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Capital of Nasty Vol. 05 Issue 13
Capital of Nasty Electronic Magazine
Volume V, Issue 13, AD MM
Friday, October 27, 2000
ISSN 1482-0471
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"I'd also say that although the term is strictly female, no woman
could ever be as much a bitch as him. He's not even an asshole
really, but a bitch.
If he went to prison, you'd be able to drive a truck up his ass
after his first three days there."
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Like...Well [Leandro] was really good at organising a mass class
rebellion during the classes I taught. I heard he made one teacher
cry. He is a great leader (of leftist leaning antiestablishment
groups).
- Marty Timusk
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1. Editorial
2. Closing Time Bloody Closing Time
3. EuroTrash Diary
4. The Colour of Culture
5. Stress, diarrhoea and other stuff you shouldn't read about.
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This week's Golden Testicle award:
http://www.plif.com/archive/wc245.gif
"All their magic kingdoms are burning"
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1. Editorial
The issue's rather long, and since the general tone of editorials
seems to lower people's spirits to that of meagre slaves, this is
it.
I RUN REDHAT
Ron Chmara, writes:
Goatboy might do well to invent his own routines, not plagarize the
Travaglia BOFH series.
http://frolic.dhs.org/humor/bofh/
Goatboy admits his horrible crime for attempting to write a humorous
pastiche clearly based off the BOFH's original stories (hence why he
titled it "The Bastard Assistant Editor from Hell").
CoN actually ran some original BOFH stories last year with the
permission of the Bastard himself (You can check it out here on our
text archives:
http://www.disobey.com/text/capital_of_nasty/volume_iv/CoN17.txt).
Goatboy was duly arrested, processed and finally executed. His last
words were: "Just for the record, Simon's official BOFH site is this
one: http://bofh.ntk.net/Simon.html ... UGH!". He left many
scattered kids.
OUT FIGURE ANYONE CAN WHAT SAYING HE?
Eelco den Dunnen kicks my ass:
Leandro,
Been awhile, no?
So, where's the humor?
Well, let me *particularly long* flame it to you.
Me just had to react on the V.12 issue, since you blatantly invite
full-scale mediocrity into the CoN feed by complying to
> a request from contributors and some readers, we're
> going back into the Theme based issues of CoN. As usual, send in
> your suggestions (not that I am expecting any. Damn you all!
> Damn you all to hell!)
Two things seem appropriate here:
One, don't ever, ever, ever utter that you, in any way, will ever
conceive, let alone support, the notion of meeting any request
whatsoever from whoever. Makes assholes like me write (back). And
that's like inviting immigration officers to perform a preventive
anal search: you'll *always* get more then you bargained for (unless
you missed a much anticipated weekly sado-orgy at the Whip-'em-Till-
They-Blow club).
Two, *as usual* thanks for the damnation, but this is kicking in an
open door, right? Or does your pamphlet actually needs the rantfeed
from readers? (then this email may serve some purpose) If it's to do
with quality, don't bother asking: It better be send-in suggestions!
Reading the latest flood of CoNs, it's obviously not fill you're
short on. Moreover, one gets puzzeld by the word *contributors*, but
let's not stray on that path already. Or should we?
Right then. Let's examine your sorry Rant-contributor Jason
MacIsaac's "Being Misquoted" (Get it, J?). Better yet: let's not.
Me'll give you why. Because we're confined to Hell (which is, well,
the very bottem, right?) and frankly, you couldn't hit it more hard
rock-bottemed then this pulp, me reckons. To think that me was
master, me stand corrected: in this MacIsaac got the better (..er..
me mean worse) of me. OK, one for you, Leandro. The need for
contribution is definitely there. So much for the quotation lessons.
Who's next?
Goatboy.
Me'll get back on him soon. Me suspect him (or the likes of him) to
be working at my office as well.
Who then? Right, Jeff is on. Burry this bloke right where you dug
him up. Unbearable. Mov(i)e One: don't give off on the dumb majority
of FILM visitors. They make festivals possible (read: affordable)
for most dedicated followers of anti-Hollywood shite. Most people
still don't *get* 2001 A Space Odyssey neither, but without them you
wouldn't even know what film me was talking about. Embrace the vast
shitload of people on this planet, without the amount of these
mindless hordes of idiots there wouldn't be a place for the few
goodies. By the way: if something is "Needless to say", try not to
say (or write) it then. Stating what should be left out is actually
putting it in, sort of omissioning the omission. Just trust me on
this one.
Mov(i)e Two: damn laddy, are you goin' mental on us here? Believe
me, people catch your drift if you tell them that a theatre, made
for plays, makes a bad movie screening place, that's inherent to the
purpose of the bloody building! Quit babbling convert reasons like
"because it's big and looks fancy".
And then you do it yet again: First you please us in telling that
you won't discuss the dumbest aspect of any coverage, namely the
commentator's personal uncomfort, immediately followed by the
remarks that it will be dealt with in full later on. Really, fool,
nobody is interested is them. Not then, not later. Never!
Worse still, when you finally come to *a* point (e.g. the bleeding
FILM) you're not going to give us any plot synopsis, instead you
give us your rant about your personal opinions on the stars, your
irk, the audience and believe it or not the actual actors
playing...actors. I know it's confusing, but hey, you're the pundit
here, or what?
Skipped the rest of Jeff's FOURTEEN mov(i)es, it could only get more
"irky" from there on. Two-nil, Leandro. Confine Jeff to one key
only: the spacebar. Or just lose the bugger!
Rounding up here.
Bad news: you do need help, man. Badly.
Good news: by the looks of it, it can only get better.
Unsubcribingly mine,
Eelco den Dunnen (Below sealevel, ebb or flow)
http://edd.www.cistron.nl
-------------------------------------------
2. Closing Time Bloody Closing Time
By Will Torrens aka Reverend Martinez
The store was empty as I began locking up. Seeing that there were
tons of chocolate bars lying around, I took a few; no one would
know. Anyways, we lost pretty much everything when we got robbed by
Jojo the dog-faced boy earlier today. Holy lord, what a mess.
The jingle of the door chimes interrupted my reflection.
"Hey. Is it too late to get a Lotto 666 ticket?" My god a customer!
And my store in such a state...
"Not at all" I responded. Just then the telephone rang.
*brrrriinnngggg*
"Can I get that? I'm expecting a call" asked the gentleman. He
looked well dressed and responsible enough so I let him answer it.
"Carlito! Damn, how's the drug cartel, ese?" he said as he drifted
into conversation.
As I stuffed the last chocolate bar down my pants, a squeal of tires
screeched past the broken shambles that was my store. Walking
outside, I happened to see the screeching car ram into a telephone
pole. 3 disoriented teens got out the back of the car, stumbled
towards me and asked if they could use my bathroom to wash off the
blood of the deceased driver. I didn't see why not.
"Sure go ahead."
As I re-entered the store, the well-dressed chap had just hung up
the phone.
"It was for me" he said as I handed him his lottery ticket from the
tray. As he walked out, he was recognized by one of the teens who,
in a flash, whipped out a baseball bat and proceeded to pound the
lotto-man in the crotchal area. After the rest of them had joined in
and taken turns in the beating, they nabbed some chips and ran off.
I took the opportunity to search the gentleman near death.
Apparently, he was a tax collector on his way to (according to a
blood-stained memo) the residence of 4 tax-dodging teen delinquents
who, in an attempt to avoid him, had escaped in their car and run
into a telephone pole.
So naturally there would be hostile feelings on both sides.
I cleared my brain with an emergency tequila I kept behind the
counter and passed out. When I woke up the store was gone.
Goddamn that Jojo.
---
"The Rev. is a known recluse and operates out of his East York
basement. Many lonely hours howling at the moon and typing these
stories for CoN have ruined any kind of friendship with the
neighbours."
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3. EuroTrash Diary
BJ Sutton
It's been a strange year so far. The Xtian millenium passed in a
fog of abject pecuniary humiliation; I had churned out 60 paintings
for a group show and as a result I owed money all over the place.
So I made the great intellectual leap forward most artists are
familiar with, and decided I had to find A Job that would pay for
this bad habit of painting in the months to come. I made a few more
begging phonecalls, dug the ancient work clothes out of a box, and
spent my
last francs on a train to Geneva. I have a Swiss passport and can
work there. Here in France I don't even have a dog license but they
let me stay, an exotic ornament of my village.
When I first got there I thrust myself on the mercy of The State,
hoping perhaps to avoid any actual labouring, but while they were
helpful and even came up with a wodge of cash, I could see that this
approach wasn't going to solve anything in the long term. So I made
the rounds of the employment agencies, looking for lucrative
temporary placement for a couple of months or so.
I have to say I have a very weird CV. I wasn't always an artist; I
came back to this after about 10 years of a Respectable Career which
I dumped in favour of poverty, debt, and a wardrobe of shabby,
paint-stained vestments. So when I began the groveling process, I
got a lot of confused feedback: You did what? And now you do what?
And you want to do WHAT? My main, my only advantage, is that I have
been using computers since year N, and was hoping to find work of
any kind on the basis of being able to feel my way around a lot of
machinery.
Anyhow, just when I was beginning to panic, I got a call from a
helpful lady at Manpower. She said, I think I might have found
something, and she gave me a name and an address. So I put on a
Suit and tottered down to the Swiss Permanent Mission to the UN,
where I met with a swiss ambassador and a guy from the Danish
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They seemed to like me, and the next
day (whilst idling on a street corner debating whether or not to
start panhandling, have mercy Leo) my cell phone went off and lo, I
got the job.
So for about six months I worked with a small team of mixed nuts,
coordinating the (breathe deeply) Special Session of the United
Nations General Assembly on the Implementation of the Outcome of the
World Summit for Social Development and Further Initiatives (held in
Copenhagen in 1995). The Swiss government's contribution to this
circus was a six-day event called the Geneva 2000 Forum, "The Next
Step in Social Development". Within that Forum I organised an
International Symposium, somewhat ungrammatically entitled
"Partnerships for Social Development in a Globalising World".
(Aside: For those of you who might not know this, Geneva is the
Euro HQ for the UN and HQ to many of its agencies, like the ILO and
the ever-popular WTO. This was, however, the first time the General
Assembly ever met outside of New York, and as a result the Swiss
were all a-twitter.)
I was shown to an airless office and told to get on with it. I
didn't know who anyone was or what they were doing. The ambassador,
my boss, informed me he didn't know anything about social
development, organising symposia, or anything remotely relevant to
the job. Well, this looked encouraging. I did, however, have some
experience in these things in a Past Life, which is why I suppose
they hired me. So I started to make phone calls, write letters,
pester people, do lunches, network, make plans.
When the word started to get around I found myself at a sort of
nexus of desire: these high-level, public events are like food and
drink for professional talking heads, dozens of whom suddenly wanted
a seat on a panel so they could deliver their views to the promising
cyclopean eye of the TV cameras. Thus many important people
shimmered into my radar screen and attracted my disdain.
Ambassadors begged for favours, Heads of Agencies pled for a
platform. Journalists, activists, academics, staffers, and toadies
sought me out. I was ruthless, mirthless, deadly, and took none of
it in the least bit seriously.
When the last week of June finally rolled around and all this shit
hit the fan, I was having a ball. I got to bark at people on the
phone with impunity. I got to crawl through the bowels of the
Conference Centre with some very serious-looking security guys from
the Secretary General's office. I got to issue ultimatums to the
host broadcaster. I delegated most of the shit work to a team of
logistical people so I could sneak away and drink coffee with other
staff members and some interesting new pals. I could ask for a
chauffered car if I wanted one and started using those to go to the
lake and drink beers, work on my tan. They gave me a free cell
phone with WAP that I used to send menacing text messages to
unsuspecting friends (this phone deal actually backfired a couple of
times when, after finishing a 15-hour day I'd be drinking wine and
smoking controlled substances and the bugger would ring at eleven
pee em and there would be the Chief of Staff of Someone Important
and I would have to act like I knew what the fuck was going on).
Still, not bad for someone who spends her real life painting large,
unmarketable canvases of sexy chili peppers and androgynes with very
small feet.
There was a social side, too. I was invited to attend many
receptions and functions at the Palais des Nations and posh hotels;
at a few of these, Prime Ministers, diplomats and Special
Representatives, wrongly assuming that illusory power could somehow
transform their fatuous features, tried to get into my trousers over
warmish glasses of bad swiss wine. I heard the party line from
wildly diverse action groups, altruists, and self-aggrandisers
around mouthfuls of tiny toasted snacks. By the time the week was
up, millions of swiss francs had been spent on food, wine, ice
sculptures, fireworks, and cultural events to celebrate a conference
on, primarily, the Eradication of Poverty.
I love the UN. Anyhow, that's what I've been doing. I made it
through the minefield of Things That Can Go Wrong and it all went
off beautifully. When it was over, I came home again to my leaky
cabin, debts paid and another gallery show to prepare (which will of
course deplete any capital I have accumulated). Cognitive
dissonance, or maybe just a reality check: one week I'm sipping
champagne with Heads of State, discussing issues of supranational
import, the next swilling beer with vignerons in the local bar and
nodding understandingly about Sugar Content in Grapes. Back to
chaste anonymity in la France Perdu. An occasional thank-you letter
finds its way here, an occasional email from someone I worked with.
But aside from that, it sorta feels like it never happened.
---
BJ Sutton is not a French name. I'm originally from Detroit, the
true Capital of Nasty.
-------------------------------------------
4. The Color of Culture
By Kunal Ganguly
On a scale of one to ten on the skin color scale, one being "dying
of AIDS" or "I can see your veins" white and ten being "smile.. I
can't see you in the dark" dark I rate a six. I am an Indian, Asian
not American and all people from my part of the world have a similar
skin tone as me. Does that mean that my people and me are inferior
in any way to the lighter skinned people? No, inferiority cannot be
gauged on the color of skin. For the people who do, they make their
inferences and other incorrect assumptions on ignorance, apathy and
misinformation.
I like to tell people that in my country a majority of the people
are born with much lighter skin than me, and the harsh sun makes all
of us dark. A fact that would be proved if I were to take off my
clothes and show people the extreme damage done to my skin on my
face and arms - the parts of my body exposed to the sun. That
statement confuses most people of lighter skin here in America.
Most white Americans assume that all lesser developed nations have
dark skinned people and in more advanced countries, like the United
States, people are white. Another discriminatory assumption is that
all the colored people living in these developed nations are an
offshoot of politics and immigration laws.
Of course, assuming that all Americans think this way would be false
too, but unfortunately the majority of the populace of white America
seems to be afflicted by this disease of complete and utter
ignorance. The more knowledgeable therefore open-minded people of
America, a very small group, get badly overshadowed by the former -
sometimes even influenced by them.
I sometimes extract malicious fun from my ignorant American friends.
I tell them that in my country we don't have electricity, telephones
or computers and that we ride elephants to work (the elephants have
built in fare meters). Building on that, I tell them that the
autocratic government changes many times a year and that I am
actually the heir to the throne of my kingdom and had to flee to
America because they poisoned my pet purple canary, which signifies
that all the members of the my family will soon be jailed, unfairly
tried and put to the guillotine.
After 10 minutes of similar nonsense to my new and dumb white
American friend, he or she usually figures out that I am being
mendacious. But the look on their faces while I say this stuff to
them is priceless. The look on their face is akin to the pitiful
look on a parent's face when they see a young child (not their own)
struggling to get their heads unstuck from some big and dangerous
household appliance.
My fellow brown brethren might extract a sense of sad but knowing
amusement from this article, but at the same time a realization of
what is wrong with white America becomes clear if in any way they
had any misconceptions about the amount of knowledge about the rest
of the world a typical white American harbors. Indians (from Asia,
not the `original Americans') and natives of other countries come to
America expecting the American world-view to be open-minded and
friendly, but alas, that misconception fades as quickly as the smile
on a parent's face when they see their nice all-American white
daughter holding hands with a brown-skinned foreigner.
A white girl I became involved with said she would never be able to
have me meet with her parents because they would probably be
horrified at the very prospect of the brown skin cells from my hands
depositing under her fingernails, let alone think of any emotional
involvement between the two of us. I stopped seeing her in disgust.
It was not her fault - it was what is wrong with white America in
general.
Most white people tend to have sympathy for the darker lot, they act
as if they understand how hard in must be living in a country where
killings are commonplace and watching your sister getting raped by
religious terrorists from the next village is a once-every-2-weeks
event. I usually don't bother to correct them that these ideas,
propagated by the western media, are completely wrong.
That's one of the problems with western media - they tend to show
only the negative side of the story. But who can blame them, that's
news ethos the world over. People like to read and watch only the
bad things that happen in the world and the media complies in
earnest. Most of the news reports that come out of Asia are the ones
that deal with the worst of human behavior; therefore if one is
ignorant about that country then he or she will automatically
generalize rest of the people in that country as the same. Everyone
likes to think in generalities, the world becomes a lot less
complicated. But when these generalities are applied to the
different human races, things become quite offensive.
When CNN Headline News guest anchor David Goodnow carried a story of
a teenage couple in India being killed in response to religious
tension between two tribal communities, an American friend asked me
whether all teenagers in India are killed if they have any sort of
relationship before marriage. Teenagers in India have all sorts of
relationships, and face the same problems like most American
teenagers. The exception being that Indian women usually do not
pregnant until after marriage.
Offensive stereotyping of `different' a.k.a. foreign people can be
seen in popular entertainment too. For years Apu from "The Simpsons"
(along with his accent by white actor Hank Azaria) defined America's
image of many people from South Asia. British comedians Jasper
Carrot and Rowan Atkinson are known for their frequent comic
imitations of the way most South Asians talk, their lifestyle and
their, albeit sometimes funny, reaction to a western environment.
For years, it's been an ongoing joke among South Asian comedians and
leaders that no real-life urban emergency room resembles NBC's hit
show "E.R.". The sets of the popular show never have a single South
Asian medical staff in sight.
A light-hearted statistic conducted by a popular Asian entertainment
weekly showed that Asian-Americans could comprehend over 20 percent
of the medical terminology and acronyms used on "E.R.", while the
average American lauded himself by understanding less than 5
percent. This statistic did not include medical professionals.
After seeing a show on India on the Discovery Channel an American
girl told me that she believed all Indian men were warlike and their
women wore big headdresses and had their hands painted in weird
designs all year round. In my home country, the only Indian men who
are warlike are the ones enlisted in the army and the women dress
like that only once in their lives - when they get married.
When India conducted its nuclear tests in 1998, all news broadcasts
across America carried reports on concerns regarding the physical
safety of the nuclear weapons production plants - a concern that
exists even with the (supposedly non-functional) nuclear weapons
plants in America. While chatting on the Internet, soon after that
world-changing event, I was asked by a concerned American female of
unknown age (possibly a teenager or early twenties) as to when would
India drop the bomb on the damn Iraqis. When I told her I had no
idea about the ICBM (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile) technology
that India has, she causally commented that someone could just drive
over to Iraq and detonate the bomb - she thought Iraq was just north
of India.
It might be worthwhile to add that although she had no clue what
ICBM meant, she did a pretty good job of deducing that it has
something to do with launching a weapon across long distances. That
gem of knowledge dawned on her after I described in detail what the
words `Inter-continental' and `Ballistic' meant. Realizing I was
chatting with the future of America here, I pressed her for her
opinion on nuclear weapons. She said they were a good idea. After
all, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ("u know, those
f**king jap joints") did stop World War I ("the first big f**king
war, when those f**king nazis did some stupid sh*t"). I was too
amused to correct her. But to her credit, she got some things right.
While enjoying some pizza at Pizza hut, a former army captain,
sitting across from me and some of my Indian friends, announced that
if it were not for America, we (I assume he includes India, and the
rest of Asia) would still be hunting and gathering for a living. I
really did not want to waste my time telling him that advanced
Indian civilizations can be traced to over five thousand years ago
while American culture is only a few centuries old. He said that we
were sucking this country dry by taking all the high paying jobs
such as doctors and technical staff. Again, I looked at him and
decided not to tell him that over ninety percent of South Asian
students return to their respective countries to pursue a career
related to their major.
Negative media stereotyping of Asian countries and their culture is
true in reverse too, most people in my country believe that all
Americans do in their spare time is take drugs and have sex with a
multitude of partners - male or female. In their working hours,
white Americans work respectable jobs at law firms and banks while
black people just shoot each other. Shows like COPS, Jerry
Springer, and the media frenzy over the Clinton scandal and the
Columbine massacre do little to portray America to the outside world
for the country that it is. MTV, which is aired to almost half the
globe, is also largely responsible for giving a lot of non-Americans
(and some Americans) the idea that Americans have very few
inhibitions, which may directly translate to morals for some.
When Americans compare their living standard to the rest of the
world, it is not very hard to understand why they may feel sympathy
and a deep feeling of superiority. The average American's energy use
is equivalent to the consumption of two Japanese, six Mexicans,
thirteen Chinese, thirty-two Indians, one hundred and forty
Bangladeshis, two hundred and eighty four Tanzanians, and three
hundred and seventy two Ethiopians.
Americans live well when compared to developing nations. Although
Americans comprise only five percent of the world's population, they
use 25 percent of the world's resources and produce more trash and
pollution than citizens of most other nations.
My Residence Advisor at the dorms last semester used to talk to non-
Americans very slowly. He believed that most international students
find speaking and understanding English hard, true, but if you are
an international student who can speak perfect English the
experience can be extremely infuriating. Not knowing English
automatically makes you a savage - universal rule of white man.
Somehow, that statement makes me want to do something violent - like
grabbing the nearest leafy plant, screaming at the sky while waving
my hands (the leaves of the plant evenly distributed to both hands
and green dribble running down my fingers for shock value), every
now and then looking at the nearest person and saying things in a
strange alien tongue and spitting after every two or three words. An
important part of this fantasy is choking some poor white fellow to
near death and then claiming it was part of my ritualistic cultural
right to do so.
If you are white and have come to this paragraph without dismissing
this article as just another piece of misdirected misanthropic
literature, please, the next time you see a dark-skinned foreigner
greet him the way you would a fellow human, treat him the way you
would a fellow human, share with him the way you would with a fellow
human, laugh with him you would with a fellow human. Your opinion of
him is yours and yours alone but at least avoid being branded a
racist by careful people just like you by keeping any racial slurs
you might have learnt from your peers to yourself. We are just like
you - the same anatomical specifications that makes humans human,
just a different shell.
Lastly, if you are a single attractive white female looking for a
man who is committed, faithful, non-beer-guzzling, not a couch
potato, no major psychological problems, does not think his car is
most likely faster than the next one and therefore needs to be
tested immediately: regardless of the fact that it is a school zone,
has not practiced promiscuity (i.e. not slept with more women than
fingers - hands and legs), does not have any venereal diseases, and
most importantly - firmly believes that women are not objects and
capable of infinite orgasms, I am available.
---
Kunal Ganguly feels very much like he's from Canada. Nobody
believes them when they say that they don't live in Igloos.
-------------------------------------------
5. Stress, diarrhoea and other stuff you shouldn't read about.
By Jeff Coleman
Oh baby, I'm high on Tylenol 3s. Mmmmmmm. Very OK. Feeling horny
even. Yummy!
Seems like the late nights, Advil popping for my back pain (I'd
taken my sons to Florida for Disney World and carried the youngest
on my shoulders pinching my sciatic nerve), the tonnage of wine, a
wee impotence, lack of exercise, overwork, and numerous other
stresses (you can imagine!) all contributed to put a big hole in my
upper intestine. It exposed a capillary and well, anyway I was
bleeding but not really paying much attention to my stool (uhm, are
we talking about my chair?). I mean, who gets down on their hands
and knees and examines their shit??? Sorry, but I don't. Well,
Sunday I basically had an anxiety attack. I was freaking. You know,
going back into the class room... and I'd been reviewing student
evaluations for the first time and some of them were really awful
("From 1 to 10 how would you rate the teacher?": 1 -- yes, they came
from four of the worst students, two who I failed but I really put a
lot of work into giving them what I felt was GOLD).
The Old Fort William Game CD-ROM programming project was going badly
and I'd lost a lot of time during the holidays making simple repairs
(instead of programming the major components). The project
management, design and programming was all on my shoulders.
Programming it was quite complex (and I had lost the programmer who
was assisting me). For maybe the second time in my programming life
I realized I'd bitten off more than I could chew (I had the
capability just not the bodies nor the time to finish it).
Despite my anxiety, I decided to continue working and eat some
pizza. MMMMmmmmmm. Yeah, like lactose-intolerance was the least of
my problems. So about two or three AM I'm groaning and kicking
myself (but sometimes I can eat a lot of pizza and nooooo
problemos). Any who, I'm groaning and moaning and trying to get all
the sympathy I can and suddenly the pain goes way beyond a foolish
cramp. Stop reading because it gets worse. I suddenly feel as though
I'm dying. Not exactly a bad idea I was thinking but the pain is
bad. I can't move and my body breaks out in a series of these cold
sweats. It lasts too long for anything routine like the flu (which
maybe visits once a year).
This is new, and bad. After minutes, hours? it goes away and I go
the bathroom. Out comes a bucket'o'black stuff. It's over in
seconds. It comes out too quickly and I feel light-headed. Again,
more cold sweats while I'm relieving myself. This is not, you'll
excuse me, diarrhea. This is completely new. Black tar is the best
way to describe it. So I try and tell the world, go back to bed and
in the morning I repeat this. Jools (my wife) suggests the hospital
but I'm telling her that I'm the boss, etc., and in the morning
while she's getting her hair cut I continue my insanity. When she
returns I offer her a look (not that I want to, but a part of me is
freaking out) and then I'm off to emergency whether I like it or
not. She's furious and I'm beginning to clue in the possibility that
I'm NOT immortal. Hey wait, you mean, this is serious? In emergency
I try apologizing for her -- "You see, doctor, she's a nurse and
thinks I have an ulcer or something!" I blather on about possible
haemorrhoids (which I don't have) and lactose intolerance as the
correct diagnosis! until, that is, I have to go again! The doctor
insists on taking a look (ewwww! NO WAY) but this time I've got to
in a special big, plastic basin. I fight the process but even the
nurses are willing to punch me in the face. It's all stupid until I
get up and realize I've just filled this plastic thingy with old
blood. O H B O Y. I move out slowly and I'm no longer the smart-
ass. I ask the Doctor his take. Suddenly I'm on a gurney and being
RUSHED upstairs.
Hmmmmm. They used this cool black scope and went down my throat to
watch my guts on colour television. They made the mistake of letting
me see it before going in and I swear it looked like something from
Alien. Had a kind of organic quality to it and appeared multi-
jointed (she carried it heavy, come to think of it, like it was a
section of MY intestine -- like you'd carry a garden hose, all
coiled up and dripping). Using the same scope (it was equipped to do
a host of things) they injected the area to stop the bleeding and I
think tried to cauterize the area as well. I was awake for this but
I'd been given a heavy dose of IV Valium not only relaxing me but
made me quite forgetful. I DO remember it wearing off in the hallway
some three or four hours later as I'm farting blood. This sounds so
gross and it was soooooo embarrassing. Damnit, I told you to stop
reading!
I spent most of my time in ICU with a Mr. McFarland. He was a good
roomy because he kept quiet and read lots of Arthur Conan Doyle (a
short story anthology -- must have been heavy on his legs) and Clive
Cussler. The only time he weirded me out was when he chewed and I
swear it sounded like he had two sets of teeth. We didn't get much
sleep because my blood pressure was too weak and they thought maybe
he needed a pace maker so both our monitors kept going off and we
kept waking each other up. I began to suspect toward the end it was
all about breathing, something I was never able to prove. I just
wished each of us had our own tone (you know, a sound that made our
monitors unique) and then we could have slept better instead of
wondering which of us was having the heart attack. I knew I'd
watched too much teevee when air bubbles started creeping around my
IV tube (where they'd injected the Zantac) and, you see, I tried
telling the nurse. But she just tut-tutted me. Finally, I freaked. I
hadn't been paying attention and this this HUGE bubble started
moving toward my arm and I was slapping it and waving my wrist like
I had a spider on me, causing Mr. McFarland to choke a little on his
Turkey dinner. The nurse patted my arm like I was a child and told
me "The whole tube would have to be filled with air to do you any
harm!" Had she seen the same programs I had?! I wondered. Mr.
McFarland ate with his back to me from then on. But I didn't relax
until I heard the same story from two or three of the nurses. I'm
almost ashamed to say this now, but I wrote my wife a secret message
giving her the details of my paranoia! Only I can't find it now. Not
sure what that means ...
Well, my hemoglobin dropped to 91 -- a lot less than what I'm
suppose to have, which I'm told is suppose to be about 140-- about
33% of my blood volume.
Doctor says that if I start bleeding again I could die. The feeling
of dying is terrible -- horrifying. It's bad mojo, it's pain, and
it's overwhelming nausea. It is the horror, the knowledge that what
is happening to you is so serious, that either the knowing, the
pain, or some chemical released by either immobilizes your body. As
you break over one mountain of pain your body soaks the bed and
everything with WATER. Not sweat but water from every pore. You
continue to climb a series of mountains of pain and somehow,
eventually, it stops (and I remember gasping in relief). That I
couldn't move (literally could not move) meant for me that life was
withdrawing from me. And as stupid as this is going to sound
that's really cool.
Well, now I'm taking Losec to close the hole and Tylenol 3s.
It's dizzying and it makes me ... well, horny... but it's better
than the headaches I seem to wake up with.
---
Jeff Coleman enjoys spanking young cheer-leaders while he's not busy
writing his novel. You can read other parts of his novel at
www.digeum.com
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