transdermal celebration

Been busy with life shit and work shit and just shit in general. The bummer is that it is keeps me from being all that busy around here. A day may come where I have little else to work on BUT this – and then y’all are really in trouble. Til then – rolling with quality over quantity in picking through recent pickings. I can’t ask you to “enjoy” any of this, and I wouldn’t ask you to suffer through it either. How bout you just muddle through like I do!

• We are approaching the end game.
• This is interesting.
• The busybodying during COVID is epic and scary.
• I don’t know if this stuff works or doesn’t work – but I am convinced no one actually knows and whoever wants to use this narrative to push their own agenda.
• The good congresswoman doesn’t mention anywhere in her heartfelt plan as to whether she will commit to abstaining from all opiate use the same way she is imposing on everyone else. Then again, she will never be refused anything she wants – so why bother amirite?
• The motive for this research is a little muddy – but they do go in for more FUD around Rx opiates, so I suspect it is more general FUD.
• The DEA has created a black market far more dangerous than any of the illegal substances would be if they were legalized and regulated. We are being very very selective about who gets put in a cage for participating in that market.
• The politicians and drug warriors will never have to taper. They leave that to you.
• We had a war on drugs. the drugs won. no parades for the losing warriors when they return please…they started the war after all.
• The drug warriors haven’t even won a battle as far as I can see. Why do we keep arming them?
• I love a good polemic.
• I think this kind of thing is called news even though everyone already knows it.
• No one pushing drug prohibition is serious about solving any opiate crisis. The black market created by the drug war is the crisis. Opiates save lives. Black market opiates take them. The COVID spin is just more woo-woo.
• Everyone in our country has some idea of at least one agency that should be removed from earth. Mine is the DEA. There is simply no aspect of our lives made better by its existence. Glad I am not alone.
• I think we know how these will turn out.

I have still been sick. It has been over a month now, and only now am I starting to feel like something that could be thought of as “better”. The doc who looked in my ears said they were scarred and dark when they should look like living membrane. I had some lost hearing my left ear already, and upon my retesting, it seems I have lost a small measure more. It isn’t the hearing loss driving me nuts is having uneven hearing, but compared to where I was a few weeks back, I will take my current set of problems all day, everyday.

I really wish Michael Foucault was alive. We are living in the world he said was coming and he was more right than I think he would have wished. I have been in and out of urgent care, primary care, telemedicine, and an ER in the last month. Like police – when you need a doctor there is no better feeling than having them arrive to help. When they start abusing their power and acting like your overlord, little is more humiliating and vexing. I am always trapped between these two things.

We need Foucault because it is time for a total rethink on what institutions and people can be granted power. None who have it appear worthy to me at this point. I would make the case the only real problem in the world (outside of the spiritual) is the abuse of power. All power is abused. We don’t appear to be able to resist the temptation to do so, and the institutional checks on power have all been subverted. This really is the only worldly fight I can think of that we all struggle with together. It is definitely a problem we could all fix together, but at this point, who believes anyone of us can really change anything?

That feeling of powerlessness among us was put there very deliberately – and the escape hatches from it are under constant guard. To me, the intensity with which that powerlessness continues to be forced on us actually betrays the weakness of those doing it. They can’t lose an inch because they will lose the whole thing, and they know it. We can get that inch much more easily than people think, and it wouldn’t be a bad use of the reminder of my time on earth to try to persuade others to feel the same.

Maybe I will find myself with the energy and desire to go all-in on that struggle, but if I am honest, my heart is elsewhere. My heart is with Christ and laying-by for the next world. The problems of our planet become insignificant in the face of that larger spiritual struggle we face as individuals. The temptation to seek to rule in hell is very strong and easy to give in to. To the contrary, seeking to serve in heaven seems difficult and the opposite of the road to happiness. That is certainly how I saw life until very recently. I was wrong, but I don’t yet have the words to explain exactly why I am so certain I know this. Perhaps they will come. I believe they will if I seek them. Forgive me if seeking that takes primacy for me over anything else. I don’t think I can get where I am going any other way. We shall see.

I don’t mean any of that to mean I plan to become some sort of mountain-top ascetic. Not at all. If anything, I’d love to go the way of the warrior monk! Alas – I am too old and fat to even venture the first steps down that path. Not sure where that ultimately leaves me, but if I figure it out, I will try to make y’all the first to know! Don’t wait up.

Short news week for me this week as work and life and such have been kicking me in the butt of late. Hoping to get the mojo back soon; but whether it does or doesn’t, I know I won’t run out of material!:

• The drugs continue winning the war on them. The people waging the war haven’t so much as gotten their boats ashore.
• This is barbaric.
• Power creates sadism.
• I am hopeful that the AMA is trying to do the right thing and constrained primarily by politics. They are clear about the fact that prescriptions are down and the drug deaths are up. It looks like they can read.
• They won’t ever give up the “Poor Whitey Snared By The Pusherman” narrative because it such reliable content. It happens to not be true, but let’s not let that get in the way of a good time.
• This is wrong.
• The drugs work. The drug war doesn’t.
• Now they tell us.
• It’s old, but yet fresh as a daisy.
• Our country hates human weakness to such a degree that we need to admit it is normal here to project hatred at people who are even perceived as weak.
• Everything is theatre and pravda at this point. These people want to look busy because Satan comes back first.
• White Coats Won’t Make It.
• Yes, but did we make our numbers?
• What makes us sick makes us sick!
• Nightmare. A preventable one. Harm reduction is needed now.
• Fentanyl dont dance.

So my existence has been rather intense for the last month. I got a very very nasty ear infection that is still messing with my life a month later (multiple doctor visits, including the ER.) I haven’t been eating much while sick, so none of my clothes fit. I spend most of this time in a tiny NYC-area apartment with the windows closed since it was hellish-hot for most of that time. Long story short – 2020 is not agreeing with me at all. I have a very distinct sense that life is nasty, and only getting nastier; and that concerns me.
The one thing I can say has been positive is that I have recommitted myself to the Christian Life. I don’t come from the Fire-n-Brimstone wing so you needn’t worry I will be off the deep end in that way. To the contrary,I came up through the UCC – who could never have been fairly accused of being knuckle-draggers. I want to do something good with whatever time I have left on the earth, and I can’t say I have done that enough. I am thinking my experience with Fentanyl and tapering might be put to good use helping others having a hard time. If not that, surely there is something I can do to help others that I have not yet tried. This is as good a time as any to make it work somehow.
I am going to be relocating to the midwest until my office in NYC opens up again (and I might just stay here in the midwest anyway), but I am going to try to find a charitable group that works in harm reduction and in serving people with drug abuse issues. I am mad at what I went through in trying to get proper treatment for my condition, and I still want to work on behalf of pain patients, but I am convinced they are similar struggles. Certainly our society considers the life of the recreational opiate addict and the life of the pain-medication-dependent patient to be equally worthless, so there’s that. Plus, the solution – total drug decriminalization – would be the most effective solve for both. I can serve both purposes with words and deeds.
I haven’t put as much time into this log as I should, and who knows, if I join the ranks of the unemployed, I will certainly have enough time to perfect this stuff; but my aim is to do something more direct and more charitable. If anyone knows of a good program I could volunteer for in Chicago, Rockford, Madison, or the Quad Cities, do be a dear and let me know.
I am behind on medical news, and frankly, with the way COVID has been handled here, I am glad I haven’t had my nose in the news every day. There have been some zingers of late, so I do have some prime material for this entry. Depending on how long it takes to get myself to get my health topped up, this may need to hold over for a spell. I don’t do any site analytics, so for all I know, no one has ever read word one of this. I will assume the planet will survive if I can’t get back to the weekly schedule for another couple weeks. Hang with me friends. Here’s what I got for ya:

• The only safety provided by urine tests is economic security to those doing the tests. Theoretically the wait staff at the mansions of those people do ok too.
• Just regular reminder that Oxycontin was developed and approved to be “abuse resistant” via a time-release. It was reviewed and approved for exactly that purpose. Now the dipshits who approved want to act like those wascaly wabbit Sacklers may outsmart Elmer Fudd once again. It has never been anything but theatre.
• It isn’t 2020 til you try to rename a problem you can’t solve.
• American society has gone out of its way to deny black people their rightful place as equal members of this society for as long as we have been here together. African Americans have never been treated fairly, and it is pathetic that they have to work so hard on their own to get what we are all supposed to have by virtue of living here. It is time to end the bullshit and finally do right because it is right. It is obvious there are still many who will be running a fighting retreat on behalf of old Jim Crow to the end. These people are incapable of shame. It is time to do right by African Americans and make whole what was taken from them. Miss me with anything not generally going that direction.
• If you are more worried about whether you like the name Black Lives Matter than whether or not black people are being abused by the institutions that should be protecting them, I am fine having you lose any bookmark you might have for this web log.
• “Does ‘dependence’ on opioids constitute a distinct clinical state?”
• When a government declares war on its own people – which is what the drug war is – you should expect secret courts.
• The best thing that could come out of COVID from where we are at right now is if our facemasks made facial recognition tech fail.
• I saw a compelling idea about how forced tapers violate the Nuremburg laws on medical ethics (use of untested medical procedures known to produce harm.) I am looking into more on that before going too crazy with it, but I do find this work a spectacular down payment on getting things fixed.
• The opiate deaths are through the roof while the prescriptions are cut dramatically. The DEA and CDC and their ilk are straight up liars. They are going to have to do incredible gymnastics to explain it all. They can count on NPR and NY Times for help, of course. Things have to be bad because the Cato Institute is one of the few sane voices on the issue.
• The King died on the throne.
• The fix is in – because it was never not.
• I try not to be too overtly political. I don’t think this is too political – it is just funny.
• We will live to regret bringing this into our society.
• Dirty cops are usually a tough problem because they make us lose confidence in institutions we need to have a civilized society. For example, I am not a big FBI fan but, for the bad they do, that is an institution that we can’t actually live without – they do many important things. Local police too. We need local police for many things, so when one of their officers is dirty, it really has a negative impact and undermines needed institutions. The DEA is different. The DEA is an institution we could absolutely live without entirely. We’d be much better as a society without them. The black market is where the danger comes from, and they create (& exploit) those black markets. I might go so far as to say there is no large moral distinction to be made between their “good” and “bad” agents. It is all fruit of the poisoned tree. It might seem better to be harshest with other kinds of dirty cops because of the damage they do, but in this case, I think we should throw the book at every dirty DEA agent and ideally make it so such people can’t live among us anymore, even for relatively minor infractions. These are people who knowingly predate on their own people for no other purpose than to keep themselves in full employ. Sick shit.
• I know this is hard, but I am as sick as I have been because I was scared to go to even the doctor’s office. Please don’t do the same. Be smart and not make any unnecessary trips, but how you feel is usually something we all know about our own bodies. Listen to yourself. If you are sick – get treated. I did not do that and I had an inner ear infection go crazy on me for a month. It is not fun at all.
• I might like the Christian Life, so I won’t take delight in anyone’s demise, but I know enough about Romulus MI and strip clubs from my past life to know that this event was largely predictable.
• We’d need 7 planets if everyone were allowed to eat like the G20 nation’s do!