We Saw Avatar

And we all kept our wonderful 3-D glasses afterwards. Fuck recycling. The movie was great. I wept for CGI creatures and a CGI planet. The 3-D glasses are good because they help to hide the tears. Planets should fight back more often. My beard was wet when we left. I noticed Lee had a wet eye too. Wuss, lol. Chas enjoyed it but I think she thought we were pussies. Afterwards we went around the mall (which I hadn't visited in ages) and half the stores were new (to me) and I went around saying what everything used to be and asking Chas, "Is this store cool with kids? Is this one?" It was 90% clothing stores. We watched the rainbow trout and some other native PA fishes swimming in the fake rock pond. There were two distinct groups of trout: aggressive and catatonic. I accidentally scared a skinhead in the Dollar Store. He apologized profusely for almost walking into me. He was shaking when he walked away. I don't think I'm that scary looking. Maybe he was having a bad moment or I looked like his evil dad or something. The coat I was wearing does do things to people. It's just a Bill Blass but it has this weird intimidation factor built in. I've seen this do it so many times. I suppose the coat looks like it cost a lot more than it did. Or maybe just that I was wearing an inappropriate coat meant I was crazy or hiding something on my body to him. Why try to figure these things out. I bought liquid B-12, of which an eyedropper gives you 16,000% of your RDA. Imagine. We went in Gertrude Hawk chocolates and were surprised at all the good deals. You can buy that Sevigny glass candy for 1.74 a box! So I got my Mom that. I also bought chocolate ladybugs (they have little cardboard insect feet!) and gold-wrapped large size chocolate Lincoln pennies for my niece and nephews. My mom had flashbacks when she saw the glass candy (we visited her afterwards) as her Mother used to love those. GH Christmas smidgeons were also marked down. Lee found some of his beloved white chocolate (the only kind he eats). A pedophile was eyeing Chas for a ridiculous amount of time until Lee and I both froze and stared back at him to let him know what a creep he was. "Excuse me, that's my daughter's ass." I got my Mom fudge from the fudgemaker on the upper floor of the mall. We went in the arcade and watched people try to win a Wii and then do the dancing game. There were photos of actual people who had won actual Wiis, lest you think it's a racket. They could have all been holding the same Wii and not truly have won it at all. Who knows. They also had turned DEAL OR NO DEAL into an arcade game. We went into a novelty store that sold mostly really ugly knives and weird earrings for gauged-out ears. Isn't mostly a weird word? Isn't it strange that there is such a word as mostly in the English language? It's a sign of a wishy-washy civilization. Then we went to a thrift store and I bought four vinyl records--since shut-in me moved my record player next to my bed like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I think she had a record player. I am too embarrassed to tell you which records they were. I found a talking Darth Vader doll, very large for 1.99. There was a space Betty Boop but she had "issues" so I didn't get her. I got a bag of plastic fake food. It's awesome. That was 1.99 also. I can't wait to play with it and arrange it. Maybe for scan art. Lee found two great books, one a decoupage Beatrix Potter book with all the original decoupage sheets unused and a wonderful Treasure Island with many color plates from 1947 (very tight and unmarked!) I checked the cd's and saw nothing, but then Lee found Daniel Bedingfield and Marlene Dietrich for me. So I have to add them to my Media Player. We heard a Michael Buble song on Sirius and it made me want all Michael Buble's albums. He got married I think. Or engaged. Happy Marriage or Engagement, Michael Buble! I figured you were gay, but oh well. I think I look more Greek now with the beard and I wear my (genuine) Greek sailor's cap so it adds to that impression. My long coat is pretty but was inappropriate for the weather tonight. WE are in the January thaw. It almost feels like Spring. I think the seagulls sleep over in Pennsylvania. They like department store parking lots. The ones with lots of puddles. My mom's neighborhood is all dark at night now as many of the houses are empty. Apparently there was a police sting or something (this is the quiet suburbs) and two of the houses on her street (which were actually the highest priced houses) had been inhabited by Colombian drug lords or something. But they were very nice Colombian druglords as my Mom said "all the boys" (she means men) "were very polite." They had many kids and seemed to be good parents. They had lived there for like eight years and been good neighbors. It's good they left before the ATF got there. She said both families just vanished overnight. These were large extended families, so it must have been a well-planned move. Other houses are just empty because people are losing their homes. Generally, when houses come up for sale in my mom's neighborhood the houses sell within like a week. Or that was how it was last year. Maybe this year is completely different. I planted a few bamboo plants in my Mom's backyard when I moved out many years ago and now it is a complete grove. The birds love it as much as they love her HUGE mulberry, which splays out all directions in spring. Lee trimmed my mom's cat's claws for her and she looked evilly at us (the cat, not my mom) while he was doing it. She's a black cat and my Mom puts her meals on a plate and puts it on her kitchen table (much to our horror). She has a pretty tablecloth with poinsettias all over it still on from Xmas and the black cat stands on her hind legs on the people chair and eats from the plate. Dis-gus-ting. But funny. I had a Buddhist book in my cart but it was 2.99 so I put it back. I wanted to make a poem out of the Index. Tra la. Then I ran in the grocery store and found good things for Lee and Chas. Clams for tomorrow. Alaskan King crab legs shelled and ready. Steaks. Huge ass potatoes like garden border rocks. We had a small stroke of good fortune today that allowed us to do these things. Before today my next mortgage payment was a complete mystery. Serendipity, Thank You. It's great that I can continue to be poor instead of "worse than poor." That would have really sucked. I was hoping God would pull a wheelie in my fate or something. Because I didn't have a wheelie in me. He did. Thanks, God! Now if the lottery ticket in Lee's wallet hits, we'll be even better. Then we can spend the rest of our lives island hopping. I think we'll start with Greece. That should take twenty years at least. I felt more human today than I have in a long time. I realized it had everything to do with the whirring of time and feet, things which I have let fall by the wayside for many, many months. I think it helped that I'm finally beginning to get answers why I've been so sick. Turns out I can add to my hypothroidism, SIGM (selective IgM deficiency) and hemochromatosis. Possibly the hemochromatosis has something to do with causing the SIGM. Anyway, it means my immunity sucks and certain types of bacteria can attack me with complete impunity. So I am immunocompromised. I hate typing that. But it's been my reality for some time now. I've had sinusitis for like five months. I never had that before. My Eustachian tubes collapse a lot. I have to be wary, in particular, of certain types of encapsulated bacteria because SIGM makes you very vulnerable to them. These are mostly the upper respiratory infection causers. It sort of makes sense looking back, becaue I got really ill when I was working two summers ago with a mysterious bacterial lung infection. Out of the blue. Bronchitis with no cold. Never had that happen before. I thought it was from my work environment and I still think some of this might be due to that. My office caught fumes that came from the huge garage behind my wall. The exhaust got to me. Lots of people who worked there ended up with coughs. Non-smokers. My doc thought I had COPD or something awful like that and I was breathing into spirometers and getting all sorts of X-rays. I didn't let it bother me too much at the time, because I was still busy being an alcoholic then. Alcohol always made me feel immortal or not give a fuck if death were my neighbor. Now I scream if I even see the shadow of death's little toe. Or its pinkie. "Death's pinkie, YAAAHHG!" So looking back, that's why my strep infection went over to bacteremia and why my feet skin peeled and all that. Why I had scarlet fever (I prefer to use the classic name: scarlatina.) I probably had meningitis then too. That was when I was putting books in the refrigerator and things like that. I had that skull pain. I remember the doctor saying, you couldn't have had your feet peel. It would mean you had septicemia. He didn't believe me. Dork. "Your temperature would have been through the roof." Well, guess what. My normal body temperature is about 97 and sometimes 96 so I don't think I get that hot. So a low fever to me is probably a high fever to someone else. I asked my body a long time ago to never give me another hot fever and it complied, but in this funny manner. I suspected I had this years ago and began cutting iron out of my diet. But even with that "remedy" I still max out the hemoglobin, hematocrit, etc. on those tests. And of course it ends up in your liver. I'm getting to the age (forties is about right) when hemochromatosis people start to get ill. And I have the ridiculous ratio you see in heavy metal poisoning. My CD4s are way up there (which is good) and my CD8s are way down, giving me a ratio of like 3.43. They say that's often seen before a worsening of the condition. Low CD8s are another thing seen with hemochromatosis. I can't afford a hematologist. I can't afford an immunologist. I will have to find some mind power trick. The good news is the treatment for hemo-c is simply bleeding. Hemochromatosis patients were some of the few people who actually benefitted from all that horrible bloodletting doctors used to do. That's how they get rid of the iron. Really modern, huh. Maybe I'll start raising leeches. That seems a good way to do an end run around the hospital bills. I'm getting OLD. For just turning 44! Did I mention my vision suffered a sharp decline recently. I'm afraid to have them look at my eyes and tell me something scary. I am farsighted so I have to hold books way out at arm's length. Some books anyway. Lee found his old glasses and I kept saying, "This will never work! Don't even bother!" And when I tried them on, they were PERFECT! I love that guy.