I'm out of the hospital, back at home. Broke etc.
I seem to have signed the rest of my life over to some health-care enforcement agency called RISARC. Or maybe not. I didn't read much of the fine print they handed me, along with a memorized spiel they get mean if you interrupt before they finish (because it's the law), I didn't see much choice in signing or not, so I did.
I did a bunch of pain meds while I was in there, morphine of course, but I tapered off that on my own, which I thought was a good thing to accomplish considering the awfulness and hopelessness of my spot - and Norco, which I never heard of til last week was more effective then morphine at actually stopping the pain of the fracture/surgery. Morphine made me feel better but the Norco, which is I guess just twice-stronger Vicodin, stopped the pain.
I self-weaned off that too, tapering until the last night when I had a little party of two at a time every four hours, as I was getting most angst-ridden and grim about what was to come.
I've got Vicodin by the handful now but I'm sticking to one or two at most a day for now.
I do enjoy the opiate calm and that pleasant sense it brings, of rightness in all things, but I have to make some hard decisions that are coming as clearly as I can make them.
-
Morphine visions:-
A pyramid made out of blocks of California hill landscape, golden dry grass and scrub-oak, manzanita etc... alive and growing but geometrically laid out with indented lines all through it like the real ones.
A vortex made from parquet wooden tiles, so what I saw was a really large basketball gym floor, and a smooth curved lip, an oval about 40 feet by 20 feet wide that led down to an unseen darkness, tiled all the way in T&G with that waxed brilliance of gym floors.
I kept seeing these little holes, which later I thought might be my body reporting on the screws that were in there, plus Doctor King, the surgeon, said he drilled for a lag screw but it didn't take. So there may be a hole down there. I don't know.
I watched way too much TV these last two weeks, but I'm grateful for the enlightening presence at one point of Joel Osteen and the Dalai Lama on Larry King's CNN talk show.
King mumbled a couple of times how much he respected the D.L. but he never really apologized for the technical glitches that made the conversation seem alien and incompetent on the D.L.'s part.
After each question, the Dalai Lama stared at the camera for way long, then sometimes seemed to be replying to something else then stopping. Then dead air. Way too much dead air.
In contrast Osteen was superbly telegenic.
It was another mage-battle, and the forces of darkness own the studios and all the transmission equipment.
Osteen reminds me of so many rich kids I've known, innocent and full in the way they inhabit their lives and their worlds, but they can't let themselves see how circumscribed those worlds are, how limited to the safe and controllable their input has been all their lives.
The debutante in Richmond in 1853.
They see the rightness, the fitness of their triumph, their position, their privilege, and anything that falls to that must be inferior. The falling being all the proof you need as to their inferiority.
It isn't racism anymore, it's "loserism".
Compassion is a lapdog in that house, yapping and running around, but small and ornamental, a pet.
The D.L. spoke, in the context of speaking about the Katrina/aftermath, the word "suffering" with the most psychedelically profound emphasis I have ever heard a human being use outside a peyote circle.
It made my hair stand up.
There were all these un-understood bits from King to the D.L. and King just let them sit, then expressed his impatience and cut to Osteen, who appeared to be beating the D.L. without even competing with him. Except for once at the beginning, in a clear message of Christian separation from anything Tibetan Buddhism has to give the world, Osteen never even related to the D.L.'s presence with him on the show.
Two women were allowed to ask questions of the D.L., one in that smarmy neurotic voice of opportunism announcing to the televised millions that she herself was a reincarnate 12th century Lama, the other a more sophisticated but artificial set-up question about meditation as something to be done on top of charity and acts of mercy.
All in all it was a total takedown for fundamentalist Christianity. And Larry King was right in there, making it happen.
Like I say, he never apologized, never spoke directly to the consistent tech problems, so the numb-brains and the minor league demon-lovers all saw their power transcending.
Osteen was his usual self, brilliant, glowing, filled with a loving spirit, but as shallow as a fruit basket.
It's very hard to tell people who worship only what gives them what they want anything, especially anything they don't want to hear, unless you have what they want.
But given even Zizek's smart prattling about pantheism and animalism and buddhism, and his neo-Marxist post-theoretical embrace of Christianity, and the general embrace of fundamentalism by nearly everyone in the forefront of Media America, I think it's a little bizarre that King threw Osteen and the D.L. together.
-
Later there was a news story about protestors at Hong Kong Disney. It had images of these huge bars, like on a bull paddock, and these tiny little dark-haired partial faces peaking through. Then images of neat and clean Disney amusements.
The news-person said the protestors had "set up shop" outside Disney's new theme park.
-
Later Mike Leavitt, the Secretary of H&HS, compared the devastation in New Orleans to the Yellowstone Fire - the awfulness slowly replaced with shoots of green and a gradual rebirth of the cycles of life.
I'm sure he meant well. Probably he feels that it is a comforting thing to say.
It is in some ways. It's just that you need to get the Darwin-O-Meter out.
Some of us see the benign complicity of "God's Will" and studied neglect in the New Orleans event.
Not gas chambers so much as predictable inevitable vortices of removal.
When the plagues come, it won't be much different. The elect will survive in greater number than the undeserving, and this is the way it should be, in Joel Osteen's world, and in many people's.
Not in mine.
Resist evil.
