5) There's a box from Cologuard I'm supposed to return still sitting in my office. I keep moving it so it's in my way and I have to step over it to remind me to -- fill it -- and return it. To this point I haven't opened it.
I saw a meme intimating that there are two types of wipers: sitters and standers. And that each group is entirely unaware of the other's existence. As a former sitter, I can understand people get locked in their ways and stop using their imaginations to improve their lives. But having tried both methods, standing is clearly superior. At the very least, lift yourself into a half-squat so you get a good angle. I feel like I'd have to be a gymnast or yoga-master to contort my middle-aged back and arm to reach around behind myself while seated.
Usually, and this is often because I go a few times a day, I will shower after. At first, I liked to make sure my outside was thoroughly clean. It always seemed like toilet paper was just kind of a half-measure and never actually got it all and I was just fooling myself. Then I realized there was always just a little bit inside, too, so you had to soap up a fingertip and irrigate, and that made you feel fresh. Then I realized that the whole rectum often had residuals and that you could flush that stuff out with the shower head and an extended middle-finger. Eventually, I got to the point where I can navigate my whole arm through my intestines and back up my esophagus and wave at myself in the mirror with my hand sticking out of my mouth.
Ultimately, though, I realized that to be truly pure, I needed a method to avoid defecation completely. I started calculating the specific number of calories it takes me to survive and have trained my body through intense exercise to be a nuclear furnace which burns every morsel of food as I eat it, including fiber. I've reached an equilibrium where what I consume exactly equals what I need for energy. On average, I have a bowel movement once every six months now.
What can I say? I like being clean. You people disgust me.
***
4) Eleven weeks after triple-bypass surgery, and I'm still struggling. This third month has in some ways been more difficult than the second. Physically, I'm better. I can walk the walk I used to walk, my neighborhood walk I mean, forty-five minutes to an hour, up and down hills.
I tried jogging, but since I'm not allowed to do push-ups until my sternum fully heals, my softened pecs bounced and hurt and made me more understanding of the merits of a sports-bra. I can march up and down the stairs twelve times. But I still get a little winded. Not as much as when my blood pressure was low, 110/70. Then I'd get dizzy standing up.
Now my blood pressure is running high. First thing in the morning and last thing at night, it spikes to 140/95. Ish. Doctor is still tweaking my meds. The thing with blood pressure meds. "Hey, these meds may make you feel terrible, but at least they don't control your blood pressure." Am I right?
I get tired every afternoon and stumble to the couch for a half-hour coma. It's hard to wake up on time in the morning, and when I do, I don't feel like exercising. I'm eating right and avoiding salt, but I'm still slowly gaining weight. I make my own healthy turkey-sausages and bean-burgers and flax-seed chips. But I'm still fatigued. Too much so, all the time. I'm not horny for anything.
I haven't mentioned the worm yet. I first became aware of it in my teens. There's a thick, black worm that lives in my intestine, and it sucks all my energy. It wants me depressed. It likes when I sleep thirteen hours, so it can eat my life-force. I don't talk to the doctor about it, but it's a problem. Please don't say "Ivermectin" or "SSRI," those makes it bigger. Same with meditation. Anyway, it doesn't surprise me that after open heart surgery, the worm is having a gay old time in my gut, controlling my every thought and feeling! Opportunistic little shit.
Did you know they call the gut the "second brain?" It's really interesting, actually, 90% of the body's seratonin is produced and stored in the intestinal tract. Anyway, I'm supposed to be doubling my Carvedilol, but it makes me so tired. Who can live like this? It's either take the meds and not be able to function or not take the meds and walk straight into a stroke.
Bodies are frail and foolish and fragile, and if we're made in God's image, He's a fucked up, decrepit, falling-apart flesh-bag of bones, meat, blood, and pus. Why does He have skin-tags and hemorrhoids and sinuses, and why do I have to have them?
Even sexy people are disgusting, if you ask me. Even with their stunningly ignorant smiles, a stray clot away from vegetative.
***
3) Last night I had a fever and dreamed fitful dreams. I was seized by the gravity of the Darkness beyond measure of physicality and tumbled across the void for decades, gently, a journey on which I saw many things which changed my mind. Planetoids, echoes, burdens, multiplicities. Once I saw a feather of light become a sun. Once I saw a vast mouth die into itself. After the learning, I arrived, stretched thin and wound like a ribbon, to the central thought which animates the spark upon the wick. Through it I squirmed claustrophobically inside a soily burrow toward that dim light, unable to feel my limbs and unable to breathe. Every moment was the imminent collapse of external structure and internal frame. I was like an earthworm, my bones long since jellified, yearning to surface. Above me at the tunnel's opening, there came to gaze a grave eye, and she said to me to not stop now, because nature still had need of me. That I should join the willing mass in our natural purpose to eat the fruits of the land and make manure as we walk. And at once, cast high into the new sky like a geyser, I saw from the position of the vulture circling, far below, the factory of it, the churning miasma of naked pink flesh a million strong, making mewling noises, pressed up against one another as we march in endless circles, knee-deep in our own excrement. I accepted the evidence of my eyes and rested there a while in my fever like a cloud before I rained down on the green lands.
***
2) I'm not one to shit on my ex, but...
We ended up getting a cat and named it Doreen. My ex never adored her like I did. I think she was weirdly jealous of the cat's affection, as though Doreen was plotting to come between us. I'd try to be reassuring, but I guess in my ex's worldview it wasn't possible for someone to have the depth of feeling to love both a partner and a pet at the same time, that somehow my petting the cat diminished the love I had left available for my partner.
My ex was in charge of feeding, and I realized after some time that Doreen was always hungry and had gotten very frail. Doreen became a little aggressive at the table, and I took to feeding her myself when I got home from work. I asked my ex about this, and she said, "we can't afford to feed her twice a day." I told her we could do without ordering food delivery one night a week, and I started bringing home extra cans and bags of food.
A couple weeks later, Doreen, who was indoor/outdoor, went missing, which she had never done before. I was really worried, and my ex acted concerned as well. After a few days, I started to give up hope. But one night, I heard meowing and scratching at the back door. Doreen was dirty and starving and she had hitchhiker seeds stuck in her fur which took hours to pick out. She looked like she'd walked for miles. My ex was unexcited to see Doreen return and acted strangely nervous about it.
While I was at work the next month, my ex -- without telling me -- took Doreen to the vet and had her declawed. I was shocked when I came home, and all my ex would say was "she scratched me," even though she wouldn't show me where. When I became upset, she said Doreen was lucky to be declawed because she almost had her "depawed" and that she "knew a guy." For two weeks, I had to try to keep Doreen from jumping or climbing while she healed. One night, I found a printed diagram of feline skeletal anatomy among some papers. My ex had made a red circle around where the foot meets the tibia.
Anyway, Doreen and I now live in Florida. If anyone wants the name of my ex's employer...
***
1) One thing I don't talk about much is my grandmother. She was a serial killer.
Mom's relationship with her was strained. There are no photos. Once I got $5 in the mail from her for Christmas.
Her name was Lena Griggs, and she lived in an old white house in Choctaw for thirty years after our grandfather died. My parents took me to visit that house a couple times when I was little, but I don't remember anything about the woman, just a fence along a dirt road with grass growing up the center, and green blackberries, and a nest of yellowjackets.
So it came out in the 1980s that my grandmother had murdered several men. Out in that old country house, she'd take in laborers passing through looking for work at neighboring farms. Apparently, she used pesticide mixed into food, a little at a time. Buried their bodies near the crick - she would probably have had to chop them into pieces and use a wheelbarrow - and planted rows of beans over them.
One year there was a huge storm washed everything out. A fisherman spotted exposed bones up off the bank. They found four bodies. There might have been more. It was in all the papers. She was sick and died in jail before there could be a trial. She denied everything.
My grandmother was known to be a kind-hearted woman. There's a hobo sign, a cat, used to direct travelers toward a "kind-hearted woman," the sort of friendly old widow who might provide a meal. I think about that. And I wonder sometimes because I believe I am a kind person. But who knows what we're capable of.