Grown Ups Talking

Can you believe this stuff?

It’s been over eight years of horrifying govenment. You duck and cover every time the news comes on because of the latest trotting out of Bush’s ongoing thumpingly brutal, short-sighted, cow-footed idiocies. When you pay attention you need to screw yourself up and wince at whatever they are about to say.

Well the first thing Obama’s government has done is to announce the closing of Guantanamo Bay. Not immediately, but within the year and meanwhile harsh interrogation has been suspended.

I find myself looking forward to news broadcasts.

Weird! But good.—Pomerol

As Tricia says, fresh pineapple is good for gout. Also cherry juice (!) 8 glasses of water, and aubergine/eggplant.

Under dispute are orange juice, tomatoes, pork, wine vs. British beer, Colchicine, NSAIDs, corticosteroids, and many other ingestibles.

Sigh. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. But listen to Dr. Tricia.—Pomerol

The slipper is suffering from gout. It’s excruciatingly painful. The internet is full of what to eat and natural remedies, most of it contradictory. The doctor confirmed that he had gout, then downloaded a couple of internet pages for him. She also prescribed a drug for the condition, but as the side effects include, but are not limited to, gastric bleeding and severe diarrhea, he’s waiting it out while eschewing booze and red meat.

Obama’s hootenany is already rolling along nicely. My friend Valpolicela is getting her nails done before she and a couple of gal pals sashay into Washington to stand in the freezing cold and watch the First Family strut their stuff on enormous television screens.

But it’s hard to be cynical. The pundits are lapping it all up, the republicans are grumbling defensively about abortion and gay marriage, yeah yeah, we’ve heard this all before, bla bla whatever. I’m so sick of all this chat about people chatting about politics. The fact is many many many people are Really Happy right now.

Even the slipper, in agony, will be watching from his rocking chair.

Maybe all this excitement is for slender reason. Maybe they’ll be brought down with the a bump in a couple of weeks. But how many times in our stumbling history have people all over the country, indeed the world, been able to say, history is being made, I’m part of it, hooray for us?

Fact is, I’m kinda psyched too.—Pomerol

Oh the best of all possible times. The New Year beckons as we raise our hung-over eyelids blearily into a remarkably uncertain future and listen to the know-it-all pundits speak wisely about the economic upheaval that less than six months ago they swore would never happen.

“Don’t believe everything you read in the paper” is a wise, smarmy self-satisfied saying, but these days it sounds like one of the ten commandments. One advantage of impending middle-age is you start to realize how clueless everyone is. It makes you feel a lot smarter, though also a lot more scared.

Our New Year’s was a muted, practically middle-aged, affair. We sat and watched television til midnight, then stepped out to the edge of the bay where teensy little fireworks streaked out of the darkness but quickly disappeared.

The Bush administration has, in the words of John Stewart, “time for one more big fuck-up” before he disappears quickly into the wilds of Texas. Fireworks in Gaza have been the real thing, wiping out everyone one in their path. You can just see Cheney and the Israelis working it out. “Wait for December, the Yanks will be obsessing over the economy, Bush will be ham-strung, Obama won’t be in power yet, you’ll have a month to do whatever you want.”

Will Obama have the guts to tell Israel to stop murdering? We can only hope.

Me, I’m crossing my fingers and going into an extreme health routine. Something tells me it’s going to be a tough year. —Pomerol

So here I am in sunny Ireland, basking in the generosity of the slipper’s delightful relatives. And relatives go they are pretty good. They put us up, put up with us, and manage to be charming, tolerant and amusing.

If only the world were like this.

It’s been a weird year and in the last month, notwithstanding economic disaster, ongoing wars and regime change, I’ve started to understand old peopole a little bit more.

As regular readers know, Chianti and I are constantly approaching middle age. In America this means relentless re-evaluation of one’s pension status (these days a mug’s game), re-assessment of one’s status in life (again, somewhat irrelevant as women are pretty much judged by their children, which neither of us have, even though we both love kids) or our health, which is judged in a particularly American way which is a rigid schedule of visits, assessments, and tests by doctors who draw bodily liquids and scan your insides to see what’s going on.

Now, it’s easy to be glib about these things. It’s very irritating to deal with hospitals, tests, unfeeling practitioners, or not-feeling-enough practicioners.

And therein lies the rub: you want the help, you don’t want the incompetence. In America, health is a money-making opportunity, so you are fighting the potentially incompetent healthcare system while resenting the fact that you have to deal with them at all,

The fact is that I had a Scary Scan recently. I was terrifed. I rehearsed my goodbye speeches to everyone I knew. As it happens, everything was fine.

But reality is, when you ge older, most of the people you know had a Scary Scan recently. As this starts happening, people are blandly understanding. It’s horrible. You have experienced the scariest moments of your life, and the people you talk to are calm and understanding.

It’s crazy! But the chances are, they have gone through the exact same thing, or their best friend has, or their husband-wife-boyfriend-girlfriend-daughter-son-best friend has.

They check for more things. they find more things. As you reach impending middle-age this becomes normal life. It’s less dramatic than you might have thought, and it’s less scary than you might have thought.

And if the doctors had not found these things and not considered your possible impending death, you might have thought to be angry or felt inconsidered or sued.

These day aging is a quantifiable gain or loss for somebody’s bottom line.

Get used to it. It sucks, it should change, but it’s not going to happen any time soon.—Pomerol