Neurotic Fantasies
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Good Afternoon. I’ve written two poems just for you (you know who you are), both of which are straight off the news. The first is a “poke,” which is a literary form I invented a decade ago, that re-tells old jokes as poems. The second is just plain crappy doggerel. I am a practitioner of some damn fine crappy doggerel.
Poem One
A young man leaps from a plane, his chute upon his back,
Falls for a while then pulls the cord, but, whoa! Good Lord! alack ..
Nothing happens! Which is when he hastily recalls
There is another cord to yank for perilous free-falls.
He pulls that cord, but once again, no other chute deploys.
Of course he starts to panic and lose every bit of poise.
And then he sees another man, out there above the town
That guy was rising UP to him as he was falling down!
"Do you know how fix my circumstance? From a plane above I dove!"
"No, but while we’re here, do you know how to fix a gas stove?”
--
Poem #2
Hail to George Santos, who cured diabetes
And invented the Internet, too.
He's a Hindu, a Christian, a Muslim
And a Sikh and a Jain and a Jew.
He's captured killers and rapists
Saved puppies from death
Raised millions for orphans,
And … blew life into lungs with his very own breath!
He's ended cruel droughts,
(Made it rain from the skies)
I know that his tombstone
Will begin with: "Here lies..."
So, on Friday my girlfriend put down her cell phone and informed me that someone she had been working with on stage -- a fellow actor -- had just tested positive for Covid.
We maturely agreed that everything would likely be fine -- she was feeling okay, she tests all the time, had not seen him for days, had been masked in his presence, etc.
Then, within seconds, my throat got sore. Seconds later, my nose began to run, copiously.
The pandemic has been hell on everyone, but offers an added fillip of anxiety for highly suggestible people, people like me, people known to the medical profession (with some distaste) as "somatizers." If you are one, or know one, you know what I mean.
For many years I had been an avid practicing hypochondriac; I actually wrote a humor book about it. (You should buy it; it is long remaindered and available used online, for, like, 40 cents plus a dollar shipping, and, as an added inducement, I don’t get a cent from each sale.) To hypochondriacs, I suspect it was the scariest book ever written, because it contained dozens of symptoms that seem minor but could signal terrible things.
Yes, hiccups can mean cancer. The sniffles can presage Wegener's Granulomatosis, which can basically make your nose fall off, then kill you. Itching can be the onset of mycosis fungoides, which makes your skin erupt in tumors that have been charmingly called, in medical books, "tomato-like." Persistent deja vu can mean you have a tumor in the temporal lobe of the cerebral cortex. Persistent deja vu can mean you have a tumor in the temporal lobe of the cerebral cortex. You know, stuff like that.
The book reveals that I defeated hypochondria at age 40 through the only known cure, one I revealed but did not recommend: Get a fatal disease. That had happened to me -- it was hepatitis C, for which, at the time, there was no cure. Once something like that occurs, you stop sweating the small stuff. So I was tested by that ordeal, and cured. Of my hypochondria, at least. The Hep C cure came later.
But now Covid has re-tested me. I'm averaging a C-minus. During the early days of the plague, I woke up one day with eyes glued shut by encrusted goo. I literally had to sponge the eyelids apart. This, I recognized, was conjunctivitis, also described in medical texts as “pinkeye.” (This is, by the way, an absurdity. It’s an indignity. It would be as though medical books said non-gonococcal urethritis could also be known as “pee-pee disease.”)
Anyway, I knew all about pinkeye, and was unconcerned: It’s a minor infection that usually clears up on its own. But just in case .... just to be SURE... i went downstairs, fired up my computer, searched for Covid and discovered that just the previous day, conjunctivitis had been identified as one of the presenting symptoms. I immediately began coughing and sneezing. Then I felt my forehead. It was burning. Searing. Heart pounding, I took my temperature. It was 98.2. My forehead evidently had felt hot because my hands were cold, because all the blood had drained out of them when I realized I was dying.
(In case you are wondering, hypochondriacs do have the dreadful ability to bring on symptoms at will. Not THEIR will, exactly. They are at war with their brains. When I was 20 I went to my dentist because I had a slight pain in my jaw. He said it was probably nothing, and then told me a story. He was just being friendly, making conversation about jaw pain. He should burn in hell. He said that during World War I, soldiers sometimes had to flop hurriedly into the trenches if there was incoming artillery, and sometimes when that happened, they would fall face-first onto their rifle stocks. Bam. No biggie. Except sometimes a few weeks or months later, their jaws would begin to ache, and then all their teeth would fall out.
I immediately decided this had probably happened to me. I couldn’t remember a specific flop, into a trench or elsewhere, but it seemed familiar. Had I taken some blow to the jaw? I think maybe! So, for weeks, I would shimmy my teeth with my fingers and they would shift a little! — which is of course normal. Try it. But, still, I decided my mouth was doomed and that in a few months I would look like Shari Lewis’s sock puppet, Lamb Chop.)
Speaking of taking one’s temperature during the pandemic, at one point we went to New York for a few days, during which time we dined at several restaurants. New York had a code requiring restaurants to test everyone’s temperature before they could be seated. And they all did. They put that wand up to your forehead, it beeped, and only if you didn’t spike a fever were they allowed to seat you.
At every restaurant, my temperature ranged from 92 to 95. Now, if you have a body temperature of 92, you are in a life-threatening situation and your organs might shut down and you ooze to the floor and die in the ambulance. But the restaurants just seated us. Me cannot prove but methinks those thermometers were set to under-read everyone because, let’s be frank, do restaurants want to turn away clients?
Anyway, my girlfriend and I are still one of the six people in the United who haven’t yet gotten Covid. But just the other day I noticed an increase in eye floaters — those annoying bits of epithelial cells that drift across your field vision like tiny twigs and dandelion puffs from the demonic garden of Hades. Usually this is insignificant, but just to be SURE, I ….
Dr. Google does in fact inform me that an increase in floaters could be a Covid symptom.
Yes, it is hell being me.
Okay, so now it’s time to shift to the fabulous interactive part of this chat — where you have asked questions for me to answer, or leave comments about how my answers suck. You will find that next half of the chat … here. As always, ask your questions … here.