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?