Family Sized Carrion

The air smells of grass and copper today. I kept my eye out for huddled jackals gnashing in a circle. My morning might have been a bit colored by my week. The week was not exclusively mine, I’m pretty sure we share the same time, if not space, Saturday through Friday. If we had the exact same week you wouldn’t be judging my choice of extraneous words like days of the week.

I didn’t expect to see any carrion eater bigger than crow, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t any; grass and copper, like an old kill on the savannah. Are crows carrion eaters? I don’t really know. I’ve never seen one hunt. I have seen a lot of them with trash in their beaks. I don’t think jackals, hyenas, eagles play with trash. I guess an old Starbucks cup is a dead thing, and whereas I can’t imagine a vulture eating an old cheese Danish bite that sat in evaporating coffee, I can imagine a crow doing that. The second ex wife once insisted a spider crawled up on her pillow, reared on his hind legs and hissed at her. I guess if you’re afraid of crows they are scary. I’ve seen large pit bulls with empty star buck cups on their muzzles. It’s not a scary look. Ok, I put the Starbucks cups on certain pit bulls, I confess I’ve never known a crow as well.

Way back in the double oughts, last decade, when god was in his heaven and Herschel still graced this vale of tears, Starbucks had an accident. Somewhere in the corporate cancer of burnt coffee outlets, some dumbass with a green apron and a title like window barista, handed a dog biscuit through a car window, and the dog, not a Pitbull, took the hand. Dogs are carnivores. Sure, you can make them omnivores by adding meal into the kibble, but, you know, all their teeth are canines. I heard this story from a window barista in the starphucks up the road from my shack in Clackamas. He was trembling slightly and called me sir and Herschel’s dad (I found the latter endearing, though, I could have been insulted. Herschel was known in that part of Clackamas, well known, but, you know, my name was on the credit card. Right?). He didn’t know how to tell Herschel or me that Starbucks had pulled dog biscuits from their windows. When I finally figured out what he was getting at and asked if I could get a cup of whipped cream for him. Relax, Herschel could eat a Volkswagen, the only thing that ever got to him was corn.

I just threw the cup of whipped cream in back, he caught it mid air and we happily went along our merry way. It took me a minute to figure out why traffic was moving weirded than usual (you get a high tolerance for weird traffic patterns in Portland metro area). Herschel’s had his big smiley head out the window and frothy stuff all over his muzzle. That day the air smelled of hilarity and Fritos.

I had a two-hour EMG test on Wednesday and then a two-hour neuro-ophthalmology test on Thursday.  Not an hour and forty-five minutes sitting alone in an exam room but a full two hours of muscles twitching to electricity and a full two hours of having lights shined in my eyes and the like. My worldview is a bit tainted today. Both doctors did the same sort of horrible thing that had nothing to do with … well, anything. The one said “welcome back!” and every employee there told when I was last there. I just plain old don’t remember. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you’d forget. The other doctors office — everyone who read the file insisted I told them I’d been hallucinating for over a decade. Um, seeing bright jagged lines in my vision, not, say, huddled jacals chewing on the bones of a barista.

It’s been two years. Their proof? They had written it down. I’ve spent most of the last twenty-four hours wondering if I’m losing my motherfucking mind. Wait, no. I slept for six hours and before that I talked to the GF, the keeper of my memory (I keep hers too, which sounds very sweet, and it is, but not always very effective). I had honestly just thought I was missing some memory. She told me not to worry, she’s sure I don’t have dementia. Heh, she didn’t quite put it that way, but, you know, it was a much longer conversation. So, 5 awake hours thinking I was losing my motherfucking mind, 2 awake hours worrying about dementia, six hours sleeping, a few hours wandering out in the carrion air and right the fuck now. Where’s a frothy smiling Pitbull when you need one?

Oh, I’m not really omitting shit from testing. I didn’t want to wait around, twitching, for the EMG results and the eye results are what you’d expect from the medical community in America two decades into the new millennia. More tests, expensive tests, and I’m torn between attitudes; 1) Fuck it, if I have to have insurance they might as well pay for shit and 2) Insurance is a vicious cycle, jacking up health care so health care jacks up insurance. I can’t think of another private for-profit industry that’s mandated (you can’t get a state license in any state without car insurance, and the real ass-fuck of Obamacare was transitioning to the same with health insurance. You can own a car and a body, you just can’t take them out without insurance.). Again, it’s a much longer conversation, but, serious folks tend to leave that very simple infringement out of serious conversations. It’s like the phone tech support guy forgetting to ask if the computer is on. The relative ethics and morality of gambling (there’s other ways of explaining insurance, but gambling is pretty accurate) with every citizens welfare are moot when it’s mandated that everyone ante. I’m not talking race, creed, color, socio-economic class, I just mean it’s harder and harder to find pay as you go healthcare in the states. Yes, I know, I’d like nationalized healthcare too, but that’s not on the table today, and, neither is pay as you go.

Fuck it, I’m going back to worrying about dementia and eating Nutter Butter cookies as though I forgot the package was just opened a few minutes ago. Um, the half a package. Family size.