March 11, 2003
I recently completed a year of medical treatment in a second attempt to refurbish my liver. I find myself not so interested in whether the treatment took, whether I achieved the coyly designated “sustained viral response” (the medical profession’s fear of the word cure is interesting) and more interested in the tidal surge of life returning to my body. My first encounter with the chemotherapy-like treatment of interferon, which you inject and supplement with red corpuscle murdering pills called ribavirin, was defined by my fixation on whether or not I could achieve a “cure” of the underlying condition. It seems unlikely that I have succeeded as the result of either of my year-long efforts (bloodwork reveals conflicting evidence that will clarify prognosis as the medication clears from my system; harried specialists console one with the highly untechnical sounding concept that one’s liver has been given a “rest”) but this seems surprisingly secondary. What I am focused on is saliva. Skin secreting sebum. Hair regrowth. A conviction that one has the newly acquired capacity to sense cells manufacturing energy in a time-lapse dance of excruciating pleasure. Muscles craving exertion. Appetite. Memory rescinding its intimacy with the contours of nausea. Even the occasional capacity to shape and articulate a thought, to read a paragraph. All of these phenomena were absent during the liver make-over. I am now luxuriating in a sort of Tourette’s syndrome of returned energy. I am not sure what to do with it all; my spouse looks nervous. Has a year’s absence of all physical energy been stored in some annex, some makeshift organ the body jerry-rigs in physical extremis? Is that storehouse of kinetic jubilation now being liberated into circuitry barely capable of containing the burden but, nevertheless circuitry shrieking with glee at the electricity burning up its pathways? It would seem so. I fear I may bark, yelp, dance, leap, commit acts of gross indecency I am so filled with the shock and pleasure of existing. The first indication of this great generosity of power returned appeared as moisture in the form of saliva. Let me say that saliva is a greatly underestimated substance. One of the side-effects of the treatment (documented in a neat little package with type so small and so demoralising in its content that I advise anyone tempted to read this mini-tome to bury the thing in the garbage immediately) is “dry mouth.” Now this term might strike one as an innocuous enough affliction and indeed it is not so difficult to endure. But the return of saliva, the flooding of the mouth with such sweet reassurance makes me feel compelled to kiss, eat, taste, drool, talk, and lick, to run my tongue around my mouth in an incessant appreciation of the body’s exquisite calibration.
Of course as the pleasure of these bodily functions fades into the knitting of daily life the problem of wanting more from that life returns. You feel better and a wet mouth is forgotten. When feeling ill the simplest of pleasures can fulfill one’s needs, the most mundane of tasks completed can feel like a grand accomplishment; fragility doesn’t only foster frequent irritability, along with it creeps in a tenderness and patience that I find is frequently absent from my hearty mode. Admittedly this softer, more compliant self may be the body’s endlessly calculating capacity to foster a future for itself: I’m so sweet, take care of me, but my compassion for humanity relished during the past year is fast being replaced with a ruthlesness and a rabid impatience to be done with all that is not essential. Neighboring the building that stores that year’s absent energy is the granary of a year that seems largely lost. So if I mow you down, yelping like a banshee and refuse to scrub the toilet bowl or wash the dishes, it’s because I’m currently attempting to live to the power of two and it may not be as alluring as Chatterton on his deathbed. Getting on with life is reassuringly vulgar.
Salivation, barking, yelping dancing leaping and committing acts of...could it be spring already?
maybe she has feiffer fever.
also, chatterton, i presume.
acts of gross indecency is maybe Spring or Bacchanalia.....but whats gross about indecency??
Spring? Perhaps, though clearly the month of the loins.
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On page /rachael:
March 10, 2003
Jean makes me want to smoke cigarettes. She makes me want to light the next one with the one I’m finishing. I haven’t really smoked consistently in seventeen years and it was never my biggest vice. But Jean could change all that. I see her twice a year at a mutual friends house. The house in question is a non-smoking residence (as is my own—depending on what you’re smoking) so we lurk in the kitchen with the window open and blow our second hand smoke out the crack. We sit on stools and talk to each other about our lives. About how winter kills us. How cooking saves us. About how our friends annual Robbie Burns night, where we always see each other, positioned in the calendar at the arse end of winter, drags us through this treacherous seasonal passage and girds our drooping loins for the onset of spring. Jean reminds me of why I took up smoking in the first place. At boarding school girls can be divided into two camps: the smokers and the non-smokers. Those that spend huge tracts of time in bathrooms with cans of ozone depleting deodorant gripped in their hands, behind the bicycle shed, sheltering under the cricket pavilion, negotiating the muddy paths of the nearby woods, all in order to have a smoke. I don’t know what the other camp does as I was never part of them. I suppose they went to the tuck shop, toasted white bread, chatted up boys, maybe even studied. But I was smoking. It takes a surprisingly long time to get the hang of smoking as any smoker will tell you. Hours of green gill inducing nausea on buses returning from away hockey matches, bathroom dizziness, head bobbing over the bowl, horizontal spins. All this was an initiation ceremony worth enduring for the pleasure of the company of women. A certain kind of woman. When I look at the smokers in my class, some of whom I am still close to, they are the ones still getting into trouble, still turning their lifes around in their hands looking for new surfaces, new shapes.
I know other smokers, but Jean is the one who instantly transports me back to this society that adopted a very specific ritual to denote it from all other lodges.
Lately I have been listening to Jean. When I hear her voice I want to run out and buy a pack of high tar smokes and gasp through them in quick succession. I want to brush my teeth, like I used to in school, and then light up in order to taste the tobacco better. Jean works as an interpreter at the United Nations. She has a voice that reassures one that all will be well with the world, and this in spite of the subject matter she is interpreting. She fulfills the requirements of her job with such grace, imagination and passion, converting the discourse of desiccated nations into an urgent poetry. If you listen to the Security Council hearings (my only concession to the impending war as I have couched my ostrich-like sloth in the convenient stance that I hate war-mongers, but I also hate the anti-war mongers: down with mongerers!) she is there telling you how important it is to talk. To sound the voice. Her Scots inflected speech can make you hear the time we are in. And it can convince you that whatever happens we must go on talking into the night, against the odds, channeling streams of sound into gummed up ears in the hope not of boring a passage to the brain, but simply because defeat is to lose one’s voice. To concede that we are rendered inarticulate is a fine admission, but silence is still a fair approximation of death.
All that smoking has only made her voice more beautiful.
rachael
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On page /rachael:
Mar 7, 2000
As I was circumnavigating the toilet bowl of the restaurant last night with a piece of paper towel wiping away the vomit from the latest bulimic assault it had endured, I wondered about the identity of the vomiter. It's part of the pleasure of being a hostess: spot the bulimic. I also wondered why I had been saved from this fate. I love to eat and I also love to fit into my tightest pants, the logical extension of this conundrum is to throw up your food. However, you're either a puker or you're not. To me it's just too radical, all that peralstisis in reverse. So I just prefer to oscillate between the two: eating a lot and then eating less/fitting into pants; ocassionaly the extremes are tempered by regular visits to the gym or during periods of interferon injections taken to ameliorate the ravages of hepatitis c on the liver. Interferon is probably the most effective diet drug you will find on the market (by prescription only and with the slight drawback of flu like symptoms, depression, suicidal ideation, hair loss, muscle wasting, dry skin, loss of libido, intestinal problems, fatigue and anemia.) I can't imagine puking several times a day is any better, but that's just me. On a lighter note: yes the loins never lie, was that not the first sweet smell of spring in Manhattan today? I smiled at people and they smiled back; such sweet pleasure this simple wave of delight at another passing soul. Guthrie, C and M's Chinese girl arrives in New York on March 29th. They asked me to be her godmother.
rachael
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On page /rachael:
Mar 5, 2000
Haven't been here for a while. Winter creates those numb interstitial bits. I like the display of abandoned garments on the railings on the south side of the street on Rivington between Norfolk and Suffolk. It changes regularly and I have no idea where it comes from or who takes advantage of it. Entertaining in a way that an installation could never be. I went to Asbury Park, New Jersey today; I'd like to know what happened there. It looks like it took far too much LSD. It's nearly 4am and there is a BBC voice floating out of NPR reassuring me that the opposite end of the spectrum to Asbury Park does exist somewhere on the planet. Or does it? Apparently we have forgotten how to nourish ourselves. The statisticians tell us that the number of obese people have caught up with the number of malnourished. Complicating the matter is that many of the obese are also malnourished. Have decided to approach Lent with seriousness in the year 2000, as an Irish Protestant I thought it might be fun to go the whole hog and besmirch myself with ash on Wednesday coming and give up something really fundamental, like liqour, again. It feels like it might be time for a little sackcloth and self-flaggelation. Ah, spring's sweet tremors toying with the loins.
rachael
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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I recently completed a year of medical treatment in a second attempt to refurbish my liver. I find myself not so interested in whether the treatment took, whether I achieved the coyly designated “sustained viral response” (the medical profession’s fear of the word cure is interesting) and more interested in the tidal surge of life returning to my body. My first encounter with the chemotherapy-like treatment of interferon, which you inject and supplement with red corpuscle murdering pills called ribavirin, was defined by my fixation on whether or not I could achieve a “cure” of the underlying condition. It seems unlikely that I have succeeded as the result of either of my year-long efforts (bloodwork reveals conflicting evidence that will clarify prognosis as the medication clears from my system; harried specialists console one with the highly untechnical sounding concept that one’s liver has been given a “rest”) but this seems surprisingly secondary. What I am focused on is saliva. Skin secreting sebum. Hair regrowth. A conviction that one has the newly acquired capacity to sense cells manufacturing energy in a time-lapse dance of excruciating pleasure. Muscles craving exertion. Appetite. Memory rescinding its intimacy with the contours of nausea. Even the occasional capacity to shape and articulate a thought, to read a paragraph. All of these phenomena were absent during the liver make-over. I am now luxuriating in a sort of Tourette’s syndrome of returned energy. I am not sure what to do with it all; my spouse looks nervous. Has a year’s absence of all physical energy been stored in some annex, some makeshift organ the body jerry-rigs in physical extremis? Is that storehouse of kinetic jubilation now being liberated into circuitry barely capable of containing the burden but, nevertheless circuitry shrieking with glee at the electricity burning up its pathways? It would seem so. I fear I may bark, yelp, dance, leap, commit acts of gross indecency I am so filled with the shock and pleasure of existing. The first indication of this great generosity of power returned appeared as moisture in the form of saliva. Let me say that saliva is a greatly underestimated substance. One of the side-effects of the treatment (documented in a neat little package with type so small and so demoralising in its content that I advise anyone tempted to read this mini-tome to bury the thing in the garbage immediately) is “dry mouth.” Now this term might strike one as an innocuous enough affliction and indeed it is not so difficult to endure. But the return of saliva, the flooding of the mouth with such sweet reassurance makes me feel compelled to kiss, eat, taste, drool, talk, and lick, to run my tongue around my mouth in an incessant appreciation of the body’s exquisite calibration.
Of course as the pleasure of these bodily functions fades into the knitting of daily life the problem of wanting more from that life returns. You feel better and a wet mouth is forgotten. When feeling ill the simplest of pleasures can fulfill one’s needs, the most mundane of tasks completed can feel like a grand accomplishment; fragility doesn’t only foster frequent irritability, along with it creeps in a tenderness and patience that I find is frequently absent from my hearty mode. Admittedly this softer, more compliant self may be the body’s endlessly calculating capacity to foster a future for itself: I’m so sweet, take care of me, but my compassion for humanity relished during the past year is fast being replaced with a ruthlesness and a rabid impatience to be done with all that is not essential. Neighboring the building that stores that year’s absent energy is the granary of a year that seems largely lost. So if I mow you down, yelping like a banshee and refuse to scrub the toilet bowl or wash the dishes, it’s because I’m currently attempting to live to the power of two and it may not be as alluring as Chatterton on his deathbed. Getting on with life is reassuringly vulgar.
- rachael 3-11-2003 7:18 pm
Salivation, barking, yelping dancing leaping and committing acts of...could it be spring already?
- bruno 3-11-2003 9:22 pm [add a comment]
maybe she has feiffer fever.
also, chatterton, i presume.
- dave 3-11-2003 9:54 pm [add a comment]
That's the one. Want to be my link slave? rachael
- anonymous (guest) 3-12-2003 4:38 pm [add a comment] [edit]
does that job have a good benefits package?
- dave 3-12-2003 8:31 pm [add a comment]
no, but you would get about 50 weeks vacation a year
- rachael 3-13-2003 5:24 pm [add a comment]
acts of gross indecency is maybe Spring or Bacchanalia.....but whats gross about indecency??
- Skinny 3-11-2003 10:44 pm [add a comment]
Spring? Perhaps, though clearly the month of the loins.
- steve 3-12-2003 3:20 am [add a comment]
[home] [settings] [music] [images] [image upload] [add user] [logout]
Web page search results (results for comment pages are below)
3 matches found for: loins
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On page /rachael:
March 10, 2003
Jean makes me want to smoke cigarettes. She makes me want to light the next one with the one I’m finishing. I haven’t really smoked consistently in seventeen years and it was never my biggest vice. But Jean could change all that. I see her twice a year at a mutual friends house. The house in question is a non-smoking residence (as is my own—depending on what you’re smoking) so we lurk in the kitchen with the window open and blow our second hand smoke out the crack. We sit on stools and talk to each other about our lives. About how winter kills us. How cooking saves us. About how our friends annual Robbie Burns night, where we always see each other, positioned in the calendar at the arse end of winter, drags us through this treacherous seasonal passage and girds our drooping loins for the onset of spring. Jean reminds me of why I took up smoking in the first place. At boarding school girls can be divided into two camps: the smokers and the non-smokers. Those that spend huge tracts of time in bathrooms with cans of ozone depleting deodorant gripped in their hands, behind the bicycle shed, sheltering under the cricket pavilion, negotiating the muddy paths of the nearby woods, all in order to have a smoke. I don’t know what the other camp does as I was never part of them. I suppose they went to the tuck shop, toasted white bread, chatted up boys, maybe even studied. But I was smoking. It takes a surprisingly long time to get the hang of smoking as any smoker will tell you. Hours of green gill inducing nausea on buses returning from away hockey matches, bathroom dizziness, head bobbing over the bowl, horizontal spins. All this was an initiation ceremony worth enduring for the pleasure of the company of women. A certain kind of woman. When I look at the smokers in my class, some of whom I am still close to, they are the ones still getting into trouble, still turning their lifes around in their hands looking for new surfaces, new shapes.
I know other smokers, but Jean is the one who instantly transports me back to this society that adopted a very specific ritual to denote it from all other lodges.
Lately I have been listening to Jean. When I hear her voice I want to run out and buy a pack of high tar smokes and gasp through them in quick succession. I want to brush my teeth, like I used to in school, and then light up in order to taste the tobacco better. Jean works as an interpreter at the United Nations. She has a voice that reassures one that all will be well with the world, and this in spite of the subject matter she is interpreting. She fulfills the requirements of her job with such grace, imagination and passion, converting the discourse of desiccated nations into an urgent poetry. If you listen to the Security Council hearings (my only concession to the impending war as I have couched my ostrich-like sloth in the convenient stance that I hate war-mongers, but I also hate the anti-war mongers: down with mongerers!) she is there telling you how important it is to talk. To sound the voice. Her Scots inflected speech can make you hear the time we are in. And it can convince you that whatever happens we must go on talking into the night, against the odds, channeling streams of sound into gummed up ears in the hope not of boring a passage to the brain, but simply because defeat is to lose one’s voice. To concede that we are rendered inarticulate is a fine admission, but silence is still a fair approximation of death.
All that smoking has only made her voice more beautiful.
rachael
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On page /rachael:
Mar 7, 2000
As I was circumnavigating the toilet bowl of the restaurant last night with a piece of paper towel wiping away the vomit from the latest bulimic assault it had endured, I wondered about the identity of the vomiter. It's part of the pleasure of being a hostess: spot the bulimic. I also wondered why I had been saved from this fate. I love to eat and I also love to fit into my tightest pants, the logical extension of this conundrum is to throw up your food. However, you're either a puker or you're not. To me it's just too radical, all that peralstisis in reverse. So I just prefer to oscillate between the two: eating a lot and then eating less/fitting into pants; ocassionaly the extremes are tempered by regular visits to the gym or during periods of interferon injections taken to ameliorate the ravages of hepatitis c on the liver. Interferon is probably the most effective diet drug you will find on the market (by prescription only and with the slight drawback of flu like symptoms, depression, suicidal ideation, hair loss, muscle wasting, dry skin, loss of libido, intestinal problems, fatigue and anemia.) I can't imagine puking several times a day is any better, but that's just me. On a lighter note: yes the loins never lie, was that not the first sweet smell of spring in Manhattan today? I smiled at people and they smiled back; such sweet pleasure this simple wave of delight at another passing soul. Guthrie, C and M's Chinese girl arrives in New York on March 29th. They asked me to be her godmother.
rachael
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On page /rachael:
Mar 5, 2000
Haven't been here for a while. Winter creates those numb interstitial bits. I like the display of abandoned garments on the railings on the south side of the street on Rivington between Norfolk and Suffolk. It changes regularly and I have no idea where it comes from or who takes advantage of it. Entertaining in a way that an installation could never be. I went to Asbury Park, New Jersey today; I'd like to know what happened there. It looks like it took far too much LSD. It's nearly 4am and there is a BBC voice floating out of NPR reassuring me that the opposite end of the spectrum to Asbury Park does exist somewhere on the planet. Or does it? Apparently we have forgotten how to nourish ourselves. The statisticians tell us that the number of obese people have caught up with the number of malnourished. Complicating the matter is that many of the obese are also malnourished. Have decided to approach Lent with seriousness in the year 2000, as an Irish Protestant I thought it might be fun to go the whole hog and besmirch myself with ash on Wednesday coming and give up something really fundamental, like liqour, again. It feels like it might be time for a little sackcloth and self-flaggelation. Ah, spring's sweet tremors toying with the loins.
rachael
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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- steve 3-12-2003 3:23 am [add a comment]
How transparent technology can render us! rachael
- anonymous (guest) 3-12-2003 4:39 pm [add a comment] [edit]