January 20, 2004

• Good morning, good morning

  
  

  I woke up this morning dazed and confused.  I looked at my watch, it was 9:15.  For a moment I thought I had slept around the clock.  Then I remembered I’m in Alaska, it’s supposed to be sort of dark this time of day and year.  It seemed lighter at seven, when Kathy finally went to bed–her fibro has been hurting her something fierce lately, I guess the pain kept her up all night, again.  Anyway, I got out of bed, struggled into my hernia truss without getting anything important snagged in the straps or buckles, took a while to figure out how to get my long-handles straight–the problem was that everything was right-side out, except one of the legs.  Finally managed to get that on–even got all the buttons buttoned right.  I sometimes get my shirts buttoned wrong–Kathy says it makes me look cute and childlike.  I think it just makes me look like the village idiot.  (Sidenote–around these parts, the villages are so small and poor, they can’t afford a village idiot–everyone takes turns.  Same thing with town drunks,. especially in Talkeetna–the place has like a dozen bars and liquor stores and a population of 897.  But I digress.)

  
  

  I’m  still muddled, wondering if my  own fibro is getting worse.  Kathy has times she calls being in a fibro-fog, sort of like being drunk without the euphoria.  (Or the nausea or the hangover, thank god.)  Like the time we were grocery shopping, I kept steering her toward the back of the store for laundry detergent and every two minutes or so she’d ask me what we were going back there for.  Maybe the fibro has started to affect my mind, too.  If so, I guess I’m complete now–the damned disease  seems to have started at my feet, with bizarre and painful muscle spasms, worked up through my ankles and knees, then to my groin (ouch!) and into my hip joints, then skipped to my shoulders and down to my hands.  Or maybe it started in my neck and shoulder when I had that wierd office whiplash injury.  Anyway, now I hurt in places where some people don’t even have places.

  
  

  Then again, maybe it was the dream.  In it, I was back wandering around on the campus of my college, Shippensburg State University.  I saw a slimy ten foot tall monster building a 20-foot tall statue of himself–undoubtedly an NPD case.  I went into Old Main, hit the snack bar planning to get  a chocolate malt and a cherry grapefruit soda, didn’t get either one, since I don’t do that stuff anymore.  (Even in my dreams, I try to abstain from sugar and other dangerous drugs.) 

  
  

  Went down to the basement, saw a scientist aiming a kind of ray gun at a stack of rifles.  I asked him what he was doing, and the guns turned to knives and scalpels and he said there was a secret study out showing that improperly-sharpened scalpels were causing macular degeneration. He showed me pictures to demonstrate.  You don’t want to hear about the pictures.

  
  

  Then I noticed the corpses in the lab.  They were in big laundry carts, partly packed in ice. And they were moving.  The scientist had fixed them up with motors so the hands would wave.  Thwn he took me through this elaborate display full of things that looked like mutated  Day-glo muppets and cobwebs and fungi and many more parts of corpses.  They were moving, too.  I wondered where a small college got the money for such a large installation.  I was upset, too–I had been there before, and at that time, the muppets were their normal colors and there wre no corpse parts, moving or otherwise.

  
  

  Leaving the display, I confronted his assistant, an attractive Oriental woman, and walked out.  There were groups of students making competing protests on the campus, only their signs were scribbles.  I thought sure, they were idealistic now, but most of them would grow up to vote Republican.  The thought saddened me, and next I found myself having dinner with the in-laws from my third marriage.

  
  

  My mother-in-law was serving watermelon, only it had thick green fur where the red stuff was supposed to be.  Her husband was making fun of her.  I ate it.  It wasn’t bad.  They had a huge open pantry full of stuff like shriveled-up watermelons, and I was hoping they wouldn’t offer to give me any.

  
  

  That was around the time I woke up, dazed and confused.

  
  

  I’m feeling much better now, the coffee must be working.  I see I am making fuer misteaks.

  
  

   

  
  

   

  • 3:47 pm
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