The waiting list for the waiting list (or: I have a drug for that)

I don’t remember where I heard this – maybe in Moscow on the Hudson, one of Robin Williams’ earlier films, where he had not yet calcified into the parody of himself he is now. But it was a reference to being “in the lineup to wait for the lineup”. Do we think this only applies to the fucked-up Soviet system of inefficient callousness?

Substitute “medical” for “Soviet”, and you’re almost there.

I’ve been waiting to hear back from my doctor. I went in three weeks ago to address some alarming symptoms, the kind of thing that medical articles and TV doctors say you should follow up on immediately. I need a certain nasty-sounding test. It’s an up-the-ass sort of test that I don’t look forward to, a Roto-Rooter boring into my colon. I bailed on one of these tests a year or so ago, just couldn’t make it. This time there’s a serious reason for taking it, and I’m hearing nothing.

Maybe three weeks on the waiting list for the waiting list isn’t long, who knows. I have phoned twice to check up on it, and both times was hand-pattingly gotten rid of. In the nicest, we-know-who-you-are-you-hypochondriacal-old-bat way.

I didn’t think I had quite reached old-battitude yet, but I guess it’s a matter of degree. I don’t think of myself as a hypochondriac, but I once was told I was a “psycho-chondriac” because I dared to complain about clinical depression. Nowadays, they’d get down my neck if I didn’t complain. Don’t you know that’s a serious condition? Don’t you care about your health?

You don’t dare listen to medical specialists, especially not on TV where the more ludicrous the claim the better, because it “makes good television”. Soon the theory will be completely discarded, and of course anyone who goes to their doctor to have it checked out (as the medical “expert” never fails to insist that you should do) is looked at with that blank, incredulous, “what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about-anyway” look.

And doctors also say “whatever you do, DON’T go on the internet about this.” I can see why, I really can. Lots of internet sites about health verge on black magic. Wave a dead cat over your head at midnight, and you’ll never have a heart attack again. Eat certain things, ingest herbs, roots, whatever they have for sale at an outrageous price, and your cancer will vanish and never come back.

But why can’t we get some basic information in this information age? Are the doctors, overloaded and harried and eager to install a revolving door in the office so they can yell “NEXT” every five minutes or so, any more useful for our enlightenment? Especially since they all have different philosophies and insist that theirs is the One True Religion.

I’ve noticed something else. My husband collapsed on the floor about a year and a half ago, and no one knew why. It was alarming to see him surrounded by police and ambulance attendants and paramedics. I had to stand back, way back, while they worked on my grey-looking life partner. Then came the barrage of tests. I don’t know how many tests, but he had to see many specialists, each of whom took a different part of the body and studied it.

Reminds me of that old story about the blind men and the elephant. It's a big piece of leather. No, it’s a thing like a hunk of rope. No, it’s a big chunk of ivory. No, it’s a – look out! It’s about to charge!

. . . PHHHHHHHHHHHHHHT!!

I do have a point. None of these specialists ever talk to each other or even send reports to one another. It is as if Bill had a separate heart, nervous system, brain, bladder, prostate, etc., component parts that were assembled like Lego or an old Meccano set. They weren’t parts of a person because these specialists are not concerned with a “person”. They are concerned with a piece of tissue, a hunk of organ. Never is the circulatory system connected to the heart, that’s insane! Nor is brain function tied to the nervous system. How absurd. They’re separate systems.

Frightening, is what it is. There is no consultation between experts, just conclusions, usually that everything is just fine and the patient is full of shit and whining for nothing.

Sometimes I want to bring back the days of the family doctor, like the wheezing old guy who carried a black bag into our house when I had the measles or the whooping cough. For a while after my first grandchild was born, there were three generations of my family seeing one physician. I’d had my doctor for nearly 15 years and recommended her to my daughter, who took her on, then started taking her infant daughter in to see her. It was an interesting throwback to a different time that is now completely obsolete.

Then she retired, and that was over and done. A child nowadays would have to go to a “pediatric specialist”, and if she was acting up a bit and stamping her foot and not paying much attention to parental commands, she’d be diagnosed autistic. ADD is now old-fashioned and has been pretty much phased out, like personality disorders in adults. The autism “spectrum” is the thing now, you see.  And by the way: I have a drug for that.

Oh, don’t get me going on psychiatric stuff, the way fads and fashions seem to dictate everything. Depressed women used to be given Valium, a highly addictive tranquillizer, which was about as sensible as taking a crowbar to someone with a concussion. Gay men were sick. They couldn’t help it, they were “immature” and their mothers were too dominant and their fathers were too weak. If they tried really hard, they might pass for hetero. But for the most part homosexuality was seen as a permanent mental illness, a serious one that disrupted the chance for a “normal” life.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Simple physics. So now gay people – especially gay men in drag – prance around in pride parades, flaunting their “outness”. And we all smile, some of us a bit tightly, not daring to say we find the whole thing a bit silly, if not extreme. “Why aren’t there any heterosexual pride parades?” one unfortunate local politician once muttered, only to have so many bricks thrown at her that she never spoke again.

I’m not for going back to the barbaric model of “diagnosing” sexual orientation. But I don’t see psychiatric patients prancing around in parades celebrating the fact that they’re “out”.  They’re afraid, that’s why. Their condition is still very much medicalized, marginalized and stigmatized. There is no flexibility here, no individual definition of “normal”. You’re either a fuckup or you’re not. And if you’re not readily diagnosable, if you don’t fit any of the known (or should I say current/trendy) psychiatric categories, there will be hell to pay. You may even be told you’re untreatable and your condition is hopeless.

Do I sound a bit cynical about medicine? I wouldn’t go back to the days when no one even spoke the word cancer, or people in psychiatric distress were “put away”, often for life. (By the way, are you wondering now why I even mention psychiatric illness, when it obviously has nothing to do with “real” illness, “physical” illness that takes place in the body? Psychiatric illness takes place three feet above your head in a little white cloud with a nasty little man in it who spits on you every so often.)  I wouldn’t go back, but I couldn’t anyway, could I? There is no going back.

So I wait. If I do have cancer, which is extremely unlikely, then it is bubbling and festering away inside me even as we speak. It may be half a year before they can even tell, because I am waiting to see how long I will be waiting.

I’d like to see a horse doctor, please. If a horse has colic, they shove a big rubber hose into its rectum and blow a stream of warm water in it until the obstruction pops out. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

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Land of the Dead: or, why I liked English class

I have a horrible confession to make. I liked English class. I liked it so much I had to hide it. I never said anything, never contributed a single comment to any discussion, though my mind was teeming with ideas about everything we studied.

It was decades later, when I was an adult and went back to school, that I found the courage to say the things I felt and saw. By this time my perceptions had shifted, of course. Even the most familiar poem wasn't the same; someone had gone in there and changed it, in every textbook in all the world.

I guess Auden's As I Walked Out One Evening is my favorite poem because it makes me want to scream that I ever dared to write poetry and try to get it published. I DID get a dozen or so of my poems published in small literary mags, but maybe seven people bothered to read them, mostly the contributors. Sometimes I wondered if the editor had bothered to read them at all.

Example. I wrote a poem called Lightning - God must've been punishing me for writing a poem called Lightning, because in the final printed version it came out Lightening.

"Well, it's only one letter different," squawked the 19-year-old assistant editor who had neatly inserted an error where there was none before. She must have thought I had made a spelling mistake.

So now my poem, which HAD been about childhood sexual abuse and doing hard time in a mental institution, was suddenly about a much more powerful subject: Coffee Mate "lightener", guaranteed to replace cream with a metallic-tasting petroleum-based powder which would never go sour.

So much for MY adventures. In my last post I decided to illustrate that favorite poem from high school (written by that dry, craggy desert of a man, W. H. Auden), and in doing so, some of that English class stuff came back to me.

My teacher in high school, Mr. Griffin  (probably dead by now, I realize with a shock) read this one out loud one day, and I was riveted. Maybe it was the way he read it.
The class called this teacher Griffy Baby (though not to his face), and he was given to telling tales out of school, recommending we watch a literary-based movie called Carry On Up the Jungle. Sometimes when he was tired of teaching he told funny stories about his kids, one of whom resembled a baby Dylan Thomas. Then there was the day he showed us a home movie of a tawdry drama he had filmed with his drunken friends.

Griffy Baby was partial to giving me As, but was curious as to why I never said anything in class. My soul was so crushed with social isolation and constant, relentless bullying that I didn't dare open my mouth. But I was grateful for that magnificent poem, and I never forgot it.

So to make up for my silence in class, I want to do a blow-by-blow analysis here and now, which is maybe appropriate given Auden's legendary sexual orientation. (He also wrote an infamous poem called The Platonic Blow which I don't think I will post here, but I do encourage you, even urge you to look it up. It'll make your literary hair stand on end, or something else if you're gay. Short of out-and-out porn, it's the most sexually-explicit writing I have ever seen.)

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

When the poem opens, the scene is just so. . . normal. The poet is out for a nice little stroll. Just walking down the street. Then he sees crowds upon the pavement. . . not other people strolling along, but crowds. Assembled for what? And these crowds, which sound about as friendly as the spectators at a Roman coliseum, are fields of harvest wheat. I mean, they don't look like wheat or sound like wheat or smell like wheat or taste like wheat. This is no synonym, folks, it is that deadliest of things: a metaphor! And speaking of deadly, isn't it just a little obvious that these wheaten folk seem all ready for the scythe of the Grim Reaper? "Harvest" wheat, indeed.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

Arch of the railway. This is why I included in my last post's illustrations quite a few images from a superb movie called Notes from a Scandal, with Cate Blanchett playing a 40-year-old teacher having an affair with a 15-year-old student. Having to meet in such a drippy place smells of the illicit, or at least of the damned uncomfortable. And that brimming river: hey, that's assonance, folks! He says it three times, too, which makes it magical. Brimming like tears, like a cup about to run over. But that nasty cup appears later on.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

Here he seems to be introducing silly mythical images which would be highly inappropriate if it weren't for the sing-songy, nursery-rhyme-esque form of the poem, with its strict rhyme and meter. Personally I wonder why he spends so much time on these innocent-sounding pronouncements, when I always thought the dank, furtive image of the arch of the railway implied meeting up with a prostitute, male or female.

Idealism, maybe? Or is this guy or girl, or guys or girls, just incredibly stupid, given to ludicrous hyperbole? In any case, all these blatherings seem sum-up-able in one word: "Forever." I will love you, dear, I'll love you. . . for all eternity.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

The years run like rabbits, as if to say, my, how time flies when you're having fun! Or is it something else? They may be running away, but it has nothing to do with us chasing after them. Some day, such as NOW, we may fervently wish those rabbits would slow down.  Rabbits also imply a sort of dumb, embarrassing fertility, not to mention the rabbit being pulled out of a hat ("Nothing up my sleeve!") and Alice's white rabbit, who is somehow always running "late". (And note the double meaning of late!)

And just what does "rabbiting on" mean? That you talk too much?

And that "first love of the world" cannot be anyone but Eve, the first woman. Hmmm, I wonder what she charges?

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

I like this. I love this. I love the "device" of Time speaking to us, of all the clocks in the city starting to protest the bullshit of the lovers writhing under the arch. The audacity, too, of allowing Time to address us, as if God Himself decided to step up to the plate (which He does, all the time, in the Old Testament).

 

And already we have our warning: my teacher read this in a slightly smug tone. "You cannot conquer time."

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

This is one of those ravishing verses of poetry that you don't want to touch because it's just so fucking magnificent. I wanted to write that on my term paper - "fucking magnificent" - but I didn't, and still got an A.

But he's doing the same thing here, capitolizing and I suppose personifying the Nightmare, Justice, etc. Justice being not blind, but naked. Pull down the blinds, please. And how about that little cough, ahem. Excuse me. Do you know who's in charge here?

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

Nobody wants to read this because it makes them groan inwardly, especially those first two lines. It's so bloody true, even in the most goal-directed, achievement-stuffed life. And Time, that wonderful personified Wizard of eternity, will have his "fancy", much as a rich man might pick out a particularly tasty prostitute from the lineup. Fancy is a silly, ephemeral, frou-frou sort of thing, the opposite of plain: fancy this, fancy that. And it also means fantasy. The "tomorrow or today" is sort of like setting up a delivery time for a parcel: "oh, I'll be here tomorrow, I think, you can bring it round then. Or, wait a minute, I'll be home today."

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

I had a little trouble with this until I stole an interpretation from someone else. Green valleys are very British, of course - how green is my valley, and all that -  but why is the snow (grey hair, old age) so "appalling"? It casts a pall over the valley, even obscures it completely so that the green life beneath it does not show. It might as well not be there at all. The next two lines are all shivery and liquidescent. I don't know what a threaded dance is, but I think the diver is Cupid. Once more, eroticism is shattered by that dirty old man, Mortality.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

This is among Auden's most famous lines, for some reason almost always misquoted (like Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle) as "stare, stare in the mirror". The mirror does come, but a few verses later, and in a much more disturbing manner. This one is effective, I think, because of understatement. Or: is the subject just washing his hands of the whole thing? (Didn't Pilate do the same thing? And Lady Macbeth? Oh, I'm going overboard here.)

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

Probably my favorite verse, because it makes me want to scream and never write again. Glacier, desert, crack in the tea-cup, land of the dead, where we all end up, unless you believe in Heaven, which Auden obviously does not. The safe comfort of the everyday and the brutal fact of mortality are so closely juxtaposed that we no longer take any notice. It's as close as the skin on your face.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

This is a weird one, and I suppose it echoes the nursery-rhyme quality of some of these verses. The Giant must be a reference to Jack and the Beanstalk, but what does it mean that he's "enchanting to"? I hope not what I think. Most Americans won't know this, but the Lily-white Boy (also a strange image) is a character in an English folk song called Green Grow the Rushes-o. Jill goes down on her back, well. . . innocence begins to prostitute itself. This is the Land of the Dead, which is beginning to resemble Hieronymus Bosch's vision of hell.

'O look, look in the mirror
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

Yes. THIS is the verse with the mirror in it, and it has that "o look, look -", that sense of shock, almost of horror at the inevitable, strenuously-denied passage of time. I don't want to look, but I must look! And those ironic lines - life remains a blessing, but we're about to die so why is a blessing even relevant? And the stinging self-contempt of "YOU cannot bless", as if you have somehow, and mysteriously, lost all your power.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

There was a crooked man, who walked a crooked mile. . . and the whole human condition is drawn in slanted lines.

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

And thus, the soft, gentle benediction, as we lie howling and writhing in the face of eternal Hell.

In the burrows of the Nightmare

As I Walked Out One Evening
by W. H. Auden
As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: 'Love has no ending.' 'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, 'I'll love you till the ocean    Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking    Like geese about the sky. 'The years shall run like rabbits,    For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages,    And the first love of the world.' But all the clocks in the city    Began to whirr and chime: 'O let not Time deceive you,    You cannot conquer Time. 'In the burrows of the Nightmare    Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow    And coughs when you would kiss. 'In headaches and in worry    Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy    To-morrow or to-day. 'Into many a green valley    Drifts the appalling snow; Time breaks the threaded dances    And the diver's brilliant bow. 'O plunge your hands in water,    Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin    And wonder what you've missed. 'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,    The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens    A lane to the land of the dead. 'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes    And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,    And Jill goes down on her back. 'O look, look in the mirror,    O look in your distress: Life remains a blessing    Although you cannot bless. 'O stand, stand at the window    As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour    With your crooked heart.' It was late, late in the evening,    The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming,    And the deep river ran on.

coke and mentos bottle rocket hits cameraman

Cute 'n sexy gifs: it's Young Frankenstein!

One of a hundred or so fave moments from Young Frankenstein. I want one of those wigs, not for Halloween but just for everyday wear.

Gene Wilder, Gene Wilder. . . Gene Wilder (no I'm not gay, I take it back)

                                              Who's this? "Abbie Normal."

Even sexier in mascara.

Madeline Kahn, Madeline Kahn. . . I changed my mind, I guess I am gay.

(and, funniest movie line ever, even without seeing the movie)

"IT!. . . COULD! . . . WORK!!"