Bad Bishop Chapter 2

don't read on until you read the first chapter of Bad Bishop here


 http://pamthompson.weebly.com/blog-nature-hikes.html

***

 You know the kind of person that uses the Windows default settings right down to the out-of-the-box desktop backround with the rolling green hills and popcorn clouds? Well that's me now. I have the opportunity to bend time and space, to live in a neon dreamscape. I could soar godlike over a cartoon fantasia, turn my body into pure clitoral tissue, or section my mind into a dozen platonic thought engines that breathe logic and shit theorems. But instead I direct an avatar that looks exactly like my body, an avatar I refer to as "me". Usually I'm wearing gray Dickies and a Blizzard of Oz t-shirt. Sometimes I'm not really "feeling it" and I change into some Umbro shorts and some other crappy t-shirt. And when I say change, I actually mean that I direct my sorry avatar to extract legs from leg holes then stick those legs into other leg holes. If you're wondering, no I don't actually do laundry, but once in awhile I actually throw my abandoned clothes into a hamper programmed to appear full of abandoned clothes. But usually I just throw them on the floor.

I'd love to say that I throw my clothes on the floor because I know they aren't real, that there is some small gesture built into my routine that recognizes that my existence is simulated. But if I'm being totally real with you, I throw my clothes on the floor because I'm a lazy slob.

The Windows Desktop metaphor is not just a metaphor. My chosen environment, the place that I spend every conscious and autonomous moment of my life, is in fact the default simulated environment provided by the Sloware Corporation's personal OS. Basically the start-up screen, the place you pick your passwords and maybe end up when the system boots in safe mode. If I didn't spring for HD, I could probably run my whole world inside the brain of a nematode.

There's no way to slice it, I spend all my time in an American style tract mansion, circa 2003. It's based on 3D blueprints and compiled photographs of a real McMansion still standing in Fredrick, MD (Fredneck to some). Based on this distinction, the house has been designated as a historic site and maintained spotless and empty for tours. In this state the house is reminiscent of the model home the Bluths occupy in Arrested Development, with more empty rooms and slightly less character. I've furnished most of the house to look like the waiting room of a dental surgeon.

I spend most of my time in the study. The study reeks of leather and deep mahogany. In one corner there's a vintage globe, the kind with sea-monsters, which opens to reveal bourbon, dark rum, and an ivory case of menthol cigarettes. In another corner is a hand-carved totem pole with the faces of Nixon, Elvis, and Che carved in the front, capped by a giant skyward baracuda head. And in the center of the room, on the giant heartwood slab of a desk, is a Mac Pro with a huge screen, a pornographic paperweight, and a slinky. The message this setup communicates to me, effectively, every day: I'm a serious person, a person who works on big things, but I do it on my own terms.

Sometimes the system will glitch. This actually happens to everyone running a high-acuity setup. An edge will smear or you will catch an aftterimage. Emotions, however, are not supposed to ever glitch because they are still run 100% on goo-ware, no matter how many layers of chemical and electromagnetic overrides are used, and goo-ware in theory should smooth everything out, in that familiar brain way. But a long time ago I made the decision to reprogram my belief-core, so that I would believe that it is possible for emotions to glitch. Because I used to become overwhelmed with the feeling that I was being laughed at, passing in a split-second shudder. It would happen repeatedly whenever I used my computer, and it was really distracting. It took me months but eventually I pinpointed the feeling. I was embarrassed that the computer was laughing at me. It was laughing because even though I was in a computer, I chose to be on a computer. I hung on to every banal detail I could stuff in my field of vision because I wanted to remind myself of my human life, to feel like a normal bloodbag in a line of hard working bloodbags. But to do that, I had to massage white plastic and stare into a screen. And so I would start laughing. For hours. I would't be able to stop.

--- 

A diagnosis of Typical Hastening Syndrome can be made under the following conditions:

A. Five (or more) of the following symptoms have been present during the same 2-week period; at least one of the symptoms is either (1) perception of one's surroundings moving unusually fast or (2) subjective experience of the waking day as shorter than the dreaming day. Note:  A diagnosis of Hastening should not be considered in patients experiencing organic dementia.

(1) the visual perception of objects, other people, or one's own body moving at speeds which appear excessive. At least one of the following should be present: difficulty visually tracking especially fast-moving objects, blurring or other difficulties recognizing objects in motion, or a consistent feeling of acceleration despite moving at a constant speed.

(2) reports that the subjective experience of each waking day is consistently shorter than any dream. Only a single REM cycle should be necessary to achieve this effect, and in some cases any loss of consciousness will be sufficient. Note: Individuals with certain untreated neurological conditions (eg narcolepsy, temporal seizures, medication withdrawal) can qualify if they experience a severe modulation of time perception that is consistent with episodic neurological events.

(3) loss of weight or dehydration due to failure to recognize internal cues of hunger and thirst.

(4) hypersomnia or frantic efforts to avoid consciousness.

(5) extreme slowing of voluntary bodily movements, loss of small motor control, or frequent spasticity.

(6) consistent unidirectional changes in one or more sensory modalities. Common examples are pitch-shifting, extreme brightening of the visual field, and purpling of the visual field. Less common examples include intensification of all flavors, a constant meat-like taste in the absence of food, or the perception that all areas of exposed skin are lightly stimulated at all times.

(7) perceived loss of voluntary control of actions when motor and forced-preference tests confirm intact volition.

(8) consistent recall of events from previous days as having occurred during the present day. Alternately, belief that events that occurred hours previously are occurring currently.

(9) inappropriate affect combined with the sensation that mood changes are caused by unknown events which have not yet occurred.

B. At least one of the above symptoms can be temporarily attenuated by cannabinoids, dissociative anesthetics, oxygen deprivation to the brain, OR disruption of the hippocampus and/or temporal cortex using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation.

C. The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

D. The individual is over eighty years of age.

E. No abnormal changes are observed in the individual's mitochondrial metabolism.

 -excerpt from the 18th Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

 

 http://pamthompson.weebly.com/bats.html

Lymonade

Before reading Lyme of My Life I didn't know much about Lyme disease. The blog is written by Sadie, a former coworker of mine at St. Joseph Center. I didn't get to know Sadie very well but I remember she first came off as a bland and efficient sort of person, but as I got to know her a bit better I could tell that my first impression was wrong and that she was smart and interesting, and possibly annoying. I followed her on Facebook and learned she was a militant and spunky biker-rights person. And then it seemed like she sort of disappeared for awhile. I didn't think much about it, figured she was just shrouded in the mists of the Facebook algorithm. And then I found out she had advanced stage Lyme disease and had become essentially disabled.

Like I said, I didn't know much about Lyme disease. What I did know was mostly based on this kid Sean that moved to my neighborhood late in elementary school. Sean was a big dude, definitely big for the grade and we eventually found out he'd been held back but didn't know why for awhile. Nobody teased Sean to his face because he was a big angry dude but there was a cloud of mystery around him and people liked to speculate about why he was held back. Incarceration was the dominant theory. Sean insisted on people calling him "Trapper". He collected reptiles and fireworks, shot air rifles at squirrels, called people "pussy", and liked to talk about how he wished he had a dick in his armpit so he could pleasure himself more easily. He would constantly lie for no reason and claim to see military bases on the surface of the moon with his naked eye. He bragged constantly. I kind of thought he was full of shit, but I met a medium-hot girl in swim class (my parents forced me to take one "physical activity" at all times to be well rounded) who talked nonstop about his sexual prowess and eccentric predilections. Understand, I was 14 and hadn't touched boob. So Sean became this kind of enigma. I saw him stick up for people getting bullied more than once, and he would vacillate between periods of silent sulking and loud obnoxious dickwadism.

One snow day I was waiting for the bus and Sean was driving past and he picked me up and drove me to school. By that point we weren't friends at all, but I think he'd recently realized his two friends were total assholes. I barely said anything during the ride but he opened up to me in machinegun fashion. He said he had to repeat 4th grade because he had Lyme disease, which didn't really surprise me because he spent most weekends crawling through streams searching for reptiles to capture. It made him unable to do anything for a year and he convinced himself that he was going to die, but then he suddenly recovered. Then he went on to talk about his future plans to join Black Ops or something and I kind of spaced out, thinking about him trapped in his room in 4th grade anticipating death. This is the last conversation I ever had with Sean. But the impression I got was that Lyme was very bad and very mysterious, a kind of primeval holdout that lurks in swamps waiting to pull us in, not to kill us but just long enough to show us our rot.

A couple of years ago I went to Mexico with my new wife Pam, and stayed for over 10 months, almost immediately after a honeymoon in Queensland. I had to learn alot about diseases and toxic insects and hostile lifeforms in general, but for some reason Lyme didn't make the cut. Maybe it was because the work with my wife involved being frequently bitten by bats, and I decided to fool an ER in the States to give me post-exposure rabies shots so I didn't have to shell out five hundred large for the pre-exposure course. What I didn't know at the time is that this would result in me also being injected with 2,000 IU of human immunoglobulin, so much that 20 injection sites (including my finger) swollen visibly from the fluid volume, before puking orange juice due to the Norco they gave me to stop my whining. Maybe Lyme didn't make the cut because I woke up next to a dead Assassin Bug with a possible bite site. The Assassin Bug is basically a living blood-straw the size of a large roach that sometimes carries the protozoan disease Chagas, which can lie dormant in the body for decades before causing a rapid slide into dementia. Maybe Lyme didn't make the cut because I lived in an area known for deadly scorpions, where antivenom availability is advertised at the front of every clinic. Small scorpions which are known to hide in shoes, pillow-cases, and laptop covers (turned out we never found any in our house because they were eaten by our borrowed cat. cats are immune to scorpions). Maybe Lyme didn't make the cut because we were constantly at war with mosquitos, making some days seem like little more than a cycle of cold showers, application of multiple forms of repellent, application of multiple forms of anti-itch cream, application of anti-bacterial creams to the sites of freshly-scratched bites, and ingestion of fistfuls of whatever antihistamines we could get our hands on. Did I mention we lived in an area where mosquitoes sometimes carried Dengue Fever? Maybe Lyme didn't make the cut because we had guns pulled on us twice, or because a Stage 2 Hurricane hit just a few kilometros from our leaky concrete beach house.

But Lyme should have made the cut. Because in a couple months in the dry season I had more ticks than the rest of my life combined. We would burn them, we would use duct tape, we would yank with tweezers. Twice I got the head stuck and got a nasty boil that lasted for weeks. Once because of a botched removal and once because the tick was undetectable for over a day on my scalp before it became so bloated as to be obvious. Nothing is weirder than a tick bomb, when dozens of tiny juvenile ticks will attach so weakly that they can be pulled off with fingernails. Knock on wood.

Sadie is on a pretty serious regimen involving frequent injections. She takes enzymes, specialized supplements, anticoagulants, and antibiotics. She sits inside some kind of spacesuit designed, as far as I can tell, to make her sweat. Sadie often loses consciousness from standing too long. She has severe muscle weakness and difficulty maintaining weight. She experiences pain in her joints and the kind of hypersensitivity to stimuli associated with migraines and fibro. Not trying to list all her symptoms, just give you an idea of how global and debilitating Lyme disease can be. Sadie had to quit her full-time job, go on disability, and move home to live with her parents. Her treatment is essentially a full-time job and it isn't clear when she's going to recover.

But I know that Sadie is going to recover, because I have worked long enough as a social worker with people with a variety of chronic conditions that I can smell success as surely as I can smell death, stagnation, or hypochondria. Sadie is a person who takes her recovery very seriously and doesn't trust others to do it for her. She is a skeptic but not a cynic. She has a sense of self-effacing humor. She still has the unmistakable human drives of a total person. She's very feisty and combative with her condition. Most importantly she does not want to be sick. But none of that is really why I know that Sadie will recover. I know this because I have known Trapper. Trapper was a man with a million problems, demons that will always chase him, huge character flaws. But despite all this Trapper was not defeated by Lyme, not even when he had slid all the way down the rabbit hole and was ready to throw a game of checkers with the reaper himself. Just being a deep down stubborn asshole was enough to get Trapper through in the end. So that's all it takes. Sadie, I know you have that in you.

Jack3d Banned: What Is DMAA's Legal Status?

Disclaimer: I'm no doctor, witch or otherwise. I'm not a lawyer, cop, or vendor. So don't do drugs, because I won't make any money on any of it.

DMAA is now illegal to market as a nutritional supplement in the United States. There are still plenty of vendors offering the pure chemical for sale in the US, and this should not be viewed as a crime as long as the website does not advertise that the chemical is intended for "human consumption". DMAA is not a DEA scheduled drug and is technically legal to possess and purchase, again as long as no claims about it's effects on human beings are discussed or advertised. I have not come across anyone claiming that DMAA is illegal due to the Analogs Act, which means it's chemical structure is substantially different from any current Schedule I or II drugs. There is no way to know when or if DMAA will be banned in the US.

This is meant as an update to my more extensive post on DMAA. The situation has changed a great deal since then but I intend to keep the old post up for "historical" purposes.