Catalano!!!

"I know a dirty word - hello, hello"....Jared Leto is walking on sunshine. White out. Jared is beautifully strutting on a sunshiny morning. What a sweet distraction to the dull ache on my left leg.

And I was imploring - is my near end, O Lord? This pain is nothing to what you suffered for our redemption but let it go away, give me some relief, and some cussing.

I will take emotional pain any day. With emotional pain, you can rationalize your way around it. Even argue with it. Box it in its proper perspective. Shelve it and do things to keep your mind off it but with physical pain, there is no escape. You cannot focus, sleep is a hard commodity to bargain, and you are pratically rendered unproductive and useless....just feeling rotten in one miserable corner, in my own corner of the sky where cats don't fit on the window sill.

No pain, no gain, some quarters say. Well, you can have them all. Just let me be a happy loser.

WeeeeeeeD

Ganja in a funkier package, yay! Leaves a bad taste, these corporate jocks who prefer designer drugs actually conceptualizing, glued to their story boards, hatching up plans to market this sacred herb. Dread and trepidation.

But if this is a necessary step to make it more accessible and acceptable, who am I to disapprove? An alternative painkiller, it should be available in our suking tindahan soon. Make it faster than soon.

Queen of Pain

“Antonio knows that pleasure
Is a child of pain” - Michael Franks, “Antonio’s Song”

Over the stern disapproval of my oncologist, I’ve been booking sessions with a chiropractor since April. It’s an astral experience, perhaps nearly similar to childbirth.

The chiropractor explains that my lymphatic channel is obstructed resulting to 2 major drawbacks. First, toxins are not flashed out, forcing them to linger in my frail body. Second, which is more glaring, the brain’s signals to the body are garbled or not picked up in their proper context. This is the reason why my body, before this chiropractor’s hands were allowed to press nerve-endings here and there, could not recognize pain.

Gee, eureka moment for me, lending clarity to constant ribbings of being “manhid.” That's why I am not ticklish at all. My body just blocked any form of sensation, mostly pain. Amazingly, the body unilaterally decided it’s pain that it shouldn’t recognize, not any other emotion. What if it were joy or love or fear and loathing in Vegas? And Sarah is wailing “And I fear, I have nothing to give. I have so much to lose here in this lonely place..”

Yes, my eyes on the ball here, I was rambling about the body unable to comprehend pain.

While fellow cancer patients exhausted their S2 prescription, that’s the yellow prescription regulating hard drugs such as painkillers, here I was strutting like a favored child of heaven, devoid of discomfort, not needing the aid of a druggist.

Now that my central nervous system is being repaired by the chiropractor and physical pain has made a resurgence in my material world, every philosophical canon, every Zen incantation, lose their insight. It’s unproductive to wax philosophy when pain marches centerstage.

My sister, in a magnanimous gesture of sympathy, asked “want something for the pain?” “Weed, just weed,” I implored. “Get it yourself,” she retorted.

What option did I have but to settle with something that rhymes with weed – read!!! But pain bars you from digesting new information so I ended up re-reading Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth” over my 'painful' weekend in honor of my yellowish, crooked ones. Seriously.

But mostly, sleep. Sleep, the sleep of the innocent, is the best antidote to pain. The pain can go a-throbbing but you’re in wonderland, thank heavens, where it is not welcome.

******************************************************************************

On another note, the discovery of anaesthesia is considered not just a eureka moment, but a social revolution of sorts. It revealed cracks in the institutional church’s position that pain came with being Christians; that as Christians, there was no option but to endure it.

This mea culpa attitude was overthrown in this crucial shift in the mindset regarding pain. It was only in 1957 thru Pope Pious XII that the Church relaxed its anti-anaesthesia stance, thank you very much. Yes, pain is essential to our existence but if we can avoid it, why not?

Weed, give me my weed. Ai, mistake. Erase, erase.

Wage, decent wage for the working class!!

Miracle Drug

“Of science and the human heart, there is no limit….
I’ve had enough of romantic love
I’d give it up, yeah, I’d give it up
For a miracle, miracle drug” (U2, Miracle Drug)

Mong-bebe, my former live-in partner, nah, dormate at Ipil - technically, we lived under one roof and I just get a kick introducing male dormates as “live-in” partners. Beat me.

He YMed several links yesterday regarding swine flu after reading the entry here. The links, when I opened them, were sites of pharmaceuticals. Baxter sparked my attention because this is the maker of a very expensive vial injected to me during my long confinement in June last year. The vial was supposed to remedy my albumin deficiency.

Is Baxter evil? The very sound of it smells evil. Well, we just have to be in consensus that pharmaceuticals, by their very nature, don’t earn cookie points in heaven.

That is really an ungracious thing to say for someone whose life was made less stricken because of drugs – nausea suppressants and anti-depressants. Going through 8-cycles of chemo last year, Plasil, a very tiny pill, didn’t make me puke. On my early days of confinement, a capsule called Zoloft which serves as a depression-buster put me to sleep. Zoloft is also a painkiller, I believe, like morphine.

I have an ugly relationship with painkillers not because I am a masochist. In my experience, painkillers are nightmare-inducing and they make me upbeat. Upbeat, that’s not me.

My oncologist in collusion with the psychiatrist stonewalled that popping shiny happy pills before depression gobbled me up was an awesome idea. Depression, my clit.

Depression among cancer patients is such a cliché. Certainly I am not jumping around in euphoria to have what a religious leader says as “God’s blessing in disguise” and in a moment of rarity, I am in complete agreement. A fair warning though: never tell a person newly diagnosed with cancer that having it is God’s blessing in disguise. That person might just become an atheist.

Here’s my take. The good Lord orchestrates our lives around mysteriously logical patterns and we should not even contemplate dismantling or thwarting those patterns but instead learn what the playwright Ariel Dorfman described as “a trembling state of humanity called recognition.” This divine grace Dorfman prefers to call recognition keeps depression at bay, not Zoloft or Prozac.

My sister reproached me for being rude to the psychiatrist. Until now, she picks on my impoliteness and I wrack my head which part was I reprehensible. Sketchy but I recall taunting the psychiatrist not to catalogue people into easy, neat categories. Is that being mean?

In fairness to me (hmp!), I gagged myself in recognition of her discipline. Psychiatry is about diagnosing what’s wrong in people and to be able to do that, you need to lump them into types. In fairness to the psychiatrist, we saw each other on Christmas and she showed no signs of harboring a grudge. Bless her.

So what do I do with my mean streak today? Mong planted the idea – attack the giant pharmaceuticals!!! With great pleasure.

It can be argued that by their very nature, the last thing pharmaceuticals pray for is a healthy population. Granted that we are all healthy, they still make money persuading us to buy their products to remain healthy. Always a win-win situation. Now, imagine the profits they are bound to gain in the event of a pandemic? Don’t, it’s just bowel-staggering.

The current media reportage of this flu the WHO insists is of pandemic magnitude is a bit sensationalized which will only advance corporate interests and militaristic political agenda as I have mentioned in an earlier blog.

The majority of deaths related to swine flu are actually due to lack of proper medical attention, poor nutrition, poor sanitary conditions. Long and short of it: poverty. It’s not the flu, per se.

I am in no position to contest the WHO’s assertions. A flu is a flu. The breakthroughs in medicine and technology have been spectacular enough to suspect this atmosphere of panic created by WHO’s pronouncements over a disease that’s not quite life-threatening. This is not the 18th century. Medical science has reached a point where it can play god and perform mind-boggling acts. Why do they want us to be afraid? Why do they want us to be alarmed?

Unless there’s something they are not telling us.

Pass the Dutchie

(I am not a DJ but this piece is dedicated to http://www.mariaganja.blogspot.com/ - for belaboring to read and comment on the entries and for being a non-biological mother of all mothers)

“I love my drug buddy, my drug, my drug buddy”
Lemonhead, “Drug Buddy”

Pablo Escobar and his Medellin cartel engineered Colombia’s underground economy before the druglord calendared a violent rendezvous with St. Peter. At one point, he seduced his government to grant him freedom in exchange that his country’s foreign debt be put on his tab. It’s mortifying, how loaded was this guy to even have the capacity to pay a fraction of Colombia’s foreign debt, much more foot the entire bill?

The war on drugs is a layered campaign and we can attempt to understand its failure by hemming it into straightforward socio-economics.

At the core of the drug business are political institutions – law enforcers, members of the judicial and executive branches who are in the payroll to bungle on their profession.

Then the trajectory moves to the market. For 4 decades now, the Dutch government made a distinction between the hard drug and soft drug markets. Consequently, prohibition on cannabis was relaxed and hash was on the menu of every coffee shop in Holland. A former Dutch czar bragged a strong argument - that by making it an accessible and ordinary commodity, “we have succeeded in making pot boring.”

Is ganja even a soft drug? Shooting from the hip, I can contest that it’s an herb/hemp, organic and healthy, no different from pito-pito except in the preparation. You roll one, you boil the other. What’s the difference between a spliff and a cigarette or tobacco, for that matter? Tada-ding!!

If marijuana is decriminalized, profit suffers. If it becomes legal, I can plant it in my own backyard. This is pure and simple the dictate of capital.

In one of GMA-7’s news programs, it ran a story of how, due to the economic crunch, marijuana is substituted by dried eggplant leaves. Interviewees claimed that the latter had the same calming effect as the former. If this goes on, would eggplant leaves be illegalized? It’s absurd.

Are potheads threat to society? Here’s the kick: Do they imperil the governments’ war on terrorism? Are they exploiting our mineral resources? Are they selling the nation’s patrimony? Should they bear the brunt of persecution?

There are casual users and there are junkies. Is jail time the only option? There’s rehab for the junkies and for the casual users, just give them space. Leave them to their peace. If medical studies are correct that indeed, prolonged marijuana use can hurt, these casual users are not injuring anyone but themselves.

Lighting up is what body massage or a glass of beer or whiskey to others. When the prolific American filmaker Robert Altman was interviewed one time how he relaxes, he made no qualms in saying that at the end of the day, as the sun descends from its pedestal, he sits on his porch, smokes pot as he reflects the events of the day. And he has an impressive body of work to show for it.

Why congest our rotten prison cells with people locked up for possessing a joint or two? In the US, about 2/3 of inmates are slapped with drug charges, mostly small fish. More significantly, they are serving time for “victim-less” crimes. Can you imagine how spacious the prisons will become if there’s a shift in the government’s pot policy?

Hard drugs are a different story altogether but just the same, I would still go for rehab instead of the arrest-imprisonment approach favored by the government. Put a chain on them for theft and other crimes but don’t jail them primarily because they are junkies.

God knows I have been chastised for taking this position by hardcore anti-drug sentiments of a few I have encountered. I try to understand where they are coming from and I can’t even begin to plead for a more humanistic view of junkies. It’s frustrating. These people talk about redemption and they can’t even, on the cloak of pretense, muster some compassion.

I am not saying that junkies should not be criticized but there’s a thing called human frailty. We can’t even begin to understand the demons they are slaying. Do we honestly think that our loved ones who unfortunately are engulfed in an abyss of their own creation (or so we convince ourselves) just elected one day to do shitty stuff to hurt us?

No, our harsh judgments would not help. Our support and understanding might, I say might, turn their lives around.

As for the war on drugs, Europe, particularly Portugal, Holland, and Germany has shown some innovative approaches that actually work – in terms of crime reduction, health benefits, and believe it or not, decline in consumption.

A synthetic drug called Methadone (it’s to heroin what a nicotine patch is to cigarettes) is available everywhere, even in mobile clinics. Clean needles junkies need to shoot up can be bought in vending machines or if they have no money, they can swap their old needles for new ones at police precincts. If you’ve got shaky hands and your drug buddy is indisposed, you can actually request a doctor to insert the syringe on you.

Let’s not wait for the spread of AIDS or an HIV epidemic to be more rational about needle use. I mean, we just have to be realistic that a “drug-free” society is like asking Satan to govern in Heaven. I hope I am wrong but it’s just not going to happen.

The least we can do is reduce health risks. Avoid ODs which normally happen with unregulated drugs and when junkies hide in dark-lit alleys to shoot up and can’t find their veins.

In the early 90s, the Swiss government set up a heroin-prescription program and the results are quite positive. Putting junkies on prescribed dosage apparently “sobers” them up. More importantly, the element of rebellion is gone. Partially, drugs’ attraction stems from the delectable idea that it’s forbidden. Once you relax the restriction, you take away the adrenaline rush. Then doing drugs becomes boringly conservative and ordinary.

Junkies, I bet they don’t smell nice. But there’s a band called Cowboy Junkies which does.

When Pigs Fly & The Swine Flew

This is the curse of a movie fan. The WHO has placed the swine flu pandemic at Level 6 and I say to myself that I have seen this happening in movies whose titles I have forgotten.

The plot is formulaic – there’s bad-haired Dr. Frankenstein doing his military-scientific research, attempting to invent a magic-liquid that when dabbed on humans, determines whether they are terrorists or Commies. Then while the mad scientist was taking a nap with a drool sliding from his mouth, his cat sneaked in and stepped on a chemical which spilled and diluted with another concoction – mayhem!!! And a new strain of virus is born to cause wreckage on our “civilization.”

Maybe the movies ruined me to assume that behind a convoluted story are the steady hands of manipulation and conspiracy. Or maybe it’s my political orientation. My brain is programmed to suspect the “Washington consensus” and this neo-liberal project governing our very existence. Or is this just paranoia on my part?

I am not saying that the swine flu pandemic is not real. What I am saying is that it is not a mere health issue. We were all given fair warning at the height of the protest against GATT, that in the IPR provisions where the production of GMOs is explicitly encouraged and tampering of the environment in the guise of research would go unregulated, the result could be the proliferation of new strains of virus.

It looks like the prophecy is manifesting itself.

Before my mother visits me in my dream again, mocking my propensity to paint a political hue in every issue, I will beat her to the punch.

Yes, Myat. The swine flu pandemic is not a mere health issue. It is political.

First, it is an outcome of a political decision to ratify the GATT despite warnings of its detrimental effects on health, on nation-states, on national economies, among other things.

Second, it has been woven into this highly contentious and very political issue of immigration. At the moment, the heat is on Mexico where it supposedly originated. US-Mexico relations is not exactly good-morning-sunshine. There’s NAFTA, the war on drugs, illegal immigrants, and now that the US government has finally admitted its bankrupt economy because it cannot shroud it any longer, calls to “close the border” could gain a lot of support.

Third, the quarantine law is proving to be a headache on political diplomacy. The Mexican government recently decried China’s strictness. Who determines when national interests end and racial discrimination begins?

Fourth, those lunatics at Fox News are howling this could be a form of bioterrorism. Well, they say loonies don’t lie. Seriously, they are sounding off the usual suspects – those men wearing robes and who pray to their God 6 times a day.

It’s not as if the US needs a valid justification to fire its guns. For the sake of argument, let’s agree with those loonies. Why would the Arabs sacrifice Mexicans? More significantly, is there a technology in the world more superior and sophisticated than that of the US? If there’s one country that has invented and mastered bioterrorism, it’s the US.

Will the US be even made to confess its preoccupation in creating its own monsters and demons? Don’t ask me. Observe how US officials defend the use of torture by its military. Take Condoleeza Rice who argued without rhyme and reason that if an action is approved by the president, therefore legal, it’s not torture. Is this how mainstream America thinks? I mean, this is a culture that introduced wild ideas like collateral damage, low-intensity conflict, preventive containment, among other things.

And the devil of it all? The US still wins in this so-called pandemic. This pandemic, more than anything, has legitimized the use of thermal scanners and other devices invasive of individual privacy. As if the US needs another excuse to pry and spy on its citizens and the rest of the world. Essentially, the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has been strengthened.

That’s just swell – in the name of security, you have a government which thinks it’s legal to read your mails and horoscopes before you do, to tap your phone in case you’re talking to Martians, spy on the contents of your belly, and monitor your body temperature. What’s next? Clearly the US is becoming a police-state if it isn’t one already.

And you know what? I first learned about it in movies.