A word about health. MY health.

 Think I’m afraid of something called 19? Guess again.



Sorry. Not afraid of this thing. Have I been vaccinated? Yes. Over the years, many times. DPT, Polio, Small Pox, Typhoid, and a couple tetanus boosters due to rusty nails and such. I have not lived a risk free life. Never got a flu shot, never got the flu. Haven’t been to a doctor for illness in my adult life, only stitches (14 by last count). Haven’t been hospitalized since the age of three, when they took my tonsils out and lied to me about an ice cream reward in exchange for the ether trip. Apple sauce was all I got. I’m 68. Ever since, I have had this rule, not a superstition but a rule. Stay away from the medical system. Once they get you, they got you. They got my grandparents, all four of whom died in the Salem Hospital where I was born and expect one day to die myself. They got both my parents, though my dad escaped partially; having been born at the Salem Hospital, he did not die there but on a fancy motorized bed borrowed from the Salem Hospital. He had a whole bunch of morphine too. They called it lung cancer. I called it, “They finally caught up with you, the medical system.”

Many times my wife and I have made a joke about the constant television ads showing happy people taking polysyllabic drugs while the streaming chyron warns of side effects including everything from drowsy eyeball to sudden drop-dead-itis. I understand when the drug being peddled is for psoriasis (fate worse than death) or advanced forms of facial cancer (sentence of death cruelly withheld by fate), and of course, Restless Leg Syndrome.

So. I’m at a loss during this new federal government invasion into my life or what remains of it. I don’t want to hurt any of you out there. Actually, I rarely go out amongst you all, maybe once a week. I wear a mask for three minutes each time, when I buy cigarettes in Delaware from a mask-wearing buddy whose faces we haven’t seen each other of in a whole year. I wear the mask because he has to. None of the other customers is “wearing,” if I may coin a term. It’s good manners on my part, learned in childhood from my mother. Same at the ATM. If anyone in line is “wearing,” I do too. If they’re not, we just do our usual thing of trying to strangle some cash from the machine.

Guess I’ve backed my way into my own health position and my own personal VAX rule. I will be “wearing” — when I am — only as a matter of strictly personal courtesy to you and other utter strangers whom I do not wish to offend. I’ve done the math most of you haven’t done or don’t know how to. The mortality rate of this thing is (to use an actual math term) “in the limit, approaching zero.” How so many of you can be so terrified has puzzled me from Day One of the initial Pandemic Panic. As to the vaccine Trump moved heaven and earth to procure for us, bless his heart, I don’t need it, don’t want it, and won’t have it. This is not a political statement. It’s a longevity strategy. Mine. I will keep living as long as I can keep the damn doctors away from this old body. So keep your hands off.




Comments

Post a Comment

Readers also liked…

A Near-Perfect Microcosm of “The Swamp”

Image
Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny. There’s an intensely contemporary reason for taking a close look at Scientology. The Swamp is so huge it seems like the Borg. But what are the stripped down essentials of the Borg? Here’s a look at a laboratory example, a microcosm if you will. In the interests of full disclosure, I did encounter Scientology back in the weird year of 1968. I was in Boston, got scooped in to a “Dianetics” exercise, and got speedily thrown out for having too much “charge” to participate. The one in charge was blond, bland to the point of creepy, and I almost (but not quite) succeeded in making him lose his temper. In further interests of disclosure, I spent years on Facebook, debating Trump-haters. They did lose their tempers. But they also exhibited the exact same repetition of Talking Points the lefties (and Scientologists) employ. Exact. Same. Words. How I made the cult connection. Overview Like it says. Troublemaker. Destroy Utterly  Horror Show Squared More ... More
Read more

A Reclamation Project Begun

Image
As you work your way through the links here, don’t be shy. Get ‘Click Happy.’ Even on pics. FIGHTING BACK ONE FILE AT A TIME … How bad has it gotten? I uploaded this video from the old Instapunk at YouTube an hour ago. It has already been removed for violating YT Community Standards.  There’s a pdf version, just published, of the post from Instapunk.com the video above was created for. Nobody censored it 15 years ago. Back then, it was unquestioningly covered as freedom of expression. Here’s my pdf file of ‘ The Goosestep Enigma ’.  This was by no means the most controversial post or graphic included in Instapunk’s 2,000+++ posts over the years. Now I’m going back in time to make pdf versions of the key parts of that website, meaning the most comical, controversial, reflective, insightful, and graphically provocative. But why reinvent the wheel. It’s all still there, isn’t it? The sad fact is that the truly huge resource called Instapunk.com is facing a ticking clock. The original site
Read more

The Best Book on the Trump Phenomenon

Image
Everybody rushed in after the fact to be first with the goods on how Trump pulled off the biggest electoral upset in modern presidential history. I was already ahead of them though. I had been covering the political briar patch with a steady diary approach for four presidential election cycles, both terms of W, the meteoric rise and weird re-election of Barack Obama, and of course the first flutterings of the Republican country club riot over replacing him. I had three blogs to draw from over that time, and a couple+ books out of it, including one demonstrating that I had Obama  figured out long before even his fiercest beltway critics caught on. Here’s another relevant book . I recognized the unique potential of Trump to win the whole thing early, in June of 2014. I could prove it. Why has it taken me this long to do my own book about the most spectacular politician of all our lifetimes? Two reasons. I didn’t realize I had produced so much material about Trump, the blog in whic
Read more

Guess I’m the last one who’s fighting back with nunchucks…

Image
YEAH. THE VP DEBATE You have no idea. This is all an apotheosis for me. The Joke meme has captured me. Like, you know, I know there will be Democrats out there and vociferating about how good Walz did in appropriate ethnic accents. Defending Kamala was always a loser. Bathos is hell.  And they think this POS is on their side. They do. Actually this is called projection. Here’s the real basis of Tim Walz. A banjo-banging would-be wise man who claimed Minnesota children were “above average.” Keep watching, rolling over to the next vid too. Keillor is a Walz… uh huh. Older, fatter, meltier… 2028 My very first blog, Gloves Off, contained a spirited defense of the ones we used to call Ladies. All gone now except for the ones still motoring onward with walkers and cute hair with no cosmetic surgery. They were mostly mothers. Not all. I have memories none of you can match — my own mother, Addie and Adelaide, Mildred Conklin, Gwendolyn Fennessy, Emma Jones, Rosa Riggs, Joy Coleman, Sis Hine, I
Read more

Don’t like Trump? Get over it.

Image
Another has-been life ruined beyond repair. Trump Curse writ large. Rosie O’Donnell still can’t get over the fact that Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 by blowing off Megyn Kelly’s gotcha question about his mean tweets to women, using her as the completely understandable punchline.   Millions of men, and even some women, said to themselves, “I would do that too.” She’s a sad case. But this latest outburst got me to thinking. Maybe I’ve been unfair to The Donald myself over the years. With my wife and others, I’ve taken the position that I admire Trump as a President and would-be savior of the Republic. I’ve also said I wouldn’t have him in my house for dinner. Or, less pompously, that I have never had any desire to meet him in person. I have fought strenuously for his political life and fortunes. No one can deny that. But I also fought for George W and Mitt Romney (as I had done for McCain, whom I genuinely despised) when they were running. Didn’t want to meet them eit
Read more

About those White Dudes for Harris

Image
The Boss White Dude Bradley Whitford When I first heard the name “White Dudes for Harris” I thought immediately of Bradley Whitford. It was the role of his lifetime. Playing White House power behind the scenes Josh Lyman, who bullied his secretary to make things happen for the righteous presidency of Jeb “Martin Sheen” Josiah Bartlet, a little guy with MS who was in every way a precursor of Obama but for being physically small and weak and gloriously intelligent like no one else who could talk Christian while being the smartest meanest man in the room.  Bradley Whitford himself went to Wesleyan University, one of the ‘Little Three,’ who always knew they were smarter than Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Are we cool enough yet or what? I always despised the smug self-hagiography of the West Wing. The longest running political propaganda as soap opera entertainment in the history of American television. Bradley got himself Emmies and Golden Globes pushing his own inane political agendas.  T
Read more