I’m going to post this without cooling and editing because otherwise I might lose the courage. Nor posting to Medium which is supposed to be “fine writing.”
My gas installer had a mild case of Covid in August. Enough time has passed that I think he might not be contagious and anyway we stayed far apart as did all the tradesmen who went through here. Either I didn’t catch Covid or I had it but couldn’t tell it apart from the status quo.
Pondera County is where I live. Toole is where the laundromat is. I’ve been wary of using the laundromat, but now I look at these stats:
Pondera: 62 active, 198 recovered, 2 deaths
Toole: 24 active, 541 recovered, 8 deaths
Toole is the Port of Entry to Canada and a train/truck intermodal center, plus a prison and nursing homes. I doubt whether the prison occupants are counted here.
For comparison,
Cascade (Great Falls): 3339 active, 788 recovered, 53 deaths.
Glacier (Blackfeet Rez, if their stats are included): 137 cases, 964 recovered, 18 deaths
The big health label beyond Covid is Diabetes 2 which I’ve had for years now. I’m not on insulin and cut out all sugar except that late in the afternoon I often hit a low and eat a few squares of chocolate. Biggest worry is the impact on my feet. “Sitting is the new smoking.” By bedtime my feet are engorged despite being on mild heat. I’m taking Benfotiamine, Vitamin B1 made more soluble, which seems to help.
The tradesmen always said, “You don’t look like you’re 80.” They are used to women my age here who have lived on sugar, nicotine, and alcohol and been out in the sun a lot. Nowadays they also have Diabetes 2, but are dependent on horrendously expensive insulin paid for by Medicare. They are vulnerable to everything and die young of cancer.
When I stopped eating sugar, I lost about thirty pounds, but didn’t get thinner. Instead my skin became loose and is still puckered like seersucker. I have what the Heart Butte kids used to call a “pop belly” — very common around here — but now it’s more of an empty sack. Still makes it hard to tend to my feet. I should be massaging them regularly after soaking in hot water.
But the real health hazard is my attitude. I just don’t care about all this stuff you’re supposed to do. For one thing a person is supposed to use bedtime and rising as well as the three meals at the normal times. But I’m not scheduled like that. I respond to the cats’ schedule: Up at 4AM, eat write and back to sleep at 5AM; up at 9 or 10AM; hand-eat all day; nap at noon; eat at 5PM; nap afterwards; eat at 9PM; bed at 11PM. This does not correspond to when pills are supposed to be taken. On the cats’ schedule it doesn’t matter whether I care or not because they pester until I do it, but they don't know about pills.
This old house is full of workarounds, operating gimmicks. displacements, etc. I’m trying to disperse my library and archives, but the pandemic means that the places I want to take them are closed. The most I can do is box and label. The cats enjoy the chaos and like sleeping in the boxes. But they are taking liberties with their turds. I sheeted the front room rugs with plastic, which they assumed means they can “go” anyplace now. Not quite ten cats compose a colony of relatives, and I’d like to give away some. Four big soft agreeable tomcats would be good mousers on ranches except that the coyotes eat them.
No money for veterinarians. The town is too small for occasional spay/neuter clinics and the larger towns do not advertise them here. I have not contacted the one humane society I know of in Shelby. Whatever the cats are carrying — viruses, microbes, worms — I share. No fleas or ticks. I have not given birth to kittens. Occasionally a kitten begins to cough and dies. There are four corona viruses that afflict cats.
In terms of writing, which is the point of all this, the content is going well. I’m gradually finding the people I should be relating to. I had high hopes for Medium which started out talking about quality writing and turned out to be how to make a living by re-cycling pop stuff. I can’t make money from them because the setup is for people in cities who have websites and cell phones for transferring funds. If I had a website, as suggested by Lulu.com who wants me to sell books, I would be starting a kitchen table business that if successful would eat up my writing time. Internet use is getting more difficult and intricate just as I am less able to cope with it.
Lately I’ve been attracting business parasites who offer to rewrite my material into movies or correct the dozens of mistakes I’m making in formatting or some other thing that would make me rich and famous. I also attract people who read a post like this and are filled with benevolence, wanting to offer friendship and maybe even gifts because they want to get past my boundaries and save me, be part of my life. I puke. History buffs think I’m in their frame of reference, which is white triumph over savages. Not.
I should provide something positive that I really like and seems to be a way forward. https://www.youtube.com/watch v=KJn4s4IhXjQ&feature=youtu.be
This is three interviews, one with the editor of Slant publishing house at the beginning and one with a Christian screenwriter at the end. The middle is about kids, which I don’t do. It sounds as though they’re claiming Christianity back from the mega-church-mega-mad people and also taking down the idea of “fencing the Communion” which is the historical term for an early time when the Christians were so defensive that they would only allow the “saved” to participate in ritual. Not that I’m Christian or want to be, but that it’s in my culture along with other “religions”. I want to part out that “thing” and scrap some pieces.
The writing that has seemed cast aside is the exploration of ideas, well-explored and expressed. Where is the audience? Certainly not in politics and not in venues like Medium. It’s almost like people are hiding in fear of attack.
No one here will attack me, but they will withdraw services. I’m past that now. My house is much safer without gas pipes underneath it. The wall furnace is my only gas appliance and it vents outside. The cats love it.
No comments:
Post a Comment