I guessed I had to walk, and it was strange because all that up-and-downstairs, across parking lots, more up-and-downstairs, muddy roads, etc. etc. which I had dreaded on the way back didn’t bother me one bit because I was two  feet off the ground trailing vapor like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

So that was it, pretty much straightforward, assembly-line medicine, and I was very glad to be told (before I left!) that they hadn’t found a thing that was out of the ordinary. All clear. My guts were clean as a whistle.

But there is another part to this story that I sort of remembered retroactively. While I recovered in the little curtain-y place, I heard moans and cries. Then I realized the elderly lady with the European accent was having her colonoscopy in the same room that I had just come out of.  I now understood why her husband had been chewing his nails. The cries went on and on. At one point a nurse (?) went in there, and I heard her say, “Instead of screaming, breathe.” And that was the last I heard of her.

Total abstinence: I won't last a day without food

I can’t remember the last time I went a whole day without eating.

I used to go on extreme diets, but that was a long time ago. When I look at pictures of how thin I was BEFORE the diet, I plotz. In some photos I look like a ghost: it was at that point that I felt I was “thin enough”, at least until I put back 5 pounds or so.

I have had an uneasy relationship with food, with eating.  Whole industries have sprung up around it, billions of dollars’ worth. Buying food, preparing food, eating in restaurants so we won’t have to put out any effort at all.

I remember feeling a little shocked when a friend of mine (quite obese, and apparently going to a nutritionist because she said she had no interest in food ) said to me, after we’d finished eating in a restaurant, “So what's so great about it? It’s in one end and out the other.”

Well, it’s true, but we don’t think about that, do we?

Why make such a fuss about food? Everything turns to shit anyway. Kind of like a metaphor for life.

I’m thinking about all this, as I sit here already feeling hollow and groany in the stomach. I’ve been doing “prep” for a colonoscopy for several days now, first with a restricted diet (no this, no that), and today with a liquid diet restricted to anything I can see through.

Meaning limited Jell-o, limited chicken broth (these consumed as “meals”), ginger ale, apple juice, and water and water and water. And water.

Already I am feeling unmoored. For food isn’t just something that keeps us going, as in "calories in". It’s a way of marking the day, of orientation. “Haven’t you had lunch yet?” “You mean you don’t eat breakfast? It’s the most important meal of the day.” (Why?) “Let’s have dinner some time.” Etc. Not “let’s get together and talk trash", but “let’s get together and stuff food into our mouths”.

I won’t write about the obesity crisis which seems to be blowing people up like balloons. My theory (one that I have never seen anywhere else) is that people are responding to the emotional stress of a harrowing, violent, climate-damaged world by stuffing things in their mouths. They’ve been doing it since they were babies.

It’s self-comforting, and the thing is, when you walk into the average store, I mean a drug store or department store like Walmart or Target or one of those, one of the first things you see is a WALL of junk Sometimes walls and walls of it. None of it is really edible and most of it consists of sugar, fat and other empty calories. All of it is within easy reach and does not cost very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, here’s your pacifier! Come stuff it in your mouth, and a few hours later, shit it out in your diaper. Or wherever.

But I set out to write about this strange fast, this abstinence, fortunately only one-and-a-half days long. Later this day I must purge, and I’ve heard this stuff is a Roto-Rooter to your insides. It scares me half to death  because the whole reason I am having this procedure is that I’ve been having abdominal pains. Might they be made infinitely worse by this liquid Draino I have to drink tonight?

I am not one of these people who wants to “watch”, by the way. I don’t know why they let anyone watch the procedure. The whole reason it’s done is to screen for cancer, tumors and other abnormalities of the colon. Who wants to be lying there staring at the screen and suddenly hear the technician say, “Oh my God, that’s the worst one I’ve ever seen"?

It’s seven minutes after eleven, and all I’ve had today is coffee (black) and water (clear). I thank the Lord I can have coffee at least. When I have my fasting glucose test every few months, coffee is not allowed, and by the time my arm is stuck and bled, my head is pounding. After the siphoning I run for Starbuck’s or, even better, McDonald’s, which has surprisingly good coffee that is just loaded with caffeine.

As I sit here listening to my stomach make noises like a grizzly, my mind bounces back and forth. I’ve been doing this for weeks now, but it has intensified over the past few days. Of course everything will be all right. I’ve “passed” every medical test I have ever had. Nothing is ever wrong. EVER.

Then why am I having this?

There’s no cancer in my family. Anywhere. But that turned out to be a lie, or a “mis-truth”, a form of selective amnesia. My Dad was indeed treated for bladder cancer and completely cured and went on to live another 30 years. My mother had her uterus removed, but no one ever told me why (and in fact I did not find out she had a hysterectomy until many years later. At the time, she was just “in the hospital”.)

So it is quite possible that BOTH my parents had cancer. A strange sort of flip-flop from what I believed until quite recently. I wasn’t lying to myself. I just didn’t “know”, though in fact I knew very well. I was protecting myself from the truth.

So how do I feel without the anchoring effect of food, the three meals a day that prevents everything from blurring together into “blunch”, “linner” and “dupper”? I find I’m already forgetting and almost grabbing something to eat. Just a banana. (God, I had a lot of bananas yesterday.) I am holding off on my feast of peach Jell-o and Knorr chicken broth (“Made from real chicken!” Hell’s bells, what ELSE would it be made from?) until I am truly desperate.

I don’t want this “procedure” to happen, but at the same time I want it over with. I know the most likely result: no phone call, which is good news, isn’t it? Better than the other kind.

I can’t help but remember, though, all the friends I used to have, the ones who fell to disease: cancer, heart attack, AIDS, more cancer. . . Oddly enough, the one that bothered me most was the recent death of someone I could only call an acquaintance. I had not seen her for years – she was once a member of my former church and had just been ordained as a minister – and then suddenly I’m getting a Facebook message inviting me to her memorial service.

MEMORIAL SERVICE?

When you leave a place you’ve been part of for years, it sort of freezes in time. If you meet someone you knew years later, you can’t help but think, God, they look old. But when someone dies at 50. . .  Someone you admired, liked, even though you weren’t really friends. Someone whom you knew would make an outstanding minister because of her soaring spirit and vibrant faith.

And now she’s dead. Dead?

I am still having trouble getting my head around it, don’t really believe it, can’t associate her with death at all. And it was cancer, that looming shadow, perhaps the main thing we are trying to rule out tomorrow, which is why I have to be so cleaned out. If she could die like that, just vanish, so that I’ll never see her again. . .

I can’t finish that sentence.

This is just a procedure. Millions of people have it. I haven’t had any real symptoms. At least, I don’t think they are symptoms. I don’t know what they are, just things that have been bothering me. I only know I am not allowed to eat, and the peach Jell-o quivering in the fridge is beginning to look like coq au vin.

Not eating, fasting, is like missing a step in a dance or a skipping rhythm. Or maybe stepping back from everything. It feels weird, hollow. It leaves you clutching at the air. And oddly depressed, your pacifier snatched out of your mouth, so that you are forced to see, and feel, all the things that you would really rather not.