*sigh* *cough* Well. Hello again. I hardly know how to begin, and gosh! I’m sure Inquiring Minds Want To Know…just how Boozilla is faring. SHE is fine. And waiting for breakfast.
1) I don’t know about you, Gentle Reader, but? Plaxico Burress getting two years in jail for shooting himself in the leg seems completely ridiculous. Someone can be chopping people up and storing them in their freezer undetected by their Parole Officer, but boy howdy. Shoot yourself in the foot/leg? You are in the cooler, you menace to society. Also, we’re looking at, what? $100,000 over that two year period for his incarceration for a victimless “crime”.
2) I’ve figured out the thing with health care and medicine in this country. Finally. Besides the fact that everyone is so risk averse they won’t even say if it’s day or night when they’re outside and it’s staring them in the face, there is also the fact that you, as the patient, are not presenting with a question to be answered. No, you are an item to be stuffed into the prevailing paradigm whether you fit or not. It’s just the way it is. No point getting upset about it, right? I’ve gone beyond ballistic, seeing as how I actually had to figure something out or watch someone live in total misery. And? I DID figure something out. Which given what I am attempting to do in my work, makes sense I suppose. Still, it was grueling and upsetting and infuriating. However, also a function of the fact that there appear to be just too many people to pay attention to. It’s a game of Russian Roulette, going to a doctor in these circumstances. If their favored best guess about you is in actual synch with you, you are lucky. If it isn’t, you stay sick, get worse, and…well. Good luck. The “clinical” model of having to get a huge amount of empirical (” “) evidence (” “) before arriving at a diagnosis (” “) has its’ strengths. Blood tests can be wonderful. But also, it has a lot of weaknesses. It removes the necessity of paying any real attention to the person in front of you. After all, you have to wait for the “test results”. So, the necessity of compassion, empathy, feeling what the other person is feeling, actually LOOKING at them? Not there. So medicine becomes a cut and dried process when in fact a good deal of it is STILL intuition and exploration. Not to mention perhaps a dash of common sense. Obviously, the best strategy for healing is an inclusive one. You do the tests AND you pay attention. You leave your prejudices at the door of your consulting room. Sure, people lie. Sure, people do things that are completely opposite to their best interests. But not everyone does that. There are alot of medical issues people have that are not, as the literature says, “well understood”. That doesn’t mean they are not real. It just means right now, our medicine people don’t understand them. And that’s all it means.
3) Tomatoes. Have, indeed saved my life.
Small bit of nature
You can see a few speckles on the lower right: Lovely yellow pear tomatoes. Right now, a slender thread between me and sanity, but a good one. Panzanella is quite sustaining, as it turns out. Cube up some french bread, day old is good but just moisten and warm first if it is hard. Finely chop red onion (about a half a good size onion for 1/3 loaf of french bread), chiffonade of two paws full of basil, I like some parsley too, then cut up tomatoes (three or four depending on size) (I like the watermelon shape slices in this). Mix all together, toss with red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. Divine. Even good left over. Lead me, as it says in the Upanishads, from the Unreal to the Real.
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