2009 07 24

Well. It's been a while. Lately, we've had the swine flu, sick sick sick. We're still packing and arranging and listing things that the border agents want to know about, but we're taking a lot longer than we'd hoped. And losing ten days to the bloody flu didn't help. Wish us luck, we need to be on the road mid-August.

Susan Boyle

I am disgusted with all of you. Susan Boyle is a perfectly ordinary-looking woman nearing fifty, a little overweight and with the colouring of someone who lives in a colder climate and maybe hasn't taken a lot of interest in her appearance. The fact that she can sing seems to astound. Why? Dame Joan Sutherland was no beauty, but no-one denies her ability to carry a tune. Your idea that only "beautiful" people can have talent is ridiculous - Maria Callas was considered if not beautiful at least interesting-looking and was one of the worst singers in opera, lousy technique and shrill high notes. Your idea of beauty is skewed and screwed - anorexic females with plastic tits and vacuous expressions and no discernable talent are more beautiful than someone like Emma Thompson who can make you believe in whatever character she is portraying? You'd rather watch Jessica Simpson simper than Glenda Jackson tear up the screen as Queen Elizabeth I? So, because Susan Boyle hasn't plucked her eyebrows you call her ugly and assume that she should be hiding herself from public view - and compound your shallow stupidity by assuming that her looks have anything to do with her talent. You want to see ugly? Look in the mirror. I'm ashamed of all of you.

2009 03 24

Well, here I am, sitting around my palatial accommodations, basking in the warmth of a beautiful cloud-free day, eating grapes and wondering how I am possibly going to spend the vast amounts of free time at my disposal. Then I wake up and discover that I'm really in Northern California freezing my ass off. I talked to the boss in Mexico (gracias, jefe), and Gary and I are going to drive back together, hopefully before mid-April. There is a lot to do to finish packing and sorting the moving truck, and it makes sense for us to travel back together - my Spanish is a lot better than his, which doesn't say much but would mean that we need to call bilingual friends a lot less. Besides, I'll have a road-trip about which to blog! I have to go back to sleep now.

2009 03 02

Well, here I am in rainy cold rainy grey rainy cold Northern California. I want to go home to Mexico! I go to see the quack today, to try to sort my meds and find some way to live with the drugs I need to take in order to live. Assuming the boat will float down the freeway ... LOL. Wish me luck. Please.

2009 02 22

I had a heart-attack almost two years ago, and have been taking a selection of chemicals to prevent a recurrence. They have been causing me some grief, especially pain in my joints and muscles, which is inconvenient, to say the least. Yes, it's better than the alternative, but I would really like to be out of pain for at least short periods each day. So, I have a new doctor, and I want to reassess the drugs that I take, and started doing some research.

I have come to the conclusion that we don't know what the hell we are doing.

Some combination of chemicals is discovered to relieve or reverse, say, high cholesterol. Unfortunately, these drugs not only sometimes do what they are intended to do, they also cause things: chest pain, headache, fatigue, dizziness, rash, nausea/vomiting, diarrhea, heartburn, increased transaminases, myalgia, cough, influenza, allergy, lens opacity, libido change, memory impairment, muscle weakness, neuropathy, paresthesia, taste disturbance, tremor, vertigo, anaphylaxis, angioedema, cholestatic jaundice, cirrhosis, cranial nerve dysfunction, dermatomyositis, erythema multiforme, ESR increase, fulminant hepatic necrosis, gynecomastia, hemolytic anemia, hepatitis, hepatoma, lupus erythematosus-like syndrome, myopathy, pancreatitis, peripheral nerve palsy, polymyalgia rheumatica, positive ANA, purpura, rhabdomyolysis, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, vasculitis, angioedema, cataracts, depression, dyspnea, eosinophilia, erectile dysfunction, facial paresis, hypersensitivity reaction, impaired extraocular muscle movement, impotence, leukopenia, malaise, memory loss, ophthalmoplegia, paresthesia, peripheral neuropathy, photosensitivity, psychic disturbance, skin discoloration, thrombocytopenia, thyroid dysfunction, toxic epidermal necrolysis, increased, transaminases and vomiting - in that order of occurrence.

How can a drug cause a virus like influenza?

And that is just the cholesterol drug I take, one of, I don't know, eleven or so. Each of the others has more or fewer 'adverse reactions' in its arsenal. And they work in combination, or fight one another, or affect the performance of one another, or play merry hell with one's liver, kidneys or heart. Some foods, notably grapefruit, cause unknown amplification or suppression of some drugs' actions. Anti-depression drugs cause ... depression. Asthma drugs cause ... bronchiospasm and difficulty breathing. One asthma drug causes high blood pressure, which I take another drug to lower. The drug I take to lower my pressure causes some other drug to do something else that causes some other drug to cause me to take a drug to combat the nausea that they all cause. Is this sounding rational to you?

I've come up with a list of drugs that I think do all the things that my current selection are supposed to do, and, according to a web-site designed to track these things, don't interfere with one another, I started a spreadsheet of the adverse reactions, and now am not sure that I should change any of them: I'm accustomed to the way I feel taking this set, and don't know if I'm interested in accommodating a new plethora of side-effects. The myalgia and arthralgia caused by this set are absent or way down the list on the new set, so it may be worth it. We'll see what my doctor has to say next week. Wish me luck.

2009 02 18

I'm a little worried about my reaction to this. On Saturday, three young men, one about 10, the other two more than 15 but less than 20, stood in the field next door and nattered at me in Spanish that I didn't understand. One of them finally said "fucking money give" and I told them to go away. I continued to work at the other side of the house. A little later, I caught them in the bodega, and they ran away. Once I realised that they were in the yard, I called the police, and the operator hung up on me without saying a further thing once I had explained my situation. Very reassuring. A little while after that, they came to the street side of the house and asked for water, which I declined to give them because I was getting more than a little fed up with their antics, and then they sat across the road and watched me water the plants. Monday, mid-morning, I was in the flat quietly working on my spreadsheet after I'd finished watering, and I saw two of them sneak across the pasillo towards the front door. I went downstairs and scared them as they were trying to jimmy the lock. I was pretty pissed off at this point. I had to go to town to shop, so I had a friend come and babysit the house while I was gone. When I got home, Enrique was here, and we talked about the situation, and he went to Ecuandureo and spoke to the police. Two officers came by later in the day and gave me a direct telephone number to the dispatcher in Ecuandureo, and have promised to add our street to their rounds.

I am not a believer in violence as an answer to problems. I don't think the first action of diplomacy/resolution should be to reach for a gun/nuclear warhead/army. I don't think that bored almost-adults should break into apparently empty houses for the hell of it. While shopping, I seriously considered buying a firearm.

I'm old-ish, fat, can't breathe and can't run. I'm not a muscle queen. I can't handle two Mexican farm-boys on my own, if they decided to get physical in response to my getting physical. Because they didn't know I was here, they ran away when I startled them, but who knows what will happen next time? From what Enrique found out through the grapevine (his innumerable relatives), these kids are supposedly known to the local gendarmes, but they can't do much, as the law prohibits holding minors in custody. So they arrest the little bastards and book 'em, Dan'o - and then have to release them. At this point, I don't give a damn about the sociological pressures or any of the other supposedly mitigating circumstances that led them to a 'life of crime'. What I care about is that I can't afford to replace anything that they might steal, I don't want to have to clean up the mess they are sure to leave, I don't want to have to live in an armoured enclosure and wonder what nasty surprise is waiting for me on the other side of my twelve-foot -high walls. After five years there, I won't live in the US again because of the official 'culture of fear' that permeates everything from airports to McD's, and I sure as hell don't want to live in a gated complex of terrified North-American expats here in Mexico. But I also resent this violation of the rules of good behaviour.

I fired a rifle once, from the back of a bouncing truck, on my uncle's farm, when I was short, which is sometime before I turned 13. I didn't hit the vermin we were trying to eliminate, my father took the gun away after I'd fired one shot, and that was the end of it. I think that the US National Rifle Association is a collection of nuts. I think that the ease with which people, especially in the US, reach for a firearm to settle disputes is disgraceful. Canada has more guns per capita than the US, and less annual firearm-related crime than Los Angeles on a bad day. (Yes, the entire country has fewer gun crimes in a year than LA on a bad day. Think about it.)

I'm appalled that I actually considered purchasing a firearm. I would probably shoot myself rather than the thieves. But the thought of blowing their knees away as a service to mankind was pretty tempting for awhile - it would be really trying to attempt to sneak over a fence in a wheelchair.

Bigotry is a double-sided affliction

I may be a cranky ranter, thank you Baggie, but I am an equal-opportunity curmudgeon. I'm also assuming that anyone who reads my blogs is not going to be a raving homophobic moron, so I don't think I'm running too great a risk of reinforcing silly stereotypes with this post. I try to be informed before I make decisions. I look at both (or all) sides of an issue and then make as informed a choice as possible. (It can drive boy-friends crazy.) A lot, I would even say a vast majority, of anti-gay writing (in all forms, but especially blogs) is based in fear, ignorance and lack of critical thinking. My Tribe is not immune from said sad disease, and the following, from a virtually anonymous comment section on a gay news site, illustrates my point:

Uniting for a “common” cause with heterosexuals who cannot possibly grasp what it’s like being us spells nothing but political SUICIDE! Oil and water do NOT mix(much like science and religion). I prefer it to be ZERO affiliation with the heteros. Simply put I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could toss a semi! LOL! They will always have a superiority attitude in dealing with us merely because they can crank out lots and lots of unwanted babies. For all of our gay “brothers” who pal around with these overactive breeder reactors maybe you should step back and ask yourself exactly what do you wish to accomplish? Your so called straight friends really don’t give a flying F**K about you, about us or(most importantly) about our civil rights movement!! All one needs to do is check out the list of donors to the Prop H8 campaign to confirm THAT! OH how I so SO wish that the names of the signers of that petition were put online! I think it would’ve been quite a eye OPENER for all these yuppie, artsy fartsy middle class homos to discover what many of their absolutely fabulous hetero friends really think of them and US in general. Ass kissing is SO simply pathetic! LMFAO!

This particular site requires that one put in a name and an e-mail address, but only the name one uses is visible to the general reader. This means that the moderators of the site would be able to contact a truly offensive person and/or provide said information to police, in the case of real extremists. It unfortunately doesn't add any personal responsibility to what is published, as one is not required to use one's real name. There are some very thoughtful posts, some of which even get written in real English with punctuation and everything. There are rants from The Enemy, people who read articles on gay-positive sites and then post virulent, offensive, or merely astoundingly uninformed opinions from their religious/right wing/outsider perspective. There are rants Against the Enemy, with which I have more sympathy but which sometimes come from the same mentality as the rants 'from' The Enemy. The quoted post is my first exposure to such stupidly blind bigotry from, I assume, a gay person.

I understand the feelings expressed but abhor the reverse prejudice. I saw ten minutes of some afternoon American talk show, LaToya or some such, in which the black hostess informed the general public that she "would never hire a white man, no matter how qualified he was for the job". I understand the feelings there, too. Unfortunately, both of these people, and undoubtedly many others, espouse truly revolting prejudice in the guise of repudiating prejudice, and without any irony or sense that they are just as bad as what they purport to be fighting.