Collops

Posted By Matthew Delaney on August 13, 2009

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

–Sarah Palin

OK.  Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that this is idiocy and alarmism of the worst stripe, and the fact that if Sarah Palin had half a brain she’d tip over, and talk about “death panels”.  Know what?  I’m all for them.  Yep, I said it.  Bring on the death panels.  Have you any idea how much money we’d save?  If I were the king of the universe, with limitless power, I would use a very simple strategy to decide who lives and who dies: Quality of Life.

If you are brain dead, immobile, fed through a tube, and dependent on a machine to respire for you, I submit that you have a very poor quality of life, and should be killed humanely.  Why not?  You’re brain dead.  Whoever you were no longer exists.  There is nobody home.  According to the American Academy of Neurology, there are between 10,000 and 25,000 people in this condition in the U.S.  That’s a lot of money we throw away annually to keep dead brains lying around.  I’d get rid of ‘em.

On the other hand, let’s say you have Down’s Syndrome like young Trig.  People with Down’s Syndrome, although mentally handicapped, are capable of love, can be educated, can take pleasure in a sunrise or a singing bird; in other words, mental retardation doens’t preclude quality of life.  I’d leave them alone.

What about the elderly?  Same rule applies.  Have you got end-stage dementia, flexion contractures because you haven’t moved voluntarily in years, and bedsores so bad that your ass is gone?  If so, you’re not alone– you have several hundred thousand friends in the U.S.  All of you guys are soaking up resources from a limited supply for no good reason, so I’m afraid we’ve got to put you down.  Not like you’ll notice: you haven’t had a coherent thought in years.

By my completely unscientific estimation, I’ve just saved the U.S. healthcare system several billion dollars a year– that’s money we can use to provide care for the young, the uninsured, the poor… you get the idea.  The amount of resources the health care system has is finite, but we throw costly high-tech medicine at everyone because we’re afraid to make tough decisions regarding prioritization of care.  That doesn’t make much sense to me.

Am I being ironic?  Maybe– but only a little.

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Tags: healthcare, PSV, sarcasm

Posted By Matthew Delaney on August 7, 2009

“But what good is the evidence and what good is the argument?  They are determined to kill us regardless of evidence, of law, of decency, of everything.  If they give us a delay tonight, it will only mean they will kill us next week.  Let us finish tonight.  I’m weary of waiting seven years to die, when they know all the time they intend to kill us.”
–Nicola Sacco, August 22, 1927

My great-grandparents came to America in 1914 from Sicily.  Seven years later, two Italian guys you’ve probably never heard of– Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti– were convicted of robbery and murder, and six years after that, they were electrocuted.  I never met my great-grandfather (he died in 1963), but I knew my great-grandmother Concetta.  On a shelf above her kitchen sink were two little figurines of mustachioed Italian musicians;  she called one “Sacco” and the other “Vanzetti”.

Think about that for a moment.  Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927.  More than half a century later, my great grandmother still had knicknacks on a shelf she called by their names.  Did she know them?  No.  Was she bitter about their arrest, trial and execution?  You bet.  There was a time when everyone in America who wasn’t a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant was too.  Let me tell you why.  First, however, I want to take the issue of whether either of the two were innocent or guilty and throw it away.  As you’ll see, it doesn’t matter.  When we’re done, if you still want to know, I’ll tell you.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italians of modest means who immigrated to America in the same year, 1908.  They would not meet each other until 1917.  Both were radicals: Sacco and Vanzetti were “Galleanists”, supporters of Luigi Galleani, an anarchist who preached the overthrow of capitalism by violent means.  In the early Twentieth century, anarchism and Communism were powerful ideas, and working-class people all over the world were being urged to cast off the yoke of oppression, take back the means of production, and overthrow their rich masters.  After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the entire Western world was terrified that the working class would unite and turn capitalist society on its ear.  In the US, this fear reached hysterical proportions during the “Red Scare” of 1917-1920.

A series of bombings by anarchist groups during those years had convinced many Americans that a Bolshevik revolution in America was imminent, and the country was terrified.  Bomb scares were an everyday occurrence; newspaper cartoons lampooned bomb wielding, bearded anarchists.  When Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, they were told they were under suspicion of being radicals and were subject to deportation.  Because they feared that their ties to Galleani would be exposed, they lied to police about their whereabouts and doings in the days leading up to their arrest.  These lies would be used as proof of their guilt when the two men were tried for the robbery and murder of a paymaster and his security guard.

At 3:00 p.m. on April 15, 1920, Frank Parmenter and his guard, Alex Berardelli, were carrying cashboxes containing a factory payroll of $15, 776 through the main street of South Braintree, Massachussetts.  Two men standing by a fence suddenly pulled guns and shot Parmenter and Berardelli, then retrieved the cashboxes and jumped into a waiting car.  The gang of robbers (either four or five men) then sped off.  Three weeks later, two men, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, fell into a trap set by police for one of the robbery suspects (who was never caught).  Although not under suspicion for the robbery initially, both Sacco and Vanzetti were armed at the time of their arrest, and both lied to police.  As a result, both were eventually charged for the robbery and murder of Parmenter and Berardelli.  Vanzetti was further charged for a similar attempted robbery half a year earlier n Bridgewater, Mass.

The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti began in May of 1921.  Vanzetti had already (despite a strong alibi and several supporting witnesses) been found guilty of attempted robbery in the Bridgewater case; now the two men stood trial for the South Braintree murders.  Presiding over the trial was Judge Webster Thayer; the defense counsel was Fred Moore, a California lawyer who had made his name defending “radicals”.  Thayer hated Moore from the start and made no bones about it: he stopped the proceedings several times to lecture Moore about Massachusetts law in front of the entire courtroom.  Judge Thayer also made no bones about the fact that he considered Sacco and Vanzetti “…the enemy of our existing institutions.”  According to sworn affidavits, onlookers overheard Thayer say of Sacco and Vanzetti he would “get them good and proper.”

Despite the fact that none of the prosecutions witnesses were reliable, despite the alibis put forth for both Sacco and Vanzetti, neither were able to overcome their radical connections in the wake of the Red Scare.  Two Italian immigrants who spoke poor English, were armed when arrested, and who lied to the police, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted of robbery and murder on July 14, 1921.  It is worthy to note that they were convicted not on direct evidence, but on circumstantial evidence, specifically, evidence which the prosecution believed indicated “consciousness of guilt”.  Basically, they acted like guilty men, ergo, they must have been guilty.  Both men were sentenced to death.

Gradually, in the wake of their sentencing, people awoke to the unjust manner in which Sacco and Vanzetti were tried and convicted.  Many famous people of the day, including HG Wells, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Upton Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell campaigned for a retrial– all to no avail.

demonstrating in London

On August 23, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed by electrocution.  In his last address to the judge after all appeals were exhausted, Vanzetti said:

“I would not wish to a dog or a snake, to the most low and misfortunate creature of the Earth– I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things I am not guilty of.  But my conviction is that I have suffered for things I am guilty of.  I am suffering because I am a radical, and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I am an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian… If you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already.”

In the years following the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti, some remembered and some forgot.  In 1977, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation stating that Sacco and Vanzetti had been treated unjustly and that “any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed from their names.”  The issue, said Dukakis, is not guilt or innocence, but that “the high standards of justice…failed Sacco and Vanzetti.”

As I said at the outset, the innocence or guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti has nothing to do with the unjust arrest, trial, and execution of two immigrant Italians who were, quite simply, the “wrong sort of people.”  For those of you who really need to know, I’ll tell you this: advances in ballistics have since shown that one of the two (Sacco) was most likely guilty of shooting the paymaster and his guard.  The question is: does this excuse a biased judge, poor witnesses and bad police work?  I say it does not.  A legal system is not Machiavellian– the ends do not justify the means.  Discuss.

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Posted By Matthew Delaney on August 4, 2009

“The gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition and promotes wonder.”

–David Hume

So my wife and I watched A Haunting In Connecticut yesterday.  If you haven’t heard, this is a remake for the big screen of a Discovery Channel “documentary” about a supposed “haunting” of a house in Connecticut.  Hence the name.  Here’s the synopsis: a couple named Carmen and Al Snedeker move their family into a rental house in Southington, CT, in 1987, because their son Philip has Hodgkin’s lymphoma and they want to be near the hospital where he’s being treated.  It turns out that the house used to be a funeral home, predictable mayhem ensues.

booga-booga!

After being raped and sodomized by unseen entities, seeing objects move by themselves, and being tormented by assorted dead people, the Snedekers call in the Dynamic Duo of phony ghostbusters, Ed and Lorraine Warren.  They quickly diagnose the problem as “demonic infestation”, do a couple of exorcisms, and all is well.  In 1992, Ray Garton was hired by the Warrens to write a book, In a Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting, about the ordeal.

What actually happened, according to neighbors, the landlord, and even Mr. Garton, is a little less demonic.  Yes, it is true that the house was once a funeral home, but the “facts” of the case end there.  It turns out that young Philip was the one doing all the fondling (he was arrested and removed from the house for trying to rape his cousin, and was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia), and all the other creepy things claimed by the Snedekers were either unwitnessed by anyone else or given rational explanations by neighbors.  And the Warrens?  According to Mr. Garton, they knew all along the whole thing was hooey.  In 1999, he described a phone conversation he had with Ed Warren to discuss inconsistencies in the Snedekers’ stories:

“He told me not to worry, that the family was ‘crazy’.  I was shocked. He said, ‘All the people who come to us are crazy.  You think sane people would come to us?’  He knew I’d written a lot of horror novels prior to that, so he told me to just make the story up using whatever details I could incorporate into the book, and make it scary.”

So much for A Haunting in Connecticut.  What’s with all this ghost business, anyway?  I honestly don’t get it.  A Google search of “I saw a ghost” returns 34,200,000 hits!  If every one of those ghost sightings were real, ghosts wouldn’t be paranormal, they’d be normal– we’d be up to our asses in ghosts.  It’s a curious fact of the human psyche that we love to be scared, and ghosts tap into some of our most primal fears: the unknown, the great beyond, the darkness, death, monsters… ghosts are truly the total package in the “scare me” department.

“OK,” says you, “what about all the people who really have seen ghosts?”

Yeah, well, there’s a simple explanation for that, and it has to to with the way we as primates have evolved.  You see, we humans are incredibly good at recognizing patterns.  It has to do with the way we understand speech, with the way we perceive and recognize faces, with the way we find food– pattern recognition is hardwired into the human brain.  So much so, that we tend to find patterns when none exist.  You know those people who claim to hear ghosts talking on audiotapes of static?  they call it EVP: Electronic Voice Phenomena.  Unfortunately, that’s just your primate brain at work.  Given random noise (i.e. “static”) your mind generates patterns– and you hear a demonic voice say, “I am a demon give me a sandwich, John!”

Couple our innate need to find patterns with a lack of sensory input (read: nighttime), and we’re off to the races.  It’s dark, we’re not receiving a lot of sensory input, so our brains fill in the blanks.  Next thing you know, the pile of dirty laundry is the the ghost of Hamlet’s father:

“But know thou Noble youth, The Serpent that did sting thy Fathers life, Now weares his Crowne.  Boooga booga booga!!!”

–King Hamlet

Let me say this: if I ever do see a ghost, I won’t be scared.  For two reasons:

REASON 1.  Concrete, everyday reality manifests itself everyday, all around us.  We’re too big to see the really crazy shit that happens at the quantum level, and too small to see the cool stuff that happens on a cosmic level.  So we’re stuck here in the plain, boring, Newtonian world.  If I ever see a ghost, I’ll be so excited/happy/amazed that something truly unusual and interesting and paranormal is happening to me, I’ll probably try to give it a hug.

REASON 2.  There are NO SUCH THINGS AS FUCKING GHOSTS.  Jeez.

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Tags: ghosts, hauntings, phonies

Posted By Matthew Delaney on July 31, 2009

Two days ago, I traded in my old car for a brand-new Jeep Wrangler.  Today, a crazy woman hit me and destroyed it.  I am utterly crushed.  I realize that I am insured, and that eventually I will get my Jeep back (or get a new one if mine is written off), but this does absolutely nothing to console me.  I want my Jeep back, I want it back now, and I want it the way it was.  Until I get my beautiful new Jeep back, I am forced to drive around in a tiny, purple rental car.  If I’m very lucky, someone will take pity on me and stab me repeatedly until I’m dead.

Whenever something like this happens to me (and things like this happen to me often, let me tell you), I am possessed by the feeling that someone is punishing me.  This may or may not be irrational.  I realize that there are six billion people on this planet, and I am merely one man among six billion.  There is nothing special about me.  I certainly don’t think that some god somewhere pays more attention to me than anyone else ( if any god even exists, which is questionable at best).  Interestingly, I don’t believe the converse of this: if something good happens to me (a very rare event), I don’t believe I’m being rewarded by anything or anyone.  Never reward, just punishment.

I have no idea why I think this way, but I always have.  Something bad happens, and I immediately say, “Aha!  This surely is punishment for X.”  To me, it seems clear– and I just can’t talk myself out of this way of thinking.  I’m never surprised when bad things happen to me, because I am convinced I deserve them.  In all other things, I am a rational, thinking person:  I don’t avoid black cats, or throw salt over my shoulder, I have no rabbits’ feet or plastic Jesuses.  What I do have is a guilt complex.

Here’s a little item that conntinues to haunt me:

In 1988 I was living at home on Long Island, attending a local college.  I had just graduated from high school, and I was a newly minted EMT volunteering with a local ambulance service.  One day, driving home from school, I came upon an accident that had just happened.  Nobody was seriously injured except Mr. Cosulich (I didn’t know his name at the time, of course), who was upside down in his car, which was upside down, and he was blue.  I don’t know if he was saveable, I don’t know if he wasn’t.  Here’s what I do know: this poor guy was blue, he was gasping/croaking/trying to breathe, he was upside down and his neck was bent at an angle I hope never to see again– and I did nothing.  I stood there, gaping, for about sixty seconds, tentatively reached into the car and fiddled with the seatbelts, then I was shouldered out of the way by the arriving firemen and police.  I drove home and washed the blood off my hands.  Great job, Mr. EMT.  Way to save a life.

People say, “Oh, you work in an emergency room, that must be very difficult and rewarding,” and I think about Mr. Cosulich and what a complete failure I was.  Emergency medicine calls for swift, decisive action;  I was neither swift or decisive, and he promptly died.  Was he beyond saving?  Perhaps, but sixty seconds without oxygen while I farted around sure didn’t promote his well-being.  In my line of work, you don’t get nice guy points for trying to help someone– you help them or you don’t.  When things go badly in the emergency room, Mr. Cosulich is never far from my mind.  Usually he’s sitting on a cloud next to an old looking guy with a white beard, wearing brass knuckles.

Is the destruction of my brand-new Jeep a punishment for something?  My wife insists that it isn’t.  I want to believe that, but I’m not entirely convinced.  I must have done something to someone– no.  Enough.  Life is random, and events occur unpredictably.  I was driving my new car and I was hit by a crazy woman.  End of story.  As someone much wiser than me once said: “Shit happens.”

OK, I’m done.  Thanks for listening.  See you next catharsis.

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Posted By Matthew Delaney on July 28, 2009

This is a post about aesthetics, and it’s also a post about the different ways that men and women see the world.  I consider myself a typical male, and my wife is a fairly typical female.  Even though we’re both human, and have enough similar likes and dislikes that we get along very well, the things that I consider beautiful–that make my heart race– do nothing for her, and vice versa.  For example, I consider this absolutely the most beautiful thing ever created:

Erection City, here I come

If someone told me they would give me a 1967 BSA Lightning if I shot the pope, Jesus, and Santa Claus, I would gladly do so.  My wife sees only an object, some tires and some metal.  It excites her no more than a toaster– probably less so.  She does, however, really go crazy for these:

The Pandora Bracelet. Big whoop.

which I completely fail to understand.  When I point out beautiful cars to to my wife, she says, “Yeah, it’s a car, so?”  I try to explain why I want her to see such-and-such a car, why it’s awesome for such-and-such a reason, and her eyes glaze over.  Sometimes she falls asleep.  My wife insists that a car is a machine, a conveyance which transports, and nothing more.  I try– I am trying– to make her see that yes, some cars are basic transportation, but some cars are much, much more.

For example, this:

Barf.

is a basic car.  It is also ugly and soulless.  This how all cars look to my wife.  Take that same basic, boxy shape and do this:

BAM!

and you’ve got a BMW 2002, circa 1972.  Clean, classic beauty.  All in all a truly awesome, well engineered, sexy car.  Very popular on the SCCA racing circuit, too.

Last weekend I did a quintessentially “guy” thing: I bought a Project Car.  I once had a 1980 MG Midget, which I loved.  She died tragically soon after I bought her.  I am now the proud owner of a 1975 MGB which has seen better days.  Under my loving hands, I hope to bring her back to her former glory.  Now, I have been driving past (and admiring) this car for a year, now.  Whenever my wife is with me, I point it out:

1975 MGB, needs love, cheap

and she says, “Mmm-hmm.”  Last weekend, to my amazement, I saw a “for sale” sign in the car.  I took my wife too look at it (and to get her approval) and she said, “How did you know it was for sale?  You can hardly see it from the road!”  

See the difference?  How could I drive past a 1975 MGB and not see it?  Asking a guy to not notice awesome cars is like asking a dog not to eat poop.  It goes against instinct.  I bet if someone threw a Pandora bracelet in the weeds at the side of the road she’d know it.  I’ll have more to say about the MGB in future posts.

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Posted By Matthew Delaney on July 25, 2009

Author’s Note: The word “gay” in the following post has nothing to do with homosexuality. Your sexual preference is unimportant to me, people.  This is 2009.  Gender is no longer relevant.

I’ve been thinking for a while now about Harry Potter– specifically, why I hate Harry Potter and all his little friends.  My wife, who is otherwise very sensible, loves all things Potter and can’t believe that I (or anyone) cannot.  The fact that we’re married (coupled with the fact that she has seen each movie 467 times) means that I have absorbed quite a bit of Potter by osmosis.  Whenever someone asks me: “Matt, why are you so bitter?” I cite this as one of my reasons.

There are a few reasons Harry Potter has been on my mind: the final installment of the HP movies is in theaters now, which means that the amount of Harry Potter energy in the universe (which falls to almost tolerable levels between movie or book releases) has risen to record high levels.  I can’t even go outside without a special suit.  Also, I came across a post about Mr. Potter today at a blog I like to read, and so decided to write once and for all about HP and why he drives me batshit crazy.

The main reason I can’t stand the Harry Potter franchise is because it’s so incredibly gay.  I don’t mean gay like homosexual, I mean gay like, “Wow, those shoes are really gay.”

some gay-ass shoes

Seriously.  Harry Potter goes to a school where they fly around on brooms (because witches use magic, get it?) and wave wands around (”Wingardium Leviosa!”) while commonplace objects can talk or fly.  Gay.  Not gay because it’s fantasy or because magic is inherent in the story– in fact that’s precisely why not.  Fantasy, as a genre, is wonderful.  The Lord of the Rings saga is fantasy, as is C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia.  The difference lies in how the subject matter is treated.  Writers of serious fantasy treat the paradigms of the genre seriously: magic exists and can be wielded, but not by waving a comical wand around.  Gandalf, the archetypal “wizard” of fantasy, is a character invested with almost funereal dignity: rarely does he use his magic, and when he does so, it’s serious business.

The Harry Potter series does just the opposite.  Author JK Rowling takes every piece of fantasy “grammar” she gets her hands on and makes it almost silly in it’s non-threatening, childlike appeal.  Take ghosts, for example.  In the HP series, ghosts are inevitably silly characters (think about that stupid girl who haunts the mens’ room or the painting of the inept knight), so as not to frighten anyone.  In Tolkein’s universe, they are not ghosts but wights, undead spirits who would gladly disembowel you just to hear you scream.  The “silliest” character in Tolkein’s Middle-Earth is Tom Bombadil: a man/spirit who serves as an avatar for the very world itself.  I’m pretty certain Tolkien would rather have put a glass rod in his penis and struck it with a hammer than written a passage wherein Bombadil gets a letter that scolds him in his mommy’s voice or eats earwax flavored candy.

I realize that the Harry Potter books are childrens’ books, and that’s fine.  My reply is: so are The Chronicles of Narnia, and they’re better written, and more exciting as well.  The passage in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe in which Aslan allows the White Witch to kill him blew my 12-year-old mind.  When he reappeared alive, I wanted to run around the house screaming.  In the HP books, the most exciting thing anyone does is play Quidditch, a made up game wherein people ride gay brooms annd chase gay flying balls.  Hardly the same as a thinly-veiled Christ figure in the guise of a huge talking lion being sacrificed and then rising triumphantly from the dead.

If the HP books are so incredibly gay and childish, why have they been overwhelmingly embraced by adults?  I don’t know.  I think perhaps because many adults aren’t familiar with the genre, so when the books became popular with kids, adults who wanted to read a similar story couldn’t say, “I’ll go read X,” because they didn’t know what to choose.  Instead, they said, “Screw it, i’ll just read this gay Harry Potter book, never mind that it takes all that is noble and dignified about the fantasy genre and makes it buffoonish and laughable.  This will be the yardstick by which I measure fantasy from now on, and fantasy sure is lame.”

Let me now attempt to correct this problem, by suggesting that you may have read Harry Potter, but the book you meant to read, because you’re an adult, is this one:

From Wikipedia:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is the first novel by British writer Susanna Clarke. An alternate history set in 19th-century England during the Napoleonic Wars, it is based on the premise that magic once existed in England and has returned with two men: Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. Centering on the relationship between these two men, the novel investigates the nature of “Englishness” and the boundary between reason and madness. It has been described as a fantasy novel, an alternate history, and an historical novel.

The narrative draws on various Romantic literary traditions, such as the comedy of manners, the Gothic tale, and the Byronic hero. The novel’s language is a pastiche of 19th-century writing styles, such as those of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Clarke describes the supernatural with mundane details and combines arch wit with antiquarian quaintness. She supplements the text with almost 200 footnotes, outlining the backstory and an entire fictional corpus of magical scholarship.

See?  A book about magic for thinking, intelligent people.  Let me tell you, incidentally, the book is brilliant.  Also, flying brooms and earway candy are nowhere to be found.  Go read it and throw away all your ridiculous Hairy Potsmoker books.  Better yet, give them to the people who were meant to read them: children.

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Posted By Matthew Delaney on July 22, 2009

OK, I was going to write some fiction this time, but instead I think I’ll tackle a post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time.  In case you didn’t know, I’m a physician assistant; I work in an ER.  A very busy ER.  When most people think of the emergency room, they think of TV shows about emergency rooms like ER or that other crappy show, House.  I’m here to tell you, people, I spend almost every day in the ER, and it bears no resemblance to television.  Let me explain by taking you through a “typical” day.

OK, we’re working noon to midnight today, so we arrive at 12p.m. to find two minor procedures waiting for us.  Unfortunately, the procedures we have to do are I&D’s– that stands for “incision and drainage”.  Abscesses (big swollen collections of smelly pus) have become a common problem now that many common bacteria are resistant to antibiotics.  The kicker is, after you have an abscess, you’re prone to getting them again, so many of our abscess patients are repeat customers (never underestimate the value of soap, kids).  Off we go to “incise and drain” two abscesses.  Just for fun, let’s make one a peri-anal abscess– they’re pretty common.  If you don’t like foul odors, you might want to sit this one out.

OK, now that those are out of the way (don’t worry, we’ll have two or three more before we go home), let’s go see some more patients.  Not sick patients, mind you, just patients.  Most of them have been here before, some several times.  Some of the people we are about to see come almost daily– for the same complaint!    That’s the nature of the emergency room: many people these days are chronically ill, but don’t have health insurance.  They know if they come to the ER, they have to be seen, so they come.  Often.  Do we give them “follow-up”?  Of course we do, everyone gets a referral– if you’re uninsured, you get a referral to the community care clinic (they do a great job, incidentally).  Here’s the problem: you’re an uninsured person with a chronic illness.  You don’t feel good.  The community care clinic has given you an appointment two weeks in the future, but you don’t feel good now.  So, where do you go?  The ER, right!  Never mind that they just saw you two days ago and diagnosed you with a chronic problem that they can’t fix (and you’ve probably had for years, like diabetes), you want to feel better now, so you go to the ER again.  And again.  And again.  Welcome to my world.  Imagine if you watched ER and every patient they treated was a chronically ill obese diabetic with open sores on his legs who had just been on ER the last episode, and the one before that, and will continue to be on the show every single episode.  Not very “must see TV”, huh.

Oh, wait, someone is calling for us.  OK, come on, the ER doc is busy and the nurses say they want us to see a sick person.  How novel!  Let’s go see the “sick person”, it will help break up the day.  Here we are: 84 years old, demented, doesn’t walk or talk.  Sent from the nursing home for “altered mental status”.  That’s pretty common, which confuses me.  If you have Alzheimer’s disease so bad that all you do is screech or mumble (or yell “Nancy! Naaaaancy!”) all day and have to wear a diaper, how on earth can they tell when your mental status is “altered”?  Apparently, nursing homes are staffed exclusively by psychics.  Anyway, our dear little old friend here is sick.  How can we tell?  Trust me, we’re experts.  A blood pressure of 50/30 is not normal, even for a cat (well, maybe for a cat).  See, old sick people don’t get fevers when they get a bad infection like pneumonia, they can’t.  they’re too run down to produce a fever.  Instead, they try to die.  Often, we stop them, so they can go back to the nursing home and live to yell Naaaancy another day.  Because that’s how we roll.

All right, time for a little sewing.  There’s a trauma patient who got here an hour ago (that’s why the doc was busy).  This nice young man decided to have a few beers and take six or seven Xanax “bars” before he drove to his girlfriend’s house.  Unfortunately, this affected his ability to drive, and when the telephone pole leapt out into his path, he wasn’t able to avoid it in time.  Some of his face is still in the car, but we’ll just make do with what he has.  We should probably restrain him first, because I’ve already told him nine times that we’re going to be working on him, and each time he replies with, “Who the fuck’re you? I’ll kick your ass, faggot!”  I’m tempted to just staple his nose back onto his face, but that wouldn’t be nice.  And this job is all about nice (besides, I’m not even gay).

Anyway, once we finish him up, let’s go see some drug addicts who feign chronic back pain in the hope that we’ll give them narcotics– then we’ll call it a day; I’m beat.  Maybe we can catch some ER on TV.

Now THIS is gay.

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Category: Non-fiction, Random, Rant | 0 Comments
Tags: ER, grossness, reality

Posted By Matthew Delaney on July 20, 2009

So, a friend of mine at work was doodling while on the phone, and he did this:

I decided Scribbly Head Guy needed a story, which you can see here.  I am a total dork.

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Category: Art, Fiction, Random | 0 Comments
Tags: dragons, drawings, scribbly head guy

Posted By Matthew Delaney on July 20, 2009

honor (noun): honesty, fairness, or integrity in one’s beliefs and actions

This was, until I deleted it, a very long post about honor and integrity, which is what I was thinking about last night while peeing before bed.  Here’s a sample:

At what cost to a man’s soul does he live without honor?  Does the man without honor lie awake at night, loathing himself, replaying his ignominious acts again and again in the theater of his mind?  Only he (or she) can answer that question.  Most of us will never have to.  Most of us will never be as ruthless or conniving as Bernie Madoff, or as traitorous as Aldrich Ames.  I think, for the most part, most of us stop long before we go down that road.  For those that don’t (…)

Zzzzzzzzz.  I could, given half a chance, be the Darren Rowse of really boring blog posts– fortunately I stopped myself this time.  See, last night as I was getting ready for bed, I was thinking about topics for future blog posts.  Suddenly I thought “Leni Riefenstahl”.  Surely you often think “Leni Riefenstahl” to yourself while you pee?  Surely.  Anyway, I was thnking about the late Ms. Riefenstahl, which led me to the concept of honor, and how when all else is stripped away, your honor is all you have left (or don’t).

Leni Riefenstahl was a German actress and dancer who rose to fame in the 1920’s.  In 1932, she was offered the chance to direct a film, Das Blaue Licht, which became a moderate success.  Riefenstahl’s skill as a director, however, was apparent.  In 1932, she heard Adolf Hitler speak at a rally and was “mesmerized”.  She became a National Socialist, and asked for a meeting with the Führer.  After the meeting, she was asked to direct a film about the 1933 Nazi Party rally.  Based on the success of this film, Riefenstahl was asked to direct another; she was asked to make a film about the huge 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg.  that film, The Triumph of the Will, is widely considered one of the greatest propaganda films of all time.

In 1936, Riefenstahl was asked by Hitler to film the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin (she later claimed that the International Olympic Committee asked her to do so).  In the movie that came out of her work at the Games, Olympia, she pioneered the use of slow-motion shots and tracking shots, even showing some scenes backward for dramatic effect.  These two films, Olympia and Triumph of the Will cemented her place as one of the greatest cinematographers of the twentieth century.

Throughout the twelve-year span of the Third Reich, Riefenstahl was an ardent supporter of Nazism.  When German troops marched into Paris, she telegrammed Hitler: “With indescribable joy, deeply moved and filled with burning gratitude, we share with you, my Führer, your and Germany’s greatest victory, the entry of German troops into Paris. You exceed anything human imagination has the power to conceive, achieving deeds without parallel in the history of mankind. How can we ever thank you?”

Riefenstahl even filmed one movie, an adaptation of Hitler’s favorite opera: Eugen D’Albert’s Tiefland, using concentration camp inmates as extras.  They were killed after filming was complete.

After the war, Riefenstahl changed her tune.  She denied that she was a Nazi, claiming that she was just a young girl, caught up in the spirit of the times and infatuated with the trappings of power.  She denied any first-hand knowledge of the atrocities committed by the Third Reich.  Despite this, she came to be more and more reviled by her fellow Germans and the world at large, never again achieving the success of her earlier, revolutionary work.  She died in 2003 at age 101, still fervently denying anything more than a passing involvement with Nazism.

So, why am I bringing all this up, and what does this have to do with the concept of honor?  This: Leni Riefenstahl was one of the greatest cinematographers of the early days of film, yet this is a quote from her obituary in the London Independent:

“…Though widely celebrated for her innovation, Riefenstahl became notorious as a propagandist, whose radical and seductive films gave power and credence to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.”

When all else is stripped away, only your honor remains.  If you were a part of something odious, accept it, own up to it, admit it, else no matter how colossal your body of work, no matter what ground you broke or trail you blazed, the world will remember you with scorn.

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Category: Non-fiction, Random | 0 Comments
Tags: honor, Leni Riefenstahl, scorn

Posted By Matthew Delaney on July 18, 2009

Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you I’m not religious at all.  I bounce between agnostic and atheist depending on the day of the week– but I am fascinated by the story of Cartaphilus, who made fun of the wrong guy and got the ultimate beatdown.  Hence this post, which I have had in my notebook in very rough form for a couple of years now (categorized under “fiction”, unless lightning strikes me).

“Soon.”

That was the email I received two days ago.  A single word, sent by anonymous remailer.  The only message I have ever received at an address known only to me and never used, read on a public computer at a public library.

“Soon.”  

Rejoice?  I am too tired.  And who would I share this news with?  I have no family, no friends– who would befriend a gaunt drifter in filthy clothes?  The answer, I have learned, is nobody.  I have been beaten, robbed, stabbed, shot, clubbed, garrotted, but never befriended.  I bear a mark that none can see but all can sense: I am outcast, untouchable.  I am anathema.  I am a scapegoat, a Sin Eater, an object of scorn and hatred doomed to walk the earth until…

It is my own fault.  No man but myself can be blamed for my fate.  I was a young man, rash, with an eye for the girls.  Always performing, always the loudest, the brashest.  On the day the carpenter was to be executed, I joined the crowd lining the route to the hilltop, eager for any excitement.  At that time, in that place, any diversion was welcome, even the death of another.  All I knew of the carpenter was what I had heard in the taverns and the shops: he was mad, he called himself the “King of the Jews.”  King of the Jews?  Clearly a madman.  Rome brooked no challenge to its authority.

As I stood in the dust on the side of the road, I saw the doomed men approaching, carrying the timbers they would soon hang from.  As soldiers whipped them onward, people began jeering, spitting.  The cloud of dust grew nearer: they were passing.  Suddenly the tallest of the condemned stumbled and fell in front of me: the carpenter.  He was bloody from head to toe, panting in the dust.  Our eyes met– and I taunted him.  “Go on quicker, Jesus, go on quicker!  Why dost thou loiter?”

The carpenter’s eyes narrowed as he lay in the dust, and my heart froze in my chest.  I felt him look not at me but into me, and I despaired.

“Nay,” he said, almost in a whisper.  ”I shall rest here a moment, but thou shalt go on until the last day.”  I fainted.

When I awoke, filthy with dust, night had fallen.  I had been robbed of my money and my sandals.  I went home, but my mother and my father hissed and spat as I stood in the door.  ”Liar!”, they shouted when I told them I was their son.  ”Liar! Be gone from here!”  My sentence had begun.

I am Cartaphilus, doomed to wander the earth until the carpenter grants my reprieve.  I have seen empires rise and fall, I have seen plague and famine, war and peace.  None who see me smile.  For two thousand years I have waited for my parole: I have waited for a sign from the heavens, I have waited for a dove to alight, I have waited for an angel to call my name, but no sign, or dove, or angel has appeared.  I have looked for letters, tablets, telegrams, I have listened by radio.  I have waited for an email at an address I have never used, known only to me.

You, mortal, may fear the end of all things; you may regret the things left unsaid, the places never seen, the love never fulfilled.  

Not I.

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Category: Fiction, Random | 0 Comments
Tags: Cartaphilus, Fiction, religion