A Song for Found Elephants

This piece has become cornball over the years, kind of like Flight of the Bumblebee (which I hate: the only version I have ever liked is the one in The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon was dressed up as - who WAS he dressed up as? - anyway, he ran real fast to it and it was funny).

I remember hearing it on Mad Men when Betty Draper, in all her 1960s splendour, came down the staircase in a restaurant called (I think) Lutece. Don looked at her in admiration and even awe. But like most of the music in Mad Men, it was really effective.

GOD, when will Mad Men be back? I die inside, I can't wait any longer.

Speaking of things Indian, ever since Slumdog Millionaire, every comedy has to have a funny Indian guy with an accent. The Big Bang Theory is only one example (a GAY Indian guy with an accent). I can't figure out why this is considered OK. They wouldn't have a black guy named Rastus shuffling his feet, would they? Yet these characters talk incessantly about elephants and cobras and arranged marriages, like something out of a Kipling story.

(This is sung by Bjoerling - I won't try to spell his first name - and his silvery voice, vibrating with layer upon layer of overtones, seems to catch slant rays of sunlight. Indian sunlight.)

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Kate, the pregnancy, the prank. . . the disaster

I'm just like anybody.  I have no interest in the Royals at all and at best find Harry's exploits - dressing like a Nazi, getting drunk and flailing around like a veritable Prince Phillip - juvenile and boring. (At least we know now that he wasn't sired by Diana's "riding instructor": his eyes are too close together, like all the rest of them). And the things they wear on their heads, the women I mean, look like those weapons the Klingons throw on Star Trek.

So I'm not really a Royal watcher, but I honestly did like the Royal wedding, the excitement and magic of it, such a departure from the suffocating,  elephantine bumph of Charles and Diana and the train that went all the way to Bristol. I like Kate, like her self-assurance and her dimples and her way of wearing clothes: stylish, but with none of the narcissistic preening and fluttering of Diana at her worst. Kate seems like the real deal to me.

And then she's pregnant - more excitement - but things aren't going the way they are supposed to, she's throwing up all the time (and do I know what that is like). So the rather overly-slender Kate has to be hospitalized before she dehydrates completely.

Then it happens: the "punk" that "punk'd" the world.

These idiot Australian radio people, whoever they are, I can't even be bothered to look up their glutinous little names, decide to try to get through to the nursing staff at the hospital. And what they do is so patently ludicrous that I can barely describe it.

Putting on the worst phony accent since - since - I don't know! I can't remember ANYONE else with an accent that bad! - the she-part of this poisonous duo called the hospital assuming the identity of some drunken drag queen who likes to impersonate Her Majesty at gay biker orgies. In other words, she was trying to sound like the Queen.

She used the word "please" twice in one sentence, for one thing. She sounded more "Strayne" than anyone I've ever heard. And the poor nurse, the naive nurse, put her through! If she says she's the Queen, she must BE the Queen. The nurse who actually reported on Kate's bouts of retching must have been equally taken in - perhaps more so, to give out so many details we really needn't have heard about.

But no one could predict what happened next. I was in the car with my husband driving home from Staples or something, he had been away for a while, and I started recounting the stupid "punk'd" story in case he hadn't heard it.

He had.  "She died, you know."

"KATE??"

"No, the nurse. She was found dead."

"What - the Royals hired a hit man? That's insane!"

""No, they think it was suicide."

It was one of those odd the-world-slips-sideways moments. It just didn't add up. This woman didn't even give out those medical details that should have been kept confidential. She just handed the phone over. What happened?

Nobody is sure what happened. But someone died. So with its usual crystalline logic, the entire human race decided to MURDER those two Australian DJs for plotting to deliberately assassinate a poor innocent nurse. Looking at it backwards, the insane logic is: they punk'd her, she died, they killed her!

I have a few points to make. Maybe I've already made them, but I'm so sick of Twit, Tweet and Twat and the Gospel of Facebook screaming "those murderers should be hanged!" and stuff like that,  I'll make them again.

One. Those punksters NEVER thought they would get through. It was one of those sleepover gigglefest type-things where little girls call someone at random and say, "Is your refrigerator running?" The worst that could happen, they probably thought, was, "Get off the phone, you wretched impostor!", or perhaps (even better!) the threat of arrest.

Two. If there had been ANY level of security at all in that hospital, the "punk" never would have happened. It would've been shot down before any information could have been given out at all.

Three. It's only one small step from freely giving out confidential medical information on the phone to carelessly letting some drag queen dressed as Liz in the door for a nice little visit. The hospital administration made a grave, even horrific mistake, far worse than mere carelessness, in maintaining such a lax system.

What the fuck were they thinking? Did they have their heads shoved up their blowholes? But though there obviously was no special policy in place to protect Kate, meaning that anyone in the world could just phone and ask  for information and get it,  the whole shameful episode got shunted on to this poor nurse. Even though nothing really bad came of her actions, she must have had such agonizing pangs of conscience that she decided she should not exist any more.

The nurse no longer exists, but someone still has to be blamed. Someone's head has to be paraded around town impaled on a stick. The villagers with flaming torches are about to close in. So it has to be those two heartless, murderous, bloodthirsty, demonic Aussie DJs!

To be honest, I feel sorry for them. I think they're just idiotic assholes who were seeing how far they could push it. Pretty far, as it turns out. Whole Facebook pages are being set up even as we speak to bring them to justice, i. e. life imprisonment, if not the gallows.

This whole thing was completely bizarre, one of the strangest stories I've ever heard, but where does the blame ultimately lie? Isn't it obvious? If the Royals trusted this place enough to put one of the most admired and influential women in the world in it, shouldn't they have known a little something about their security system, if indeed they had one? (As it turned out, they didn't.)

This isn't B-list royalty: Prince Edward's dumpy wife Whatsername, or Sarah Ferguson and her horrific fanged daughters. THIS IS KATE MIDDLETON. She is far too valuable to be trusted to a place where they might allow an IRA member dressed as Prince Phillip in for a nice little visit.

(A very sad postscript: I just had the thought that a lot of good might have come from this asinine prank. Policies might have been changed, security tightened, awareness of danger increased.  Maybe Kate might have been a lot safer next time, i. e. when she gives birth. But instead, the whole thing tumbled down into disaster.)

Bob Dylan: here comes your worst Chrismas nightmare

To quote a well-known literary phrase: This is just WRONG.

I leafed through most of the tracks, now posted on YouTube, on this strange album/artifact. It sounds like an old man choking on Liquid Draino. I was hard-pressed to find the worst track, or even the most representative track, so I just took a stab. The religious ones might be worse, but the elevator-music/Walmart p.a. system arrangement in this one won by a Santa Claus whisker.

What's this Jew doing, anyway - what's this born-again, died-again, reborn, dead for a while, then all-of-a-sudden-gets-nominated-for the-Nobel-Prize fella doing recording a whole buncha Christmas carols with a backup chorus of chicks and someone playing one-o-dem little ting-a-lingie things?

I don't know, me and Bob Dylan. I will admit to a crush, nay, an obsession in my youth, back when he was the most enigmatic thing since Russian black bread and writing things like:

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying
Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn
Plays wasted words, proves to warn
That he not busy being born is busy dying

Every once in a while Dylan moves himself, and in a recent interview he quoted the above lines and said something like, "I can hardly believe I wrote that, man. It's fantastic."

Well, it is. But how did he end up here, on the slippery slope to poor album sales and for-God's-sake-let's-hide-this-from-the-kids? How did he become a Christmas abomination, standing on a street corner bleating old carols strained through too many layers of cigarette phlegm?

I still look at Bob Dylan as an enigma, ever-changing, always leaving us guessing as to what he'll do next. I think I know him, then he'll turn around and reveal himself as much more intact and articulate than his current downtrodden-old-bum image would suggest. I saw him just last night on a rather dull documentary about Pete Seeger, who has the dubious distinction of having the worst teeth in folk music. The cuddly old Commie was praised to the skies by Springsteen, Baez, a totally adorable Arlo Guthrie (I want to take Arlo Guthrie home with me - he is a beautiful man), and - Bob Dylan.

When I see interviews with him, it startles me: he has a diamond-flash way of speaking, quick, ferociously articulate, and way ahead of the game, always - in fact, reinventing the game as he goes along so that no one can get ahead of him. And then there are those eyes: not "bluer than robin's eggs," as Joan Baez wrote in her tortured ballad Diamonds and Rust, but flourescent blue, lit from behind by - something - but it sure is something the rest of us don't have, and certainly never will.

So, fine, all this is in the positives, isn't it, and then there were all those early albums I listened to half-to-death (even though I had no idea who Medgar Evers was) until my parents were ready to scream. The last Dylan albums I truly enjoyed were Desire and Blood on the Tracks. Like Rubber Soul and Revolver (which I liked to call Rubber Revolver), these two would have made a nice double album, maybe called Desire on the Tracks. Here Dylan was still playful and soulful and sometimes heartbreaking, even in the simplest of songs (One More Cup of Coffee being my favorite: I always preface it in my mind with the mournful slow movement of the Rodrigo guitar concerto.)

Long before Desire on the Tracks and this Christmas thingie, Dylan got into beeeeeeg trobble  when he cut a very strange album called Self Portrait, which had a picture of a smeared cookie on the cover and virtually no original material. Almost all of them were "covers", and bad ones too, such as his version of Take a Message to Mary in which a female chorus intones, "These are the words of a frontier lad/Who lost his love when he turned bad. .  ."

As they say down in old Jerusalem town: oy vey.

Self Portrait, a (gulp) double album that would have made a nice no-album, inspired one of the best-known opening lines of any music review: "What is this shit?" The Rolling Stone guy didn't know what to make of it, and I didn't either. Sounded like something he recorded in the basement of Big Pink, whatever-the-fuck Big Pink is anyway, when the guys in the band were all drunk and falling down.

Bob tries, he really does, but the best Bob Dylan performance I have ever seen isn't by Bob Dylan. It isn't even by a man, but by Cate Blanchett, who nails His Bobness like no other actor ever could. I don't think anyone could play the older Bob because the older Bob sounds like he has shredded his vocal chords (cords? Either way looks wrong) with a StarFrit all-purpose flesh grater. Everyone complained about his singing THEN. They should hear his singing NOW. But the people who really objected back then, the teachers and parents and Great-Aunt Matilda, have all died of old age anyway.
 

The only thing I heard more often than "I don't mind long hair as long as it's clean" in the '60s was, "I like Bob Dylan's songs, but not when he sings them." They preferred somebody else, like Peter, Paul and Mary or The Byrds or Sonny and Cher.

Bob has apparently lifted all of Bing Crosby's arrangements in this album, and superimposed the vomitous horror of what is left of his voice. Somebody else has already sung these songs, Bob, in goopy syrupy voices and stuff, but still. They're a little more palatable to listen to than the garburator growl of an old man still trying to hang on to something, some sense of youthful glory.

The legacy of Dylan's earliest creations, that glittering Krypton ice palace that can still illuminate like a great spill of diamonds, slowly, somehow, turned back into coal (the thing you find in your stocking if you're bad). Or maybe it's rust, flakes of russet-colored, degenerated iron, the leavings of a man who couldn't stop singing even when his voice was gone.

A winter masterpiece by Scott Feschuk

Anticipation, not denial, is the first step of winter

by Scott Feschuk on Friday, November 16, 2012 10:26am

VIEW IN CLEAN READING MODE »

WHAT IS THIS ?

Here at Maclean's, we appreciate the written word. And we appreciate you, the reader. We are always looking for ways to create a better user experience for you and wanted to try out a new functionality that provides you with a reading experience in which the words and fonts take centre stage. We believe you'll appreciate the clean, white layout as you read our feature articles. But we don't want to force it on you and it's completely optional. Click "View in Clean Reading Mode" on any article if you want to try it out. Once there, you can click "Go back to regular view" at the top or bottom of the article to return to the regular layout.

Photo Illustration By Taylor Shute

It’s that difficult time of year again, but come on people, we can get through this together. To better navigate our ordeal, it’s important that we take the time to review the challenge ahead. Here are the seven stages of Canadian winter:

1. Anticipation. As the long, hot summer surrenders to the first hint of an autumn breeze, many of us experience a small thrill: winter is on its way, bringing relief from the heat and promising the many splendours that accompany the most Canadian of seasons. We envision snow-flecked landscapes, ice-covered ponds and joyful Christmas choirs. Digging deep into the closet, we gaze fondly upon our parkas and mitts. We dream of frosty adventures ahead.

2. Despair. The first cruel winds of November cut through us and we pretty much want to fall down and die right there. Three days of hostile muttering ensue.

3. Sarcasm. A huge December snowfall—awesome! And maybe a little freezing rain in there because THAT WOULD BE PLEASANT. Wake up and there’s a metre of snow in the driveway—and hey, great, it’s the wet, slushy kind that weighs about a squillion pounds per shovelful and lays those of weak heart in their graves. Yay winter! Just when we finally get it cleared—literally, just as we finish clearing it away—the plow pushes a huge drift back in front of the driveway. Thanks for that, buddy! And for the record, that could have been anyone’s snow shovel that flew through the air and struck the window of the plow’s cab. We only ran away because we were in the mood for some exercise.

4. Rationalization. Typically this stage is triggered by an enjoyable day spent outdoors. We are imbued with the belief that not only can we survive winter, we can learn to love it. We vow to plan more outings. We settle in for hot chocolate by the fireplace. We look out the window into the deep black of a winter’s night and we are content . . .

5. Swearing. . . . until we realize it’s only 4:35 p.m. Sweet mother of @!%*#. It’s pitch black when we go to work! It’s pitch black when we come home from work! There’s more daylight in Das Boot. HUMANS WEREN’T MEANT TO LIVE LIKE THIS, BY GOD! Our stylish leather boots are salt-stained. The legs of our pants are salt-stained. Our will to live is salt-stained, and that’s not even possible. At work, the guy two cubicles over is wearing the same wool sweater for the third time this week. It smells like a wet ferret. And now we smell like a wet ferret. Morning comes and the ice on our windshield is thick, so thick, and we take our scraper and we just hammer on it and hammer on it until we crumble to the driveway, spent and weeping. Later, at Starbucks, we overhear some cheerful idiot saying the Inuit have dozens of ways of saying “snow.” We tell him we’ve got hundreds of ways of saying, “Shut the $@*# up.” The ensuing conversation with management centres on whether we’re banned from all Starbucks or just this one.

6. Despair. It’s late February. The snowshoes we got for Christmas are still in their box. Communication among family members has devolved to a series of grunts, crude drawings and middle fingers. In this dark moment, a decision is made. The next person who comes up to us and says, “Cold enough for ya?”—we are going to murder that person. Not secretly. Not with any foresight or planning. We are going to reach out with our bare hands and we are going to strangle the life out of that person right then and there, and if anyone tries to get in our way then we are going to murder them as well because we just. Can’t. Take it. Anymore.

7. Despair. The neighbours are back from their March break trip to Florida. They’re all tanned and perky, and they sure seem eager to come over and tell us all about it—right up until they spot the barbed wire and land mines. They back away slowly. Spring is coming. It must be coming. But the nights still are long, and in our dreams we hear only the swish-swush snowsuit sound of the longest of the seasons.

(This bit of genius from Macleans Magazine needs no preface and no post-face, cuzzadafact that it's PERFECT THE WAY IT IS.)

Things that smell

Things that smell

 

 

 

 

Stale pee in stairwells

BO that leaves a visible trail and should have its own postal code (note: this should be a punishable offense)

Old vomit in the crack between seats on the bus

Old Navy stores (why do they always smell like the inside of a vacuum cleaner?)

The inside of a vacuum cleaner

Dog

Dog pee (or anything else a dog does)

The dishwasher before you run it

Cigar butts

 

 

I'm sorry, but some people smell. Some things smell, but not as bad as people.

I wrote this list, which is far from complete, a long time ago and just stumbled upon it while trying to make my computer work the way it is supposed to. This may never happen, which is heartbreaking, but at least I have this list. It touches on the main issues, I think. But worst of all is the smell of an unwashed human.

It's as if they are sitting on your face and farting. It is public pollution. When BO is so strong that you can tell the person has been there half an hour after they leave, it should be a punishable offense.

If you had a gas canister or ammonia or a bucket of horseshit or some other noxious substance that you uncovered in a public place, you'd be charged, no?

I recently took a hearing test and was told I had unusually acute hearing and could hear frequencies that most people my age can't. Fine. My sense of smell is equally hypersensitive. What does this do for me? It's seen as a "disorder", no doubt. Hypersmellism or something. Every asset is now medicalized.

But there are times. . . there are times. . .

We're supposed to put up with it in teeth-gritting politeness and not even mention it to anyone when a 350-pound man in a creased polyester suit that hasn't been dry-cleaned in 14 years squeezes himself into the aisle seat beside you, emitting an odor so gaggingly bad that you don't see how you're going to stand it during that long flight to Australia.

You hope to God he doesn't move around very much. But when he yawns, which he does every 30 seconds or so, he thrusts his big mutton arms into the air and goes, "Ho, hmmm, ho-hoh-hoh-HOHHHH, hm, hm hohoooh, hm hm hm, hoooooooooooohoooooooooooooh." This would be obnoxious enough without the slaughterhouse waft that escapes from his swilling pits, soon to form a dense storm cloud that looms over the entire cabin until it begins to rain sweat.

Last time this happened to me it was in a movie theatre, and fortunately it was empty enough that I was able to move. I had to nudge by a little old lady (twice - I forgot my popcorn) who gave me a nasty look, and I said to her, "That old man over there stinks and I can't stand to sit beside him." She gave me a startled, offended look as if I'd said, "He's a Jew and I can't stand them." You just don't SAY things like that.

You silently endure. But I was tired of having to try to tune out that disgusting stench and keep my mind on the movie, which suddenly appeared to be in Smell-o-Rama.

I think we should bring back expressions like "the great unwashed". Personally I can't see harboring all that greasy gunk on your skin without realizing how noxious it is, and I REALLY can't see how your mate, if you have one, can withstand lying next to it all night. Being married to it.

Of all the things that smell, human beings smell worst of all. They say Bigfoot smells, and no doubt Neanderthal did too. But almost all of us now have access to a marvelous little thing called running water, both hot and cold! Most of us have the wherewithal to wash our clothing, and ourselves.

I have sat next to homeless people who smelled better than the fat guy in the polyester suit. Maybe being outside airs them off.

Up on the Housetop, safe from pain

There's backstory to this, sort of. My new computer, wonder of wonders, is fucking up royal in so many ways that I want to scream and just leave the house, I mean permanently. I can't attach photos to emails, I can't edit photos, I can't send a link to anyone of a YouTube video or anything else without great arabesques involving "hyperlinks" and all sorts of shit I don't want to know about.

My old computer KNEW how to do all this stuff and never gave me a bit of trouble. It realized I did not need a whole bunch of fancy shit to get in the way of basic, clear, easy function. I could do everything I needed with one or two clicks.

I will never get that back. My husband and I are at the sizzling point because he lumbers over to my computer, fucks around with it for half an hour, then tells me he can't do anything and I'll just have to live with it the way it is.

I don't understand why, when I try to email someone a photo, it is embedded, HUGE, in the body of the email, in a form I am certain they do not want. I don't understand, furthermore, why I must be humiliated over and over and over again for being stupid.

I wasn't supposed to be stupid. I started out with great promise.I took Grade 3 and 4 in one year, then was put in a super-advanced Grade 5 class in which I learned exactly nothing, but had great fun giving the teacher a nervous breakdown.

I had a very high IQ and my reading skills were at high school level, and great things were expected of me. NONE of it came true, I mean none.

I don't know what it is. I was the youngest, and all the disappointments of the other three siblings (who were much older) were somehow heaped on my shoulders. I remember my Dad once saying in his usual drunken state that every one of us had let him down in innumerable ways, especially me because I was the only one left to clean up all the wreckage. I was his last, most desperate hope.

I don't know why, because all of my three siblings became very competent professional musicians and were supersmart.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with the video. I wandered in search of distraction, wondering if I could find a non-sticky/sugary version of a Christmas tune I like, Up on the Housetop. To be honest, I heard it on a commercial for Canadian Tire or something, played in a sparkly way with something like a banjo in the background.

This was the only non-sticky version I could find. I like the mellow tone of this dulcimer: some of them sound like garage doors opening (and don't get me started on the psaltery, a scream on strings). It has that relaxed banjo-y flavor to it. This isn't a professional player, but that's what I like about it: it's the sound of someone working on proficiency who obviously has musicality and plays with pleasure and enjoyment, the very thing that was forbidden to me while my Dad stood over me with a big stick.

I find myself deleting paragraphs these days, lots of them. I just can't put all that pain out there. Melancholy dogs me. This isn't the best time of year for me, though I love attending Christmas concerts with my grandchildren in them - could anything be more magical? - and some of the music, and looking at twinkly lights and things.

But, maybe because of my early experiences and all those failed expectations, life seems essentially melancholy and even tragic. I don't know how people walk around with smiles on their faces.

The horror, the horror. . . let's ring in the Christmas season!

It's already the goddamn start of December, and at this point I hate Christmas, as so many people have come to hate it.  I hate it cuzzadafact that it's now almost exclusively a retail opportunity. The sight of people knocking each other over and trampling one another on Black Friday has been enough to put me off it forever. And we don't even have Black Friday in Canada: more like Brown Friday, or maybe off-white.

But then, I found this!

I don't think I have ever watched this video all the way through, because it's so interminable. The violence in it, even puppet-show violence, is horrifying and makes me gasp.The children sit there helpless, not knowing how to react, as Santa presides over the whole thing like some creepy forerunner of the Grinch.

 

He has no warmth or Christmas cheer at all, but intones his phony greetings in a nasal Brooklyn accent that is freaky and utterly repellent. Santa is borderline creepy anyway: most small children scream in terror when their turn comes up at the mall, and no wonder! Haven't they been warned not to talk to strangers? And here they're being asked - expected - even commanded not only to speak to a stranger, but to sit on his knee!

Through most of this video the children look frozen in fear. Fake squealy noises that sound like they are on a continuous loop have been added to the soundtrack, resembling nothing more than a pack of coyotes on a frosty December night.

Numerous animals pop up from this magically-appearing stage, but my favorite, around 5:00, is something called a Golliwog: an incredibly racist doll, a Little Black Sambo-type of thing, more animal than human. One can imagine it eating watermelon and singing "I'm coming, Mammy".

I vaguely remember Punch and Judy from the hand puppets we had as kids. Like most puppets, they were creepy. Marionettes are even worse, with bodies like skeletons held together with bolts and string. Those jerky, dangly, macabre movements are anything but "lifelike" unless you are referring to something from Edgar Allan Poe. I don't know where Punch and Judy came from, but probably they're some bloodthirsty medieval thing like the Commedia dell'Arte (and how the fuck DO you spell that anyway??).

The very essence of Punch and Judy is violence, which makes one wonder why it was considered acceptable for children. In remote corners of the world, such as Etobicoke, it may be acceptable still.

The last shot in this remarkable artifact is a sweep of the mantlepiece on the Nght before Christmas. Withered empty stockings, probably about three feet long, dangle like immense dead worms, and the tinsel looks like something scrounged from a 1940s brothel.

Anyway, this should set you up nicely for the season and remind you of the True Meaning of Christmas: bashing the living shit out of each other. No-hell!

Sounds pretty good (and pretty old)

 

 

www.matthewlind.com/CRG.html

This link, if it works, will take you to a generous selection of the 78 rpm records of my youth. (I never pretended to be young.) These include such delicious favorites as Puss in Boots, Travels of Babar and Robin Hood. That is, if they will play for you. It's dodgy: at first they were in some sort of mp4 format that I couldn't extract sound from, so I ended up converting them to mp3s. But at this point, they might actually play without all that screwin' around.

When I first heard this again, my reaction was: SHUT THE FRONT DOOR!! I never thought I'd hear the Ballad of Puss in Boots again.

"When I was just a teeny-weeny kitty,
Everyone told me that I looked so pretty.
They said, beautiful eyes
They said, lovely fur
But all I could answer was meow
Or purr. . ."

Dog, dog, dog. . . goose

Why are doctors such a bunch of assholes?

This is the last day of November, which really should be the "cruellest month":  T. S. Eliot was obviously out of his poetic little mind to say it was April. This day is sort of special, and sort of not, because it has now been 22 years since I had a drink. I have to confess I was afraid to write about this before because I thought that, by some far-flung chance, a publisher might see this and conclude I was a drunken sot and completely unreliable. You can't write about your triumphs because they will do you in ever time.

But on to the topic of the day: otorhinolaryngology, or something like that. My problem goes back many months and still isn't resolved. In June of this year we had a very enjoyable week of holidays in San Francisco, but on the last day I started to feel not-so-good, achy and weak, as if I was about to get the flu.

On the plane home I didn't feel so hot either, but as we started to land, oh God. Both my ears began to shriek with pain, as if someone was driving screwdrivers into my head from both sides. It takes about 35 minutes to land a plane, from that first subtle feeling that you're dropping in altitude to the reassuring thud of wheels on the ground. So the agony went on and on and even increased. "Try swallowing," my husband said, as if it hadn't even occurred to me.  Try to patch a gaping war wound with a bandaid.

The really distressing thing is that I never did have that "pop" that indicates the pressure has been relieved. The pain went on for at least an hour after we landed. There is something truly excruciating about an earache, like a whistling icy wind blowing across a bad tooth. L'angoisse, as the French call it.

Feeling rotten and weak and sure I had the flu, I dragged myself into my doctor's office and left about a minute and a half later. She took out one of those ear thingies, looked in both ears and said, "They look fine." I mentioned flu and she said, "Oh, no, it's not flu (with a patronizing smile). It's just a summer cold."

Months went by. I was completely over my "summer cold", but alarming symptoms remained: every time I yawned or swallowed, there was a noise in my left ear, not the "crackle" described by medical web sites but cannon fire on the side of my head. I could not imagine going back to the doc and having her tell me "well, don't yawn or swallow then" (like the old joke: "Doctor, doctor, I have a terrible pain when I do this." "Well, don't DO that!"). Worse than that was a new symptom: whenever I talked, which I can hardly give up altogether, I heard a buzzy, distorted sound on the left side of my head, like an old speaker with a loose wire or a radio not tuned in quite right. This wasn't from the outside, obviously. It was the sound of my own voice feeding back inside my head. It was also very loud.

Months went by. It wasn't going away in spite of my doctor's instructions to hold my nose and blow. It was worse, in fact. I went to a walk-in clinic and saw another doctor who took out the ear thingie, looked in my ears and said, "They look fine." Then she sat there impassively until I left.

More months, more annoying racket in my head. I was SURE something was wrong in there, this COULD NOT be normal! I went back to that second doctor and she told me to hold my nose and blow, then  finally, with considerable arm-twisting from me, referred me to an ENT specialist in New Westminster, about an hour and a half drive from here.

After still more months of discomfort and cannon-fire, my appointment finally came up. I did not have a good feeling about it. I was pretty sure I would be dismissed again. When I entered the office, I was in a time warp. All the medical equipment seemed to go back to the 1950s, antiquated, as if it should be in the Smithsonian. I had to fill out one of those forms, and one question was about medication, so I wrote down what I was taking. It never occurred to me not to.

 

The doctor, an old impassive Iranian guy who looked like he never smiled, never once made eye contact with me and seemed both bored and annoyed. I told him about my symptoms. He looked inside my ears with that little ear thingie and said "they look fine". His assistant stuck a little rubber probe into each ear. The right side was OK; the left side was just excruciating. I tried to tell him about it and there was no response.

The hearing test was normal, which was both a relief (I don't want to be one of those "EH?" people) and distressing: I knew that if I could still hear, he would soon dismiss me.  As a matter of fact, I had better hearing than almost anyone else in my age group. I was not really surprised: when I'm under stress my hearing becomes so hypersensitive, I can hear a watch ticking across the room, loud enough to keep me awake at night.

Fine,  I have better-than-normal hearing. That means I can hear the cannons and buzzes much more clearly!

The doctor's bored look had hardened: his impassive face had turned to stone. With one last gasp, I tried to tell the doc about my annoying, even infuriating symptoms. He said I should hold my nose and blow, then sat there not looking at me. I kind of went, "Ummmm. . ." In an irritable tone, he said, "Everything is fine. You can go."

I had some thoughts after this big letdown. One, I am not a woman of childbearing years. Older women usually get short shrift because subconsciously, they are not perceived as being "productive" in their natural, God-given function of spewing out babies. Two, I made a terrible mistake in filling out the form: I was honest about the medications I am on.

I am not saying this is conscious - or maybe it is - but when he saw the word "lithium", I think he just crossed me off the list of people to be taken seriously. Lithium equals manic-depressive equals fruitcake/hypochondriac/delusional old bag.

Do you think I exaggerate? My first impulse is to be honest in almost every case. Of course there are a few exceptions, but mainly to spare people's feelings.

But have you ever noticed that with most people, a lie goes down much better than the truth? For one thing, a lie can be tailored any way you want. You can unmake and remake reality, bend it and soften it and take the sting out of it, or - best of all - make it so that it flatters the person you're lying to, even if he's a total asshole.  So , yes, yes, yes, we believe you because it's easier on us, the lie is much more palatable.  There are many advantages to this policy, and much more of it goes on than we consciously realize.

There are sub-categories, of course, including the lie of withholding information. This is the one I definitely should learn to practice, particularly with doctors, who are some of the most heartless human beings I have ever encountered. Don't tell me it's because *I* am being difficult. I bend over backwards to accomodate these bastards and they let me down almost every time.

Result: after 5 1/2 months, I still have the cannon-fire and the loose speaker-wire buzzing inside my head, and it's quite possible I will have this for the rest of my life. If you go from doctor to doctor, well, guess what that makes you? One of "those": meaning those crazy old ladies who are so lonely that they will feign illness to get any sort of attention.

I have no idea what to do now.

I deleted the last paragraph of this post because it was just too angry and bitter, though in my mind it contained some truths that badly need to be told. Trouble is, they're pretty unpalatable the way they are and need to be dressed up.  And I'm not too good at that. My attempts to be honest have gained me exactly nothing except a one-way ticket to that prominently-marked door in every medical office. The one with the four-letter word.