Some Poetick Autobiography

1. It's been six month of sobriety. Plus a few days. How do I feel? I feel like fucking Miss Havisham. I should have a fossilized three-tiered fucking wedding cake in one room, cobwebs on my wedding dress. Cobwebs on the shiny shirts.

2. Sometimes I call the CDC (1-800-CDC-INFO) in the middle of the night and ask detailed questions about diseases I think I might have, not have or possibly have at one time had. These conversations usually last forty-five minutes, or sometimes an hour or more. I like to make the associates research the articles of the really weird, unexplained deaths posted on their site, and then the woman and I, or the man and I, commiserate on what a mysterious universe this really is and how absolutely horrible that person's death really was. Nobody knows why that person died a horrific death in a scene out of Bram Stoker's Dracula. She died like fucking Lucy surrounded by doctors killing her. Probably some little virus as yet uncatalogued. Science.

3. It doesn't have a name. What kills you. Stop pretending it does. That's a game you play with yourself.

4. If I could just find the courage to hang cloth over all the mirrors the way vampires do. At least cheesecloth. You hate it when I stand before the mirror and stare.

5. It is possible to go from 43 to 73. Or 83. Sure. Just subtract a really good drug.

6.. I am afraid of my cat now. I can't stand the way he sneaks up on me. He hadn't had fleas in eight years and now it's like the Hittites and who was it? The Assyrians? I think I've used everything they sell but fucking Zyklon B on him and I'm getting terrible guilt. The "natural cures" like the lemon I boiled so I could bottle the essence seems even more objectionable to him. I warm it by my space heater so it's nice warm lemon. Lavendar all through my bedsheets. I'm winning the war room by room but they still own the downstairs. You don't see them, but they're there. How many times can you spray and vacuum your furniture in a week. I hate the "flea comb" moment. They lay millions of eggs.

7. One flea bite can set me off like a Catholic saint experiencing stigmata. I'm serious. I can't bear it.

8. Sexual addiction is the harder nut. But if you can keep it at a very great distance, like a holler down a canyon, you might be okay. Right? I notice boredom creeping in, which I consider progress. But an actress is trained to complete the soliloquy, get off the stage gracefully. But the writing! I throw the script down in disgust immediately afterwards. Without alcohol it's like having phone sex with yourself. You get the therapeutic benefit of disgust. "Is this what I was?"

8. The urge never to touch a human body again except maybe on the brow. The face. To trace the ears. The lips with a finger.

9. You got pissed at me because you said you can't really see death in my face. Well maybe I can. My eyelids. The doctor said they had just thinned. "You lost a lot of weight." No. They're creepier than that. They look like somebody made up for the stage in the nineteenth century. I see silver glitter on them. Where the fuck does that come from? I imagine I'm a child of Edgar Poe in a dream made to perform in horrible verse dramas. The silver glitter catches the light from the fucking flambeaux. They had flambeaux in Baltimore? Sure. Why not?

10. Fucking Depakote. You fucked my platelets up horribly. 24% of people get ITP. If you say 24%, it's probably 46%. You lying murderers. And now I see one of the reflux drugs the new doc gave me is ranitidine. Mentions vascular shit. So that drug's out. I'll try the Omeprazole and see. You sleazeballs even marketed Depakote as an HIV antiviral for crissakes (on anecdotal fucking evidence) when you had solid science showing in vitro it made the virus replicate like crazy. It did the same thing to other viruses. You killed a young man with HIV. You killed a baby. You killed hundreds if not thousands more who weren't documented. Tom Cruise might sound crazy because Scientology is crazy but I think he's had a personal experience with some of those drugs. That anger doesn't come from nowhere. It happened to him or someone he loved. Big Pharm is evil and we're still at the "rat poison" phase of pharmacology. These are VERY primitive times.

11. I'll never take another bipolar drug without a gun held to my forehead. And even then I'll try to take the person holding the gun. And force the drug down their fucking mouth.

12. Lorazepam. Valerian. Clorazepate. You do little damage. You cushion me.

13. I had been researching cults online because I had been thinking about joining one. I thought it would have been funny to arrive at the ranch or whatever wearing a Snuggie.

14. In a scant hundred or so years, nanorobots will patrol your blood, fixing shit before it goes wrong. Happy little bees of immortality. Oh, you'll still have to go to the hospital sometimes, but probably just when you're dying. Or to get your nanos serviced. Nanorobots will biopsy, check oxidative damage, check neurotransmitter levels, restore electrolyte balance, restore blood cell ratios, destroy viruses and bacteria. It's the all-new superior macrophage and more. Nanos will do complex surgeries. Laparoscopic will be a distant memory. Less invasive, less invasive, is the mantra. The Japanese will probably own all the patents, as usual.

15. It must be getting cold. The louts have stopped yelling in the streets mornings.

16. I couldn't even finish reading the disability form. It was more boxes to check.

17. I wonder if there is a Personality Inventory Test where the result can come back "Great White Shark?" "Primitive Tree Shrew?" "Anaerobic Bacterium?"

18. The thing about alcoholism is that it can keep a corpse not just upright but singing for many years.

19. He said my vocal cords look horrible. I inherited a hiatal hernia. Does this mean I have to stick to jazz tones? Blues? Broken gospel?

20. Arguing with him whether or not I am "immunocompetent." He thinks I am. Then don't prescribe a fucking drug like that for me. You know what a drug like that means to someone who thinks like I fucking do.

21. And the doctor who had the needlestick and only tested out to six moths. Though he had the prophylaxis. What the fuck are you trying to say to me? This is about courage or stupidity? You know the fucking protocol. Twelve months. Yes, I know the odds are like 1 in 300. But you're showing me you're a great big brave stupid man. I get it. I hope you're fine. But shut the fuck up.

22. Out West, at one of the Lab Corp facilities (second largest medical testing laboratory system in North America) for months the technicians (I'm guessing 8 bucks an hour?) had been taking reactive (positive) HIV-1 E.L.I.S.A. tests and doing confirmatory tests on HIV-2 (what, 100 cases in the history of AIDS in America total since the epidemic began?) E.L.I.S.A.s (instead of Western Blots or IFA's) and then reporting these as "negatives." This went on for months.

23. One of the women who helped develop the DNA PCR tests which are used for everything from HIV to the various hepatitises, etc. was raped and then later stalked and murdered by her rapist. She was on Forensic Files the other night. It's a scary process with a lot of false positives because it's basically a mathematically exponential process of multiplication of sequences...so false positives can emerge from the 'garbage in, garbage out" scenario and you can have "phantom viral loads"....usually these are lower numbers...below 10,000 is suspicious...but if you buy the VirusMyth people's arguments (and I run screaming from most AIDS denialists although they occasionally bring up good reasearch) there have been false positives as high as 100,000.

24. One virus. Studied for decades. And some of the most basic assumptions about it or still completely mystifying us.

25. Higher viral load does not (according to the consensus now) equate to higher disease progression the way lower CD-4 count does.

26. The confusing issue with virions as opposed to full virus. To what degree are CRFs (recombinant combination of HIV-1 M clades) viable/virulent and to what degree are they even fucking testable by the current antibody tests? Does anybody realize how fast these CRFs are proliferating (now 25% of new diagnoses in Europe). Guess what's in store for America. Are the American tests even accurate now? It's like the fucking FAA...improvements only come with each plane crash.

27. England uses the DUO...antigen/antibody combo. Which makes more sense than what American does. By far. Up to a certain point. It's all about the money. RNA test best early. DNA test reliable throughout (supposedly) but spikes then levels and theoretically a good controller (serious viral suppression by host) could be missed? Antigen theoretically vanishes several days before antibody appears. After a certain point, the antigen test is thought to be useless. But in the troubling example of people who NEVER produce antibodies (and not for say the expected genetic abnormalities but possibly some immunodeficiency, humoral fuckups) sometimes it's the antigen which lets the doctors know first (like the case in Madrid).

28. The idea is that the antibody confers no special advantage (other than diagnosis) which is not the situation as with other antibodies (which can confer protective status...say some of the hepatitises). Who knows if that's true. Maybe this is the real mystery behind "elite controllers." I haven't seen any research along those avenues.

29. I'm tired of reading/thinking about viruses.

30. A funny article the other night where DNA in the PCR tests was being assigned to other animal species (evolutionary antecedents)...or believed to be such...do people realize what a junkshop DNA is...how it really never throws anything away? I still buy some of those studies in The Ghost in the Machine about recapitulative evolution. The fruit flies blinded by genetic excision regaining sight in a few generations. If those weren't faked results, there's a reason DNA keeps all that shit...reconstitutive evolution might be a reality. And the evolution of long-diverged (talking Pangaea landmass separation timeframe) extremely parallel marsupial and mammalian species does point to a sort of directed, finite programming once certain structures have been selected. Homologies explain some of this.

31. It's my suspicion that viruses can be reverse-engineered and used in a way similar to nanotechnology to do genetic restructuring. Viruses can be made "pro-evolution" in a non-Darwinian, non-selective sense.

32. Cloning and stem cell research can be very valuable weapons in virologic warfare. If money is shuttled that direction. If nothing else, you know they're going to be farming livers and hearts in a few decades. Get real. Big Pharm would make it necessary if nothing else did. (And many other things, natural and unnatural, do.)

33. Sorry, it's one of those Philip K. Dick days. Reality sandwich got too much mayonnaise on it.

34. I think they're going to have a "second birth" process in the next century as well where the baby goes from natural womb to synthetic womb and immune system is reconfigured using best biotechnology. Give 'em that great white shark anti-cancer gift along with the pearly whites.

35. The human species is so in the process of shedding its idiosyncratic bullshit. The paragon of animals is almost completely ready to write The Catalogue. A new Edenic shopping.

36. And the Catalogue will be wonderful.

37. As usual, Good Luck Poor People.