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housemate blows a gasket
Thursday, June 7 2001
My sleazeball recruiter, who hasn't called me in over a month, called me at work today (how did he get my number?) to tell me about a "really hot" job he had to fill over "in the desert" in Lancaster, California. According to Mapquest, Lancaster is 70 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. The pay wasn't especially good, although, the recruiter told me, "because it's with the military" there are "lots of benefits." Another big plus, according to the recruiter, was the fact that "rents are low," should I "decide to relocate."
I cannot exaggerate the extent to which I'd stressed to this very same person that I only wanted to consider jobs on the Westside of the Los Angeles area.
The recruiter finally had the nerve to make like he didn't know he was talking to me at work (he must have had to call the front desk to get my number!) and when I said I was, he said "I thought [name of company] was all laid off!"
Now why, unless he was crazy with desperation, would a recruiter even entertain the notion that someone would be willing to relocate from a big city out into the desert, just for a job? If I think living in West LA is bad, just imagine what I'd think of a dusty desert town dominated by the military? It would be like San Diego, but without the beach, without the temperate weather!
For the past two days of NPR's Fresh Air, Terry Gross has been focused on interviewing writers interested in biology. Today she gave an interview of a weirdo who specializes in the study mosquitoes. That wasn't particularly fascinating, though I did learn some things. For example, a mosquitoes stabs its host an average of 20 times before hitting a vein. Without hitting a vein, a mosquito cannot eat.
Yesterday, Gross interviewed Michael Pollan, the author of a new book entitled The Botany of Desire. It's about the marvelous symbiotic evolutionary relationships that have developed between humans and plants. I'm a sucker for biologists who use evolutionary theory to explain the biological systems we normally take for granted. As familiar as evolutionary theory should be to reasonable educated people, for some reason applying it to normal questions of "why are things the way they are?" always seems to lead to fresh new forms of understanding. This was particularly true of the way Pollan explained the consequences of the intensive cultivation of marijuana that has taken place during the thirty years of the ongoing drug war. The original marijuana plant that grows wild in Central Asia contains relatively little THC, but it's enough for people to want to smoke it recreationally. THC, it turns out, is very similar to a compound found naturally in our brains, a compound whose presence results in sharply edited short-term memory. Thus THC has the effect of allowing the smoker to live continuously in the moment, something that the distraction of short term memory does not permit. Pollan figures that the original selection for THC was probably done by birds (which, like us, enjoy occasional recreational self-medication), then, when the THC reached a certain threshold, it was picked up by man. Now, with the harsh repression of the drug war, pot plants have been driven indoors and into the warm embrace of the sort of agriculture that simply isn't possible outside. Pot has become a sort of lapdog among plants, and like most lapdogs, it bears little resemblance to its wild ancestors. In the legal climate of the drug war, the marijuana most favored has been the kind that could deliver large amounts of THC in relatively little space and taking relatively little time. All other concerns were unimportant. If the plants needed extra carbon dioxide, heat or light to achieve these ends, that was easy to arrange. The only thing asked of it was that it produce the THC and produce it fast! Now, after 30 years of intensive selection and shortened generational cycles, with people practically living among their plants for every stage in the process, the pot one buys from the Pot Guru in Encino is many times stronger than the pot that originally freaked Nixon into launching the ill-fated drug war in the first place. Just imagine the kind of 60s that would be possible today!
I've been keeping weird hours for the past couple of days. Yesterday I came home, took a bath, and went directly to bed, not awaking until the wee hours of the morning. Then I stayed up until past 5am working on my brand new rating-widget-powered webcam portal (in which Vodkatea members are encouraged to add their own webcams and rate the webcams of others). It's stupid, it's superficial, but (in keeping with the way dotcoms need to be to survive) it's completely maintenance free!
While I toiled on this project, I noticed that my housemate John wasn't in the house. He'd left the lights on in his room and downstairs and gone somewhere, apparently very suddenly. But I wasn't too concerned; John can be very spontaneous at times.
Today after work John finally came home, looking weak and amused. Then I saw the tell-tale bandages on the insides of his elbow joints. He'd spent all last night and most of the day in the hospital!
For John, yesterday had been like any other. In keeping with his somewhat intensive training, he'd gone for a nine mile run with Fernando. Sometime during the run, he felt some intestinal discomfort developing. Then, on the drive back from the Valley, he experienced an unusual form of intestinal gas. Once he got home, he was horrified to find that he was shitting a substance that resembled tar. Something inside him was bleeding profusely. A sharp pain in the stomach came and went, doubling him over in agony at its peak. He called Maria and/or Chun.
At the hospital, various tests were performed and various fiber optic probes where shoved down John's nose and mouth. After some deliberation, he was diagnosed with a stomach ulcer, probably a pre-existing one he'd exacerbated with excessive ibuprofen and hot pepper ingestion. While drifting into and out of demerol-induced sleep, John found himself caught in a bureaucratic mix up, shuttled off to a hospital bed when the doctor had specifically requested that he be released. When John told his nurse this, she was in no mood to hear it and basically told him to quit his complaining. Later Maria (who was out in the hallway) heard her bitching about John and requesting to switch with another nurse who didn't have such a prick for a patient. When you're family, you're family, especially in that household. No one talks about Maria's brother like that and gets away with it. She calmly pulled the nurse aside and informed her that she wasn't being very professional. At this point the nurse escalated the issue and it became something of a shouting match. It turned out that John, sedated though he was, had been correct. As he was being discharged, John and Maria could hear the bitchy nurse being "shellacked" by superiors off in the distance.
Tonight John had his main support crew, Chun and Maria, over. We all sat around watching teevee and talking about the hospital experience. We discussed how terrible the American medical system is, even for people (like John) who actually have health insurance. But our leaders are thinking about us and there is some good news out there; we'll all be getting checks in the mail due to the selfless efforts of our 'Tard in Chief.
Once Maria found out that I liked ABBA, she went around the room and made everybody share the name of their favorite ABBA songs. I couldn't think of any of the song names except "Dancing Queen." I believe the lyrics say something about being long and lean like a tambourine.
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