Day 168: God this flu is bad

I SEE, ICY ANGELS (Kieran McGonnell)Theres a mirror nect to my bed so I can see if I turn blue.

Can’t wait. Its cold enough for sure, is gthis winter ior what?

Day 169-70: Thirsty

Still here, this is her laptop. She made me drink more. I peed my bed. She didn’t care, had a kid. She gave me fresh fruit like a cool fire

Day 171-2: Born-Again ‘Banana Boy’

I’m better, thank you, though I haven’t read much mail yet.

Anna stopped in twice a day to make sure I was taking my Tamiflu and was hydrated and eating fresh oranges and apples! I don’t know where she got them. She won’t tell me. From heaven, where she lives?

YES WE HAVE YES BANANAS!I was so greedy I apparently asked for a banana. Thankfully I don’t remember, but they’re apparently impossible to get. When I was little, my dad called me ‘banana boy’ because I’d gobble a week’s supply in an afternoon. When I told her that, Anna said she’d see what she could do….

Two of Anna’s cooks came down with bird flu, too, so she had to cut back food services. One died, a very nice woman from the projects. Some of the other volunteers panicked. Things almost fell apart.

Anna took Sneeky home with her because she was working 22 hours a day and I couldn’t feed him and she knows I’m afraid he’ll catch H5N1. He seems restless and lonely, she reports. Sneeky is accustomed to having me to kick around most of the time.

Ric’s landlord is trying to get the LES DIY out of the restaurant, but a lawyer is helping them fight to stay till the rent runs out at the end of this month. The lease says rent must be paid three months in advance. I can’t believe the courts are processing this stuff while people risk their lives to feed starving kids.

The Betadine Solution

While I was feverish and crazed, the city called to say they’ve picked up Ric’s corpse. I thought I’d dreamed it. My answering machine—which picked up before I did—replayed a shockingly civilized voice assuring me he was in good hands. She never asked if I was okay, though I must’ve sounded at least half-dead. They don’t need to solicit business.

Now I’m wondering if the landlord and the city spurred them to get the body so Ric could be declared dead and the LES DIY evicted. As Our President boldly enunciated while I was hallucinating, “America has no room for cynics who’d rather scorn good works than perform them!” Huh?

A doctor from the LES DIY (one of several saintly medicos purged by the system) called today to ask how I’m doing. He apparently kept tabs on me through our friend, Silent Nightingale. I suspect he visited, but they both deny it. I’m told he’s writing a faux mystery novel about the destruction of America’s public health system—it’s called The Betadine Solution.

I already feel like cleaning my apartment, a delicious impulse. I’ll let it ripen.

I wonder if the Pneumovax 23 shot saved me from catching pneumonia. Who knows? Maybe the Relenza I took at first helped. Or the Tamiflu they gave me when I was too weak to breathe deeply. Fighting flu is a strange war in which you feel terminally passive. It’s like watching someone try to beat you to death.

Fitch came by to process orders for protective gear after I assured him I’m no longer contagious. He’s furious at how the Feds and Washington police gassed and busted mothers and kids who showed up at the White House to demonstrate against “toxic vaccines” and for “pandemic transparency.” No one expected thousands of moms to materialize without notice.

Fitch says N.A.T.U.R.E. (Nation Against Toxins Under-Researched Everywhere, an acronym I truly hate) quietly switched the dates and caught the Feds flatfooted. While I sweated obliviously—wishing to heck I could have been vaccinated—intrepid “flu moms” were unfurling portable ladders to scale the president’s fence. Some made a good run to the White House. (Soccer moms, no doubt.) The videos become hard to watch when dogs and clubs are unleashed. It made me feel sick again.

It’s interesting that protesters no longer need TV stations and networks to cover their events, provided the government adds sufficient drama. When a protester’s video finds a Web audience, the media buy it and run the footage for all it’s worth. The government first enraged a lot of people by bashing these women and kids. Then it lied, tried to say they were violent subversives who attacked the troops guarding the White House.

The videos prove that these women were just impassioned trespassers. They didn’t deserve to be caged on an Army base while the government investigated their fitness as mothers. Hell hath no fury like a beaten, arrested, incarcerated American mom. The antivaxers are really fired up. Judging by what Fitch says, they don’t believe anything the government says about anything any more. Who does? For days Manhattanites weren’t even told about a blackout across the river, in Brooklyn. (As a rule, we don’t peer over there.)

 The Last Book on Earth

While sick, I was haunted by images that must have taken root in my mind from The Last Town on Earth, Thomas Mullen’s novel about when the 1918 pandemic strikes an extremely independent logging community in the deepest woods of Washington State.

In most books I’ve read about bird flu, the language is so clinical that the symptoms seem abstract. But there’s nothing distant about this disease: It explodes inside you for days like a hot sticky chain bomb.

Mullen’s vivid portraits of flu victims and the tensions and hardships that surround them cropped up when I was burning with visions. Once I thought I was cutting the biggest tree in history. I realized I was kneeling in bed trying to saw something. Anna says I was funny a few times, but she’s too kind to provide details.

I coughed blood early on, before my mind fled the premises. That was the scariest moment I’ve ever experienced. It must have been crud from my sinuses, irritated by all the gas and smoke in the air, but it looked to me like the first drops of my last gasp.

I lurched up to pour out a week’s worth of kibbles for Sneeky when I saw red. There weren’t many left when Anna took him away, but my toes are accounted for.

Not least, belated and limitless thanks to the woman in New Hampshire who sent me her priceless copy of Dr. R. Edgar Hope-Simpson’s The Transmission of Epidemic Influenza. She thinks they’re publishing it again. I’m thrilled. Thank you!

Day 173: Swimming in Antiviral Waste

I worry about reports that Britain’s rivers and lakes are full of Tamiflu and Relenza, which means ours are, too. Heck, I contributed my share—when I could stand up.

A flood of medicine that collects in urine has flushed into sewers since the pandemic struck. Human pee accounts for 1% of wastewater, but contributes more than half of all waste nutrients via stuff like vitamins, pharmaceuticals, and contraceptive hormones (as opposed to New York’s famous Coney Island Whitefish, the plastic kind).

OUR WATERS ARE DOSED WITH DRUGS: AN IOWA STATE STUDENT SAMPLES A STREAMNo one knows how the antiviral surge will affect wildlife or essential waterborne microbes. The question has never been researched. Vincent Racaniello long ago suggested that sewage from extensive use of Tamiflu might cause recombinant resistance to the antiviral. A tide of antidepressants unquestionably messes up fish and frogs. (Federal regulations force medical institutions to flush narcotics, stimulants, steroids, and depressants—any controlled drugs—down drains, rather than bury them in landfills.)

 For the sake of those still uninfected, I’m now hoping the pharmaceutical-industrial complex gets vaccine out soon. I see reports that the first batch of bioactive chicken eggs is rolling off the line after many delays. There won’t be that many and they won’t go to regular folks. DHS and DOD will grab the lion’s share. If there are black or gray markets, a lot of corporations will pay any premium to stave off a complete collapse in operations. (Have you tried telephoning any companies lately?)

In case any of you snag some vaccine, you should avoid popular pain relievers known as NSAIDS (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as Aspirin, Tylenol, Aleve, and Ibuprofen) before getting any shots. A University of Rochester study says they may inhibit your ability to produce the antibodies you want; for an excellent translation, read the explanation at Effect Measure.

It stands to reason that quelling inflammation reduces our immune response; inflammation is an immune response. Taking a pill any time you feel lousy essentially stops your body from fighting what ails you.

Fever We Can Believe In

This is one of those medical “surprises” that keep cropping up because people don’t want to believe it. Years after that Rochester study, the CDC urged parents not to give children Tylenol before their swine flu shots, citing what AP called a “surprising study” in Europe that found it useful to let children suffer a little fever after a vaccination. Duh. It meant they were building up antibodies to the virus. NSAIDS aren’t so hot anyway: A Norwegian Institute of Public Health report says they seem to diminish driving skills.

When an H5N1 vaccine proves out, how will they inject the chosen few? Telekinesis? There’s talk of sending EMS workers with shots, but it’s tough enough for them to tend the sick, let alone deliver meds to those who remain well. I probably won’t need a vaccine unless the flu keeps mutating, in which case it wouldn’t work.

On the plus side, I feel as if one fever has replaced another. I’d like to see Anna soon, thank her with conviction. She’d make a great doctor, but she prefers to study psychology at what she calls “The Endorphin School of Mental Health” because she believes that stimulation through what wiki calls “excitement, pain, consumption of spicy food, love, and orgasm” is an effective way of putting people who are breaking down back into motion.

Having stimulated my natural opioid peptides, Anna has left me to recover while she lines up an alternative eatery in case Ric’s landlord succeeds in evicting them. I picture her smiling innocently under wide, slashing brows, daring anyone to try to stop the LES DIY.

Day 174: Fiddling While the Web Burns

Count Blogula is in the house, yo!

I feel really well tonight, marvelously patient, pleasantly manic, purified by the virus. In contrast, the Internet remains so slow—at least on my block—that I managed to clean my house waiting for it to relax.

LONG BEFORE THE WEB: A HOT ROMAN LAMPEveryone’s downloading movies and shows off the Web when they’re not drowning in image spam that drains capacity. They should kick back and consume low-bandwidth blogs like y’all are doing. Reading me is a public service! (Around now Count Blogula should thank you all for the fan pages you’ve set up for Anna and me, proudly AKA Maskman. I’m honored.)

Before the pandemic, it was forecast that the Internet wouldn’t measure up to demand when tens of millions of workers tried to work from home. Indeed, corporations expecting their internal communications traffic to flow easily onto the Web wound up getting less from stay-home staffers whose messages sometimes moved at dialup speed.

This let workers direct their attention to more important matters, such as the hot new home-porn industry that’s sprung up. “Tape my wife, please” has become the password to a home-cam craze that features trapped and bored Americans subscribing to one another’s pandemic exhibitions. It’s not just wives, of course: Plenty of hubbies and in-laws are exposing their deepest yearnings to strangers. Missoula Housewife has rocked the Web, but Laramie Lumberjack is hot on her tail. Rocky Mountain fleshbloggers are making serious money.

Domestic digital smut inspired some Flagellants to attack cable maintenance trucks while I was sick. (The driver they whipped wasn’t amused.) The government says it’s taking names to prosecute when bird flu subsides—porno celebrants, not Flagellants.

Even chat rooms of a sexual nature have been near-impossible to enter, crashing for days at a time as proprietors race to add servers. The telecommunications industry didn’t plan much better. I’ll never forget the executive who said ISPs would route traffic away from areas whose inhabitants were very ill and toward those that registered better health. Pandemics don’t work like that. Sometimes people get sick everywhere.

Those who said the Internet would regulate itself in line with the tenets of supply and demand were closer to the truth. The slower it got in recent weeks, the more people logged off. Or worked late at night, like me. I never know if you’ll be able to access my lines, but I’m reasonably confident I’ll be able to post them between 2 am and 6 am. (Which is why I’ll post my reaction to Hope-Simpson’s opus later, when it’s really calm.)

So far, the Department of Homeland Security—charged with keeping us all connected in a crisis—has pursued its customary dithering. Back during the mellow days of swine flu, Congress' General Accountability Office determined that DHS hadn't developed a plan to do much in case the Web frayed. DHS was indignant, according to Reuters: "The report gives the impression that there is potentially a single solution to Internet congestion that DHS could achieve if it were to develop an appropriate strategy," a department spokesman wrote the GAO. "An expectation of unlimited Internet access during a pandemic is not realistic."

What then is realistic? IT expert and flu blogger Scott McPherson has issued detailed warnings for years that the Internet would never hold up under a prolonged emergency. In predicting that the government would ultimately have to shove the rest of us aside, McPherson disclosed that key government operatives already carry cards enabling them to ensure priority access by calling a secret number once they've gotten a dial tone. "Eventually, if there is dial tone to be had, you will get dial tone," McPherson assured. "Hanging up actually means you'll lose out in the hunt for dial tone."

There Go the Little Guys

As big companies—including all significant Web vendors—pay huge premiums to boost incoming capacity, it’s getting tougher to access sites like this one. Whatever remained of Net Neutrality is doomed. I’m watching Congress lure campaign money during a pandemic by vowing to toss out what’s left of equal Web access. A lot of libertarians hated Net Neutrality, but entrepreneurs and bloggers aren’t going to be able to find their own sites at this rate.

Want to reach missionimpossible5.com? No problem! Want to read a blog about some obscure disease that might kill everyone next year? Write it yourself. Want to launch a wiki? Get some pigeons. (Doh, I forgot!) "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one," said a dead boxing writer named A.J. Liebling. It took 36 seconds to look it up free and it’s still true.

The ‘reform’ won’t even help consumers. A lot of the slow-mo timing issues we face are caused by local jams. In other words, selling elite Web access won’t necessarily enable us to download faster unless and until the telcos and cable companies rewire our neighborhoods. We’ll merely pay more for whatever the ISPs see fit to pipe in.

No matter that the pandemic will have ended by the time the proposed Internet Security Act throws us under the wheels of big carriers and vendors—and incidentally makes our private communications accessible to any official who cares to look, even for unofficial reasons.

We won’t be able to sue for any privacy invasions. A cop could virtually hack your pc and loot your bank account without consequence, the way some experts read this thing. (I particularly recommend anything from the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington.) Quick, let’s trash our remaining freedoms before H5N1 goes away!

The president’s half-baked denunciations of ‘naysayers’ and ‘peddlers of mistrust’ offer none of the usual assurances that dissent will always be welcome in Washington. (Still no comment about the recent violence on the White House lawn.)

Americans always think now is forever. This is a great time to buy stock and real estate if you have cash—and a rotten time to start a blog no one will be able to read once commercial traffic buys priority.

Power-wise, major chunks of the country are falling into blacked-out chaos. There are so many stories of people being shot for sneezing on other folks that I smell an urban legend. When it can get through, spam throughout our proud nation has turned into a lofty variant on Nigeria. Hey sir, send me your money & I send you miracle protection!

Dang, that’s what I do.