Angry Birds

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."

---Revelation 18:2

I had to fix the tsukubai this morning because some nighttime visitor had knocked over the return pipe so the water poured into the ground instead of back into the sone basin that sits above an uderground reservoir with a pump. 

The entire time I was repairing the problem, the hummingbirds, those small annoying hyper nasty “yappy dogs” of the bird kingdom, nagged me to get out of their day spa. It took me longer to fix because I was yelling at them to get out of my yard. I sounded like that archetypical angry old man yelling at a cloud. Hummingbirds aren’t hateful, they’re just noisy neighbors.

In other news, I’ve had this recent e-mail conversation with my doc about drug side effects. In the course of this conversation, he asked how often do I take Vicoden? Here’s my draft reply: 

Subject: Vicoden Vs. Warfarin

Dear Doc,

How often I take a Vicoden depends entirely on my decision about how often I’d like to sleep through the night without waking in pain. Hypothetically, I prefer to sleep enough hours nightly to avoid having to suffer daily from sleep deprivation hallucinations. Notwithstanding the foregoing however, I also don’t want to take Vicoden more often than 3 nights a week because the more I take, the less it works. And I need it to work.

And now that we’re on the subject of how much you care about potential drug side effects, it may interest you to know that the warfarin I take to thin my blood (Fun fact: warfarin is rat poison. I shit you not.) is problematic wrt/ side effects.

• For instance, I bruise so easily that if someone speaks sharply to me they leave a bruise.
• For instance, large bruises - say =>3” in diameter - are painful. Who knew?
• For instance, increasingly, my bruised fingers and hands swell up and turn purple in a tight and painful generalized bruise that lasts two weeks, and that keeps me up nights looking at the dark side of the moon while my hands look like two balloons.
• For instance, if I get the least little scratch, I bleed so much that if CSI used one of those backlights in my house they’d think it was a Manson Family time-share.
• For instance, if I had invested in Band-Aid stock when I started on warfarin, I’d be rich enough to have a doctor who first did no harm.

Let’s call it a working draft reply and leave it at that.

Fear Itself

“Freedom of thought is the only good that is perhaps more precious than peace, for the simple reason that, without it, peace would merely be another name for servitude.”
- Andre Comte-Sponville

Here are some more pictures of stuff I can’t grow in my backyard. The pictures are of my sister’s garden in Michigan. She's too busy gardening to have her own blog.

Generally speaking, I’m a big fan of Freedom of Speech. But recently, I was caught in the ripple of an e-mail message circulating about a new scam thieves use to steal your car and terrorize you. Here’s the heart of the matter, purportedly from “a Pine Bluff, AR Policeman”. In the seductively gravelly whisper of a horror book on tape, the message says, “You walk across the parking lot, unlock your car and get inside. You start the engine and shift into Reverse. When you look into the rearview mirror to back out you notice a piece of paper stuck to the middle of the rear window. So, you shift into Park, unlock your doors, and jump out of your car to remove that paper (or whatever it is) that is obstructing your view…” That’s when the thieves “appear out of nowhere” and jack your car. Walking and talking about fear itself: terror is another name for servitude.

Or, I suppose you could do what I do - and simply not look in your rearview mirror before you shift into “Reverse”. I know what you’re thinking, but this story must be true too, because the chain mail message includes “THIS IS NOT A JOKE” in the subject line. The part about me not looking in my rear view mirror before backing is so true I forgot to laugh.

And now for something seemingly completely different.

I’m thinking of starting an e-mail chain to spread the word that me and my college friends weren’t crazy when we were watching the Wizard of Oz, and at the exact moment the Cowardly Lion roared for the third time, somebody started playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Literate college kids all seem to know that the song TOTALLY goes with the movie at that point, and explains some of life’s greatest mysteries. Rest assured, THIS IS NOT A JOKE EITHER. Movie and song sync perfectly even if you’re NOT stoned and listening to Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre” when the tornado hits Kansas.

To paraphrase what Bill Murray’s character said in Caddy Shack, about how a swami once told him he’d have universal awareness in the moment before he dies: “So, we’ve got that going for us.” So let’s all just be careful about retrieving messages left on our rear windshields, and we can all get on with our lives.