Wednesday 5 September 2012

FROM ABSENTIA, A PUFF OF GREY SMOKE

Negotiating Cyberspace's Babel of comment, rant, bile, hatred and marketing opportunity is hard for one who doesn't know what PDF and RSS and HTML mean, who simply cannot download, whatever that means, a programme, whatever that is;  that I was recently bought  - ForBeingA BraveBoy - an  I pad Three, has not advanced  my competence  and I remain a stranger in a strange land, with yet more gadgets  and gewgaws upon which to display my cackhanded infantilism.  

The fact that these commentaries, a fortnight after publication, require a blog administrator, that is to say me, to approve further conments, is what I considered to be a pretty suave way of preventing some interesting discussions being rounded-off, weeks later, by advertisements for penis enlargement products. 

 I had an eye, like all of us, to Posterity, to future historians, people like the RockGod/Archaeologist, Neil Oliver or the hissing, queenly Simon Schama  rummaging through these discussions - wherever the fuck it is that they exist -  and saying, on the global hologram, And this tribe, here, the Ishmaelites, however lofty their discussions on politics and art and religion,  they always descended to talking  about the size of their cocks.

Now, you and I know that these cock-expanding posts are not posts at all but just adverts which  are generated automatically and just appear, almost everywhere  but historians in the main, the teevee ones, anyway,  are vain, stupid arseholes,  peddling the tawdry and salacious,   as though they, too, like the govament, were a branch of skymadeupnewsandfilth, which of course  they are, unless we are talking about Mr Tony Robinson of the ghastly TimeTeam programme who inhabits his own entirely unique  region of unspeakability.

I have spoken before, here, about an early, gigantic work of science fiction, A Canticle for Liebowitz, in which post-apocalyptic diggers in the ruins find scraps of paper, bits of text, which they assume to be holy scripture, when, in fact, they are mere shopping lists - one tin of beans, one jar of syrup, and so on, items, like our civilisation, all long vanished -  and this book, like too many books, has extended, were it possible,  my personal infinity of paranoid possibilities to the point where it now includes my concern about being misunderstood, post mortem,  by the unfuckingborn. How fucked-up is that?

And so, at the very least, I thought, if I manage to exclude the GrowYourOwnCock brigade, then hungry people in the future, huddled in the ruins, around fires of dung, clutching sticks sharpened  against the night's terrors,   may not think too badly of me.

And that is why, mr jgm2, that two-week cut-off exists, it is to keep out the GodlessHeathenBastard bigdick merchants.

It also, however, I have learned, prevents the automatic publication of, kinder, more considered comment, such as one by mr anonymous on a previous post about Mr Francis Maude, The Pig Society, I think.

I will, if I can, remove that cut-off and instead, set a guard in the watchtower to repel the knobmen.

I have not been ill, per se, just undermined, the cocktail of delusions and anxieties which constitute the me having been o'ershaken. After heart surgery I enquired why I was on this wretched nebuliser, a hurricane of icy oxygen blowing constantly into my mouth.  Ah, it's just that we want to make sure your lungs are working OK...... But they are, look at all the readings.....Yes, but it's just a coupla days ago and  they were lying in a tray for three hours.

It's hard to visualise, that. And better not even attempted, although, of course, I do. Now,  either I'm too sensitive or else I'm getting soft but the thought of my lungs being in a tray outside my body - even for a minute, never mind three fucking hours -   well, it fair stretches the imagination.

None of this stuff registers properly for ages and ages.  Within three days I was striding around the ward like a man possessed and within a week of my lungs being in the tray I was shopping in Aberdeen.  I don't know what the painkillers were, only that they were so strong it must have taken ages for them to wear off and even then there was, is,  a sanctioned heavy doseage of lesser opiates. Concentrating on getting up and down, round and about, just doing ordinary stuff,  I think that forestalled any serious contemplation of the massive, overwhelming invasion of my body that had taken place, of our absolute  vulnerability whilst  in the hands of the people with saws, knives, needles and thread.

They took a vein from the length of my leg and put the wound back together with a large-ish staple gun. I don't know what I expected but I didn't expect that.

You know the kind of plastic tubing that you siphon petrol with, about half-inch diameter, there was a foot of that sewn deep inside my chest.  I watched it come out and thought it would never end whilst thinking, Where the fuck was all that, I didn't know there was that much space in there, thought it was all taken up.

Oh, yes, and I came around in Intensive Care to find an Indian boy, actually a very, very skilled nurse, carefully rolling white stockings up my legs, like I was in some mad, porno, transvestite charnel house;  tubes in my chest, tubes in my neck, tubes up my nose, tube in my dick, tubes in my arms, zonked out of my skull and there's this guy putting stockings on me.  They were surgical stockings, but.... you know,  they were still stockings. Christ, what a freak show.

All in all, then, one way and another, a weird time;  a time of life and death  stuff.  The physical aspects of heart surgery are relatively straightforward,  the people who do it are very good at it; it's crude and mediaeval  and one day we'll laugh at it but for all that it is - almost miraculously - very effective, its practitioners mesmerisingly adroit.

The psychological effects, though, are a different story, undermining, of  almost everything.

On the bright side, I didn't see or hear a moment of Brenda's Jubilee,  Cheap at the price.

The seals are singing still, mrs narcolept, although soon, a month's time, they'll be gone to wherever it is.  Who knows where the time goes?



     

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Mr Ishmael

Sounds like you've had a whale of a time. "If you'd just like to pop your clothes on the chair over there and slip on this fetching gown, we'll be right with you, oh, and if you'd be so kind as to drop your lungs onto this tray, that'd be great"! Yowfuckingzers.

Well, you'd think you'd be a bit more out of the woods now, and jolly good it is to have you back with your fancy gadgets and doped to fuck on some fancy scag. All the best - I hope it's kind of like getting a degree, once you've done it then you probably don't have to do it again. Anywho - take it easy ol' bean.

DtP

Woman on a Raft said...

It's lovely to have you back.

the noblest prospect said...

Keep walking, Mr Smith and watch the sternum.

Verge said...

"Brenda's Jubilee"? You missed it? Say it ain't so. The riverrunspeakable splish-splosh was bad enough (Princess Manne in full Ruritanian Admiral drag) but the Masque in The Mall, mate, the Night of the Wigging Dead, that was something else again, such a grotesque parade of wheezing superannuated nutsacks...made yer proud to be British, or something.

call me ishmael said...

I did see a Filth-O-Graph souvenir, mr verge, a Gawd Save the Queen, Gawd luv 'er, applesanpears, trubbleanstrife, whistleanflute, Diamond geezer, innee, Phil the Greek? photo special and they did all look more Ruritanian than ever. Gilbert and Sullivan, even. A gang of wastrels all dogged-up to fuck in medals and sashes and comic opera uniforms. Surely, the rest of the world was pissing itself.

Now, as it happens, would be a felicitous time for Philip to go and join Zeus up on Mount Olympus. Christ, the weeping and wailing would see us through to the next general election. The BBC would love it, the unelected govament would love it, skymadeupnewsandfilth would love it. Prince Brian and FagAsh Lil, Countess HorseFace would be biting their own arses in frustration; will Mummy abdicate, or won't she? Now, there's a soap opera to cheer our march to the workhouses.

Mike said...

Mr I: "Surely, the rest of the world was pissing itself."

I must say as a Pom, now Aussie, I did find it excruciating what little I saw, here, in one of Her Majesty's states.

Increasingly, as with the Olympic opening ceremony (had to hide behind setee), I find the land of my birth becoming a parody of itself.

BTW hope you are now travelling well.

P T Barnum said...

Good Lord, man, I feared you had gone to Olympus, never mind Phil and his leaky urethra. Thrilled that you have failed to ascend.

Tis curious, isn't it, that we can be mended by our highly skilled biological plumbers, but that tiny little spark inside all the squidgy pink and yellow stuff gutters horribly in the face of knowledge of our utter fragility. Like some Swiftian attempt to extract sunlight from cucumbers, there's no handbook which teaches anyone how to understand or heal that.

Welcome back. Missed you.

yardarm said...

Glad you`re back, Mr Ishmael. It was truly a summer of motherfuckerdom.

Anonymous said...

Very pleased you are not dead.

A friend of mine had the same op, and he says that the wound on his leg was far more painfull than the one down his chest.

At least you got some magic beans to ease the misery. They work even better with scotch.

Glad you're back.

call me ishmael said...

Assuming the patience of others, I will post more on the subject of hospitalisation in the near future.

Thanks for the kind words. One is not royal and hesitated, therefore, to post bulletins, feeling that to do so would be to inflate one's importance to the level of one's betters; not posting at all, whilst a bit rude in itself, seemed the lesser offence.

Things are what we make of them; after a similar operation, Spunky Bill, for instance, was, within days, back at the helm of his and Mrs President Trouserses business empire; I, on the other hand, was inrospective and preoccupied, not so much by the process as by what it represented - helplessness, vulnerabilty, mortality and so on.

It is not that I didn't open these windows and write stuff, it's just that it all seemed so overwhelmingly bleak, denuded even of its customary dark and barbed pungency.

I'll post it up in due course anyway and Thanks again.

a young anglo-irish catholic said...

A friend, not 40, had a heart op. they said he'd come round raging with anger. And he did. Affected his mind, though. Made him an older man.

Maybe we have a soul, and hoiking our insides around has an effect.

You sound good and angry again, so the job's a good 'un.

call me ishmael said...

"Maybe we have a soul, and hoiking our insides around has an effect"

I don't know about souls per se, mr yaic, as in the traditions of the Abrahamic faiths but I think you can have an identity that is bound-up in the inviolabilty of your innards, Maybe your friend had one of those moments when he drifted into semi-comsciousness and heard the various Misters taking the piss, as they do, and woke up angry at the whole shooting match. Nothing wrong with anger, anyway; I think it's in too short supply,

I think it probably troubled my mind, too, how could it not, but I suppose, as with all these things, it's better than the likely alternative.