'Snot Fair

Two recent related letters to the editor reminded me of my childhood, which only makes sense. Because why would they remind me of your childhood?

In the first, Trump supporter Gary W. Christenson bemoans the fact that hardly anyone but him has a political bumper sticker anymore, or a flag decal on their car, and this is a sign that nobody cares about the sorry state of our country. He was also bitter about the greed of we, the people. I'm not sure it is a sign of anything. I think the absence of bumper stickers is less important than the fact that people keep using "we the people" as the object of a sentence. But the gentleman is correct: you don't see many bumper stickers anymore. There are people who festoon their cars with enough stickers as to leave no doubt whatsoever what kind of people they are, or road-rage targets they would like to become. But mostly our cars are unadorned. They're $40,000 items, and not the old family Rambler.

When I was a kid there were tons of bumper stickers. Some were political but most were advertising roadside attractions. They weren't necessarily voluntary stickers.  They were just promotional barnacles your car would pick up by virtue of parking in a lot for an attraction. Take the kids to see Luray Caverns, and you'll come back out to find a gigantic Luray Caverns sticker splayed across your back bumper. This was very common in those days because there weren't nearly as many lawyers as there are now.

The political bumper stickers of the time were probably helpful to alert you to the folks you shouldn't talk politics with in the church basement, if you didn't already know. Politics has always been contentious. But it is more so now. Before, you'd just know that the guy with the Nixon-Lodge sticker wasn't your kind of people. Now, you can safely assume, no matter which side you're on, that the owner of the opposing-camp bumper sticker is personally in favor of ushering in the Apocalypse, and must be burned with the fire of a thousand suns.

Which brings us to the second letter to the editor, in response to the first. Kit Hogan complained, and rightly so, that every time she put a bumper sticker on her car "in this liberal state," she got her car keyed, or windshield wipers ripped off, or vulgar notes left on the window. Worst of all, a "Veterans For Bush" bumper sticker resulted in her car being covered in phlegm.

There's an image.

This also reminded me of a time in my childhood when I was more or less covered in phlegm. I had a series of really bad colds in fifth grade and at one point I felt like a snot factory in boom times. Mom gave me one of those little Kleenex-packs with two or three tissues in it which were completely overwhelmed by the first hour of school. After that, every sneeze resulted in a fluid spill which I believe I decanted onto the bottom of my desk and was otherwise helpless to mop up, a foreshadowing of personal feminine-hygiene horrors yet to come. It was dreadful. And I'm not proud of this, but I developed a fantasy of a world in which my grades would be determined by the quantity of phlegm I could produce. There would be something like an S&H Green Stamp collection book involved, with little squares that could be topped up over time (snot left to dry, in the viral stage, boogers in the healthy times). At the end of the school year I could proudly show off my completed pages, two pages per grade increment, say, with a full book earning an A-plus.

It is remarkable that I was ever considered college material.

But I did learn enough not to put political bumper stickers on my car.

Influenza A (H3N2)

With bowsprit

Okay, all hands on deck. Wash them first.

I was hoping there wouldn't be a reason to have to haul you all out here like first-year recruits, but something has to change. The Ship Of Murr is not in good shape. I'm sure you've all noticed that no beer has gone down the hatch for ten days and counting. Has it. All righty then.

And there has been no beer going down not because the Ship Of Murr is mean, or a sorry place to work, or someone vetoed the pipeline. No. It is because the Ship Of Murr had expected a mere minimum of maintenance and care from its crew, and those expectations have not been met. Instead the crew has invited everybody and his buggy cousin on board without any consideration of the consequences. The Ship Of Murr blames herself. She has never wanted to be one of those taskmaster types, all stern and demanding, preferring to believe that if everyone was content, they would all pull together and row as needed out of simple comity. There have been no edicts about behavior and nutrition and exercise, no palming the entire venture off onto Leviticus, no shortage of forgiveness. And that, she fears, has led to a culture of negligence that might as well be mutiny.

And as a result of the singular lack of discretion in inviting folks we don't even know onto the Ship Of Murr--"they're with the band," blah blah blah--we have been drifting in a tiny little circle for days and days and days. Did it even occur to anyone to check for viral contraband? Can anyone remember who's supposed to be in charge of the rudder? Because clearly nobody is in charge of the rudder.

This is not the sprightly party boat it once was, with the fresh paint and the champagne stain on the bow. Gone are the days we can load  up at the dock with sketchy strangers and celebrate into the wee hours. Back then we somehow found a way to set everything back shipshape within a day, and maybe we were a little lost and things looked a little foggy, but it's a big ocean, with not a lot to run into. We picked up our share of dings and scrapes and you never heard one word about it from the captain. Did you.

No, because the Ship Of Murr never thought the dings were that important. The Ship Of Murr always thought there were better things to do than keep up appearances. But now we're picking up barnacles at an accelerating rate. We're trailing weed. We look like shit, frankly, and that's still okay. But it does mean we're slowing down. We can't turn on a dime anymore.

And while you're all here, no poop deck jokes. It's beneath you. It's too easy. And none of you even knows what a poop deck is. Face it, you're not sailors. You're freeloaders. And it's time you shaped up. I shouldn't have to point out that there is a veritable shitload of phlegmy crap coating everything below-decks, and it ain't going to clean itself up. Don't even look at the cilia--they're doing the best they can, but they're overwhelmed. Start swabbing. Just because the little princesses that are supposed to be operating the crustacean tubes are on strike again doesn't mean everyone gets to sit on his entitled little fanny.

Not talking about you, pancreas. We don't any of us know what it is you do, but you must still be doing it, because we're still underway.

Maybe some day we'll get engulfed in a flocculent plume of whale poop or maybe we'll get systematically punctured by albatrosses irritated about the plastic gyre situation, but one way or another, this ship isn't going to sail forever. You want the ride to be as long and pleasant as possible, and you want your beer rations back, you'll exercise a little more caution.

Now clean this place up.

A Month In IKEA

My colds all follow the same script. There is the inciting throat tickle; the sore throat and fever; then the march of the phlegm brigade; sneezing and congestion; and finally, a dry hacking cough for a day or two, and we're done. A week, tops. The dry cough is the worst. Nothing alleviates it, although there is medicine that will transform it into a dry, mentholated cough.

So when I got my inciting throat tickle in the airport in Fiji on January 20th, I thought: well, at least I'll be done with this before I give a reading of Trousering Your Weasel at the bookstore. And judging from the crush of humanity and humidity in the Fiji airport, I should be grateful it's not Ebola. People who are not me love that kind of heat, but I associate it with lying wretched on the linoleum floor in front of the black oscillating fan in August in Washington, D.C. in 1960, and other tropical diseases.

My throat did get sore, but that misery was eclipsed by the fact that my ears sealed up on the airplane and never flopped back open again.

After two weeks, they still hadn't. "Have you tried yawning?" people inquired, one after the other. No! Really? I am nearly sixty and I've never heard of the yawning trick, you annoying shit. Young mothers steered their children away from me as I walked down the street repeatedly gaping like a carp and yanking on my earlobes. I still didn't have congestion. Then, all out of order, came the dry, hacking cough. "I've still got three days before my reading," I thought. "I should be done by then."

The cough continued unabated, especially when I tried to talk. I quit talking two days before the event in an attempt to rest my throat, a nearly unprecedented phenomenon which left Dave confused as to whether to enjoy it or be worried sick. The dry, hacking cough remained in force for a solid week, with one two-hour break in the middle, during which I had my reading. It was a little miracle, for which I was advised to credit God, who intervened on my behalf because he really wasn't up to wading into that business in Syria.

And then the cough subsided, followed by--we are three weeks into this thing now--the beginning of major congestion, which appeared to be having no effect against the invading virus, and so was amplified by a surge of phlegm soldiers, which emptied into my hankie in such quantities that it seemed my head should fold up like a drained juice box. On Day 24, my left ear unclogged for several minutes and then thought better of it. A few days later the mucus quit running but kept accumulating and filled up every available space inside my head like a herd of unemployed twenty-year-olds in a house full of sofas. And then the sneezing began. One after the other. FAGLAVIK! FORHOJA! SNOIG!

That's when it hit me. OMG. My cold went to IKEA and it can't get out.

That's what happened to Dave and me. We went in to IKEA for something specific. Escalators herd you straight upstairs. I didn't notice at the time, but there are no down escalators. We did maneuvers through office furniture, bookcases, and bathroom furnishings, and finally located our section, selected our item, and tried to make our way back. In IKEA, there is no way back. Retracing your steps requires a sort of reverse peristalsis that their staff is not equipped to clean up after. We were instead directed to the exit by large one-way arrows on the floor aisles, and so we began our odyssey, kinking around the store like farts in a bellyful of intestines. There are no windows. I have a good sense of direction but after four turns I had lost all sense of the exit. "This is ridiculous," Dave said. "Oh look: picture frames," I said. We got some traction in the pillow department and gained momentum through glassware, until Dave bogged down at the tumbler display. Linens were next. I could use some new curtains. I pawed through the samples. "There's a shortcut here, it says," Dave said, pointing at a sign. We headed that way.

"Look at this sweet vase!" I said. "We don't need any more vases," Dave said. "But it's so cheap!" I said. "We have a million vases," Dave said. "Look at this price!" I said, to his back, which was disappearing around the bend. I caught up fast. He'd gotten hung up. "Look at this sweet drawer divider!" Dave said.

Ten minutes later, I was pleased to see another display of curtains. "Hold up," I said. "There's more curtains here."

"They're the same ones," Dave said. Pshaw. I'm the one with the good sense of direction, not him. Holy shit. They WERE the same ones. I was rattled. "Okay, run! Run! And this time, no shortcuts!"

The exit doors finally came into view. They are easy to find. You start at the entrance doors and follow the arrows for forty-five minutes.

I feel sorry for my cold. But enough is enough, I told it. Grab some Swedish meatballs like everyone else and get the hell out of Dodge.

Speaking Phlegmish

Regular readers may have surmised that I recently spent some time in a jet seated next to someone with marginal control over his own phlegm. Those readers would be right on the money. Over four hours of time I spent, in fact, strapped into a narrow seat fifteen inches away from a snot-snorking, loogie-rattling middle-aged dude with a cache of post-nasal drip that he was augmenting with regularity. I'm sorry--were you eating? Neither was I.

And instead of being random about it, he had also adopted the Chinese water torture aspect in which the event occurs at predictable intervals--in this case, every forty seconds. You become so attuned to this nasal rhythm that you tense up in anticipation at around thirty-two seconds; at thirty-nine you have become rigid with dread. Relief at forty-two is oh so temporary. After the first couple hours the only recourse I had was to attempt to hypnotize myself by watching Two And A Half Men. Tough times call for tough measures.

So I nearly jumped out of the window when the dude, out of nowhere, abruptly turned to me and said, "In 1964 I braided horses' tails for $25."

Silence. "The eagle flies at midnight," I said cautiously. Satisfied, he returned to his mucus-herding project for another half hour. Then:

"Do you do yours yourself?" I was at sea. Then he pointed at my braid.

I have long hair that I customarily fold into a French braid because otherwise I would spend my waking hours splitting the ends. This is a dreadful compulsion that I had when I first grew my hair out at age twelve. I spent much of my adult life with very short hair and then was relieved to discover that I'd gotten over the hair-splitting thing when I grew it out again in my fifties. But I hadn't. It's just that, what with the presbyopia and all, I could no longer focus on the ends at shoulder-length; but a few inches later I was right back at it.

I told the dude I did my hair myself. "How do you keep it so centered?"

Huh? I use the hands on the ends of my arms, which are the same length.

Phlegm-ball production resumed and I excused myself. How long are you allowed to spend in the lavatory on a plane? Shortly before landing, he leaned towards me and said "You should do horses." No one has ever told me that before.

It is really saying something that the least objectionable part of this flight was the fact that my hair reminded someone of a horse's ass. However, I got a different perspective on that when I saw a picture in the paper of a fellow manning a plow behind a pair of beautiful draft horses. He was Mr. Duane Van Dyke, and he is the president of the Oregon Draft Horse Breeders' Association. He maintained, and I quote, "When you plow with these horses, you can't get much closer to God."

Well, he was sure close to something. I guess if God speaks through a whirlwind and a burning bush, his voice could come out of anywhere.