6000onions

I have a UTI, which is to say, a urinary tract infection. I am prone to them, as are many women, although in the States nobody ever talks about it and in fact everybody kind of acts like it’s some sort of unusual, secret, shameful thing. I was lucky to get my first one as a teenager living in Spain: nobody made a big deal out of it and my French friend Sylvie said “Ah. la cystite!” which is what I still call it. Cystitis, the Brits say, and I was happy on first encountering Caitlin Moran to discover that nobody makes a big deal out of it in the UK either: they just pretty much figure you’re going to have it now and then. In Spain they, or rather Javier the doctor, the QOB’s friend, gave me some green pills that made me pee orange and some blue pills that made it all go away. And over the next many years I have had it here and there and now and then and the only time it’s been a big deal is when I don’t have health insurance or the doctor gets weird about it, which happens.

I am a bit miffed though about having one right now, because cystitis is one of those Judaeo-Christian punishing illnesses: you generally get it from having too much fun. Which is to say, it’s also called honeymoonitis because you can get it from having too much sex – wait, well, too much? Anyway, a lot of sex – you don’t get it from your partner, by the way, it’s from the friction. Basically, it’s a physics based disease. Heh. You can also get it from hanging around in a wet bathing suit, so, see? Fun. You get it from fun. I have not had either of those varieties of fun in a very very VERY long time – and it occurs to me that it’s been EVEN LONGER since I had them in tandem – so this bout seems particularly unfair. But then, ascribing ridiculous religious reasons to why bad things happen is one of the rabbit holes people fall into in this country and I don’t want to go there. Next thing you know I’ll be picketing funerals. I do think, though, that this is why nobody in the US has a healthy normal approach to cystitis and instead act like it’s some kind of particularly skeevy STD, like crabs or something.

However! Let’s stop having fun and instead return to the health insurance part. I have health insurance now, and I have a doctor, or, well, at least I have a doctor for my lady parts. I keep meaning to find a doctor for the rest of me – necessary, clearly, as shown by the shoulder episode: you can take your shoulder to the gynecologist but she is not going to understand it  – but I haven’t gotten around to it. Cystitis is not really a lady part thing except that it is – we ladies have a much shorter and I think thinner urinary tract than the gentlemen do and so ours tends to get clogged more easily than theirs does, or so it was once explained to my non medical school attending unless you count WebMD brain. At any rate, it’s sort of hard to say whether it falls under the purview of the gynecologist or not. On the theory that it did I called mine up and, I am utterly delighted to report, she called me back and called in a prescription and all I have to do is go and pick it up. I don’t even have to pee in a jar, hurrah, hurray, oh frabjous day. More or less. I do have to go to the drugstore over by where I work which meant that on the off chance of encountering a coworker I had to put on a bra, which I would rather not do on my day off, but whatever. First world problems! BUT.

As I hung up the phone it occurred to me that this is middle class privilege in action in America today. If I was poor – poorer, I mean, which is astoundingly, horrifically possible as I know to my sorrow – I wouldn’t have health insurance. Don’t talk to me about the ACA – in NC at least it doesn’t work because our psychotic state legislature did not expand Medicaid and thus, if you make more than, hmmmm, I think it’s like $12K a year, or if you make less but are not either over 65 or under 18 or permanently disabled, unless you have an extra $80 or $200 or more a month, you still don’t have health insurance of any kind. Nothing has changed here since Obamacare happened. Well. So if I had woken up with cystitis – actually it started yesterday and I’ve been trying to stave it off with the unspeakable horror that is real, undiluted, unsweetened cranberry juice but no dice – and I didn’t have insurance, than this is what would have happened.

• I would have had to either come up with the money for Sisters of Mercy: $200 or the ER: also at least $200 but they ask for the money at the end instead of the beginning so you might be able to get treated for free, just at the cost of your eternal credit report forever.
• Or I could have taken off work tomorrow, thus forfeiting a days pay, and gone to the free clinic at ABCCM, where you have to show up at 7 am and sit for an hour and a half in line and then there is no guarantee that you’re going to be seen.
• Then I would have had to pee in a jar and wait.
• Then I would have to pay full price for the prescription, Cipro, usually, which is probably not cheap if you don’t have insurance.
• And all this would have bankrupted me, so I just wouldn’t go, and instead go on with the cranberry juice and prayer regimen with the result that possibly if not probably it would go into my kidneys and I would end up at the ER really sick.
• AND PEOPLE WONDER WHY THE FUCK THIS COUNTRY PAYS SO MUCH MORE FOR MEDICAL CARE THAN ALL OTHER COUNTRIES! HINT: IT’S NOT BECAUSE THE CARE IS INTRINSICALLY BETTER!!

What would solve this problem, class? UNIVERSAL SINGLE PAYER HEALTH INSURANCE!

And that is our rant for today. Anyway, I’m going to the drugstore now, so enjoy and count your cystitis free blessings.

Somebody tweeted “This is the Summer of Watching Helplessly” and I, along with many others, retweeted it because it felt so damn true and then a few people picked it up from me and tweeted it on and, yeah, here we are: tweeting helplessly. I have been watching the news from Ferguson, MO, primarily on Twitter and on Metafilter – the best way, I find, to get my news for the most part – and I keep wanting and even, occasionally, starting to cry. I get so angry and so depressed and just, jesus. I can’t even. Even.

I wish that people would listen to hippies. I know, they’re annoying as fuck, I can’t stand them either, but look, they were right about the neonicitinoids killing the bees – not that anything is being done about that except for, uh, the occasional hand wringing article in Mother Jones – and they were right about the police, the rise of police power and the problems, to put it mildly, of the increased militarization of the police. Post hippies, we the punk ass generation were also right about these things and yet, fuck, goddamn, here we go again. Here we go again and this time, the gloves are off and the real force of the horrible, seemingly eternal, casual racism in this country is right there on display. And you know it’s all just going to go underground again and you know, FUCK THAT. FUCK THAT. Bring it out. Bring that demon out kicking and writhing into the light of day and let’s look at it: in the USA in the 21st century it is okay for the police to shoot young black men. No, really, it’s okay. It’s okay in Asheville and it’s okay in Ferguson, MO and it’s okay pretty much anywhere.

I don’t like cops. In fact I fear and pretty much loathe them and I don’t know what would have to happen for me to call on one, but I doubt there is trouble enough in the world. Why? you say, the cops are here to help us, you say. Unfortunately, I have probably more reason than most nominally middle class white women to dislike them: if we were black, I think there is a very good chance, by which I mean about an 85% chance, that my son would be dead now. We have failed young men in this country, young men of every color, but they mostly don’t shoot the white ones.

Someday I might tell the whole story of what happened from 2008 to 2012 in this family, but not today. It is not entirely my story to tell, after all, but here is the gist of it: my son as an angry, troubled teenager got himself into first minor and then rapidly escalating major trouble. For this he went to jail, repeatedly, starting with the time at the age of 16 when he was kept in the Buncombe County Jail for four days and three nights without any way to reach me – at that time inmates were not allowed to call cell phones and all we had even then were cell phones and my boss, not understanding, being a middle class white woman, refused all calls from jail – and he might be there still except for a chance encounter with a public defender friend of mine. And that was just the beginning of our four year journey to hell. My son, as you know if you know me, has had a rocky road his whole life: he has multiple learning disabilities and a variety of other diagnoses involving lots of initials, including ODD, which is to say he mouths off to cops. The cops in this town, who have always made a point of hassling him, partly because they routine harass teenagers in this fucking wealthy tourist destination and partly because he’s a big, mouthy kid and partly because his friends come in a wide variety of colors and sizes and partly because we are poor and partly, okay, I grant you, because he fucked up many a time, really don’t like him. And although he now holds down multiple jobs and works his ass off and does not get into trouble and I am incredibly proud of him, they still don’t like him and they still want to harass him and, by extension, me. Fuck tha police, indeed.

They decided, at some point, that he was a gang member and probably a gang kingpin at that. This is a kid who at that point was too ADD to find his fucking shoes most of the time and as I told a probation officer in a fit of fury, if I thought he had the ability to mastermind a gang I would have worried far less about his future. That would be why I had 12 police and probation officers show up at my house in full riot gear one day in 2010 and search the house and the yard from top to bottom, while I stood there in the kitchen, wondering if I should make coffee, or what. Awkward! They found, eventually, two broken down paintball guns and a collection of fake Samurai swords that had been hanging on my son’s bedroom wall since he was 9 and a machete that was on its way to be used for brush clearing in the trunk of his car and, then, somewhat later, during a sudden second search of a now emptied room, a rather surprising whole half gram of marijuana. That was the day when our comic relief was his friend, handcuffed in my living room as I stood there, unbelieving, trying to wrap my mind around this, was told that his pink ribbon tattoo, a symbol of his mother’s fight with breast cancer, was a clear gang marker. Yeah. We never got the swords back, by the way, and I imagine they are on the wall of a cop’s kids bedroom now.

That experience, combined with the days and days of sitting in courtrooms and taking phone calls from jail, all of which cost money, you know, quite a lot of money – it is terribly, horrifyingly expensive to have a loved one incarcerated – and sending money to jail for such non necessities as shaving cream and aspirin – an aspirin costs $16 in jail, by the way, $16 – and then the long months my son spent in a hellhole state youth prison, months that I pretty much cried every night, left a variety of marks on my soul but one of them is a distaste and distrust for police and an absolute disillusionment and horror of what we laughingly call the criminal justice system in this country, a system that incarcerates more young men than in any other country in the world, in the motherfucking world, that will not ever go away. They used my kid as a scapegoat and if we had been richer, I am pretty sure he would have walked away from everything with a slap on the wrist and no record. As it is he has multiple felony convictions on his record so he cannot vote and he cannot get a passport and his future as a result is confined and limited and yet, you know, with all that we are incredibly lucky because Michael Brown is dead and my son is alive and this is not because they are different: they are not different except for the color of their skins.

This country is fucked. It is so fucked, so badly now that I at least no longer hold out any hope that it can even be reconciled. Maybe there is still time or still a way to rein it in, to rein in the crazy rhetoric, the power mad testosterone and chemical fueled rage coming from the right wing and the police and even the churches, Jesus wept, but I doubt it. I think it’s too late, now, way too late, just like climate change, and I wish I or someone could write a better epitaph for some dream of the US than the one that is being written in blood and human suffering all over the country this summer while we stand by and tweet helplessly but I don’t think we will even get that. To quote the minstrel prince of the hippies, right again, everything is broken.

Tonight at the bar the subject somehow came up – I think it was somewhere in between the possibility of quantum universes and who should keep the dog in any given breakup – of how, when I was 12 or possibly 13, a crow dropped half a bloody dead rabbit on me in the woods. By which I mean to say that I brought it up, because obviously, nobody else knew about this. Well, one would hope not. I was alone that summer afternoon, except for a maladaptive springer spaniel, and since I was already more than half insane with hormones and fantasy novels and a kind of deeply dysfunctional family situation, nobody else ever knew except my best friend. I told her in hushed whispers, because I thought that it meant I was a Witch, and soon More Signs Would Follow. This was before Harry Potter, or I would have spent a lot of time waiting for an owl. My best friend ended up hospitalized for schizophrenia when she was 17 and I’m not sure if she ever really got out. She did, once, and took a Greyhound bus south to visit me in Charleston and it went, well, not well. And Signs did not Follow.

It was the back half of the rabbit and it came down through the pine woods with considerable force and there was a lot of bird shouting. There was a riot of crows, or perhaps a murder, and the branches shook and blam, not quite on me but almost, smack, was half a rabbit with the guts and muscles and so on hanging out among the gray fur.

My friend Jodi said, on hearing this story, that she thought this was the incident that had shaped me into who I was forever, that that half a rabbit had made me forever akin to the absurd. “You knew,” she said, “After that, that anything could happen at any time and there was no sense to the universe.”

“On the contrary,” I said, “It seemed to me that it meant there was tremendous sense to the universe. I thought it meant that I was Chosen.”

It was just later that I figured out I wasn’t. And, yes, that the universe does tend to run to dead rabbits, except when you really need one.

“What did you do with it?” asked a more practical member of our party.

“Nothing,” I said, “I was afraid to touch it. I mean, it was bloody and gross and there it was. I think I poked it with a stick once or twice, because it occurred to me that I should bring it home and keep it forever, or melt off the flesh and keep the bones or something – I had read my fantasy – but I couldn’t quite bring myself to pick it up. And I wouldn’t let the dog touch it and I could just imagine my mother’s response to this appearing in her kitchen and it was not good. So in the end I left it there.”

Actually I continued on my walk and I thought then and kind of think now that I then went through a small time portal and wandered briefly into the edge of a future Lincoln, Massachusetts (that was where we were living that year) but everything was strange and filled with McMansions, another term that hadn’t yet been coined, and buzzing (literally buzzing, like cicadas or downed power lines, not me, it would be another year or so before I discovered drugs) so I went back and through the hissing twilight and the frogs and home again, 12, or 13 or actually now that I think about it even maybe 14, surly, uncommunicative and filled with loathing. And heading into adolescence, full tilt.

Dead rabbits fell on me, yes, but there are other, somewhat less dramatic but just as weird, things I also did when I was in middle school and here, on no particular order, they are.

1. I ate the same lunch every day for my entire 8th grade year. Ham and swiss on rye with mustard, an apple, a bag of Fritos and a Coke.

2. I also wore the same outfit, basically, I had it codified: jeans (I had 3 identical pairs, so one was always clean, all flair, even though that was out and people gave me shit for it) and one of my four turtleneck bodysuits (this was a terrible 70s thing, they snapped at the crotch like leotards and mine were, fashion gods forgive me, ribbed. I had a mustard one, a dark red one, a dark green one and I think a navy one. Even then I would have died rather than worn pastels. The orange pants in this picture were a terrible thing of my mothers and long since banished.) and either clogs or Frye boots, depending on the weather. Remember that I was already 5’10”, weighed about 105 pounds, had neither boobs nor butt nor hips but instead was not unlike a young tree or 2′ by 4″. I had outsize bottle bottom glasses and thick not quite curly not quite blonde not quite brown not quite red hair that my mother was forever attempting and failing to contain with a variety of red rubber bands and barrettes and haircuts that just kept on getting progressively worse until we all gave up and left my hair the hell alone.*

3. A couple years before the above, before the rote sandwiches and jeans, we lived in Connecticut. Every day at 5:00 Star Trek (the original one, the only one, really) came on TV. I kept a Star Trek Diary that year, and in it I wrote down the title of the episode playing that day, so I HAD to get home just before 5:00 because they would only flash the title up on the screen one time, just at the very beginning. I couldn’t miss it. I rode my bike to school and back again, or to a friends’ house, or where ever, nobody much cared where I was or if I was home or, well, I think my mother would have noticed if I hadn’t turned up for dinner, maybe. But that year, I got myself home at 5:00, because the one or two times I tried to get a friend to turn on Star Trek so I could at least catch the title, I was relentlessly mocked. Star Trek was already only for nerds by the early mid 70s. And here I truly out myself: I had a book, a paperback that had the history of Star Trek, a bio of Gene Roddenberry and a synopsis for every single episode ever made (they were long done making new ones by this point) and I checked off each episode. Yes. Since I’m confessing, here, I also read some Star Trek novels. Yup. I did.

4. And then, the next year or so, I wrote a Star Trek episode myself which featured every single person in my grade, which is to say seven of us: it was a small, Anglophiliac and rapidly dying girl’s school with a jaw droppingly beautiful Edwardian campus and a headmistress, a good friend of my mother, who would later go on to shoot the Scarsdale diet doctor. My Star Trek story was well received. Everybody liked hearing about themselves on a starship having adventures.

5. Jean Harris told my mother that it was okay and even normal that I had stolen Fear of Flying off her bedside table and that I would probably survive and not become a nymphomaniac.

6. At a point equidistant between the ones above, when I was attending a different all girls school in a different Connecticut suburb, a math teacher told us about a a googol and a googolplex, which are numbers that are so large, nobody can count up to them or even write them out. They have a million million zeroes, or something like that, I can no longer remember and I don’t want to google the googol and find something everyday and real. I want to hold onto the image of the unattainable that I grasped that afternoon in math class, because I immediately started to try to make it attainable. For the rest of the school year, I filled a succession of marble notebooks with zeroes. The first one had a 1 at the beginning and the rest just had zeroes. I wrote them every time I was bored, which was most of the time in that school, except when there was horrible drama, which was the rest of the time because it was 7th grade in a girls school. I kept on filling my notebooks.

7. Years later, when I saw a Jonathan Borofsky exhibition at the Whitney, I felt like I had come home.

8. That same year we went on an overnight trip, or it might even have been several days, to Cape Cod. On the bus I took a plastic cup and cut it into vertical strips – not all the way but so that it was still holding together – and put it down and it walked like an octopus from the back to the front of the bus and briefly, very briefly, I was cool.

9. On that same bus trip I had to sit next to the most unpopular, uncool, loathed girl in the school and she told me that she was okay with being hated because she knew her parents loved her and that maybe we could be friends? And I felt like the lowest pond scum on earth, because all I wanted was to get the hell away before I caught her pariah germs. And I fled as soon as I could and didn’t look back. But I never did say anything mean to or about her again.

10. The summer this picture was taken, on Block Island, I found a strange hidden place behind the dunes that was full, I mean full, of bird bones, like a silent, bleached, hot, sandy graveyard of hollow white bones. I spent a lot of time there. I brought bags and bags of them home, and my mother thought we would all get lice, or scabies, or something, but eventually she relented. It was a difficult summer familywise.  I wish I still had the bones.

11. I was a weird kid. But all kids, you know, are weird.

*This state of affairs has essentially persisted although I have more or less dyed it into submission.