This Week's Laughter #51

Still catching up on the haw-haw-haws

I am, for all intents and purposes, a simple individual. The works I read in any given time period tend to orient me toward whatever it is I am thinking about: input-output. Or perhaps this is less about intents and purpose and more about context, tolerance, and capacity - that this is a time in which my cup, mediocre as it may be, only fills for a week at a time.

This week I have read just two books: Kit Schluter’s Pierrot’s Fingernails from Canarium Books, and Liesel Ujvary’s Good & Safe tr. Ann Cotten & Anna-Isabella Dinwoodie out of World Poetry Books. The former is, to me, something of an ethereal orgy with a thesaurus - all over the place, with tenderness. The latter is something of a series of exercises, meditations, chants, observations? Part transcription, many parts of finding everyday sentence constructions and exchanging the noun/verb statements to see how things fit when they’re flailed around. I don’t know if I enjoyed either work holistically; however, each certainly had moments that were memorable and etching for me. Ujvary’s formulaic-nature did more spawning of my own writerly questions than the frantic underlining of words and searching them to understand what a line meant in Schluter’s.

I’ve laughed quite a lot this week. I’m laughing as I write this at a cafe here in Seattle where across the street is an Orangetheory Fitness with some demonically-happy, inflatable snowman is perched behind the front door. It looks to be about five or six feet tall. I think if it were to come to life it would have a spree of uncontrollable violence, but ultimately settle into a life as a dive-bar barback, slinging rum and cokes and picklebacks.

The tiniest duck I found within a medical room, sitting happily in the corner.

October, for all intents and purposes, was such a ridiculous month. My health insurance was terminated, and I was only notified of that termination midway through the month. Too late to pickup new coverage for the month, which meant I had to wait some weeks to pickup prescriptions, which means a CT scan I got just before notice of the terminated coverage was performed without insurance. My body, so to speak, has not been immensely happy with me. With pancreatic illness, since it is responsible for processing fats, one of the most common forms of symptoms is lethargy: fats are a means for the body to gain and store energy, but being unable to process them means the body is working harder to gain and store smaller quantities of energy. I’ve been irritable and despondent over my exhaustion, the ways in which chronic illness is influencing my ability to simply live as a multifaceted individual with dreams and ambitions that reach far beyond the range of my arms and that should I dare to slow down enough, these dreams only feel as though they gain more distance away from me.

It was in Atlanta, if I remember correctly. I’m envious of whomsoever purchased this beaut.

My doctors for this miraculously unique biliary-gastrointestinal condition have added two additional specialist consultants to their team of highly-educated-individuals-interested-in-my-pancreas. One walked into my appointment saying I’ve been thinking about your case a lot and listening to all number of pancreatic medicinal conferences and lectures. The gifted child wannabe in me feels privileged to have achieved the gold star status of having superlatively rare medical condition. The conscious human in me feels infantile over my desire to tantrum and rage through this condition into a day where I no longer constantly feel the pit in the bottom left corner of my abdomen, knowing just how strained this organ is for the most basic endeavors of existence.

I’m laughing pathetically a lot these days. Going to bed at 8pm laughing over how ridiculous it is to be nearly 32 and feeling like I’m falling apart.

I’m laughing on the pitch (hah aren’t I the savvy soccer player). Having a number of younger and older players alike come speak to me after soccer games telling me I’ve been improving, that I’ve gotten faster. The games continue to be played in an area of Seattle which sees an intense amount of traffic generally. It’s home to a farmer’s market. It’s adjacent to the queer neighborhood. It’s one of the largest open green spaces in the city. It’s 200 yards from a police station known for its brutality toward transient individuals. It’s home to all number of attempted efforts at rejecting the desired implicit condition of cruelty toward unhoused individuals, individuals suffering mental health deteriorations, and individuals belonging to ostracized identity communities. This past week I bore witness to an altercation that ultimately boiled into nothing: nobody was harmed, no safety was jeopardized, mostly a lot of yelling and posturing between male-bodied individuals; and yet, I couldn’t help but think of it as something of a representation of the threadbare hold on compassion most of us have with today’s given scenarios of suffering, cruelty, and isolation. At the end of the altercation, as the aggressive party was walking away, they yelled back toward us the gangle of soccer players, “This is why nobody fucking likes soccer in America.” Which is, I think in terms of statements one can make while trying to maintain a tough facade, among the most funny of those postures.

Makes you wonder how many things you could simply log into. ‘The password to the White House is whitehouse1.’

I’m laughing through the poetry reading series I co-host with Ally Ang, Other People’s Poems, where we just celebrated our one-year of doing this series. All number of individuals have told us this is their favorite reading series in Seattle. All number of people have sparked robust friendships from this series: bookclubs, romances. We were able to secure arts funding for this series and are doling out the first rounds of payments to writers for participating in our series. To say I am proud is perhaps a magnificent understatement. I am proud.

And I have wrist surgery coming up (finally). It will have been almost nine months exactly with my hand being in a state where I could not lift more than twenty pounds, where at times throughout this year I bemoaned the excruciating restraint of not being able to write with my right hand and needing, instead, to muddle thoughts down with my left. I’ll still have some probably three months of recovery post-surgery; however, three months suddenly feels so much more possible knowing that, at the end, I will if all goes according to plan, a right hand capable of doing things once more. The surgeon was expressing to me that this surgery is by no means a guarantee of recovery: that around 5% of reparative surgeries here will need more rigorous surgery down the line because, despite best efforts, the bone still does not heal. He looked consternated while telling me the percentage, perhaps because he couldn’t remember the exact number of percentages or perhaps because he was doing his own calculations on if 5% would be construed positively or negatively to me. After playing Old School Runescape for as long as I did and grinding for items that were as rare as 1/15000 rates, a 1/20 is miraculously possible to me. And yet, I laugh to myself, thinking surely I can’t lose the health lottery this many consecutive times; surely my bone will heal after having a screw literally drilled through it.

So, here we are. Laugh with me, yeah?

Nap time.