Month: May 2009
Dream
Posted on May 23, 2009 in Dreams
I’m trying to find my way through a cemetery by reading the tombstones as I drive. Lynn and I end up in a Unitarian-Universalist meeting led by a rabbi who was hired by the minister to lock the doors and turn out the lights. At many points during the service, he stops to check a torn-out piece of yellow notepaper affixed to the frame of a glass door. At the end of the lecture, he pulls out several piles of books which he says will be helpful in our spiritual journey. There’s a stampede of hands for them and the only thing I manage to grab is a thickish text on how to study.
The lone tree and rigging in the mouth
Posted on May 23, 2009 in Body Language Dentition Hikes and Trails Photos
This is a photo ((If you want to see more, visit my photostream.)) I took on my last walk with Drake in the hills. This golden mesa kept attracting my attention but I couldn’t frame it with a wide-angle lense, so I stretched out my zoom to telephoto length. Even then, haze made the picture unpretty, so when I downloaded at home, I put it through an infrared and then a platinum effect plug-in to get the result that you see.
I’ve been quiet mostly because I went into a frenzy of shooting photos before I got a tooth extracted on Wednesday. I’m none too comfortable today — traditionally the most painful because you puff up and stretch the stitches to the breaking point.
Last night I got up the courage to look at what the periodontist had wreaked ((My Twitter friend Felicity said “You only just looked at it tonight? I would have checked it as soon as I got home.” I confess I am a coward and need to get used to the string being there.)) . There’s enough string stretching from tooth to gum to palate (ew!) in there to rig the Pilgrim or The Spirit of Dana Point. I imagine sailors tugging at the lines, changing the direction of the gums, with each pull producing a new, spasm.
This is usual for the third and fourth days, which I am in. Fortunately I was so nonplussed by the pain of the second day that I stopped taking vicodin at all, so I have a store ready to weather the next several hours of misery.
This ship is rounding the Horn. We’ll make the Golden Coast soon.
Where I Have Been
Posted on May 18, 2009 in Daily Life
I’ve been running around taking photos and videos in preparation for my being down for several days following a tooth extraction. Once I get all that uploading done, I’ll resume writing.
In the meantime, you can enjoy my work on Flickr. If you happen to be a member yourself, please feel free to add me as a contact.
Warholized
Posted on May 7, 2009 in Imagery
You know, I always hated the creep. [[Andy Warhol]] that is. Especially after the way he treated [[Edie Sedgwick]].
Swine Flu
Posted on May 1, 2009 in Swine Flu
For the past several days, I have been tweeting against the notion that we were on the verge of a [[pandemic]] on the scale of the 1918 epidemic that killed up to a quarter of the earth’s population at the time. I haven’t heard the rumor that Obama has been spraying an aerosol version of the virus at rock concerts yet, but there are whispers that this is all an attempt by the pharmaceutical companies to cash in on a panic or by the Obama administration to push through the nomination of [[Kathleen Sebelius]] as Health and Human Services Secretary.
As events unfold, I am more convinced that there won’t be a huge flu epidemic here in the USA, not because the potential hasn’t been there but because officials of the WHO and the CDC are being allowed to react to the problem as they are supposed to. A potential Class 5 hurricane of a virus has been spotted in Mexico and this time the government has prepared itself for it.
The name of the game is to keep the numbers down by closing schools when a case is reported and by educating the public. Smaller numbers mean, among other things, less of a strain on stockpiles of the antivirals that have been shown to affect the H1N1 virus. If in six months time, the Right is yelling even louder that this was an overreaction, then Sebelius and the CDC can declare a victory. The epidemic will have been averted.
