What the Hell is My Problem

Driving my daughter to school this morning, she began to feel as if she would throw up. Each day I give my kids a multivitamin and a vitamin E gelcap in the hope that they'll grow up like Icelanders. At first, my lame-ass response was "don't throw up all over your project" and then I gave her something to throw up into. She wretched visibly.

Then somehow I had the presence of mind to roll the window down and the cold air helped her. I asked her if she ate breakfast this morning (we were taking her school project in, and everything was a mad rush up until that point) and she said no. And so I had some ... believe it or not ... fresh vegetables in the car. Downing those, she was ok. Her stomach was trying to digest the gel cap and the multivitamin on little else other than water.

Driving back , I realized that there should be a sequel to what the fuck is my problem in which I should get very specific about what the hell is wrong with me.

So let's start with the GI tract. This thing is completely lame. It's a bag of acid attached to three hundred feet of coiled up hose. Its main purpose in life is to deal with food would that I were out there hunter/gatherer trying to snack on anything I can find. It is ring one of my hellish existence.

Why is it that, I can enjoy something tasty - like a donut - and then be forced to gain weight or otherwise spin out of control? Because my GI doesn't work right - it barely extracts the nutrition from food to begin with - and its designed for me to go for a day or so living off fat until I can kill something and eat again. Donuts and coffee are a morning office ritual. My GI is expecting me to hunt and kill them.

My left leg is also a gift from hell. I shattered it in a car accident, it stitched up fairly nicely but its the wrong fucking size. My left leg is bigger than my right. My dad says its arterial scarring or something like that. But it's still pretty lame. Running long distances - the left leg will always end up with cuts. My toenails come off sometimes on the really sick long runs - they turn black and pop off - but its both feet not just the left foot. That's pretty hellish too but fortunately running long distance is its own sort of hell to begin with. I would like to have my left leg under control. My foot is tapping under my desk right now. Maybe I can chain it down. There has to be some extra chains in the office kitchen that we're not already using to keep the donuts from running away.

Of course, the wonderful environment in which I find myself - a total bush republican recovery economic crash and burn - huge and mounting bills - my tenuous grasp on research issues - the goddamn thing on the door that keeps hitting my knee courtesy of some sadist from sweden - these are all minor compared to massive water shortage - catastrophic climate change - war - and my personal favorite - rapidly mutating virus and retrovirus based disease. Some little kid down the road caught H1N1. Every day we breathe in tons of virus pathogens and they're all mutating and growing within. Ready to explode me like a spore.

Then it struck me that I'm not alone. No, there are trillions of viruses - the dominant life form of the planet - and they're busy slowly dissolving billions of people, animals, and even insects. And of course, they are trying to patent our DNA so that if we ever go in to get sequenced to even try to put up our arms against the double body blow of multiple resistance and out of control retrovirus - there will be some asshole somewhere who is going to claim that they own part of our DNA and we'll have to get permission from them to monkey with it. No, there are millions of people in this massive infomockracy - all trying to scratch out some kind of existence before some massive comet hammers its way onto our planet with yet another payload of half frozen interstellar critters to re-seed the melted off face of our planet. It's in the fossil record. Look it up.

As if to underscore my contention that life is in fact, hell - there's some guy with a beared in Los Angeles who has a thing for drawing rabbits - that published in the LA Weekly a series called "Life In Hell". Based loosely upon real life experience growing up on the northwest and west coast - seems to indicate to me in clear terms exactly the kind of justification I need to ignore the screams emanating from the donut box and get the hell back to work.

After all, my boss is probably reading this. And guess what his (her?) mission is... Give up? Ok. How about let's play a game called find that word.

My boss' mission, for fun and profit - is to make my life a living ..... .