A weird week, this one.

The fracking about 200 yards up the hill from us has provided a loud, constant thumping, overlaid by a low roar, that’s driving us all batty. Yesterday was the first time that Tigger, our cat, stopped being afraid to come in the house. Marigold, the dog, is having problems with her left hind leg that may also have to do with her back.

And Tuesday, Linda woke up with a broken wrist. How did this happen? Good question.

Monday evening we spent in extensive sampling of her excellent orange wine. It was theoretically not quite ready to drink, but that didn’t stop us, because it’s delicious and powerful as all hell. Orange wine? Yes, made from frozen OJ concentrate (the one time we used fresh-squeezed oranges, it came out not half as good).

So Linda’s wrist looked badly swollen in the morning, but she had no memory of falling, and I had no memory of waking to any loud tumble. We’ll never really know what happened, though a later discovery suggests one possibility. I’ll come to that further down, because our most remarkable time was the three hours in the emergency room in Towanda, 20 miles north of our place

We got there around 11 am. Linda checked in while I parked, then we sat for maybe 15 minutes in the odd L-shaped waiting room. Not having anything else to read, I started counting the signs on the walls and doors. I came up with 19, but probably missed a few.

One huge panel of 2-inch hand-painted letters listed all the things one must not do while waiting, such as assaulting anyone or using foul language. Apparently the ER folk get some mighty obstreperous wounded. The largest hung sign had the smallest type but was placed at least 7 feet above the floor. Maybe it had something to do with basketball; no way to tell from below.

The main entry door – labeled “Automatic Caution Door” – was so automatic that every time a husky young teen in the chair nearest the door waggled his foot, the door would swing open and shut. Naturally, that became something of a ongoing game.

But the fun really started when I noticed the doors leading to the medical area, posted with

Stanley

DO NOT

ENTER

OK, I figured “Stanley” was the door manufacturer, but the arrangement flipped my humor switch. When a nurse came by with an icepack for Linda’s wrist, I asked her, “Why don’t you let Stanley in there?”

To our delight, she hopped right on it. “Oh, Stanley was really bad. We can’t let him in for 6 months. You know what he did? He threw his icepack on the floor and it exploded all over the place!”

I don’t know whether other people had asked the same question, or she was just amazingly quick, but now I felt we were going to love this place.

Linda behaved with her icepack, so she was taken back for an Xray, after which we waited while it was being read, then both of us were ushered into a hallway, where Linda lay on a bed, her arm in a sling, and I got to sit on a folding chair. We were close to a much larger set of swinging doors, but these were controlled by slapping a big square protrusion on the opposite wall – with its roughly dozen non-public signs.

The largest hanging “sign” was a clear plastic sheet fastened over a complicated schedule chart covering meetings and goals. One square section was labeled “Huddle Group.” Ummm…

It was obvious that some kind of marker was intended to be used on the plastic, then erased, but none of the labelled squares or rectangles had anything written over them. When I asked a passing tech if this chart had ever been used, she said “Not yet.” 

The most intriguing wall sign requested, in 23 various languages, that anyone needing an interpreter point to that language to ask for help. One the languages was labeled “Karen.” Again I stopped a passing nurse or tech, “What kind of language is Karen?” “No idea.”

(Looking it up at home, turns out it’s a whole linguistic grouping used by about 4.5 million speakers along a north-south shoelace in southeast Asia. It’s good to know things.

Each time I got up from my chair I found myself in the way of some machine being trundled along the corridor. I suggested that I be given my own sign: “Obstacle.” Within this constant parade of little machines, each had a singular, obvious purpose; in mass, they somehow signaled chaos.

The nurse we dealt with most, Heather, openly enjoyed being helpful and never looked pressured. When she and the others heard that we couldn’t identify the origin of Linda’s wrist break – because of the delicious orange wine – they asked not that we be more abstemious, but rather, “Why didn’t you bring us any?” 

Next, the physician in charge, Dr. Khare, joined in. Turned out he is also a winemaker and was fascinated by the idea of orange wine. But now was the time to actually do something about that wrist. So Linda sat up while half a mile of Ace bandage was wound around her lower arm, which was again dropped into the adjustable sling.

No cast, at that time, she was just told to hold her wrist as high as her heart. (The cast came three days later, after our usual 40-mile drive to the main hospital in Sayre.)

We had a fair amount of waiting around in that corridor, but we could hardly conceive of better treatment. All hail the ER!

Yet the pleasant aftermath to an unpleasant night did not end there. We decided to get something to eat at 2:30, having had no time for breakfast. Where? We decided to see what we could find on Main St. in Towanda.

First we tried Vincent’s pizzeria, a terrific place. Not open till 4 pm. So we settled on a lovely little café, the Community Cup, on the next block – light and inviting, with a wide-ranging menu on the wall featuring fresh ingredients.

Right-handed Linda decided a sandwich would be easiest to eat left-handed. What, she asked the woman at the register, would she recommend? “The BLT is the most popular,” so we both settled on that, though I’m not a big fan of BLTs.

What we got was the thickest and best – if also the highest-priced – BLT we’d ever eaten. And my tea was served in a cup of near-boiling water: as it should be, but seldom is.

We were the last customers of the day, so the register lady stopped over to chat: It soon became clear she was also the owner. She told us her name was Joy Harnish, a retired Sullivan County teacher, and that she recognized Linda as a fellow former teacher, even remembered her name and, with a bit more mental searching, that she taught reading. From the founding date noted on the café menu – 2013 – she must have started the business the year before retiring from teaching.

So we closed out the daytime Tuesday saga on another high note. That evening I found Linda’s mangled copper bracelet, which she always wears on her left arm, by the corner of the bed, next to her bureau. I think that may explain her fall. Maybe the bracelet caught on the bureau corner and dropped her into a spill that she tried to stop with her other hand.

Still, we’ll never know for sure, which just makes the whole thing that much more intriguing.

[This is a story I wrote many years back. I’m putting it here for a particular reason, which I explain in the note at the end. But please don’t sneak ahead and read the note unless you’ve given up on the story and can’t take any more.]

The time I spent living under a bridge like a troll has to have been the worst in my whole life. It’s cold as shit under there, and naturally the eight months I spent were from October through May.

I can’t tell you how stupid it feels to be without a place to live. Sure, you’re lonely and miserable, but I’ve been lonely a lot by nature and misery can become strangely normal, but the whole time, I never stopped feeling stupid. How the fuck did I get myself into this, why don’t I get out of it, what’s wrong with me, did I leave all my mental equipment in a bus-station men’s room, that sort of thing.

It stinks under a bridge, and even though you’re protected in a way, it’s an insulting kind of protection, like having the environment thumb its nose at you–“Oh look at you, sap, this is the best you can do, I know rats that have it better.” Nobody pissed under there when I was around, but it still stank of piss from before, and when I went off to dredge up some food, somebody’d come from somewhere and piss under there again. And I don’t like to say it, I did too, sometimes. In the winter. Jesus, you don’t want to go out where it’s even colder, with the wind along the river, just to take a leak.

The one good thing, in an ironic way, was when the river froze over. It was pretty small as a river, but out where water is precious there’s a tendency to call almost anything that flows for eighty percent of the year a river because then it sounds like you’ve got water–“I’m going down to the river.”

But when it froze over, I walked out on the ice. First of all, I think better when I’m moving, and it’s warmer when you’re moving (assuming the wind isn’t whipping down the channel, as it did all too often) and out in the middle it didn’t stink. Sometimes you could play one of those I’m-lost-in-the-frozen-north games with yourself, which is a lot better than I’m-lost-in-the-middle-of-an-American-city.

Second, you’re walking on water, and who hasn’t wanted to (come on–right?). Third, I could feel life flowing along underneath me, the current’s moving even if you can’t see it or feel it, and you know the old moldy carp, the sixth-generation granddaddy catfish are trading wisecracks and letting each other know they don’t give a rat’s ass if spring ever comes because then they’ll just have to dodge hooks and nets.

I used to make up stories that the fish would tell each other, especially when it was getting on toward evening and I couldn’t face curling up in the stink and pretending I was just oh-so-warm when really I couldn’t quite stop feeling my toes but wished I would soon because they hurt, shit did they hurt.

Old Frank Catfish, he’d been a river pilot in the old days, led schools of shad upstream to spawn. (I don’t know if that river ever had shad–I don’t even know what a shad looks like.) “‘Mess of bedsprings ahead,’ I told ’em, ‘gotta detour a bit to the left, damn good spawning grounds though. You’ll be proud of those fry.'” “Eeyup,” says Claude Carp, who’s retired from the Riverbottom Navy with the rank of commander, “them shad were a peaceable tribe, I miss ’em. Too many trash fish around these days. Got some goldfish moved in, come right out of the sewer.” Then they’d go on and reminisce at each other, fins hardly moving, because in the winter a fish has about as much metabolism as a weed, and a conversation like I just related would take them three and a half hours to get through. No, I wouldn’t want to be a fish–that’s how I’d end up thinking each time, and maybe that was the idea behind it all, finding something worse off than I was so at least I could get some sleep.

It was just that one winter. Another one would have killed me.

Here’s the part that I don’t totally understand. I probably could have got a job. I mean, you have half a brain and a pair of hands, and you don’t drink too much or take drugs (all true of me, in varying degrees) and you can get a part-time, ten or twenty hour a week job, a little here, a little there, and you can eat and at least occasionally sleep inside. And there are shelters these days, even in the most medieval American city.

But I didn’t want that. I wanted to be down there, shitting off the side of a rotting piling when nobody was looking and grabbing garbage and rolling in the stink. I hadn’t already gone down far enough, I guess. I’d felt rotten, but I wanted to feel as rotten as anyone could feel, and I didn’t know what would come out the other side.

What did happen was, come May and whiffs of flowers drifted under the bridge, when maybe it would have been possible to live there and think softer troll thoughts, I just walked out, panhandled $2.85, went into a thrift shop, bought a shirt and a pair of pants, went back to the river–and not under the bridge either–stripped bareass, jumped in, scrubbed off eight months of dirt with some old leaves, tied a rock around my old clothes, put on my thrift-shop snazzies, went in town, bought a comb and a throwaway razor with the 35 cents left and got a fast-food job, all in under three hours.

I guess I had to know, and now I know. How deep could I go, and how far could I come back? Well, I could have gone deeper–I didn’t kill, I didn’t steal (much), I didn’t go wino and I didn’t sleep in my own shit like a gorilla. But for an upright, intelligent mammal, I hit the damn-near bottom. My goal now is to be something like head of an ad agency. Why? Action-reaction. As far down as you go, the farther up you can come on the rebound. As for ad copy, I’ve got a collection of metaphors you wouldn’t believe.

[Explanatory note: For my column  at the Welcomat in the ‘80s, I sometimes dropped in a piece of fiction – but not labeled as such. I figure it’s the reader’s job to decide what he or she is reading. Well, with this one – which I have changed only to correct one typo – a bunch of people who I thought knew me fairly well took it as a real reminiscence or confession or what  have you.

[So, though I’ve already let the kitten out of the sack here by admitting it’s fiction, I’m wondering how many of you, today, might have taken this for my version of reality? Send a note if you have a comment. Don’t if you don’t. Either way, drink a cup of tea in my name.]

How did the halloweenish Holy Ghost of my youth transform into today’s bland Holy Spirit? 

I guess it’s a crappy era even for the Trinity.

*   *   *   *

I can’t seem to restrain myself from the occasional dollop of political commentary, if only to prove that I can sound every bit as boneheaded as a media commentator. So here, I’m putting all the small fulminations together to get them out of the way.

*   *   

The presidential election this year is on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5 – what better way to commemorate the Gunpowder Plot of 1605!

*   *   

Campaign poster suggestion:

“Support Tump’s campaign to turn America into the Leading  Shithole Country on Earth! Right now, today, stop government interference in the lives of America’s real citizens by ending all public support for the sick, aged and different-looking, who only drag our country down.

“C’mon, let’s Make America Groan Again and Again and Again!”

*   *   

Hatred of immigrants is the universal evolutionary fear of the “other” – in all countries, in all mammals, in all life forms.

In the U.S., it’s been a repeating theme used against the Irish, the Chinese, the Catholics, the Jews, the Blacks. This fury against immigrants is in our DNA, in the the DNA of all living things (except, weirdly, most fungi, who are fine at lending a helpful thread to a plant). 

The great white replacement theory is just the result of a pressure of too many people worldwide living with too much misery, and looking for an outlet that, alas, doesn’t exist.

*   *  

Intelligence, too, is just the latest paste-on to evolution, and like all of evolution, it’s taken an erratic route in its development, with random perversions.

Our vaunted idea of “justice” is a social novelty, its glories ill-defined and unsupported by evidence. How can we prove that decency is worthwhile, when a huge swath of the electorate sees it as an impediment to self-realization?

*   *  

All the fuss about Biden’s and Trump’s age…. Throughout history, within indigenous tribes and across most of the far East, age has been linked with wisdom. There’s been the assumption that in growing up – maturing – you listen to your elders, respect your grandparents, and seek their accumulated knowledge. I assumed that much well before I became fogied myself (I’m now 85, past time to drink my hemlock).

Biden confuses names? I’ve done that my whole life, as have at least half the people I know.

What you need to master to become a worthwhile leader in any endeavor is the nature of the problems you’re dealing with, the facts behind any given situation, and how to choose among the available possibilities to deal with both the general and the particular.

If you mis-identify two French presidents whose names begin with M, you can simply say, “Pardon me.” But if you can’t identify France as part of Europe, that can be… rather disturbing.

As for Trump, he can identify only two entities: Me and Not-Me.

*   *   *   *

Say, did you hear about the self-encapsulated socialite who was voted Miss Demeanor?

*   *   *   *

Why are so many today so afraid of sex? Why should we care who screws whom? And what possible evil can the country’s handful of the transgendered release, beyond flooding our vocabulary with pronouns?

There’s no thought involved in the negative reaction to anyone’s sexuality, no intelligence – just a pavlovian negative response, along with the inability to see the world as a human setting that we’re all part of (and communally doing our best to destroy).

And I wish to hell we’d just switch to unisex bathrooms, like a civilized society.

Urinals and bidets for all!

*   *   *   *

Nostalgic ditty:

I want a girl,

Just like the girl,

That shagged my dear old dad.

She was the girl,

And the only girl,

So it wasn’t just a fad.

A good old fashioned girl

With Great Big Tits,

The kind of girl that gave my mammy fits.

I want a girl,

Just like the girl

That shagged my dear old dad.

*   *   *   *

A train that went fully psychotic had previously been cited for its loco motives.