Itsy bitsy spider

All right this bastard is, as I write, chillin' downstairs in the sink next to the washer and dryer. My wife discovered him earlier today and still managed to do three loads of laundery. What a trooper!

Weezer for the rest of us

So...The other week, I woke up in the middle of the night and there was this sound like broken glass on top of my weez.

Wait...let me back up a bit.

I live in Massachusetts--a geographical location that is attempting to both kill my spirit, my sense of social responsibility, and my body, all at the same time. When it is not freezing, it is raining, or it is so sweltering hot that you feel like you're in Louisiana, and for good reason. The audoban sanctuary/wetland I've discovered is only two blocks from my house. It is a giant, shallow lake, filled with trees so that it is otherwise indestinguashable from a forest except that the ground is liquid and filled with pond scum. Furthermore, I may not know what I'm talking about, but entire branches of large trees are covered with spider webs (like from The Hobbit), and the other day, no shit, I saw a bear in my neighbor's yard. This is the second bear I've seen either on my property or on my neighbor's, and to make this clear, I live in city limits, on route 10, which is extraordinarilly busy, and filled with people who honk as they pass by my house for no good reason.

What I guess I'm getting at is that their is a mosquito factory two blocks from my house. I sleep with a mosquito net around my bed, my child sleeps with a mosquito net around his crib. This is what I like to call "nature." Now, I love nature, but nature does not much like me. Which is why I am allergic to ragweed, cat, dog, rat, and mouse dander, junipers, those weeds that look like wild wheat, and pretty much everything else. It's always better to ask, what am I not allergic to. I'm not allergic to medicine or mold. This is good, because I am now on A LOT of medicine.

So, back to the recent past. I call the health center because the sound of crunching glass at 4 in the morning really makes it hard to sleep and they tell me that they are very busy because it is allergy season and I will have to wait a week to see a doctor. Fine.

I suppose I should ellucidate on the allergies. In the morning, I have to wash out one of my eyes to get it open. People are constantly asking me whether I have pink eye. I get bloody noses from sneezing so much, which is, by the way, extraordinarilly fun at four in the morning when you're weez sounds like broken glass, one nostril is filled to the brim with snot, and the other has clotted only so much that the slightest blowing of the other nostril, or god help me a sneeze, is going to keep you up for the next half hour tending your blood, so you let the snotty nostril just drip, and like sleeping in the rain, you pray to God that you can get used to it so that you don't have to be awake for the sunrise. I take Zyrtec for this. It's prescription.

The problem, I've been told is two fold. First of all, Zyrtec takes a couple of weeks to really get into your system. Of course, you don't start taking Zyrtec in preparation for the upcoming hell of your allergy season, rather you take it on the first day...when you can't breathe. The other problem is that Spring came on with a vengeance here in the Mass-hole. No rain, just sun, and sun makes polin and polin is ugly. The ground was yellow with the shit. Actually, so kind of was the air. It was beautiful, if you could have looked at it from the point of view of a camera or something, but me, I kind of felt like the death star at the end of Star Wars, under attack by myriad of little fucking polin ships looking to send a photon torpedo straight up my intake port (my nose). Heinous, full on, no good heinous. And of course, since my new business is cutting stryofoam with a hot knife, it's probably not a good idea to work with the windows closed, and yet at the same time, because I then spray paint that styrofoam, I can't work on shit days, so I have to brave the allergies if I want money.

A skip immediately back to November when I quit smoking, and before that when I didn't have aesthma. I'd killed all the little finger like cyllia in my lungs, and being dead they could not be rallied to come back with an aesthmatic reaction. In other words, now that I've quit smoking, I now have aesthma. Hurrah! They don't tell you that in the TRUTH ads, now do they?

Anyway, enough back story. I call the health center, they give me an appointment in a week, my Zyrtec slowly starts to kick in and by the time I reach my doctor, student doctor Rose, I feel like I've made a full recovery pretty much. In any case, I'm really only feeling it at around 4 in the morning. The rest of the time I'm fine, like say...when the nurse takes my blood oxygen level and says, without prompt, "well, I've seen worse." Huh?

Yeah, so blow into this tube. I can't help but notice that I can only make the arrow go about half way up the scale. Must be some kind of mistake, I think. The nurse tells me to try it again. Well, no better. I sit down to wait for Rose and read an article by Nando about the whole Alive experience down in Uruguay. I can't figure out from the map that's drawn whether Nando, played in the movie by Ethan Hawke, and his buddies decided to go the wrong direction when they headed off across the Andes with only a bag of human skin and some coats made from stripped airplane cushions. Because, that's just the luck of the thing. Over the next range is civilization, and yet you head the wrong way and end up crossing hundreds of miles of mountains. I remember immediately the crash of the Whale Ship Essex in which the crew, fifty miles from Tahiti, went the wrong direction, and of the three boats that set off, only two made it, and of those two, half of the people had been eaten, including young Jim Coffin who drew the short straw, was shot by his best friend, and eaten by the rest of the rescue boat for dinner. Is going the wrong direction just a factor of cannibalism? Does it indicate the desire not to return to society, to just keep out there on the edge, eating one's fellow man.

Rose calls my name, puts a stethascope to my back tells me to breath in. Then she tells me again, but this time sternly. She thinks I'm half-assing it. She turns to me. "You're having an aesthma attack."

Hmmm...well that pretty much means that I've been having an aesthma attack non-stop for the past week or so, maybe a little longer. No wonder I wake up every morning feeling hung over. I've got the bends. But...aesthma attack...I feel fine.

So she puts me on this machine...a sort of techno hookah, and I inhale deeply the sweet sweet vapors of Flovent, or something like that. Seriously, it was pretty much crack, and I don't know if anybody reading this has ever done stimulants but if you have, you can imagine that the last place you'd want to do them would be a doctor's office where everything you do comes with a lag time of twenty minutes. The machine turns off. I jitter to myself waiting for someone else to come in. Twenty minutes later, Rose tells me that the machine had no effect on me. We're going to do another shot.

So, after two sessions of intensive care on the techno-hookah, I'm sent home. Crazy enough, I did manage to get to sleep that night. But not before taking my new drugs: a flovent inhaolor, Fluticasone nasal spray, Albuteral, Patanol eye drops, and some other pill that I'm to take while I'm waiting for my inhalor steroids to kick in. Oh yeah...and the zyrtec. Make way Avram and Drivler, for I am in the system.

Oh yeah, and a day later it started raining.

money money dollar bill, yo!

Final score ebay 3, Brian 6.

In other words, I sold 6 of the 9 things I wanted to sell on ebay. Bringing in a grand total of $123.64. Which you will notice is 2/3 of what I was shooting for. Still, sold 2/3, made 2/3--not bad for an experiment. I still can't figure out why the craters just won't sell, but hey...don't sell craters, I guess that's the lesson there. In any case, I feel confidant that with school work out of the way, or at least suppressed a bit, I can go into this full bore and make my $60 a day. Maybe even more as I figure out just what sells for what.

Plus, you know...beats working at BK with a master's degree...or maybe I could become a hack writer. I have this great story about Sigmund Freud was actually a vampire. Could be good, no?

I don't do Dick

So, Cheney had a fight with the NSA in which he wanted to record domestic phone conversations and emails. Hmmm...

Look, is that harrassment? I mean, not grounds for a senate investigation (motto: "Steroids in baseball? News to us."), but a real civil case of being harrassed by Dick Cheney? And if so, can I get a restraining order against Dick Cheney? Can we all? I mean, if the guy can't be within 200' of anyone he attempted to survey then wouldn't he kind of be forced to move to another country?

The same goes for General Stalin...er...what's his name...Hayden, right? Except, I guess who cares if that guy gets out of the country so long as his name becomes synonamous with treason. Oh, wait, no...he's just going before the senate. They'll probably just tell him that if he's ever head of the NSA again, that he shouldn't spy on Americans, and then some democrat senator will ask, "didn't you know it was wrong," and he'll say, "I was only following orders," a.k.a. the Nuremberg defense.

But there's good news. Evidentally, the NSA lawyers told Cheney that what he wanted to do was illegal. Good, NSA lawyers. I guess there is some fucking honor left in Washington! Also, Avian flu is pretty much been wiped out in Asia! One distraction down, how many more to go?