I have a medical procedure scheduled for Monday morning whose sedation will, for the day's remainder, take me away from the circus. I trust I'll be back Tuesday morning. Take care.
***
"You are a very sick man," said the gastroenterologist as I was arguing my way out of an emergency-room visit last night. I quote the good doctor only to show that I'm not being lazy in taking time off. I just need a bit more rest. More blood work and new, supposedly kickass meds today. I'll be back soon.
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Update: I'm still trying to evade hospitalization by curling in a fetal position at home for free, rather than renting a $2,,000-a-day bed in which to do it. The success of my primitive efforts at evasion won't be known for a few days. I'd set the odds at about 50-50.
Meanwhile, this is a really fresh sort of populism playing out in the duck-lipped demagogue's cabinet appointments, isn't it? Let's see, how many billionaires and Wall Streeters are we up to to already? I would genuinely enjoy watching the white, charlatanism-blind working class get fucked by Trump's plutocratic establishmentarianism if it weren't the millions of thinking, decent Americans about to get fucked right along with them.
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Update II: The odds are in flux; in fact I'm resetting them, via dismaying realism, at 65-35 in favor of eventual hospitalization. I have reset the odds because of a brief stretch at the e.r. yesterday afternoon intended (successfully) to raise my blood pressure — it seems my local clinic, which had recorded a draconian dip earlier in the morning, ratted me out to my gastroenterologist — and to restabilize some of my precious bodily fluids being so cruelly sapped by this, the most depressing era of American politics since Jacksonian Democracy (I shall live and die a Northern, Lincolnian Whig, notwithstanding my Missouri roots). Thus restabilized, why then, you ask, my resetting of higher hospitalization odds? Because my lower guts are idiopathically ulcerated: they're bleeding, failing to absorb water, nutrition as well — a dozen pounds lost in two weeks (hey it ain't all bad; I've been trying to rid myself of this unseemly middle-aged potbelly for two years). There are, however, two hopeful upsides to which I cling: idiopathic though chronic the ulcerations may be, the medications I'm now on may yet restore me to the more natural order of all things gastrointestinal before the hospitalization clock runs out; and an unrelated, further weakening, really nasty cough which had me heaving my upper guts upon every physical movement is now under narcotic control (which, further, has allowed me to sit up just long enough to rattle out this unforgivably rambling note, which, by way of excuse and self-defense, I blame on the writing bug, which is as incurable as the presidential bug).
I believe in transparency, and there you have it, as best I understand it. Many of you have generously donated to this site, and you are no longer receiving the product for which you paid. My apologies. Put in political terms, I feel as though I'm abandoning my base — and since I'm no Trumpian sociopath (there's that, at least), I also feel bad about that. The narcotics, as noted, seem to be boosting my energy level. So perhaps I can soon return to some work, which I miss and you deserve. For now, I'm doing what I can. More later, and take care. I love you guys.