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BEDRIDDEN 1

One would think that the word would imply that one was rid of the bed rather than confined to it, but owing to its probable Gaelic source there is no telling. Dylan Thomas’ Great-Great mumbled it out within the hearing of a dullard in charge of the church no doubt, sometime around 1217 and the rest is for me to conjure. There is always the urge to turn the four legs of the bed into an animal you then ride, but that is a hideous stretch.

I have been in bed for four days and I don’t much feel like leaving it. The flu brought me here, tentatively. On Sunday I was down and then it being Monday I decided to pretend and picked a box of salad at Gozo, then watched the sprinklers go round while having a pleasant enough chat with the plumber about a price too steep to consider. With the seeds wet we went by separate trucks to Mano and picked some more until I began to have trouble seeing and thought I better get back home while I could. So John did the rest. Either of us usually does. He was sick earlier, and now recovering, and he is young.

The first few days flat were obligatory. I ate a lot of Advil and Tylenol and still had headaches, then I forgot to eat more medicine because I could no longer think. John came to get my signature on a check and asked if I was doing any writing. I said I would if I could think first. There is a thinking part of writing that is very elusive, and when you start writing about it you no longer can write. I knew I was getting out of the can today when I wrote a FORAGER for the CSA and it turned out OK, but you can judge for yourselves when you encounter it at the end.

I have been fairly alone with merely myself to talk to, which is not terribly unusual because I talk to myself all the time, which is the reason why, when I am involved in a live conversation and I stumble, looking for a hidden word it is probably because too many things are arriving at the spark plug of cognition for any sense to be made of the stream. Its may be somewhat like starting your car when its already running.

The ceaseless silence is beautiful because of its novelty. Beauty astonishes us only anew until we get used to it. If we are not too heartless it will make a lasting impression. In the imposed quiet I am able to think a thought and then either think it again or go on at leisure to the next. The current experience is different from kneeling in a carrot patch cutting weeds with a knife with only the wind blowing because there one encounters much immediacy and proposition while even at such mundane tasks. Crap calls out to you for remedy like refugees surrounding a truck full of rice. Here the dryer is whirring but I would have ignored it if it had not been the subject. Radio Free Fonteyn has also been silent these past few days. I would not compare that silence to anything but going to the beach and watching waves break without any roar and tumble. The continually encyclopedic repartee and reflection is mutually addictive. I have missed the laughing gas at some level, but like my taste for coffee or ability to read the Marquez book, I am not quite capable.

I acknowledged two days ago that I had left my cell phone in the truck and in the evening of the third day I retrieved it, dead, and discovered 23 attempts to reach me and 17 messages, not a single one of which I really had much use for, flu or no flu. The isolation of bedrest has reacquainted me with my own mind. Oh and it is such a storm out there, a place no one who truly loves their own brain would expose the poor helpless thing to. I would agree, there is more to it than just the brain. There is the soul, and don’t you know how the fiends come after you like you were the only 20 amp outlet in the world.

I like the doors closed and the cell in the truck. Olivia’s friend Marsha called on the land line from Port Townsend, and that was nice. And I spoke a few times to cold-calling stalwarts who wanted to help me re-fi or rip out my energy-inefficient windows. One woman was thunderstruck when I told her my wife had me take out the central heater, so our efficiency was 99th percentile. Ta-ta!

I fed the cat and gave it new water for the first time in three weeks. Chill. She has plenty of fresh water to drink from, just so long as she does not fall into the unchlorinated hot tub. I closed the hot tub lid after I gave her all that water. It was filtered water too. And I fed her salmon. But she still killed another bird. Its tortuous, lying in bed reading about the March Madness brackets while every songbird in the County is going off in my backyard and I can not immerse myself in their noise entirely because I know Chippewa is out there, stealthing in the bamboo, like she was straight out of a Cabela catalogue.

I am an omnivorous glutton who wishes we had room for a deep fat fryer, so you would not suspect that I have a fondness for ascetism that is so unusual it is like sin. Deprivation happens and I enjoy wandering around temporarily within its confines. If I fast, its usually forced. In the past four days I have eaten two servings of oatmeal, a bowl of corn chowder, three tangerines, two grapefruit, a cara-cara orange, an apple, a corn tortilla, a coffee candy, 12 Advil, 4 blue Tylenol Flu and Cold tabs, 48 saltine crackers and washed it down with 30 glasses of water and 6 cups of black tea. Today I put some honey in the tea for the first time. It is Bill Moses’ honey, none better in the world, but I did not have tongue for it until today. Olivia wanted to do something for me. Her sister Kathy, who is an RN, recommended an antiviral, Tamiflu, which I also consumed despite the fact that it cost one hundred dollars and I was going to get better anyway. I honestly suggested we should take it back to the pharmacy because it was too expensive, which would have played well with Olivia because she is thrifty. But the little pills were as much a measure of her interest in my welfare as anything so I began to consume them. I am still not hungry. Just thirsty.

I took a shower after four days. Where did the dirt come from? It always cascades off my hair looking like a Texas creek at flood stage-slight, timely meteorological reference there, in case you have observed the floods. Just continuing this effort at confession, you see, this unannounced glimpse at reality: a life-flasher. I have other dirt that washes less. I looked like I had not eaten much in four days. I stared in the mirror and did not care much one way or the other, except my hair felt better. Then I returned ATONEMENT to the Ojai Video, three days late. When I saw a woman pushing a baby carriage I did not fully grasp what I was observing until I gave myself a chance. Maybe it was the dusk.

I have had plenty of time to watch Barack Obama give his speeches, research the heretofore obscure Revered Jeremiah Wright, read dozens of commentaries and blogs, listen to Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann and Afro-American preachers, Al Sharpton not being one of them. I love Al. I know why Mr. Wright bothers people, but I must say I agree with him entirely about the thugs stealing the airplanes. The last eight years have been stolen by revenge. I was as mad as sad when those towers fell over because I knew we had brought the calamity on ourselves by our ineptitude. Should anyone want further proof, just look at what happened afterward. It’s a good thing nobody in my congregation is running for president, but if you want to, please feel free to distance yourself.

Say, are there still anonymous participants on Ojaipost? I can smell you from here.

Tomorrow I think I will venture out. Four days away from my particular little drama is like months. If the vacation must come with delerium, so be it. Maybe I will just make the rounds, show my face, be grateful that people cared, eat a cookie. I need to drag the brassicas out of the green house and harvest some more of the broccoli seed before all the incoming bird flights eat it all and figure out what to do with that employee who is driving us both crazy, again…..but wait. That’s not what my bedridden solitude has informed me. I have been burning out the bearings in my hampster cage too long. But it felt so right to rush and fret, eating anti-inflammatories and drinking just enough tequila to dilute the pain, and resolve to plunge every toilet, wolf every sandwich, finish everyone’s job, psyche out every dilatory, insolent teen, respond to every lame question, parry the slights of posers, save every cabbage! Pick up every sputem-soaked napkin! Answer every plea to post notice of the Support Group’s Fundraising Concert and Bake Sale on the front window! Deal! Forgive!

Its nice to take a little break from my little crutchie-wutchies. You might think that the prior paragraph indicates I may need to self-medicate soon though. Bed is a panacea. I had been sober for seven or eight years straight, yea years gone, as an adult, so there is no bragging to be done here about not smoking the marijuana, drinking the beer, numbing my errant lumbar region with agave for a mere four days. But the bed ride has been quite providential. A back-breakers boon. Haven’t missed that nip of beguiling silver at sundown. Nor at noon. Though the old piercing spasm runs lightning like from hip to ankle every time I cough, I have been able to measure a diminished intensity. Bed is good. Bed is friendly. I observed that I felt no pain upon returning from the kitchen this afternoon with a glass of water. Quin thinks I should quit. Save myself. Obtain a life change. Prepare for the chaos.