Before you can begin to list the ways in which the answer is "are you having a laugh, mate?" (you're always British in my head), I'm way off my normal posting time as my day was cruelly interrupted by a doctor's appointment. Plus I'm in the middle of extended preparation this week for a totally unrelated doctor thing that is fraying my mood and attention span a bit. And I'm on about Day 10 of a lingering, stupid cough. Who has the time or energy to sit down and be interesting in a media format that stopped being relevant right before Obama got elected the first time?
The answer is: not me really. The cheat of course is to set 'em up by not being particularly interesting in the first place, but over-reliance on self-deprecation is the crutch of the insecure. And I'm the fuckin' best at it.
All in all, it has not been my favorite week ever. I went in to work, as I'm required to for a small, but fixed, amount of hours per week, unless we have any symptoms that might make people think you're a Pox Carrier. This was Monday after having to stay out the entire previous week with a cold, only to have the cough come raging back with the strenuous exertion of... typing and sometimes talking to people. So I had to retreat to the house for the remainder of the week, which isn't the worst, but it sure aggravates my contrarian impulse to resent anything I'm required to do. The level of reverse psychology I'm vulnerable to hovers somewhere right around Looney Tunes degrees of sophistication.
Everything else going on is some typical middle-aged man bullshit. The appointment today was an abundance-of-caution follow-up to see if my enlargening prostate was regular enlargening or the host-body-murdering type of enlargening. All indicators were that it was the the first thing, the happily boring one, which we were able to confirm. I had to wait an hour past my scheduled appointment time to get in, but what's better than an uneventful doctor visit? I defy you to name one thing.
And further, this coming Monday, I have my first scheduled colonoscopy. That means for most of this week I'm on a preparatory diet which, for the uninitiated, can be summed up as "all the squishy white foods." I can eat all the Wonder bread and potatoes and (non-brown) rice and chicken breast I want, all the live-long day, but verboten entirely: all things that taste like anything. No tomatoes, no peppers, in fact no veg or fruit beyond our cooked, starchy, rooty, tuberous friend Ole Spuddy, right in time for Lá Fhéile Pádraig, the patron saint of scurvy.
Sunday I'll be on a liquid-only diet, because the best disposition for a successful mildly invasive diagnostic procedure is hangry, apparently. And then, of course, to top it off Sunday night will be a supplement of prescription nuclear-level industrial-strength bowel-evacuator drink, provided in a cruel, plethoric abundance after a week or more of prescriptive scarcity. I'm not saying I'm mad about it already, I just feel a little let down that they wouldn't even let me try to give myself terrifying diarrhea on one of my own bespoke programs. A lifetime of so, so many successes without even trying! But that's industrialized western medicine for you: depersonalized, authoritarian, not willing to tolerate any approach they can't monetize. It's cynical and dehumanizing. No opportunity to express myself beyond, you know, the disgustingly literal.
And the end result is going to be mild sedation while a camera is forced up my rectum, but by professionals this time. It's funny the things you'll put on the line for a bet when you're in your 20s without a lot of money to put up.
I keep telling my kids, however inconvenient or patience-testing, it's better than colon cancer. If it can take down the Black Panther, I'm not rolling the dice. Get yourselves checked. Wakanda forever.
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