Christmas List

I haven't quite figured out how to get hypertext links in here yet, despite Kevin Cuddeback making me feel like a retard about it (you just write it in html, DUDE). Whatever. The, like .03 people who occasionally touch down on this thing are all big boys and girls. Google it your goddamned self. Anyway, here is the Christmas list for this year, the shit I find cool enough to covet.

1) Absolute Sandman, by Neil Gaiman. If you haven't read Sandman yet, don't bother. You clearly don't care about groundbreaking, amazing stories. Go grab your Danielle Steele book, and leave. And folks should know-- you can get it for forty dollars less than sticker price on Amazon.

2) Lisey's Story, by Stephen King. Gotta read the new King book. Just gotta.

3) Sony Reader. This cool little device holds 80 E-books, and also can store blogs, web pages, PDF's, and word documents. I think the little fucker even plays music. I think I just felt something go off in my shorts.

4) Lullaby, by Chuck Palahnuik. African lullaby kills people. Sounds cool, and it is on my reading list.

5) An external cd-rom/ burner for my shitty new tablet pc. This isn't really a fun gift for anyone else.

6) The newest version of Final Draft Pro, or Movie Magic Screenwriter. Even if that special someone in your life doesn't necessarily seem like a writer, having a program do the formatting makes the pages fly by. You'll bang out a script that you are too embarrassed to show to anyone in NO time.

7) A new IPod. Duh. Y'know, my IPod was officially the shittiest, buggiest version that Apple ever made? That sucks. I bought the thing direct from the factory, and it was touchy from day one. Anyway, I want one that I can watch "Lost" on while I am supposed to be working out.

8) Writer's Market for 2007. Fun hobby. Makes me feel special.

9) Carrie, by Stephen King. Actually haven't read this one. Figure I had better read all the guy's works, since I so shamelessly rip him off.

10) A Verizon broadband card. This would be super cool if Ovid were part of the digital network. Then, we could have sweet, sweet high speed access again. Somehow I doubt that Ovid is part of any networks of any sort.

That's the top ten. Hope you three enjoyed reading about it.

pus

A woman came into the clinic on Friday, and she was fat. Really fat. As these things tend to go, she also had a hump, around C7 to T3. She had a chief complaint of low back pain, and diarrhea. My friend John and I were working on her.

We insert hua tou jia ji needles all around her cervical area, poking that hump so good. She's all like *oooh*. We are getting pretty good results. That's when it happened.

I am feeling my way down the spine, counting vertebra so we can start our next round of needling. Her skin appears smooth, and unblemished. I press down in between two spinous processes somewhere in her lower thoracic section, and feel a little squish.

A hot rocket of snot spurted out of her back, getting on my hand, and on John's coat.

We stood there, shocked for a moment. I (pussy that I am about that sort of thing) spun around and quietly started scrubbing my hands, OCD style. John took off his coat, and just looked out the window for a moment. Wordlessly we turned around and started working on the woman again, wiping away the goop with an alcohol swab.

She farted twice during the treatment, both replete, hot, chinese food kinds of farts.

Good times.

Mike White

Mike is a large, Nordic looking kinda guy, and arguably my best and oldest friend (despite my poor communcation skills). In any case, I want to use this space here to tell a brief story that'll help you understand what kind of a guy he really is. And no, it isn't a drugs 'n fuckin' story, or the time that he cut me, or the time that time in Montreal. This is a story about a movie.

See, Mike and I used to watch a lot of movies. In fact, it sorta defines my memories of being at home-- if we were there, we were watching movies. And when I say "we," I mean it; the fucker basically lived at my house. This particular day in my memory stands out, however. We had gone to see "Patch Adams," a movie that defies description. It has Robin Williams playing a med student, right? Except, somehow he has time to dress up like a clown and do his mork and mindy act for retarded kids or something.

So Mike and I watch the movie, right? We leave the theater in silence, walking quickly to (I think) Mike's menstrual blood colored Pontiac Bonnevile. I figure that we are both so mad we paid money for such a turd of a movie that we were speechless. I mean, c'mon. It was fucking PATCH ADAMS. We get in the car, and Mike sits there for a moment, before sticking the key in the ignition. Then he turns to me, and says:

"I could go right back in there, and watch that again. That's how good that movie was."

And he was serious.

Love you, Mike.

Novel writing, Chinese herb drinking, and Fraggle Rocking (the baby).

There comes a point in every man's life when he realizes that his mind is consumed with good old fashioned grisly violence, and sweet, sweet cheesecake porn.

It happened to me yesterday, when I finished the second graphic blowjob scene, and finished my writing for the day with a pimp getting his eyes poked out. With a tinge of disgust, I realized that I was merely writing a book that I would want to read. That might make me yucky.

I have been on a Chinese herbal formula for almost two month. It is a foul tasting granule to which I add boiling water, resulting in a fouler tasting tea. It is designed (and it really is designed, we are talking sixteen different herbs, all meticulously thought out) to clear heart fire, the pattern responsible for my chief complaint, which is night terrors.

See, I used to wake up screaming. It happened only once in high school, when I had snorted Ritalin for twenty four hours straight and then crashed. It didn't happen again, to my knowledge, until the summer after my mom died. I woke up bellowing, and my girlfriend at the time was so terrified by my yelling that I felt compelled to look it up online. Once I had a name for the problem, (pavor nocturnis) it started happening all the time, sometimes a couple times a week. Alcohol made it worse. Being in the swooning first months of a new relationship made it better.

And Chinese herbs made it go away. I am officially stoked to be in this program, because I am fairly sure that I started it specifically to make my night terrors go away.

Hurrah.

And further more...

This is part two of my indignant outrage, which appears to be a day late and a dollar short: CNN has a Time Magazine article that power in Washington is being returned to what Time calls the "realists." This is interesting to me, because I know that the article is talking about a return to a more balanced, multilateral approach to foreign affairs, but the term "realism" is misleading. In political science, "realism" refers to the very school of thought that informs the neoconservatives when it comes to international relations. The basic tenets are simple: The world is dangerous, allies cannot be counted on, and power must be taken WHILE YOU ALREADY HAVE IT. In other words, it doesn't do you much good to start digging a well while you are thirsty, right? What realism as a political theory does not focus on is alliances, international law, and globalism, which in this writer's opinion are the solution to our woes.

See, the real problem is fear. Our country has bred a culture of terror right here on its own soil: We have sensationalized problems that are arguably universal to all humanity, and we have built a culture out of trying to eliminate them.

Take terrorism, for instance. This is clearly our cultural boogeyman right now, the modern day version of the commie, and the nazi before that, repeat ad infinitum through history. But really, what is terrorism? One political analyst on NPR listed at least five kinds of terrorism, including political terrorism, religious terrorism, criminal terrorism, pathological terrorism, and acts of war terrorism. Political and religious terror are very well known, and all I need to do is remind you of the Mafia to give you a hint of criminal terror, and the unibomber to clue you in to pathological terror. That leaves terror as an act of war, and this is where the American public is way off. Let's look at some examples:

Hamas is a tremendously well organized group of armed men that occupy a large region in Lebanon. They are adversaries of Isreal, and are purportedly fighting for Lebanon, though the Lebanese government is just as terrified of them as anyone else. Every so often, they commit what Isreal and most of the world would consider acts of terrorism: They have dedicated members blow themselves up in a crowded resturant. They use guerilla tactics, and are only capable of inflicting small amounts of damage at a time. In direct conflict with the Israeli military, they are miniscule. So how did they get so powerful?

By targeting civilians.

And this is what makes them terrorists, in most people's opinion. But consider this: During the "shock and awe" phase of our military campaign in Iraq, we essentially bombed the living shit out of Baghdad for over twenty four hours. On the record, we struck at only military targets, but we also blew up mosques, hospitals, and a large number of civilians. We refer to these civilian deaths as "collateral damage" and unfortunate tactical accidents, but realistically, the number of innocent women and children America has blown up at war time dwarfs all of the civilians killed in acts of terror by about 100 to 1. So how come we are the good guys?

Here is the fact of the matter: Terrorists at war time are essentially armies that are too small to inflict any real damage. Now, this is not to say that it doesn't hurt like hell to have two thousand people die in a terrorist attack like 9/11, but if anyone truly thinks that Al Qaeda has the ability to defeat America in a standing war, then I have some wonderful swamp land in Florida I'd like to sell them.

So, unable to defeat us in a standing war, they resort to scaring the hell out of us, and they have been wildly successful in that front, partially because we so thoroughly enjoy being frightened. Tell the truth: Didn't you rubberneck just a little bit when the trade centers were hit. There was horror, sure, and I feel terrible for the people who lost loved ones, but for the vast majority of Americans, I think it was a spectacle, a horrifying traffic accident to crane their necks at. So we went to war with Afghanistan, still very clearly the good guys in a scary, scary world. We rode that buzz all the way through two years in Iraq before gas prices and boredom caused us to stop supporting the war.

Now, the fear is starting to wear off. There are two things that scare me right now: The threat of a nuclear attack on our soil, and North Korea invading the south. It is really quite simple to prevent the first thing; instead of retarding around in countries WITHOUT nuclear potential, we should be spending all of our resources securing the SOURCES OF URANIUM that has potential to be weaponized. This is not hard to do; we know where it is. It is really hard to make a weaponized nuke, even a dirty one. If we remove the key ingredient, our terrorist friends are fucked.

North Korea is stickier. Too bad we are already in two standing wars, or else we actually might have been able to help the South Koreans if anything went wrong.

Anyways, my hand is tired, and this blog is about acupuncture, and I guess, novel writing. But I mean, shit guys. C'mon.

Simple Care

Every time I think of our insurance company, I get a raw, damp feeling in the pit of my stomach, partly because I owe them money, and partly because they are dirty pirates who won't pay for my kid's pediatric visits. Incidently, I have blue cross blue shield through healthy ny, and it seems like we'd have a better deal on Medicaid. But we aren't entirely lost: There are those who are attempting to fix the healthcare problem in this country from the bottom up...

www.simplecare.com

This is hot. This is pimp. This is doctors, sticking it to the establishment.

In other news, there are a few things that I need to clear up for the American public, who seem to be lost and need to be found:

1) The war in Iraq is NOT a war on terror. Many folks seem to believe that American troops are getting attacked by terrorists, and that this is a war between terror and the west. It's not. If people want American troops to stop getting attacked, they merely need to reduce their physical presence on the streets in Baghdad. Thing is, this war is not about Iraq vs. America at all: It is about Sunni vs. Shiite, and we are getting caught in the crossfire. Now, this is not to say that our occupation of the country hasn't made us a few enemies in that part of the world, but that actually leads us to our next point...

2) Iraq is infinitely more dangerous now than it was pre-invasion. One of the worst political doctrines of the Bush administration is the shift from a cold war style politics of containment, to a retarded Wyatt Earp style of preventative force. With a dictator in place and a global silent treatment, Iraq was like a potentially dangerous dog that was locked up in a very secure kennel. There were no WMD's. Shit, there was no FOOD. Now, we have taken all the fencing down, and given that potentially dangerous dog a whole yard to play in, and the little fucker is making friends with other dogs. Poor analogy, I know.

3) You aren't really a republican. Yeah, I said it, and I am talking to YOU. You think you are, but there's been a mix-up, and I am here to clarify things a little. You probably vote republican because that's how your parents voted, and that's how the people in your neighborhood vote, and how the people in your church vote, etc. Now, don't take this the wrong way... I'm not saying you're not a free thinker! This is just how people tend to end up in their political party; their born into it. There is a slim chance that you are the kind of person who votes Republican purely because it economically behooves them. If that is you, (and you had better make sure it really is you, because this is another misnomer) than get off my blog and go play in your oil field, or fly your helicoptor or something. Rich fuck.

So, here is why you are not really a Republican. The elephant types used to be a noble creature, who put freedom for all people above personal gain. This was a salient point: The emphasis was on freedom of all kinds, not just personal economic freedom. A republican agenda might include less direct taxation, a strong security agenda, and a push for devolution of congressional power to state control, giving more freedom of lawmaking. These qualities all still basically exist, but one (very ironic) factor is missing from the equation: Freedom. The republican ethic now still embodies personal economic freedom, but it shuns civil liberties and personal freedoms. Freedom to use your phone without a wire tap. Freedom to marry who you choose. Freedom to determine for yourself if you want to have a child before its neural plate is formed in the ovum (which really isn't that much different from having a period). The promise of a fair trial. These are all freedoms that have been degraded under the current neoconservative regime in our country. They have been replaced with personal economic freedom, freedom to be Christian, and freedom to own guns. This is not good. Gun toting Christians are as scary as fundamentalist Muslims any day of the week in my book. So, that is why you are not really republican: Real republicans believe in freedom. You clearly believe in something else.

This post shall continue; I will inform the world!

The Arrogant Acupuncturist

I was standing in the cramped office, listening to the pleasant hum of the fax machine eating my paper when the clinical supervisor on duty asked me if my cohort Jon had written the formula I was faxing.

No, it was me, I replied.

"Oh," he replied smirking, "because Jon keeps nice charts that meet my minimal expectations."

So, here is the thing: Acupuncturists, despite their rather lowly position in the American healthcare system (somewhere between chiropractors and Santeria practitioners), still can be possessed of very large egos. Case in point, our faculty acu-alpha male. He cajoles. He talks down to women. He condescends. He has given me the clinical equivilent of an "F" on two seperate clinic days, and he was implying (with a smirk) that he was going to give me a third.

And do you suppose my fragile ego was hurt? Probably. The thought that passed through my mind was this:

I reckon I might have to kick this guy's ass.

Simple male with wounded pride stuff, really.

In other news, my National Novel Writing Month-- www.nanowrimo.org-- is coming along swimmingly. It's called "Third Eye" and is about a man who starts suffering from possibly meaningful hallucinations. I am monkeying out about two thousand words a day on the thing, and I am pleasantly suprised to notice that the characters are starting to behave on their own a little. It still feels a little stilted. Here is a segment from it, sans italics, paragraph indentations, and normal spacing:

8
Coping was harder than it sounded. The sleep deprivation that was an inconvenience in the hospital became downright dangerous when he was trying to bathe his son, or drive the car. At night, he would sit in a large reclining chair in his office, closing his eyes, but never slipping away. The closest Jack came to sleep was a strange, trance-like state he would gently pass in and out of. He would be sitting, feeling his body get heavy in the chair. His breathing would slow down, and then, the same visual would pop into his head: A long line of people, slowly getting their tickets checked at the airport. This droll, boring imagery, he thought, was the kind of neuronal firing a normal person would have right before they fell asleep. If he could just get on the plane, disappear into the crowd, he would be able to drift away.

But then awareness of the drift would inevitably snap him back to the present moment, and his eyes would pop open. He spent countless hours studying every corner of his office: The mudded beige walls that he had never had a chance to paint before Jack JR was born. The small wooden desk holding his Emac, a large white face staring at him, demanding to know why he wasn’t pounding his two thousand words a day out on the dirty, tea-stained keyboard. The maroon and pumpkin colored rug on an unfinished hardwood floor. His eyes would slowly scan over this space that was so familiar to him, until his body would get heavy in the chair, and his breath would become regular, and then, the polite, boring cattle call, US Airways Flight… and then the ghostly echo of airport sounds becoming white noise… boarding rows thirty-two through fifty, please have your tickets ready. And he tries to mill through the line, get on the plane, get to sleep, and his eyes snap open. Two thirty in the morning, then 4:00, …now boarding rows…

“Hon?” Sheila standing in the doorway. “It’s seven thirty. Can you take baby Jack for a while?” A slight look of distrust. I’m sure you won’t be out of earshot, Hon.

“Yeah, fine.”

Baby Jack wouldn’t go down. He was doing his little trick where he would cry in the bouncy chair, cry in the papazan, cry sitting in daddy’s lap. The only place that baby Jack wouldn’t cry was when his daddy walked him, one hand under his butt, one hand squeezing his tummy. For hours (or at least it seemed that way to Jack) they would pace across the house back and forth, and every time Jack chanced sitting down, he would hear that familiar squack of indignation from his son.

“Shh shh shh…” he shushed in a rhythmic manner, pacing the dining room with a bounce in his step. Jack JR began to calm down, then get heavy in his arms. He paced into the living room, some stupid show on TV with a giant, mouth breather type of guy that somehow landed a wife about ten thousand times hotter than he was. Bounce step, step, “Shh shh shh…” he kept rhythmically shushing and walking and rocking until he tripped on a bloody hooker lying on his dining room floor.

His eyes worked his way down her body, failing to comprehend the tangled mess in front of him. Her frizzy, permed blonde hair was caked with gobs of mucous and blood, leaving one green, brown and red dreadlock stuck to the side of her face. The eye that she had left was rolled back to reveal a bloodshot, milky blue lens. The other eye was a ragged, meaty hole with the orbital bone glinting underneath his chandelier’s gold hued light. Her cheek was unzipped in a perpetual sneer, revealing the jagged edges of shattered teeth that now more resembled fangs. Her neck had three purple rings around it, one of which revealed a slit of skin that opened all the way down to her windpipe.

He made it down to the sunken hollow that used to be her chest before his breath betrayed him, and he fell to his knees, clutching his baby to his own chest, gasping for air. Someone had stomped on her breastplate until it snapped and caved in, the jellied remains hinting at her spine below it.

Cute, huh? It isn't all horrible dead hookers and stuff, just some of it. I sincerely doubt I am going to make 50,000 words by the end of November, but I'll be goddamned if I don't finish this one.

First for everything

I have to admit, this feels a little contrived. Yet, for some reason, I am joining the legions of people who decide to go public with their journals. Yes, damnit, I am starting a blog. So, whoever you are, this is me: I am an acupuncture student. I am very young, and already on my second marriage. I have a daughter, Sophie, who is wildly adorable (even when she's shitting her pants). I like to write. Clearly very much so, since I am posting rambling diatribes about whatever is on my mind to an ether-like network of computers for no good reason.

See, self conscious.

I rocked the turtle today. "The Turtle" is acupuncture parlance for an abdominal treatment with needles that is notoriously difficult to perform well. When done correctly, it can bring immediate relief to chronic pain conditions. When done poorly, it is a time consuming, ineffective waste of needles (it isn't uncommon to use up to 25-30 needles in one treatment). The woman was in her mid-sixties, and spoke with a yummy Polish accent. She complained of debilitating wrist pain. We inserted the basic abdominal needles (in this case transforming damp obstruction), and on a whim, I did the symptom points.

It worked.

And that is why I love acupuncture: It is a beautiful thing to see someone's last resort work. They cry. They hug you. And you become an acupuncture rock star for the day.

Okay, the baby is crying. First post is done.