Friday night pity party

Permit me a self-indulgent post, and feel free to browse elsewhere if my troubles don’t interest you. They don’t interest me particularly, so I’ll understand.

My roommates are out ghosting and ghouling on this Halloween eve; I’ve elected to stay home and ponder my poor existence in quiet solitude. I’m four days into a month of alleged sobriety, a wrong-headed scheme cooked up by Yony to see if it helps with my medical condition. Since June of 2008 I’ve suffered crushing headaches on a daily basis, without reprieve. Not of a migraine type—those occur on one side of the head, and cause sensitivity to light and sound—these pains are concentrated in the front of my head, and are heavy and lumpy, as if a wet sock were balled up where my frontal lobe ought to be. 

My friends are mightily sick of hearing me complain by now, I’m sure; but they’re not as sick as I am of being in pain every waking moment, I’ll assure you of that.

Already the sobriety is out the window. Pot and drink are the only things which actually help me, not so much alleviating the pain as distracting me from it, in the style of my mother’s Russo-folkloric ‘grandfather’s cure’ (Toothache? Drop a brick on your foot, you’ll forget all about the tooth). I’ve smoked a pile of weed and am knocking back vodka-Squirts, and I already feel more human. It’s good medicine, the sweetleaf, and if it continues to be illegal it’s only because the pharmaceutical companies don’t profit from it.

I’ve tried nearly everything, in what feels like a tragicomic film montage: I’ve been to the ophthalmologist, had teeth removed, tried the whole spectrum of painkillers, quit painkillers and taken them up again, sampled an array of anti-depressants, consumed heroic amounts of water and leafy greens, tried nasal decongestants and antihistamines and myriad vitamins, gone to Chinatown in search of ancient remedies and made attempts at cutting caffeine and sugar from my diet; I’ve only barely stopped short of yoga, meditation and ‘clinical’ hypnosis, which seem about as curative as sprinkling flowers on a pile of hogshit. In my more self-pitying moments, I convince myself that I have a brain tumor—it would at least be a compelling narrative twist, and would lend your blogger-hero a bit more gravitas, my inebriated rambling reinterpreted as near-death prophesying—but having researched the subject it seems highly unlikely.

The only thing I haven’t tried is going to an actual doctor. Unemployed bloggers on foodstamps don’t enjoy luxuries like trips to the doctor. Until recently I considered this par for the course—the American Way, even; health care being a socialist construct, I’d overcome my medical problems through rugged individualism, quixotic trips to Chinatown, a pinch of internet savvy. I compounded this folly with a generous helping of guilt and self-flagellation: these headaches were punishment for my illegal and immoral lifestyle; if I wanted badly enough to feel healthy I’d bite the bullet and get a job, sign up for health insurance, quit smoking, join a gym and think happy thoughts.

My feelings have changed, and I’m beginning to drift toward the mad as hell and not going to take it anymore camp. CJ’s illness and death, first of all, have proven powerful fodder. Because she was broke, CJ did not seek medical attention for her brutal aches and pains until she’d already developed an advanced and rapidly-spreading cancer. Had she been able to afford it, she could have been diagnosed and treated far sooner, and would probably be alive now; she was essentially murdered by the greed and inequity of the American system. I don’t hesitate, trembling with rage, to point fingers.

I also made a point recently, while cooped up with a cold, of watching Michael Moore’s recent polemic on American health care, Sicko. It was gratifying to see my half-formed misgivings about our health care system writ large and legible, and it codified the fundamental contradiction of for-profit medicine, which is inherently invested in keeping people sick. This country of ours, which would sooner bomb Arabs than provide basic care for its own citizens, is a treacherous snakepit which I condemn with every fiber of my being, and I sometimes wonder if the painful lump in the front of my head isn’t just a malignant mass of American poison and confusion, a psycho-social tumor that might never be excised. For all these crimes and many more, I condemn it all to Hell.

Caroline Jaffe, 1942-2009

I had to get that last post out of my system before tackling the real subject at hand. I'm not exactly looking forward to it. My friend, the legendary CJ, died yesterday, after a fight with cancer. Those that know CJ, or have ever seen her play at the Gallery Cabaret, will be devastated; those that don't have lost the chance to see one of the greatest performers of modern times. Her residency at the Gallery was on a par with Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire, the Marx Brothers in their early vaudeville days, Lenny Bruce at the Hungry i, Bob Dylan at the Gaslight, the Ramones at CBGB's, Chicago's unheralded Nightwatch at the relentlessly seedy Lakeview Lounge. CJ was also, in a thousand ways, a divine comedian, a fountain of light, a cosmic hummingbird, a prophet of the sublime, a staunch naturist, the equine spirit incarnate. I feel pity and remorse for those of you that might never have met her.

In full disclosure: as CJ would have suggested, I think, I've been spending the evening smoking piles of marijuana. What you've got here, then, is drug writing--if you've got a problem with it, you're prowling around on the wrong blog. CJ was a also a heroic user of drugs, getting high to the very end. I'm proud to have snuck her pot brownies when she was in the hospital undergoing radiation treatment. Marijuana is, I think, a basically introspective drug, and those that fear or dislike themselves are usually averse to it. CJ certainly didn't fear or dislike her Self. Her inner world was an epic expanse of love, freedom, music and wildlife that I can't even begin to imagine. Marijuana was her simple sacrament in praise of the Divine.

I don't know how much I have in me tonight. I'm drinking vodka, getting high, chasing oblivion. My relationship with CJ was strangely, inexplicably intense. I met her only in July. In September, talking on the telephone, CJ said, "I love you." We began saying it regularly. As she got sicker, I began feeling a sort of phantom sickness, which I struggled to describe to Yony. "It's kind of like," I said, "The end of E.T., where Elliot and E.T. are pyscho-physically linked, and one feels the suffering of the other." Yony laughed. "I think what you mean is that you actually care about someone," he teased. "Maybe not a feeling you're accustomed to." A good point, but something seemed to run deeper than that. She told me, the last time I saw her at the hospital, that she wished I was her son. She had a son, in fact, at the age of 15, who she put up for adoption and never saw again. I told her, meaning no offense to my own dear mother, that I sincerely wished the same.

Strange, also, that I seemed to be the only person so immoderately invested in her success. Her friends and adopted family, I think, for all their undying love, consider her "our CJ." When she is, in fact, everyone's CJ, brought here to enlighten us, and give us hope and harmony. The world will not be robbed of her formidable music. I'll run myself ragged to ensure it.

Damn all this eulogizing and fancy talk. It does nothing. The beautiful woman, see, in the photograph above? Just yesterday she was breathing and laughing and singing. Now they've removed her glasses and put her in a horrible little box and she'll never get to sing again. Philosophize all you want, this is a piece of shit world where everything dies. I put the whole apparatus up on trial. I want CJ back.