Blood work

 

They should install a little tap on the inside of my arm. That’s what I’ve heard people say. I never thought it would apply to me until a few years ago when it became apparent that, for health reasons, I was going to need “blood work” done (and just what does THAT mean?) every three months or so.

 

It’s an art to tap the mysterious underground streams that throb inside us, and not everyone can do it. My life is besmirched and besmutched by botched attempts that left deep bruising and yielded almost no blood at all, as if I were a human turnip or had somehow turned to stone.

 

 

I’d be happy to keep all my blood, thank you. Especially now that I am no longer a prison of the Moon Goddess that makes us all run out and buy tampons every month. Science needs but a few cells, likely, but always takes what seems like tanks full of it.

 

I don’t know what it is, but I’ve had some sort of revelation. Or something. For years I had my “blood work” done at a local lab I could walk to. Seemed like a good idea. But over the years the service got worse and worse. At least every other time, and eventually every time, the technician couldn’t find a vein. They slapped, they smacked, tied the rubber thingie tighter (though one dithering lady who seemed on the verge of hysterics insisted on tying it loosely around my rolled-up sleeve “so it won’t hurt your skin”). Then they’d jab. Jab jab. Oops. Pull out, turn around, jab some more. This is what it must have been like for Victorian women on their wedding night.

 

 

Then they’d get “that look”. Anger mixed with panic. Anger at ME, actually – they’d usually say something like, “Do you have this problem all the time?” or “Your veins are so tiny!”, or something that made me feel equally swell.

 

My veins wished they could apologize.

 

The worst was when they had to bring in a second person because the first one just couldn’t do it. Then panic ensued, with technicians running jerkily back and forth like something out of a silent movie. I hit rock-bottom a few months ago when, unable to get blood from either arm, they tried to get it out of the back of my hand. It hurt like hell, took ten minutes of agonizingly slow drips, and yielded about a thimbleful, which is probably all those lab fuckers need anyway.
 

 

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before – maybe I assumed it was one of those geographical cures that’s never supposed to work – but one day I thought, hmm. I thought, WHY DON’T I TRY ANOTHER LAB? Surely all technicians can’t be this incompetent, this panic-stricken and unsure of themselves, not to mention insulting to their clientele’s veins.

 

So I did it. A little uneasily, I cracked the door of a clinic that looked pretty much like the old one. Surprisingly, the waiting room wasn’t choked up with unhappy-looking people in winter coats: I was able to go in right away. As a last-minute decision, I decided NOT to say anything about my “problem veins” or my miserable lack of success as a dispenser of my own blood.

 

I was cool.

 

Cool in the hands of the technician, an older woman with a no-nonsense manner.  I relaxed like a dog under the care of a good vet. The whole thing was over in 30 seconds, and I never even felt the stab.

 

So easy it was, it was almost pleasurable, which I know is a pretty perverted thing to say in this age of vampires.

 

OK, I said, fluke. HAS to be a fluke, or maybe this particular technician is a blood-drawing genius. But the second time, with a different one, it was just as laid-back and painless and FAST. No waiting for the agonizing drip. . . drip. . . drip. . . of  blood being tapped by a needle stuck in the wrong way, at some bizarre angle arrived at by corkscrew-like drilling.

 

It seems like we have a Land of Incompetent Blood-Tappers and a Land of the Other-Type-Thing. The bloodletting today was just ridiculous. She didn’t even say “make a fist”, and I did not feel the brief stab of entry at all. In fact, by the time she finished, I wondered when she was going to start.

 

 

It’s a mercy, for lately the frequency of the drilling has only intensified as new medical “issues” have come up, some of them scary as hell. I shouldn’t think the worst, of course. But I’m suddenly in that netherworld of clinics and waiting rooms and pee bottles and tiny circular bandaids and seeing specialists who may or may not turn out to be special.

 

I have another test next week involving not peeing for several hours, the sort of procedure pregnant women go through all the time. When I was pregnant, the doctor stuck his ear on my stomach and got more or less the same results. But now science must look inside me. Deep inside me.

 

Any time I’ve had a health crisis, which is not often, I would always feel silly when I got the test results back: no, we couldn’t find anything. Part of me wishes they WOULD find something. I crave the drama. But I also hate to be sick. Even having a cold makes me resentful.
 

 

After a most intimate probe in yet another specialist’s office the other day, I was assigned a colonoscopy in February, quite soon actually, meaning my case is of “moderate” importance. In other words, I’m not quite at death’s door from internal rot, but nor am I doing this just for an afternoon’s entertainment.

 

I’ve heard all sorts of things about this procedure. My husband had one done 30 years ago when preparation involved taking  twelve boxes of laxatives the night before, followed by lying helplessly on your stomach with no sedation whatsoever while they Roto-Rooted your insides. I hear now it’s easier, but the preparation takes five days. Fortunately you’re stoned out of your mind while they do the drilling, which I honestly look forward to.

 

But the thing is. . . some part of me, an insistent part, sometimes whispers in my ear, you might really be sick. They don’t do all this shit to a well person, do they? Or maybe they do, to rule it out.
 

 

How would I feel about that? I have to confess that a part of me leaps at the possibility of death with a sort of dizzy joy, like a dog reuniting with its master after the war. It reminds me of that Buddhist saying, “Throw down your earthly garments and run to me.”

 

It’s subversive even to think these things, let alone write about them. And yet, I do think them, pretty much daily. I look at my life and I have to conclude that it hasn’t exactly turned out.

 

Not like I thought, not as I wanted, no not at all. I look at others who have “made it”, who have succeeded and live in a world of stimulating company and conversation, while I sit there knitting.
 

 

I look at authors who’ve won the Giller, the Booker, the Nobel. Well, why not go right to the top while you’re feeling this bad. While I sit there looking at form letter rejection slips from wormy little backwater presses that won’t even give me the time of day. I look back and see years, and years, and years, hundreds of these humiliations, followed by yet one more masochistic attempt, the faithful dog too idiotic to know when to give up.

 

So why do we live? We’re set in motion, and it’s assumed from then on that we WANT to live. Why? Aren’t we sort of stuck with it?
 

 

I guess I live for the wrong reasons. I live for other people, which is also known as “codependency”. It’s a no-no and I must stop it and only live for myself, a self so tattered and shredded with disappointment that I am sure it won’t hold together as the sole reason for staying around.

 

The other thing that sneaks into my mind is this: you know it’s going to happen. I’ve seen six friends die in the past few years, from illness, accident, suicide. Some were younger than me. I have no idea what happened to them, where they went, what happened to their essence. I guess they just stopped. I guess WE just stop, and then there’s nothing. Ever. Or just a few atoms of memory in the minds of others that, too, will eventually stop.

 

So why scramble so hard to keep all this going? It’s assumed that life is an unalloyed good. It’s assumed that happiness is everyone’s natural state, and if you’re unhappy you have a “disorder” and have to take medication for it. What is "assumed" is generally a crock of shit, which is one of the themes I keep returning to in this blog.
 

 

Personally, I have always walked through life feeling like an accident. Due to the helpful information conveyed by my much-older siblings, I know I wasn’t planned, and am pretty sure my mother wanted an abortion. My father talked her out of it by saying, “You wait and see, he’ll be a genius, smarter than all the others added together.”  I’ve felt like a sharecropper here on earth, in this reality, which is why I try so fervently to transcend it with music, with writing, any way I can.



And yet, the Great God Accomplishment still looks down on me, shakes his hoary head and says with a tender smile, "No."

 

Our lives are supposed to be a priceless gift from God and all that, even if we feel like shit a lot of the time. Pain is the norm for an awful lot of people, and endurance their only choice. Even though I’m not supposed to because it makes me codependent, I DO live for other people. I live because I have this idea – I need to think it’s true – that if I died, a few people would feel it. Not many; perilously few. But those few matter immensely to me, and I don’t want to inflict pain on them. I have done enough of that already.

 

 

Gangnam Girl in SLOW MOTION

We're not sure if this is Gangnam Style or Swan Lake. For some reason those cats at Gifninja messed up the speed. But it's my first attempt at a gif and at least IT MOVES!

Ecce homo revisited

 

It's a long and winding road from Ecce Homo to Poppin' Fresh.

Jesus Christ! There he is again!

After posting about the "restoration" of that Jesus painting, the one that became a worldwide sensation and led to a boom in tourism as well as numerous lawsuits, I got to thinking. I got to thinking about one of those things. I got to thinking about one of those things I haven't thought about for a long, long time.

What do you call those, you know? - those images, usually religious, but not always religious, and there's two of them and they flash back and forth? I mean, two images that appear on the same, what, thingie, not paper or cardboard like a photo but a sort of plastic thing. It's like a photo with a double image, except it's not. What's the NAME of those things, if they have a name?

It's hard to find them now, but as a kid they were ubiquitous and represented an extremely refined form of technology. You could even get a ring with Jesus on the cross flashing back and forth with the Last Supper. The material was sort of - how do I describe it? Thick and plastic-y, sort of rough with little lines running across it. It had a weird texture. The last time I saw any of these was 15 years ago in a little Quebec town called St. Anne de Beaupre, a place with a beautiful cathedral which vibrated with everyday mysticism. The gift store had mostly tacky things in it, but I still have a hand-carved wooden pendant of a descending dove which only cost about $2.

Maybe this is all that's left of that Crackerjack-box miracle of my childhood: images of Jesus that sort-of move, usually in a wiggly or jerky way. You can't wear them like a ring, and most people think of them as pretty ridiculous.

Cynical though I may be, and I am plenty cynical sometimes, some part of me has never let go of the dizzying wonder of the Nazarene. He is a mystery I cannot begin to fathom. Attempts to debunk or mock or make-look-stupid are too easy. Jesus represents the awful vulnerability we all share at the core. Jesus bids us shine with a pure, clear light.

Jesus may have not so much walked on water as hopped, or maybe slid if the water was frozen. But never mind the manner of locomotion. What disturbs me about this one is how he suddenly disappears, just as I am starting to warm up to him. Too true.

 

This one reminds me of my last migraine: you just think it's never going to end.

 

 

Something about this one, though. . . It's supposed to be a gif and rippling away, but so far it isn't doing very much. But this Jesus is nice-looking and has tender, compelling eyes. They look blue and that isn't very likely, but we'll forgive that. I might sit down and talk to this Jesus if he were only real.

 

Was there a Jesus after all, or did we just wish or will him into being? A thousand layers of pretentiousness, cruelty, fear, false worship, hypocrisy, suffocating ritual, sexual abuse and shameful coverup, and all those things that sicken me unto my soul, have covered the truth over, and over, and over, encapsulating it as if it were a disease, and obscuring what may or may not have been there to begin with.  A vast civilization has been built up, a massive edifice founded on a possible myth, a good story that we are pretty sure never even happened.

CHRIST! Look what they've done to this painting!

 

 





‘Good deed’ by rogue restoration pensioner ruins 19th-century Spanish fresco

 

 

 

Masterpiece no more: the alterations to Elias Garcia Martinez's Ecce Homo were made by an elderly Spanish woman trying to do a good deed.

 

Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) was a prized Spanish fresco — the pride of the Sanctuary of Mercy Church in Borja, near Zaragoza, where it has delighted parishioners for more than 100 years.

But after a botched restoration attempt by a well-meaning DIY pensioner, Elias Garcia Martinez’s 19th-century masterpiece looks more like a child’s finger-painting.

The unauthorized alterations were made by a Spanish woman in her 80s who had apparently grown upset over the worsening state of the painting.

The leftmost image is how the painting looked two years ago; the middle image is how it looked in July, when it was photographed for a catalogue of regional religious art. The image on right is how it looked on Aug. 6, when the Centro de Estudios Borjanos, a local cultural organisation, went to check on it after receiving a donation for its restoration.

A spokesman from the Centre said: “The value of the original work was not very high but it was more of a sentimental value.” It was painted by Elias Garcia Martinez who is the father of two well known local artists and the family had made a donation towards its preservation.

“The lady, who is in her 80s, acted without authorisation from anyone.

“The church is always open because many people visit and although there is a guard, no one realised what the old woman was doing until she had finished,” the spokesman said.

The woman contacted Juan Maria Ojeda, the city councillor in charge of cultural affairs, after recognizing her error. Ojeda says that art historians are now discussing if the painting can be saved.
“I think she had good intentions. Next week she will meet with a repairer and explain what kind of materials she used,” Mr Ojeda said. ”If we can’t fix it, we will probably cover the wall with a photo of the painting.”



Blogger's note. HEY! How about covering it with wallpaper? Any kind would do, even Hello Kitty or those freaky dolls from Monster High.

I now feel a whole lot better about my own non-existent artistic skills.

But I will say this: it's the most unusual iconic depiction of Jesus I've ever seen, beating even those burnt-grilled-cheese varieties that sell on eBay for a zillion dollars.

I kept looking at this face, and it dern-toonderin'-well reminded me of something, or someone, but at first I just couldn't figure out what.

 

Surely Jesus resembles, if ever so vaguely, Alice the Goon from the old Popeye series.

No?

Alice just isn't brown and smeary enough. How about a botched gingerbread man?

There's a small resemblance about the mouth, but it's not quite smooshy enough.

 

 

Chocolate chip? I think there must be a special stamp for these things. This one has a delightful Shroud of Turin aspect, but it doesn't quite match Mr. Ecce.

 

 

 

Flip and tilt him, and he looks alarmingly like Bob Dylan in his Self Portrait days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's weird how many resemblances you spot when you stare at this monstrosity long enough Such as. . .

 

 

 

 

 

"I am not an animal! I am just a bad restoration!"

 

 

 

 

Scary.

 

 

But what's this? It's Homo Erectus! His hair (fur?) doesn't quite cqpture the Inuit-fur-hood-with-chin-strap-effect, and to tell you the truth I think he's more evolved than Cookie Face with the smarmed mouth. But still. . .

Ecce Homo Erectus? I think it might fly.

Noel: music and images for Christmas

 

 

Whom we call Mary, will we ever know?

We have turned the girl bearing down in a freezing barn

hiding her bastard child in terror of death

to someone carved of soap, made cloud or heaven.

Poor Mary. We have robbed you of you.

 

 

 

 

This edifice, this war! This junkyard of faith!

Like molten lead in water

this phosphorescent upflash

of livid flame

 

 

 

 

 

We have this idea we're married to

that men came,

three, though we don't know that,

that they had money and power, though we don't know that,

That they knelt and adored

but we don't know that either

the story has hung itself around us

like crepe paper

 

 

 

 

 

This is Jesus, though hidden.

Jesu ben Yusef

circumcized, a Jew.

We cannot look at him, do not look upon him,

You will burn your eyes.

We know no good has ever come from Nazareth.

 

 

 

 

This is what we find on the sidewalk

Don't go there   don't go outside

Go inside the church and stay there

 

 

 

 

 

 

Portal: walk along the street

where Jesus was, where Jesus was.

Who was Jesus, what, an idea?

A reigning prince, a pretender?
I think he was a dream

a wish, a desire, a scramble for meaning

in the small square hole of our lives.

 

 

 

 

 

For all that, there lives a desperate sort of grace

and we must reach for it

or not go on.

Stay out of our church, go in this one,

be run out of that one,

find the True Church, the one true religion

 inside your own brain.

 

 

 

 

 

For all that, there is this repeating, not endless, just seeming so,

for surely it will end

before we know it.

Will the end be the same,

faith or unfaith,

knowing or not knowing?

Why must hope be born again

at the very desolation of the year

and customs dragged out

dusted off

as if they make a difference to the world?

 

 

 

 

Like chess-pieces, we hold and handle

the smooth turquoise, the cracked cool finish

in a need to comprehend the vast mystery

in

the dailiness and boredom

 

the ascendance

the rhapsody of light

the scent of winter trees

sounds of owls

we live for this, die for it

this stubborn insistence of wonder

this god with a human heart

This one's for Matt: a Merry Very Crispness

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my friend Matt Paust, the Hemingway of the Henhouse (his name inspired by this rare photo of Ernest H. at the DayGlo Hotel in Ketchup, Idaho: I don't know how he kept all those cats away).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nah. . . it must be a fake.

This has to be the video of the week. Though it's a little hard to see, after falling down like bowling pins, all the cows immediately get up again, almost in unison. Herd animals, I guess. My question is: does the truck hit somebody at .12? SOMETHING gets in the way of the truck which swerves to avoid it, but is it a person? For a minute I thought it was a stray cow.