Here's Why

Buffalo inspires great lines

We’re in Vancouver now, resting up from a fun social time in Buffalo and Toronto.

So from my notes, here are some great lines I saw, heard or crafted myself while in Buffalo:

“Free Money
Godlike Power
Instant Gratification!”
(alas it was only advertising an Xbox Cheat Guide)

“That would be Just Plain Hookery!”
In discussion with Jeff at Fudruckers, was the topic of sex-only relationships. The question arose of whether you would have dinner with your sex-buddy afterwards.
This phrase has since been extended to any and every analogous situation.

Its not the size of the sacrifice that matters; its what you do with it!

Work That Monkey!

I won’t go there, but when you do, you can bring me back souvenirs.

Only You Can Prevent Cerebrocryotosis!

“Its not lying; its a Gift For Fiction”
(from Brain Donors)

We Suck At Mornings

“Tool Chix”

“You Too, Can Prevent Thud!”

‘You think I run around saving things like a woman?”

“Life in Buffalo is never dull, at least you didn’t win a fruitcake”

“HOME-RUN!!!!!!!!”

That’s like walking around trying to assemble furniture without tools

Blog This

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And finally we saw Senator Karen Mosen Brown interviewed on the Daily Show by Jon Stewart, where she came out of the closet on her science fiction fan minority status and thus attracted political pressure that resulted in her dropping out of the Illinois Democratic nominations. She almost got away with “Fear is the Mind Killer” from Frank Herbert’s DUNE but then she said “Live Long and Prosper” while making the vulcan hand sign and gave her secret away.
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I know, I know, putting a ‘buy from Amazon” link in my blog -
that’s just plain hookery!

Potatoes in socks

I just spoke to my parents in Australia, and the news on TV about Toronto is that someone from a Jewish charity is on the frozen streets of Toronto distributing hot potatoes in socks to save the homeless from freezing to death.

Of course its true.

Its called the Potato Tikun Olan Program of Ve’ahavta, the Canadian Jewish Humanitarian and Relief Committee.

The originator Iris Halbert is a student at the University of Toronto who read Russian history - that the peasants have put hot potatoes in their pants to keep warm for centuries. She realized that Canadian peasants could survive the same way, and have sustenance when the potatoes cool down after fthree hours in a pocket, or five hours in a sleeping bag.

Good mind-altering drugs, but no ventilation in winter in the Northern Hemisphere

This is Day Nineteen of winter wonderland, and the air in every house and car is filled with little hairs and fluff that start me coughing up a lung, and the occasional stomach lining. There is no ventilation in winter in the Northern Hemisphere. With the Super-Senses afforded to me by the curse of hyperacuity of my sense of touch, I can count every dog hair and fabric fragment as it hits my lungs going in, and sometimes out.

Hyperacuity is experiencing the removal of the normal filters that remove noise from the signals your brain porcesses from your raw senses. Its usually caused by psychotropic drugs, hypnotic states, or brain inflammation. I’ve opened the Doors Of Perception, as Huxley called this, with meditation in the past, but sadly its inflammation thats cursed me at random times in the past 12 months, and the Doors are open so wide that I can’t get them shut to get some sleep.

I’ve visited a Canadian 24-hour clinic, so I’ve been able to compare standards of medical care with my Australian experience. The 90 minute wait wasn’t bad for a Monday lunchtime in winter. My Canadian doctor was only able to handle one symptom for the visit, and his objective was to eliminate life-threatening pneumonia as a diagnosis, as quickly as possible and get me out of there so more desperate souls could receive his aid. I’m embarressing everyone with the secondary stomach problem that was caused by literally gut-wrenching, convulsive coughing on my return to the house in Toronto. My responsibility is to hope quietly that it will heal on its own. I would have been able to get an Australian doctor to at least check out the tender points, and get a baseline on whether I’ve done myself an injury in an already troubled region.

I have full travel insurance, so I can pay for proper medical care, but that doesn’t matter. Emergency rooms at hospitals are for life-threatened people only, anyone else will be resented as betraying their civil duties, and be justly punished by unpleasant day-long waits. I’m not dying yet. This I have had explained to me, and this I understand.

I’ve also had explained to me that the Docs in the Clinic are understaffed and over-worked, and I’ve seen this. I’m told that Canadian residents do have access to doctors who could actually treat you like a person instead of a symptom, but that these doctors don’t see people unless there’s a guaranteed commitment to a long-term relationship. Sort of like an arranged marriage.

I should have stayed in Buffalo, and tried out what the US medical system would make of a guy who isn’t dying, but can pay to see a doctor. I was certainly in a culture where I was welcome to express my distress, without people dismissing me as a drama queen. I made a bad decision. In my defence, I had all the signs of recovery until I hit the indoor air pollution. I felt like I was trying to breathe the atmosphere of a different planet and failing miserably. Not on Pluto anymore.

Deep exhaustion and oxygen-deprivation caused brain fog, and my ability to think narrowed sharply. Between gasps and full-body spasms, I was still able to clearly express myself in short, witty sentences, to a group of people who had no idea I’d been feverishly ill for four days already. After attempts to solve my oxygen problem with air cleaning machines, postural changes, and drinks of water, I was no longer able to think of a remedy for myself, and only wished for death to hurry up, already.

So I expressed blunt doubts about my survival, and someone was able to suggest stepping outside into the cold night air to escape the indoor air pollution. I wiped my running nose, coughed up the other lung, and put my jumper, snow-boots, jacket, scarf, gloves and touk (to stop my ears freezing), and ventured outsite. I was feeling very foolish I hadn’t thought of this traditional Canadian respiratory infection remedy for myself. I risked being told once again how upside-down and topsy-turvey my Australian expectations are.

There is a ray of light from out of this cloud of misery and snow. I’ve been exposed to vaso-dilators. Much later in the evening when all the people with cars who could drive me to a Clinic had gone home, secure in the knowledge that I only needed a quick trip out into the cold but clean night air to be able to sleep; I was offered a hit of ventolin for my tortured lungs to help me survive the night. It affected my brain a very good way. Back in High School, I remember seeing non-asthmatic kids in high school getting high from ventolin puffs.

This is what happened: I heard a loud dizzying, ringing noise, and then my mind cleared.

This is wholly remarkable to someone who has suffered clouding of the brain by severe CFS or Fibromyalgia. To someone like me, who has suffered frequent attacks of mild aphasia and complete confusion, this is like going from reading by the light of a randomly flickering LED clock, to switching on the room lights. Result!

Two weeks ago I was reading the patient’s gloss of Dr Jay Goldstein’s “Betrayal By The Brain” about his clinical research into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia. He talks about there being brain systems going wrong that are helped by vaso-constricting drugs, and other brain system problems that are helped by vaso-dilators. A bronchial-dilator like ventolin is a vasodilator. I took my prescription bronchitis inhalor tonight, and I didn’t experience the ringing in the ears, or get quite so quick an effect. However, what an effect! Not only does it help control my coughing and wheezing, but I’ve just written a book review, and a rather sizeable blog entry. I’ve only been prescribed a two week supply. My memory problems seem to remain unhelped, but my concentration and articulation are improved. Memory may simply take longer treatment.

I’ll be reading Goldstein’s book to see what else he suggests for people who respond the way I have, and planning to get some vasodilation drugs that work a little more long-term on my return to Sydney.

coalescent

I’m a Sydney-sider in Canada in winter for the first time, and I developed bronchitis five days ago. So take that into account. On the one hand I have the time to read while I rest, and I want to escape into an interesting story. On the other hand my body and my environment feel miserable.

“Coalescent” by Stephen Baxter is my current science fiction read. I’m on page 360 of 470, but its sat unread for a whole week. It was a reluctant read the week before that.

The chapters alternate with Regina, a girl in ancient Roman Britain from the fall of the Roman Empire about sixteen hundred years ago, and with her descendant, George, in the modern day.

Baxter has lovingly filled in the details of ancient Roman Britain, and he gives an impressive vision of how modern and civilized the Roman Empire was, and how quickly the foundations of a civilised system can just go away. Regina goes from incident to incident as she grows up, including time with a historiaclly plausible King Arthur, all throw away history to justify the Society she secretly sets up to make sure her family survives the fall of civilisation.

The chapters with the modern world were much less interesting, and in fact I was constantly annoyed by the formulaic manner in which the central character shows no interest at all in the alien artefact discovered in the outer regions of the solar system, unless forced to by outside events. I don’t like George at all, he’s a boring character. This is the first book in a series called “Destiny’s Children”, and I’m not sure I’ll care enough to find out what his inevitable connection to the alien artefact will be.

Its page 360 of 470, the Coalescents are a nice idea, but you have to DO something with them! Or else George and the others have to be interesting enough to draw me in so that I’m patient enough to plough through the next books and find out what on Earth the point of all this is.

Sometimes, writers will conclude a story so brilliantly, that you change the way you see all the characters and events that you’ve experienced, and you feel the difficult journey was justified. Perhaps I’m being unfair to post something this early, but with the doom-laden words “Destiny’s Children Book One” as the sub-title on the cover, I have little faith.

OK, I finally read the last 110 pages, and Baxter does finally do something with the Coalescents. He takes you into the far future and shows you what the Coalescents are really about and where they’re going. Its an interesting vignette, and then he zooms back to the present, which is boring again. He leaves the alien artefact as pointless, and I think he misses part of his own point of the self-pepetuation of large complex memetic systems with the way he ends the book with Peter and the Slan(t)ers.

So he does redeem his central itheme of the Coalescents and use them, but it wasn’t enough for me to want to go on and read the rest of the series. I found better escape while I was ill in the graphics novels “The Books of Magic” by Neil Gainman, which chronicle Timothy Hunter’s initiation as a wizard, written more than a decade before Harry Potterism.