Sick in Buriram: Medical Tourism Off the Beaten Path in Thailand

It must have been the seafood noodle yum.

That was our tentative conclusion in what was shaping up to be a game of Clue with a careless Thai food vendor as Colonel Mustard and a languishing octopus as the candlestick—the principals of the violent drama unfolding in the darkened corridor of my bowels.

The investigation had begun as I was writhing on the bed in my in-laws’ house in Buriram, a small town in northeastern Thailand near the Cambodian border, with an ice-filled sock pressed against my head and an empty shopping bag-cum-vomitorium dangling from my wrists.

Convinced that I was just suffering from a stomach bug, I resigned myself to spend the rest of the day and night moaning in perpetual motion between bed and toilet.

But my father-in-law Karl still had doubts about the case. “How many times have you gone today?”

Seven.

“When you go, does your sphincter feel tight? Like it wants to stay closed but it leaks out with a hissing sound?

Um, well, yeah, kind of.

“So,” he said, nodding his head slowly, synthesizing the data. “I think we should go to the hospital.”

With that word, a fresh sweat of desperation rippled through my bedsheets. I tried to recant my former admissions, saying my sphincter always felt tight, and maybe I had only gone six times. In fact, I was starting to feel much better. Anything not to have to go to the hospital.

But Karl was not easily persuaded. My symptoms sounded to him like something he called “para-typhoid,” an illness he had once had and whose peculiar sphincter-ratcheting qualities he could vouch for.

“You don’t want to mess around with that stuff here. It could be something serious. You know, they still have cholera outbreaks here.”

This news came as something of a shock. In the six years since I had met my wife, I had traveled with her to Thailand five times for visits lasting between two weeks and two months. Before my first trip, I had dutifully consulted all the CDC travel advice, gotten all possible vaccines, fed myself a steady diet of anti-malarial pills, applied bug spray religiously, abstained from street food, and tried to avoid drinks with ice possibly made from unsafe tap water. But by the time I came to Thailand for the second time, a year later, I had abandoned all these precautions. Street food was delicious. Ice made drinks cold. And, outside of the jungle, mosquitoes were a minor nuisance at worst.

But what really made me throw caution to the wind was the fact that Thailand-- even backwater Buriram, with its potted sidewalks, mangy dogs, faintly rotten sweet smell, and overwhelmingly genial villagers—now seemed normal. It was where my wife was from, where my in-laws lived. Absorbed into my existential horizon, exotic Siam had become pedestrian. So the mention of cholera, in tandem with a typhoid auxiliary, made me reconsider not only my hospital phobia of moments ago but my entire image of the country. Thailand again seemed as strange as ever. You could still get cholera and typhoid here!

Suddenly life felt as real as fiction. Images of Gustave von Aschenbach eating strawberries on the Lido, a Colombian Casanova telegraph operator tapping out love poems, and the computer game death notice of a pioneer child on an Oregon-bound covered wagon flitted behind the sock full of ice on my forehead.

Okay, I said. Let’s go the hospital.

On the car ride over, I saw an elephant at a streetside café, carousing with a group of diners. Sweet Christ, I thought, I really do have typhoid fever!

“Sorry to interrupt, guys,” I said, “but did we just drive past an elephant carousing with a group of diners at a streetside café?”

Much to my relief, we had.

---

Over the years my klutziness had made me no stranger to minor ER visits. A finger half-sheared in a meat-slicer. A wounded knee from falling off the ski lift. And, perhaps the all-time most degrading episode, dating back to my miserable high school marching band days— a throat swelled shut from an angry bee swallowed through the mouthpiece of my trombone. Based on these experiences, I fully expected to be keeled over for hours in a sweltering waiting room, the only unknown being the gallery of provincial ailments that would be sweating next to me.

When we walked through the doors, the waiting room was virtually empty. Only a kindly grandma propped up by her daughters and a mother bouncing two giggling toddlers on her knee. Where were the open abscesses? The mangled limbs? The consumptive hacks? The pus-filled scrotums? I barely had time to sink into the cool cushions of a couch before my wife had me checked in and we were called to the triage nurse. From there we were sent immediately to the doctor.

The doctor was an unprepossessing man resembling an Asian Doogie Hauser. He wore a striped polo shirt and leather slippers and could barely speak loud enough to push his voice beyond his surgical mask. My father-in-law Karl, an American expat who speaks perfect Thai, explained my symptoms in as clear terms as possible--
“runny shit”— violating the usual Thai tendency toward circumlocution in medical matters. The doctor seemed unconcerned. Sure, there had been a few cases of cholera in the area, but, without a fever, I was probably just suffering from good old-fashioned diarrhea. He was preparing to usher us out, when Karl reminded him that no one had taken my temperature. The inside of the surgical mask mumbled as an embarrassed nurse thrust a thermometer into my armpit. I had a fever of 102. In that case, the doctor said, it could be cholera.

Aside from the less-than-inspiring performance of the doctor, the whole admittance process was by far the swiftest visit to any doctor’s office, let alone the ER, I had ever experienced. I had been registered, triaged, seen by a doctor, and assigned a bed all within twenty minutes of walking through the front door. Not only that. My room and board, without insurance, would cost 1,070 baht per day—approximately 33 dollars.

In my wretched state I calculated what an indictment of American healthcare this bill was. For nearly all hospital visits, even a simple suture job, it would actually be cheaper for an American citizen to buy a thousand dollar plane ticket to Thailand and go to any old Thai hospital. Even with the sixteen hour flight, they would stand a good chance of getting faster medical care.

And I haven’t even told you about my room yet. My 33 dollars entitled me to a “VIP” room, the corner penthouse with private bathroom and wrap-around balcony, which was thoughtfully chicken-netted to guard against the self-destructive thoughts of the sick. The interior— replete with brown wainscoting and trim, green fake leather parlor chairs and matching sofa, pale green floral curtains, and a long wooden desk flanked by four high-backed chairs—looked like a 1950s conference room into which a hospital bed had intruded.

A retinue of nurses, smiling beneath their surgical masks, brought me some green XXXL pajamas to wear, a medley of cups for which to collect various bodily excretions, and an IV bag of medicine and electrolytes. Karl went back home and my wife Marissa, thankfully, stayed and slept on the green sofa.

---

It was, as expected, a long night. Liquid evil surged from my gut every couple hours, accompanied by twisting pangs of nausea. I distinctly remember sitting on the toilet at 2 AM shitting myself into green oblivion, entangled in tubes and my sweat-soaked oversized pajamas, filling bed pan after bed pan with steaming upchucks of corn and bile. I had what at the time seemed like an epiphany: that the finely woven structure of my consciousness—the desires, perceptions, and designs that I called a self—could literally go down the toilet if the simple arithmetical balance of things called electrolytes were upset.

This ruthless logic struck me as at once preposterous and profound, though my realization of it was hardly profound, since there are countless similarly miniscule contingencies that underlie the conditions of our existence. But I had never really reflected, and with such foreboding, on how rooted our being is to water. This truism is laced with a particularly monstrous irony when the problem is not access to water but the ability to keep it from gushing out one’s ass too fast.

My wife experienced this same episode in the middle of the night as a revelation of a different sort. She was awoken by the sound of my hacking, momentarily disoriented by her strange sleeping quarters. While trying to get her bearings, she saw emerge from the dark a shaking pale hand clutching a mobile IV stand. Was this a vision of her future, of conjugal nights in the elderly years to come?

---

With dawn came respite from my torment and the beginning of a steady stream of activity in the hospital room. Over the course of the day, a dozen different employees wearing a dozen different uniforms filed in each to carry out their own special task. Beyond my team of pill-bearing, blood pressure-pumping nurses, there were the yellow- clad sweepers, the orange moppers, the green bed changers, the red trash collectors, the blue food servers and water replenishers, the pitiable bathroom cleaner wisely wearing knee-high galoshes, and the newspaper deliverer donning a sequin fuchsia cocktail dress at 9 in the morning.

At ten the doctor—this time an older more convincing one—came in smiling to give the verdict. The lab had rooted through my feces and found no evidence of cholera. I was dejected. Earlier that morning Karl had brought me a printout of the Wikipedia entry on cholera, sure that I had hit the jackpot, joining a pedigree list of stricken personages, not counting the other anonymous millions. Nor did I have typhoid or any of its militant wings. They did, however, find a type of bacteria that wasn’t supposed to be there, the likely source of my infection. His diagnosis: I wasn’t used to Thai food. How this caused a bacterial infection was unclear. He spoke, while rubbing my stomach, in faster Thai than any of the native Thai speakers in the room could comprehend. By the time we asked what kind of bacteria it was and how long I would have to stay in the hospital, he was gone.

Americans coming to Thailand will thus feel right at home with brusque manner of doctors who seem to be on their way out the door the moment they step in to see you, as though you, the patient, were keeping them from seeing their patient. My Thai doctor managed to be evasive as well as brusque, racing in to not really tell me what I have.

---

We spent the rest of the day in a thick haze, reading, sleeping, and wondering when and if the doctor would return. Knowing that I was no longer battling cholera or sweating out typhoid, my spirits flagged. Tethered to my bedside IV bag, I escaped into Bruce Chatwin’s travel account of the aborigines of the Australian outback and his meditations on the nomadic life. With the clock on the wall broken, my sick room had the suspended feel of Dreamtime, punctuated only by the cyclical rhythm of my bowels.

When moments of ennui struck, we flipped through Thai television for the channel showing the World Cup just in case we had missed it the last thirty times we checked. The closest we could get was two infuriating fat men in front of a massive deodorant advertisement yelling about the World Cup match currently being played. Thai television, even for a native speaker like my wife, has the advantage and disadvantage of being unwatchable for more than five minutes. In the hospital, we probably watched three hours. At all times of day and night you come upon what looks like public access soap opera, always with the same radio theater sound effects and same character types: prissy female lead, humorless male, envious female, and grotesque comic relief. The default shot is profile close-up, so as best to capture all the emotion being expressed in the character’s eyebrows and lips. One historical drama, meant to evoke traditional Thai village life in days of yore, looked like a women’s locker room epic, with all the women in modern make-up wearing purple towels around their chests.

I was in the danger of becoming wrapped up in the plot of the women’s shower saga when my mother-in-law Noi (whose name means "Tiny") showed up at the end of the day in hopes of springing me out of the hospital. She managed to track down the doctor, who said I needed to stay another night, without further explanation.

---

The second night passed with the calm of a broken fever while a thunderstorm raged outside. The nurses freed me from my IV drip before bed and Marissa read aloud a few chapters from Don Quixote until I fell asleep. The next morning I woke up feeling human and ready for breakfast. I swilled ovaltine and ate rice porridge along with a salty Thai version of a beignet.

When the doctor popped in to inspect me, I tried to beam health.

“How are your bowels?” he asked. He stood contra posto with the back of his hand against his hip, like an aristocrat posing for his portrait.

“Better,” I assured him. “But very green. That’s not a problem, is it?”

“No, not at all,” he laughed. “We’ll give you some medicine to take home when we give you the bill.” And then he galloped away. Exactly what disease I had, I’ll never know.

The bill would not gallop in until three hours later, but when it finally did, we had little cause for complaint. The grand total for my two days and two nights in hospital, including meals, medicine, doctor consultation, and lab work was 6,000 baht—just under 190 bucks, no insurance.* And if I had really been looking to tighten my belt and willing to stare into some open abscesses, I could have stayed in a four-bed room for much less—though I can’t imagine the horrors of sharing a bathroom with a stranger suffering the same ailment as mine.

In the end, in the absence of cholera and typhoid, suspicion fell back onto the seafood noodle yum and the octopus handler of questionable hygiene. But I bore her no grudge. My confidence in Thailand had only been bolstered by the experience. It was still a wild place where I could, at least in theory, catch something horrendously romantic. And even if I only got the occasional middle-brow, food-borne, nondescript bacterial infection that sent me spiraling down the toilet into nothingness, I now knew I had a reliable local hospital to count on—one that even left me enough money to buy my next lukewarm seafood dish from the street vendor.

That Apocalyptic Feeling

This is the last column I wrote for the Stanford Daily:

“When the earth gapes my body to entomb,
I justly may complain of such a doom.”—Voltaire, “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster”

“And I can’t fight this feeling anymore. I’ve forgotten what I started fighting for. It’s time to bring this ship into shore. And throw away the oars, forever.” –REO Speedwagon, “Can’t Fight this Feeling Anymore”

My Sunday sing-along with the village delinquents had just reached the coda when I heard a pounding at the door.

The sound startled the young ne’er-do-wells and sent our five-part harmony into a pitchy mess. Everyone stayed on key, but they lost their balance and fell from the risers into the inflatable pool of hot pitch below. I have found, in working with degenerate youth, that sometimes all it takes to bring out the golden voices slumbering inside their criminal bodies is a little tough love.

Take the Three Tenors, for example: all products of the musical pedagogy of European fascism. “Lucky” Luciano Pavarotti was a cracker thief in Mussolini’s Italy until the authoritarian youth outreach program fed him the castor oil that brought his sweet tenor gurgling up to the surface. Placido “Sleepy Sunday” Domingo was bastinadoed sixteen times by the Spanish Falange before he could sing a melody instead of jimmy a lock. And Jose “Career Loiterer” Carreras would still be standing on a street corner in the Barceloneta if Franco’s Guardia Civil had not tended to his musical ‘reeducation’.

But back to my story: peeved that I would now have to refill the tub with freshly heated tar, I marched to the door to rage at the intruder whose knocking had interrupted my stern commitment to community service.

“Don’t you realize that I am trying to rehabilitate the malformed souls of our nation’s youth through the formidable spirit of music?” I shouted. “Account for yourself, villain!”

I concluded my greeting with a swift flick between the man’s eyes delivered by my callused bludgeon of a fingernail.

Only when his eyes failed to come uncrossed did I realize this villain was my twin brother, G.P. (Gross Product).

“G.P., you rogue! My apologies, but I didn’t recognize you dressed in your clown suit. What gives?”

G.P. was a real biz-casual kind of guy. He talked a lot about synergy, diversifying stuff, stimulating investment incentives in things, and all the legendary nights out he had with his boys in Palo Alto. He was the kind of guy who praised the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporate donations to political campaigns as a victory for free speech. So you can imagine my shock when I saw him swaddled in pink robes, his hair tied in a knot, and a skull tattooed across his face.

“The end is nigh, P.G.! Death has come to swallow our world, to gnash our guts betwixt his jaws.”

“That doesn’t sound like you, G.P. You’re usually so upbeat and of limited diction. What happened?”

“My real estate investments fell through, so I’ve joined an apocalyptic cult.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll get another investment opportunity,” I told him.

“You don’t understand. My penthouse vacation condos in Port-au-Prince fell through all fifteen floors below them.”

“Oh,” I said. But as soon as tried to say something comforting, something remotely optimistic, a little serving of a vomit would surge into my mouth. My mind desperately searched beyond the earthquake in Haiti for a current realm of human activity that didn’t make me gag in despair. Politics, War, Healthcare, Education, Economy, Jobs, Media, Hollywood, Environment—these banal terms, fired into my brain hundreds of times a day, took on a ghoulish appearance that sent me cowering in the warm vat of hot pitch. Not even art—the cherubic voices of my village hoodlum choir singing “Waltzing Matilda” in the round—could draw me from the bilious depths of my black liquid sanctuary.

My brother’s return had sapped my resolve to live among men. In the days following his visit, I tried to carry on with my volunteer work as choirmaster for incorrigible derelicts. But I didn’t possess the strength of will to cane the sole of even a single foot. As a result, the group’s singing failed to improve and recidivism quickly replaced rehabilitation. Petty larceny and gambling returned to the choir room. By month’s end, my Sunday sing-alongs had become wanton orgies of disorder. There would be no great Pavarottis or Domingos made by me—only tone-deaf cracker thieves and donkey-voiced loiterers.

In a final attempt to fight that apocalyptic feeling, I decided to volunteer my living body for scientific testing. Surely, in a world mired in disaster, science is still our one stalwart hope. So I stumbled into my neighborhood medical testing office and shouted at the receptionist, “In the name of progress, hit me with the radiation!” But the supervising physician rejected me, citing some jargony bureaucratic term called “raving lunacy.”

But, really, I’m happier here. I’m with my twin brother Gross Product, who now goes by Death Knell, and all his apocalyptic cult friends. We have a lovely little stretch of hovel in the trans-Bay tube midway between SF and Oakland. I hear the view three hundred feet above us is simply stunning. We have an ample supply of nettles and pass the time telling each other stories of the pending apocalypse and watching the BART passengers zoom by merrily on their crash course to inevitable disaster.

One thing, though. I can’t write these columns for the Stanford Daily anymore. Internet connection is too spotty down here. Besides, ever since I’ve stopped fighting this apocalyptic feeling, I’ve forgotten what I started writing for.

But, please, I encourage you to come visit.

The Everyman Machine

“I go to Washington as the representative of no faction or interest, answering only to my conscience and to the people. I’ve got a lot to learn in the Senate, but I know who I am and I know who I serve. I’m Scott Brown. I’m from Wrentham. I drive a truck, and I am nobody’s senator but yours.”–Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown

“Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.”–Cervantes, “Don Quixote”

Of course you can smell my truck. I don’t mind. Yeah, it still has that new truck scent. But I assure you that’s because I’m tidy, not elitist. No pretentious liberal phony-scent trees dangling from this mirror. No, sir. Just an American flag, my Helen Gurly Brown commemorative fuzzy dice (a gift from Cosmo) and a tea bag still dripping with earl gray patriotism. Oh, that other smell, you ask? That’s the smell of victory--the people’s victory! Now, with all due respect, please back away from the truck. You’re leaving grease stains on my populist decal.

I know what you’re thinking. How in the heck did a regular patriotic pro-life guy like me take on the juggernaut of the liberal establishment? Well, to tell the truth, I never thought I would end up in politics. It always seemed like a sordid scene run by backroom deals and shadowy interest groups. Capitol Hill brought to mind a cocktail hour intrigue of smug corporate lawyers, spineless party hacks and lobbyists from whose double-breasted suits flowed endless free steaks and Coogi sweaters. What’s more, it was worm-ridden with political philosophies, ideologies, party platforms, all sorts of things that, to a normal liberty-loving dude, sounded pretty suspect.

And, if my car hadn’t broken down that one fateful day, I surely would have carried on being a sedan-driving, golf-playing, nude-modeling drone of the liberal establishment. But when I showed up at Hertz for a replacement rental, my loafers in tatters, all they had left were pick-up trucks. After upbraiding the sales assistant, I resigned myself to the truck and drove home feeling awkward. But something strange happened on that drive home.

At first, the changes were small. I started hanging my arm out the window. I tuned in to AM radio. I started whistling the national anthem. But more perceptible transformations soon followed in their wake. A paranoid fear of illegal immigrants crept over me. I felt the sacred institution of marriage crumbling beneath my feet. My love of unborn fetuses became so overwhelming that I had to pull over and buy a pro-life bumper sticker.

At the highway rest stop, I noticed, much to my amazement, that I was trading banter and sharing laments with the other huddled masses piling out of their pickups and into the urinals. Despite wanting to liquidate their homes and send them to prison, I felt a genuine affection for their folksy desperation and lack of opportunity. I then realized what had just happened to me: I had become an everyman.

Back on the road, my new everyman aroma spewed forth from the exhaust pipe of my everyman machine, sweetening the air with a new hope for democracy.

The minutemen militias of delusional hockey moms and other dangerous ignoramuses crawled out from their bunkers and followed my fumes. They immediately recognized this scent as their own, with its stench of raw civic discontent not masked with any artificial rational fragrances, and proclaimed me their king.

So, here I am, just another small town beauty queen taking on the political machine. As an everyman, I like my democracy old-fashioned (circa 2004): without health care, steeped in war and favoring the rich.

But don’t you go thinking we’re the same as the everymen of yore. Sure, Harry Truman may have made a big fuss about being a small potatoes yokel from Independence, Mo. But then he had to go and ruin his everyman image with a palpable sense of history and an intellectual commitment to governance.

You know what that reeks of? Expertise! Elitism! Now, how are you supposed to serve the people if the people can’t relate to you? And how are the people supposed to relate to you if you know more than they do? That’s bad reality TV and bad democracy. Instead, the everyman politician of the 21st century must be a convincing avatar. When the American people look into the political mirror of democratic government (or Cosmopolitan), they want to see themselves, only with killer abs.

Also, it doesn’t hurt to have a sweet truck.

History Lives in San Diego

Oh, prosaic San Diego! Sing me your secrets. A French-fried potato stuffed in a burrito? A kidnapped Tijuana club owner stashed in a safe house? A syphilis sore blossoming in a sailor’s breeches? A thousand historians holed up in a Hyatt? What other sordid surprises do you keep in your canyons shadowed from the bleach of the blistering sun?

Destiny found me in our southern city of St. James last weekend. I had been invited to give a paper at the annual meeting of American historians: “Rethinking Fingernail Hygiene in Late Victorian Wales, 1891-1895: A Transnational Perspective.” Going into the conference, I had worried my topic was too broad. After all, pre-1891 Welsh fingernail hygiene was a world apart from the 1895 scene. It’s nearly impossible to account for all the transformations wrought by the great Belgian cuticologist Emil Rjinsdorf and his introduction of the scrub brush into the mining cultures of blackened Welshmen.

But my fears of trying to cover too much ground were soon assuaged by a look at the list of other conference panels. I knew I would have no difficulty discussing the broad currents of fin-de-siecle filth and the emerging global perspective on cuticology with my interlocutors in Radio and Gender Performance in Postwar France or Quilting in Third Generation Filipino-American Families.

The conference began wonderfully. Under the yellow morning glow of the ballroom chandeliers, we plied our trade, broke new conceptual ground, and changed our understanding of human behavior with the three to four people who were willing to listen to us. At least two of those people had come thinking there would be free coffee.

Sadly, the free coffee years were over. Like many of the humanities disciplines, history has fallen on hard job times. Granted, you would never know this from the steady stream of effluvia coming out of the historical discipline.

But there were subtle hints of underlying slump. The Career Resource Desk in Annex D of the Hyatt had a “back in five minutes” sign posted on the table for the entire weekend. The buffet spread for “Young Scholars” consisted of raw broccoli, steamed peas, sunflower seeds, and a giant punch bowl of ranch dressing. And I’m pretty sure I saw a scholar of early modern Poland picking cigarette butts off the parking lot.

Of course, that didn’t stop us from enjoying ourselves. In between presentations, we historians unclipped our ties and frolicked in the San Diego sun. The terrace came alive with ill-fitting suits poring over footnotes by the pool and heated discussions in the sauna about the battle of the Bulge.

Then things got real.

A group of masked men with guns burst into the Hyatt. They barricaded the exits, corralled us into the grand ballroom, and bound our hands and feet with duct tape. They told us we were being held for ransom. Apparently, the Mexican drug cartels had also fallen on hard economic times. To compensate, not only were they diversifying their job skills with increasing forays into kidnapping; in conducting business across the border, they, too, were adopting a transnational perspective.

Unfortunately, their plans for profit were misguided. When the university deans received the call announcing that all their historians had been kidnapped, their eyes lit up. A whole departmental budget would be free to pump into a new ergonomic finger gym for the school of engineering. Suddenly, a new solution to the universities’ budget crisis had appeared on the horizon.

When our kidnappers started filling car tires with gasoline, we knew we had to get out of this situation on our own. The time had come to bring our historical knowledge to bear on the present.

A young woman crawled to the podium.

“The first thing we have to do is sufficiently theorize our methodology.”

“We need to adopt a global perspective!” someone shouted.

“But one that is still attuned to the nuances of gender construction!” yelled another.

“Let’s be serious. We can’t move forward until we rethink the boundaries of kidnapper-kidnappee and the intersubjective process of identity formation.”

“I’d like to remind everyone that digital media technology can serve as an excellent pedagogical tool.”

The crowd murmured its assent, albeit reluctantly.

Thirteen hours later, we had struck on a plan. We would survey the historiography of slave revolts, prisoner riots, and hostage resistance from a transnational perspective, but with attention to the specific cultural dimensions of local institutions and practices. This would indicate a direction for future work on emancipation. Meanwhile, we would deliver a series of power point-supplemented lectures aimed at making our captors aware of the normative discourse of masculinity and the legacy of Spanish colonial oppression they were acting out in their transgressive roles.

But when we went to give our first lecture, we came upon the kidnappers at the “Young Scholars” buffet, sprawled out dead on the floor. The empty punch bowl of rancid three-day-old ranch dressing told the tale.

Once again, the unexamined past had brought the present to its knees.

Filial Piety

I overheard the following conversation between two young men tonight at the Palo Alto Caltrain stop. Once I heard the phrase "fighting with my grandma," I knew I was listening to gold:

Dude, I totally broke my ipod the other day.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I was fighting with my grandma. I was in the bathroom, and she was all yelling at me through the door and I was like, "Fuck you, Grandma!" And I was so pissed, I took my ipod off the counter and threw it at the door as hard as I could and it bounced off the door and flew into the bathtub. Totally busted it.

Wow. Really?

Yeah. And she was all like, "You shouldn't use language like that." And I was like, "Shut the fuck up, Grandma. I can use whatever fucking language I like!"

Whoa.

Well, that's my train. See you later dude.

Yeah. See ya.

Getting Down to Business

So much for New Year’s resolutions. There I was on Jan. 1, knee-deep in luggage, resolved to board a greyhound to Lafayette, La. to begin my new life as a philosophy major. Then a tweet came screaming through the ether into my iPhone. UL-Lafayette had announced it was doing away with its philosophy degree. Extinguished were my hopes of becoming an educated southern gentleman, drawling on Epictetus and gazing into the Heraclitean flux of my mint julep.

The pain brought to mind the trauma of last fall, when I showed up at Michigan State with a trunk full of Sophocles and some nasty stuff by Catullus in my back pocket, only to be informed that MSU was axing its classics major. No dorm room bacchanalia with maenad coeds. No drinking Old Milwaukee out of a kantharos. No impressing girls by reading aloud the letters on the fraternity houses.

I was beginning to fear this country no longer had room for a man of my liberal arts persuasion. Thereupon a dark spell came over me. I alternated between carving out chunks of my flesh and flipping through Forbes magazine.

But, just when I was poised to toss a coin and either hack off a limb or major in business, a tweet came blistering through the ether into my iPhone and restored my will to live. The University of Texas at Austin has paved the way to the future of education with a new course: The English Major in the Workplace.

Here students read Death of a Salesman and follow it up with strategies for networking, writing good resumes and giving successful job interviews (this is not a joke). With classes like that, UT is a school that is going to hang onto its English major.

At last, the fuzzy and worthless humanities have become relevant!

Before, we of the humanities had to lurk in the shadows of the nation’s majority, the business majors–teaching their children, writing their newspapers, eating from dumpsters, going to law school when resignation struck. All the while we envied their productivity, their synergy, their output-ability. But most of all, we admired their scrupulous attention to ethics, those questions concerning our collective wellbeing and ultimate aims as individual human beings. Now, finally, we’re getting the specialized workplace skills we need in order to join them in the bang-up business they are doing all across America.

And this is only the beginning. I can only dream of all the other potential edifying courses I will be able to take as an English major in the second decade of the 21st century. Look for these classes in your upcoming course catalog:

How to Sell Your Soul: The Faustian Tradition

The Brothers Karamazov and the Brothers Lehman: The Pitfalls of Family Finance

Siegfried Sasoon/Vidal Sasoon: A Comparison in (Entrepreneurial) Style

Heart of Darkness: Kurtz as Corporate Visionary

Email, Text, Tweet: Advanced Composition

How to Tie a Tie

Selling/Stealing, Brokering/Bamboozling: The Power of Rhetoric

Naked Lunch Power Lunch: A Chat n’ Chew, Meet n’ Greet for Wingtipped Beatniks (martinis and mechanical dildos provided)

Speaking in Complete Sentences and Other Interviewing Strategies

The Power of Positive Thinking: A Study in Textual Exegesis

Bleak House: Sub-Prime Mortgaging and the Dickensian Dignity of Poverty

The Cubicle: A Space for Creative Exploration (prerequisite: Thinking Outside the Box while Inside a Cubicle)

If only the University of California would start offering courses like these. Then its alums would make so much money, they, rather than the state, could subsidize the cost of tuition.

With this new business casual makeover of the bed-headed patched-tweed English major, my degree is sure to make me a valuable worker in the jobless economy. Now I don’t have to major in business just to get ahead in the bread line.

What’s more, I can look my relatives square in the face when they ask me what I’m going to do with a degree in English and tell them:

“Why, I’m going to join the workforce, juggles spreadsheets, earn great big pots of money, sink it into an oversized house, boost the GDP, watch shitloads of prerecorded television, sire some children who will be even more ignorant than I am, get laid off, lose the house, get sick, and then hope to God by that time one of my idiot kids has majored in business and makes enough money to put me in a private nursing home, where I will slowly drool out all memory of my existence.”

“Wonderful,” they’ll say. “That sounds just like a business degree. Eminently practical.”

Gentleman's Library

Please, step into my gentleman’s library. I don’t leave its leather-bound confines these days, and to receive a visitor is a rare treat indeed. Please, please, don’t be shy. Wipe your boots on the sable fur mat, set your cane in the well and cross the threshold to my kingdom.

Pray, sit down. Make yourself at home. Hang your hat on the elk antlers, the bronzed rhino horn, wherever you like. My gentleman’s library is your gentleman’s library. Only I must ask that you not remove the laminate on the sofa. We’ve been told it’s not gentlemanly. Don’t mind that shriveled woman there. She’s sound asleep. Simply pretend she’s not there. Instead, turn your gaze upon the marvels of my collection. What you see before you are the spoils of lifelong travel and the learned discernments of a private scholar. These mounted heads are trophies from my big game hunts on the Dark Continent. That folio there is the erotic diary of a 17th-century courtesan in the sultan of Brunei’s harem, a gift from the sultan himself. And here, adjacent to the wonder cabinet, betwixt my astrolabe and the collected works of Hume, is an original medical prescription written for John Milton’s gout.

For these treasures, I entangled myself in innumerable romances and intrigues round the globe. But I eventually grew weary of the world of men and retreated to the sanctuary of this library. Like the immortal Montaigne, I have consecrated the rest of my days to a life of the mind. If you look at the mantel, above the busts of Plutarch and Carlyle, you’ll see that I have inscribed for all posterity my vow to pursue knowledge strictly within these hallowed walls.

This vow has been notarized and carries with it the authority of the state of Indiana. Impressive, you say? Well, not only did the local government endorse my scholarly reclusion, they even honored me with a flashing jeweled bracelet to commemorate the deed. I have been instructed to wear it here, just below my sock garter and directly above my spats, and never to remove it. Fetching, isn’t it?

Behold, next to the fireplace, a complete collection of all knowledge, bound in gilded leather, befitting a man of my station. Every luminous pearl of wisdom from Heraclitus to Hegel–oh, forgive me. How rude I have been. I entirely forgot to offer you a beverage. And you must be terribly thirsty. I believe we have some claret in the cellar. Just a moment.

“Grandma, wake up! He-llo, Grandma! Up and at ‘em! Can’t you see I have a guest and that we’re both beyond parched? Be a dear and fetch us some claret from the cellar.”

“Now, Clarence, you know you’re not supposed to have visitors. The judge was very clear about that.”

“Grandma, please don’t tell me what to do when you’re in my gentleman’s library. That’s one of the rules.”

“Well, I thought we also agreed you weren’t going to fuss with my Reader’s Digests. Please put them back next to the fireplace before they get bent. Also, what did I tell you about putting your rocks in the linen closet?”

“You mean the wonder cabinet.”

“Sure. And, for the last time, stop writing ‘Collected Works of Hume’ on my Dean Koontz books.”

“Grandma! Just fetch the claret, would you?”

I’m sorry. She’s totally senile. I tried barricading her in the bedroom, but then I realized there would be no one to cook and tend to the scullery. After all, a gentleman must have his victuals. Now let me show you my volumes of Voltaire.

“Clarence, I didn’t see any drink called claret in the fridge. Just your usual Grape Tang. Now, make sure your friend doesn’t spill any on the sofa. That laminate is hard to clean.”

“I know, Grandma! Now would you mind–we’re trying to have an intellectual conversation about Voltaire.”

“Clarence, you know what the psychiatrist said. That Voltaire is what got you into all this mess in the first place.”

“I was just fighting for enlightenment against the blackguard clergy.”

“You exposed yourself to a nun, while shouting lewdly in French.”

“There’s nothing lewd about ‘ecrasez l’infame,’ Grandma.”

“There is when your wiener is hanging out.”

“Grandma, go to your room! You’re embarrassing me in my gentleman’s library!”

“You and your friend can visit until four, Clarence. Then my programs come on. Make sure you un-tape those cardboard animal heads from the TV by then.”

“Fine, Grandma, whatever. Just leave us alone.”

“Oh, one more thing, Clarence. Have you seen my gout prescription from Dr. Milton? I can’t find it anywhere.”

“I have no idea where it is, Grandma.”

I really must apologize. She’s quite the philistine. What’s that? You have to go? What a shame. Now, what was that you mentioned at the door about selling cookies? Never mind? Oh well, you can tell me about it next time.

Pumpkin Pie Famine

“There is definitely a shortage of pumpkins and it’s really due to a smaller yield this year. The pumpkin yield nationwide was down 70 percent, so that’s a huge reduction in what we’re used to,” said Vivian King of Roundy’s Supermarkets.

This is potentially bad news for pumpkin pie lovers like Pat Moore. Moore said that he just had pumpkin pie at his niece’s birthday and will be disappointed if the shortage prevents him from having more.

“We like pumpkin pie and everyone was commenting on how delicious it was, so it would be missed if there’s a shortage,” Moore said.

– WISN News, Milwaukee, “Bad Pumpkin Harvest Could Affect Thanksgiving Dessert Plans”

Sweet Jesus. Hide your children. Lock the door. Good. Now lock it again. If Pat Moore smells pumpkin anywhere near your family, he will eat them.

I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but I used to work with Pat Moore. He had the cubicle next to mine. Seemed like nice enough guy, into golf and boats, that sort of thing. We used to take smoke breaks together. But one time, I remember, we walked down to Roundy’s to pick up a pack of cigs, and while we’re walking through the store, Pat stops dead in his tracks and just stares at this bin of pumpkins. His eyes go all googly and he starts muttering to himself. Something about ample harvests, sweet round lovelies, and then all of a sudden he raises his arms and screams, “All my crusts shall be filled!”

I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Someone’s always flipping out at Roundy’s. It’s just that kind of place. Besides, Pat seemed totally normal otherwise.

The next year Pat’s wife left him right at the end of October. So we decided to invite him over to our place for Thanksgiving, you know, to cheer him up. We figured if he got a load of my family, then he might not mind being divorced and completely alone.

Now, this was back in ’02, year of the Great Pumpkin Famine. As you well remember, it devastated everyone’s dessert plans. The cans of filling disappeared from store shelves in September. The pumpkin bin at Roundy’s stayed empty through October. Many pumpkin farmers jumped out their windows. Fortunately, most of them lived in ranch-style homes. But their state of desperation was not lost on us. Come the week of Thanksgiving we thought long and hard about how we were going to get by. We had heard reports of people making pie with nettles and shoe leather. My Estonian barber told me he had fought the Soviets for fifteen years in the Baltic forests subsisting solely on salted dog turds, which, he assured me, tasted just like pumpkin pie. But we swallowed our dignity and settled for blueberry filling. Sometimes we must be thankful for very little.

The day of Thanksgiving, my extended family rolled in. I say rolled because my Aunt Blanche, in the years prior to her stomach stapling, had to be wheeled in on a dolly, while cousin Elmer had taken to wearing roller skates to family events ever since his head injury. Uncle Poot arrived true to form, farting the national anthem and in his customary overalls whose baggy depths concealed loaded firearms.

Then Pat Moore showed up. He had a crazed look. He said he had just come from his niece’s birthday. “Guess what? They had pie there. It was pumpkin pie. I ate it. Little girls don’t deserve pumpkin pie. Pat Moore deserves pumpkin pie. We will be very disappointed if something prevents us from having more pie.”

Sure, I was a little unnerved, but I felt sorry for the guy. Everyone was hard hit by the pumpkin famine, I told him. It was only natural to be upset. And here I gently inserted that this Thanksgiving, given such dire circumstances, we would be concluding the meal with blueberry pie.

At that moment I saw the switch flip in Pat Moore.

We tried to proceed with the meal like everything was normal. But Pat just stared at his plate. Not even Uncle Poot’s racist jokes could trigger a reaction. Cousin Elmer, oblivious to the tension, chirped: “Hey, Pat doesn’t eat turkey. Just like Elmer. Elmer only eats ham!” Pat slowly looked up, his eyes swelling as they took in cousin Elmer’s orange protective helmet. “Pumpkin?” Pat intoned, raising his finger to Elmer’s head. “Pumpkin.” And with that, he dove across the table and, with a gruesome efficiency, tore poor cousin Elmer’s head clean from its shoulders and devoured it whole. By the time Uncle Poot had fetched his gun from his overalls, Pat Moore was gone.

In the days following Thanksgiving, brigands could be seen roaming the suburbs. Looting the wilting jack-o-lanterns from their neighbors’ doorsteps, lopping the hands off homeowners clinging to their gourds, plundering autumnal cornucopias in window displays, the pumpkin gangs ravaged the Midwest on their campaign of terror. Their leader: a man named Pat Moore, a savage man, a man like you and me, a lover of pumpkin pie. Give thanks that he doesn’t find you.

The Plight of Pure Genius

People often ask me how I got to be so smart. That’s why I carry a briefcase full of photocopies of the second chapter of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise,” his last moment of lucidity before the spirochetes churned his brain to butter. I let Nietzsche do my talking for me since I’m usually too busy philosophizing to answer people’s questions.

For example, just yesterday at the café I was lecturing a peasant on how best to raise his unruly children, whose horseplay was disturbing my moment of intense contemplation (whether to have crumb cake or lemon poppy seed loaf). The dim fellow asked me, “What makes you so goddamn smart, asshole?” At which point I plucked Nietzsche out of my satchel and said, “So glad you asked, dear man. Here, read this!” He mentioned something about joining him outside, perhaps for an al fresco reading, but I had already returned to my lofty meditations.

Of course, I’ve never read Nietzsche. I wouldn’t want to contaminate the originality of my ideas. But I’m confident we’re on the same page, since Nietzsche, like me, was a misunderstood genius. Contrary to what most people think, being a misunderstood genius is not all free meals and hot oil rubdowns. Normally, I would just hand you the Nietzsche printout to explain my point, but I’ve run out of copies and Kinko’s has banned me from all California locations for Xeroxing my anus one too many times. So now I shall condescend to you, public, to share the plight of my prodigious intelligence.

I was bred to be a genius. That’s why my parents named me P.G.–Pure Genius. Well, technically, I was christened as Ralph. But after a year of witnessing my superior mind, and from the stories they tell, my amazing talent for eating nails, rubber bands and other household detritus, Mom and Dad had it legally changed. This new name was, for them, an endless source of pride and enjoyment. “Hey, Pure Genius,” they would shout, “Come open Daddy’s beer with your teeth.” Or, “Pure Genius, I bet you can’t drink a whole jug of anti-freeze.” Given my precocious intellect, I instantly mastered such activities.

The trouble started when I came of schooling age. Unlike my parents, who accepted my talents as a natural emanation of their own brilliance, the base and conformist world tried to break me. An incompetent doctor diagnosed me as a low-grade cretin. Clearly, the man could not see past superficial appearances, basing his diagnosis solely on my goiter, my lucky propeller beanie and my sardine-can shoes.

Back in those days, they tried to cure cretinism with corporal punishment. Here again, my learning prowess was apparent, as I quickly mastered how to take a lashing like a veteran sailor. I absorbed blows with the same zest I had for absorbing vocabulary words. Some geniuses, the slower ones, read widely; I read the thesaurus. It had all the good words in it, as well as the high quality, excellent, first-class, virtuous, noble, satisfactory and advantageous words. Pretty soon, I had traded up my vulgar colloquialisms for a mellifluous lexical arsenal, spoken in a cheeky East Midland accent. Needless to say, this led to only more beatings. At the age of 16, I decided to leave the third grade and light out on my own intrepid quest for knowledge.

After years of wandering, I arrived at Harvard. I had followed a frail-looking old man from the bus station onto campus, hoping to overcome him with my intellect and steal his wallet. But he was not as weak as he looked, and after considerable tussle, I retracted my claim to mental superiority and limped away. Nursing my wounds, I had a revelation. This man must be a genius, too. That was the only possible way he could have out-wrestled me. I realized this was where I belonged.

The Harvard admission director seemed shocked when I made my customary offer of sexual favors. I explained to him that this was how I had risen through the ranks of the merchant marines, how I had traveled the world and how I opened my first checking account.

“But anyone can open a checking account,” he said.

Flustered by this affront to my intelligence, I frantically displayed further evidence of my genius. I recited the thesaurus. I drew a really cool, but scary clown. I even strapped on my sardine cans and did a shuffle. Again, my genius went unrecognized.

So I came to Stanford. Here, I decided to forego the whole admission process. Instead, I have erected a perfectly habitable ivory tower of my own made from driftwood and coffee cups, right next to the Hoover Institute. It’s a one-man think tank called the P.G. Institute, and it’s open for business. Current projects include publishing an “Idiot’s Guide to Understanding My Genius in Three Easy Steps” and trying to recruit Condi Rice to come for a yearlong fellowship.

Selling Out

Dear readers, I’m feeling the pinch of the economy. In order to buy my weekly gruel, I’ve had to lease my column out to advertisers. Fortunately for you, not to the same advertisers that have leased out space on my forehead. Otherwise, you would be reading the words “Enjoy Scruggs’ Whole Meat Nuggets” for the next 700 words, without experiencing the pleasure of the adorable dancing nugget that wiggles when I blink.

Although I would like to take this opportunity to say that Scruggs, a family (style) farm operated by the Nihilex Corporation, has been producing the finest naturally flavored Whole Meat Nuggets that you’ve come to know and be strangely chemically addicted to since 1973. Of course, I receive compensation for the Scruggs Dancing Nugget I sport in two-tone color above my eyebrows. But I assure you there was no financial incentive for the Scruggs Super Bowl XXXII Nugget-Off glow-in-the-dark tattoo that shines through my underwear–that appeared after a hazy night out on the town in the company of two Scruggs Nugget employees with a vial of GHB and a penchant for prank tattoos.

Just so you know, I’m not the type of guy who goes around hurling reckless accusations of being slipped the date rape drug by Scruggs employees. But I know for a fact they did because they left this message on my phone: “Hey P.G., remember us? We’re the two Scruggs employees who slipped you the date rape drug. Yeah, and we tattooed that huge glow-in-the-dark Super Bowl Nugget-Off ad on your ass!”

Initially, I was considering litigation, but then Scruggs came to me with an offer I couldn’t refuse. They threatened to smash my fingers into splinters unless I agreed not to file suit. As compensation, however, they did offer to send me a shipping crate of Scruggs Whole Meat Nuggets and tattoo the Scruggs Dancing Nugget on my forehead. I told them that if they left the date rape drug out of it this time, we would call it a deal. I’ve always loved that dancing nugget.

But love and money are two different processed meat products. And while I may love Scruggs’ nuggets, Bickelmeyer’s pork berries pay the bills:

The following is a paid advertisement by Bickelmeyer’s Old Country Partially Dehydrogenated Pork Berries, a member of the Domicorp Group:

Do you know what’s in your nugget?…Scruggs, subsidy of the Nihilex Corporation, may look like your average God-fearing Midwestern mom-and-pop genetically modified industrial chicken farm, but what if we told you it was really a terrorist training ground, nourishing al-Qaeda one nugget at a time? What if you were to learn that Osama bin Laden has stayed alive all these years thanks to a steady supply of Scruggs Whole Meat Nuggets? That’s right, the nuggets you feed your family may be costing us thousands of innocent American lives.

Did you know Scruggs imports nuggets to a place called Venezuela, a SOCIALIST country? Did you know that socialism is a diabolical plot to rid the world of private healthcare, devised by a Marxist named Karl Marx and carried out by his Oriental henchmen Mao, Stalin and Barack Hussein Obama? Did you know Scruggs means “atheist” in another language?

Why support terrorism and the obliteration of democracy when you can enjoy a delicious freedom-loving, partially dehydrogenated Pork Berry brought to you by Bicklemeyer’s? The folks at Bicklemeyer’s have been cultivating pork berries right here on Main Street* for over 40 years. Our Old Country flavor tastes of a simpler time in America, when kids could play stickball on the streets and munch on a pork berry, without fear of being recruited into a terrorist youth organization or lured into a homosexual marriage. That’s because each pork berry is genetically infused with the spirit of Christendom. Yes, sir, when you bite into a Bicklemeyer’s pork berry, you’re consuming the blood of Christ.

Transubstantiation not enough? Well, after they come off the petri dish, we roll our pork berries in the American flag, sing “I’m proud to be an American” to them and press them between the pages of an abridged two-for-one edition of the U.S. Constitution and the Bible.

Our pork berries are what made Ayn Rand so wonderfully selfish. They’re what Rush Limbaugh gave up painkillers for. And they are the only partially dehydrogenated pork product that Glenn Beck dunks at tea parties.

Bickelmeyer’s Old Country Partially Dehydrogenated Pork Berries. Real American taste to die for!

*Main Street is what we call our industrial labor campus for children in Burma. Educating the community is a top priority at Bickelmeyer’s.

My Living Will

Dear reader,

Lately, my thoughts have been drifting toward swine flu. I find this alarming, since usually my thoughts drift toward encephalitis, botulism, and syphilitic brain-softening, in that order, right after I think about what I want for lunch, contemplate the good, and imagine a naked lady. What is this new fear in my hypochondriac closet of illnesses? It’s making me nervous. Only a sick person (perhaps someone with encephalitis!) would add a new disease to his litany of imagined infections. Granted, swine flu seems an upstart compared to a healthy neurodegenerative disease. And it’s so low brow. Even the newspapers scrawl about it. But, then again, the 1918 Spanish flu killed millions. And I have always been drawn to anachronism….

I’m sure this epidemic is nothing to worry about, but just in case, I’m writing a living will. Since you are the only person I trust, I am designating you to execute it. In the event of an emergency, please see to it that my wishes are carried out. Thank you, even though I despise you for staying alive and healthy longer than me.

Yours,

P.G.

----------------------

Dear Executor of my living will,

If you are reading this, then I am lying in a hospital bed in a completely leguminous state, no doubt stricken by one of the maladies I so feared. And you called me a hypochondriac. Looks like I really did have something to worry about after all. Just out of curiosity, what was it that got me? It was that dented can of lentils, wasn’t it? Or maybe a flesh-eating virus from riding the city bus that one time? I told you public transportation would be the death of me. Well, whatever it was, I’m not dead yet. I intend to drink up the dregs of life still floating in my inert limbs. And you’re going to help me.

Did you ever see that movie “The Bucket List”? I saw it on an airplane, and though I was feeling a little panicked and congested from all the microbes circling in those winged germ labs, I found it poignant (though poignancy is a common side effect of Dramamine). And it got me thinking; before it it’s too late, there are some things in life I want to do. Why should I be cooped up in bed comatose when there’s a whole world out there for me and my many tubes and breathing machines to explore? Carpe diem!

First, I’ve always wanted to go water-skiing. Before I fell into a coma, I refrained out of fear of pollutants. The Great Lakes seemed like one giant network of bed pans. I figured I might as well have gone swimming in a toilet. That was the old me. Now I want you to take me to Cleveland, strap some skies on my feet, tie me to a boat in Lake Erie, and let rip. Then I want you to take me swimming in a toilet.

Next, I would like to write a novel. The fancy kind where everyone talks about what a thundering talent I am, makes excuses for my fascist sympathies and infamous drinking problem, and writes me bootlicking poems on my birthday. First, put an eye-patch on me and carve a deep gash in my cheek—something that will leave a scar and give me an old world literary mystique. Then, they say to write what you know, so for a working title I’m thinking Portrait of the Artist as a Drooling Vegetable. Of course, this will require your help. I’ve devised an ingenious system of communication, where every time I twitch you start cycling through the alphabet and when I twitch again, you write down whichever letter you’re at. If I am not twitching, feel free to jostle me. I think this is going to be good.

Becoming a famous novelist has made me realize how important family is. It’s the seemingly trivial moments— sitting around the dinner table, sharing stories by the hearth, sponging down my lifeless bed-sore body—that really count. That’s why I want you to move my body to my brother’s home and see to it that I enjoy three meals a day with his family. His wife Deb will see to my feeding and hygienic upkeep. As is my want in my helpless state, I’ll have French toast for breakfast, a roast for lunch, and chile rellenos for dinner, all piped down my food straw. See to it Deb stuffs the chiles herself, daily, right after she gives me my mid-morning undercarriage scrub. Every afternoon, the kids will tell me how school was. For the sake of their education, I’d like to make them legally obligated to answer in full paragraphs in proper Latin and German. And on the weekends, my brother won’t have to go through the trouble of looking for someone to share his season tickets. I’ll gladly go to every game with him. That should make up for his having been the favorite son.

Thank you. This coma has given me a new lease on life. My will is done.

p.s. Don’t pull the plug!