A special horror

Politics is like bad cinema—people overact, take it too far. When I speak with politicians, I see this in their facial expressions, their eyes, the way they squint. I look at things like a producer. I would often watch a scene on the monitor, and the director and I would yell, 'Stop, no more, this is unwatchable! No one will believe this.' ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, 2019.

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I  crashed hard after last Friday's snowstorm, shovelling on Saturday triggered it. I am also in a cognitive behaviour therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) zoom program, at this stage we are restricted in how much time we can spend in bed. The combination of restricted sleep and post exertional malaise (PEM) did me in. My sleep time (we have to keep sleep diaries) plummeted from 6 hours to 3.5, and by Tuesday I was damn near suicidal. 

Had a major meltdown in the zoom meeting on Tuesday, in front of everyone. One of the participants suggested that the facilitator—a psychologist—and I deal with it after the meeting. I thanked her for saying that. Anyway, clearly I am not in good shape. 

The following morning was my weekly 'coffee date' with a neighbour and I told her about it. She has a chronic—ultimately fatal—illness and she recounted how it was for her when she realized that this was her life from now on; all her plans for her future were gone. I think that I am just coming to that realization; after almost two years of illness there is no firm diagnosis, no treatment and no hope of recovery (based on what I know of other people's experience). Not to mention a doctor who needs hard evidence in the way of medically approved tests before she'll say or do anything. She kind of twisted my arm to go into this CBT-I program and so far, more that halfway through, I feel worse rather than better. Probably one of the worst winters I have ever had.

I am mostly flat on my back except for necessary activities like grocery shopping and food prep; about all I can do flat on my back is read or use my iPad. And hey, have you been watching/reading/listening to the news lately? Enough said. Here in Nova Scotia we have the added pleasure of the Portapique Massacre enquiry going on. That's like reliving it all over again, only now you get to see/hear the gory details you didn't know about at the time. I have one image now stuck in my mind: four little kids from two different families hiding in one basement after both sets of parents have just been shot to death. It gets worse from there. 

This has been two years of unbelievableness, it's hard to imagine that things will get better. The major crises happening now are only obscuring the crises waiting in the wings, assuming the current crisis doesn't precipitate a nuclear world war. This isn't over, not by a long shot.

This morning I read a book review in the New York Times (they offered a great deal for a one year subscription so I took it) of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O'Rourke, 2022. There were some good quotes from the book which I definitely relate to, and my local library has ordered the book so I've put a hold on it. Turns out I'm first in line.

"It felt as if my body were made of sand, and as if molasses had invaded my brain." 

Totally. This is the one quote I think does a really good job of describing what it's like. Symptoms change, effects are physical, mental, emotional. Not only am I losing my physical capacities but my mental ones as well. I feel like I can't speak properly anymore, a kind of aphasia. Better not to even try.

"My ability to accumulate information felt like the only control I still possessed." 

Absolutely. I've become obsessed with consulting PubMed and a couple of other websites I trust for the latest in research and information. The one tiny part of my remaining life I have any control over.

"...the special horror of being not only ill but also marginalized — your testimony dismissed because your lab work fails to match a pre-existing pattern." 

Yup. So far all lab work and other tests show that I am completely healthy, so maybe a malingering drug addict with mental health issues?

"The illness was severe but invisible. And that invisibility made all the difference — it made me invisible, which itself almost killed me." 

Before this illness I was very active, and I had a great social life built around that activity. Both have vanished. When I spoke with my neighbour yesterday she described what that felt like in her life. For me, I am afraid to appear in public anymore because I just don't want to deal with people's responses, and she said she used to lurk in forest trails around her small northern town rather than walk down the street in public. Where she lived there were wolves, her husband really didn't like her forest lurking at all.

"Your need, when you are sick, can squeeze up inside your chest, balling its way up and out of your throat. I pictured it as a thick, viscous, toxic gel that slid out of me at moments when nothing else could."  

Exactly how I felt when I just lost it on the zoom call: utterly toxic.

"The entanglement of self and sickness became a mirrored distortion, a fun house I feared I was never going to escape…" 

I hallucinated the other night, wide awake and enthralled in this fun house kaleidoscope of colourful sparkly weaving/slithering/flashing shapes, I could see my thoughts embedded in it, hopelessly entangled, like little birds in a mist net.

"There is a razor-thin line between trying to find something usefully redemptive in illness and lying to ourselves about the nature of suffering. … I will not say the wisdom and growth mean I wouldn't have it any other way. I would have it the other way."  

If this is how one obtains wisdom and growth, then I'd just as soon be stupid and stuck, thank you very much.

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It's a good thing I have past experience of copy editing, otherwise this post would be utterly unreadable. Can't speak, can't even type. Took hours of retyping.

Reading and seeding, and a dirty wet dog

When I was sick I couldn't read much, my attention span and reading comprehension were not good. Watching TV was okay, and reading the news on the internet was okay too, so they became my obsessions when I wasn't out walking with Hapi. But when all the news was the same I eventually lost my obsession with it, going hours at a time with not looking or even thinking about it. I carried on phone conversations with a few friends that were largely about telling jokes and making funny. That was good, sometimes I got off the phone hurting from laughing so much. My magazine subscriptions sustained me because the articles were short, I could put them down after only a few moments of reading.

When I got better the weather did too so I was out getting my garden ready for planting, which won't start seriously until mid-May. I started some seeds indoors and all my south and west facing window sills were littered with a mish mash of plastic containers of seeds. I save seeds year over year but I had to order a few new ones. As it turns out a whole lot of people who never gardened before are now getting ready to garden so the seed companies are inundated with orders. 

Usually I buy Vesey's seeds and they are readily available at a couple of local animal feed stores and farm markets. But this year Vesey's focussed on individual online orders and did not send any seeds to the usual stores so I had to go online too. They are over a month behind in fulfilling orders and yesterday when I went onto their website to see where they were at with shipping, there was a notice that they were no longer accepting orders. They cut it off only three days after I placed my order, so I am just barely in under the wire. I knew they'd be slow so I didn't bother ordering anything that had to be started right away.

Some of the seeds that I started were over five years old (I bought them in 2015, which means they are from the 2014 crop). Every last one of them sprouted! I wanted three plants so I planted nine seeds, and now I have nine seedlings. Yesterday I hauled a shelving unit out of the basement that I had previously attached grow lights to. It took most of the day to set up but now I can put most of the seedlings under the grow lights instead of constantly moving them from south to west windows and back again. A bit more expensive and it makes my tiny crowded living room even tinier and more crowded, but hopefully less work.

After two days of being cooped up due to very bad weather Hapi and I got out for two walks yesterday. She drove me crazy over those two days. She likes to stay outdoors during the daytime even in bad weather, but towards the later afternoon she gets very impatient with me not coming out for a walk so she is constantly at the door, in and out, tracking the mud and snow in with her. I had several towels on drying racks because each time she came in I'd try to wipe off the worst of it and the towels got soaked. It was a huge relief for both of us to get back to walking again.

Over those two days I called some friends on the west coast that I hadn't talked to in a long time. They were wanting to know about our recent mass shooting, and whether I lived near where it happened. Lately in the news they refer to it as "the rampage", which I think is an apt term. So I think I will start using it instead of "mass shooting". April 2020: the pandemic and the rampage. 

Yesterday I got a surprise phone call from another friend out west who I had neglected to call, that was really nice. She is an odd bird, but we have a lot in common and can sit around having odd conversations endlessly. She also had been sick for a long time, about a month earlier than I was. We compared notes and thought we both had the same thing but didn't know whether it was covid or not. She said that because she lives with one of her daughters and two grandchildren she wore a mask the entire time she was sick and stayed in her bedroom as much as possible. Nevertheless her daughter and grandkids did eventually come down with it too. But she said that what was odd was that while her daughter was just as sick as she was, it hardly affected the young grandkids at all.

Oh yes, I started out talking about reading and where I intended to go with that was to mention a book that I am reading now called The Invention of Yesterday, which I am very much enjoying. The author, Tamim Ansary, is an old Afghan-American hippy with a very interesting perspective on the history of human civilization, and also a good sense of humour and casual style of writing. My brother told me about this book, and I am recommending it to anyone who has an interest in such a topic.

Malt Bread II

I baked the Malt Bread last night, had a toasted slice this morning. Needs a bit more sugar, as my brother's partner had written in the margin of the recipe.

Yesterday we got two (!!) Emergency Alerts from the RCMP, warning us of another shooting incident and then telling us it was over. As it turned out there were actually 4 incidents around Halifax that they had to investigate, 3 were false alarms and the 4th ended with a couple of arrests but no injuries or deaths. But at least they seemed to have learned something from last weekend. I'll definitely put up with Emergency Alerts even if they are false alarms. Hapi's afternoon walk got postponed as a result but that's okay, for me at any rate. Hapi wasn't so happy about it.

There was a virtual vigil last night, I listened to part of it. There's only so many speeches and so much sad music that I can deal with. When I did take Hapi for her walk around the neighbourhood I wore a red bandanna face mask in honour of mourning and saw many red hearts and flags hanging from or displayed in windows. Several people hung out Nova Scotia tartan scarves by their doors.

Last week I was so happy to be well again and able to get out of the house and enjoy the beginnings of Spring, this week it's been shock, anger and grief. I don't know what next week will bring.

I've been listening to a lot of John Prine lately, sad loss to Covid-19. Here's one of my favourites:

That's How Every Empire Falls

NovaScotiaStrong

Satisfactory communication

Yesterday I listened to a radio interview with someone with expertise on RCMP history who was discussing how the RCMP handled the April 18-19 shootings. Unfortunately I did not catch the name of the person being interviewed but he seemed to know what he was talking about. He discussed problems the RCMP has within its organization and how that may have impacted policing of the incident negatively. A lot of people here believe that too many victims lost their lives because the RCMP used Twitter to broadcast warnings about the killer on the loose, and hardly a single person in the area regularly tunes in to Twitter. This is not a Twittering culture here.

It is bad enough to have such a horrible thing going on at such a horrible time, but to add lives lost due to bungling is just too much to bear. Yesterday at the RCMP news conference about their ongoing analysis of the incident, when asked about why Twitter was used, Chief Superintendent Leather said he was satisfied with how the RCMP conducted communications with the public. He said they were preparing to use the national Alert Ready system when the killer was shot dead and there was no further need to communicate. I don't know how he can feel satisfied with the police communication with the public when hardly any of the affected public got the message. He said that the RCMP use Twitter because that is the best way to communicate with "the media" who can share the information. As if getting the message out to residents to stay inside was the responsibility of the media, not the police.

According to the interviewed person yesterday (oh how I wish I'd caught his name!) the RCMP have a lot of internal problems to deal with, low morale and understaffing being among them. He said he had no criticism of the officers involved who were doing their best to cope with a dysfunctional organization and to actually "serve and protect" the communities they were assigned to, but they were seriously hampered by lack of resources and bungling at higher levels of the hierarchy of power. Corporals Stevenson and Morrison should never have had to face the killer without backup. Communication was most definitely not "satisfactory".

April is the cruelest month

I'm feeling groggy this morning. I should be out with Hapi but I am still trying to wake up. The rain has stopped and now it is windy and cold, after a really lovely weather day yesterday.

I am trying not to dwell on recent events but it's hard. Right now people are angry that the RCMP used Twitter to warn folks about what was happening, but only a few people around rural Nova Scotia use Twitter. Some people died because the more widespread national Alert Ready system was not used, or even Facebook. This province has the lowest rate of internet access in the country; most of the inaccessibility is rural and in particular the area where the murders took place. So why Twitter?

Some local people took it upon themselves to go on the phone and call as many people as possible, but they did not know the crucial piece of information that the killer was dressed as a Mountie, so they said things like "don't open your door to anyone except a cop." How frustrating!

In other news, the crows are completely absent now. Busy elsewhere raising families. The two blue jays that were scarfing down half the birdseed at the feeder have relaxed a bit, now they just take seeds for themselves. I hope that means their hungry offspring are now grown up and not that they are gone for other more unfortunate reasons.

A local grey squirrel has been coming by, but whenever I see it I chase it off with a broomstick. It's not that I object to grey squirrels, but that it tips the feeder over and dumps half the seed on the ground. I kinda do object to grey squirrels—they are crowding out the native red squirrels—but it's not really their fault, they just do what they have to do to survive.

A friend sent me a link to a Roy Zimmerman parody of The Lion Sleeps Tonight called The Liar Tweets Tonight, a bit of humour in a bitter time. From there I ended up watching a video of Bonnie Raitt and John Prine singing Angel From Montgomery last November. Unrelated, but bittersweet.

May day May day

The human world was more or less normal just a little while ago. We were rampaging through our environment destroying habitats and living things at our usual pace, a few among us were warning of dire trouble if we continued in this way. We worried about the economy and profits and wages, somehow that seemed way more important than the burning of the Amazonian rain forest or the warming of our oceans or the melting of distant glaciers. This was life as usual. One day we would all have solar panels and wind turbines and the destruction would halt, we would save all those poor animals. And the wars, well, it was ever thus. Refugees should mostly go home and face the music, we could only afford to take a few of them in.

In January we heard there was an epidemic of some sort in China, the other side of the world, and they were locking up whole cities. Those Chinese! How extreme! In February it was creeping out of China, it had a name, Covid-19, because apparently it first appeared in 2019 and we were just unaware of it. We were starting to take it seriously, this might be a game changer. In March it was here. People were scrambling, local governments were scrambling. Okay, now it's a pandemic.

Meanwhile, a bunch of oil-producing companies decide to have themselves a little trade war. Trade wars have become popular of late, so why not? Locally we benefit from lower gas prices, a nice bonus in a worrisome time, although I don't think the people in the oil-producing provinces saw it like that. Albertans were already underwater with house mortgages and job losses, a price war definitely was not a bonus for them. But hey, the people battling against pipelines running through their lands could relax a bit, it was now too expensive to build those pipelines, protests or not.

The pandemic settles in bigtime. Physical distancing, self isolation, shortages of personal protection equipment in hospitals, shutting of borders, daily talks from our political leaders admonishing us to stay strong, and so on. Then the bad news, Covid-19 running wild in nursing homes, elders dying like miserable flies, all alone and separated from families. The care they received was barely adequate in the good times, woefully absent now. The careworkers paid so badly that they have to work multiple jobs to stay afloat, thereby spreading the contagion amongst the most vulnerable. Whoops. Is our social system not working so good? Someone said you can measure a civilization by how well it takes care of its most vulnerable (or words to that effect)… is that what's happening here?

Here in my little corner of the world all hell breaks loose over the weekend: a lone gunman kills a bunch of people, some with malice aforethought and some very randomly, wrong place wrong time. A trail of devastation, burned houses burned cars and so many hearts utterly broken. They initially said they had him in custody but that wasn't true, they shot him dead and thensome. Is it any wonder?

Okay, this incident pales in comparison to the fighting going on in other parts of the world. Yemen is still at war, terrible things are happening in India and elsewhere, exacerbated by pandemic. Last night I heard that the price of oil dropped below zero, well below zero. Oilmen are paying people to take the so-called black gold off their hands, we are drowning in the stuff. Governments are literally printing money to pay people to buy groceries and other necessities. Amazon is hiring a hundred thousand new employees to keep up with their vastly expanded online business. I have an Amazon Prime membership which is supposed to entitle me to 2-day delivery service (around here that's more like 4-day, but who's counting), now I am lucky to get 2-month delivery service. As if Jeff B really needs the money.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry, it is absolutely hysterical. Who'da thunk a bloody virus would lay us this low? And this fast? Can we say House of Cards? The doomsayers said it would be our dependence on oil bringing on dramatic climate change and a devastated environment that we would succumb to. Well, the environment is doing just fine now, thank you very much. Left field, left field, we're all out in a left field.

May Day is just around the corner, Happy May Day!

So much for peace and quiet

Well this was a helluva weekend. I am not sure what to say about it, all of a sudden the pandemic takes a back seat. They say this was the largest 'mass shooting' event in Canadian history, not an historic event you really want to be part of.

All of the Atlantic provinces are small, none of them much larger in population than a small city. We are less than a million here, mostly rural or living in small towns. Also, this is probably one of the oldest European settlements in North America, being one of the more easterly locations and all. So old rural settlements being what they are, everybody knows everybody, one way or another. It's just one big small town.

I knew nothing about what was going on when I took Hapi for her morning walk. But in the middle of it I got a text from the young student living next door to me, E, who asked if I wanted some turnips. We carried on a text conversation from there, this that and the other thing. I went to buy eggs from a local farm. Just as I got home she texted that maybe I shouldn't take Hapi out again, but just stay home. She included a photo of the killer and his car, who was still on the loose and headed more or less in our direction.

As soon as I got home I turned on the radio. Gone was the non-stop Covid-19 reporting, even the Prime Minister's daily talk was off the local airwaves. Now it was the blow-by-blow police chase with warnings to stay home, go hide in the basement if necessary. E texted me that a cop get shot in front of her boyfriend's mom's house. Very shortly after that the radio reported that the man had been caught. There were multiple victims but the RCMP would not be talking about it until 6pm.

I went on the internet, and sure enough, there were already reports in the UK and the USA about what was happening in our little province, a lot of speculation and precious little hard facts. The CBC said they would only report what they could verify was actually true, but there was plenty of speculation swirling around.

So this morning they are reporting at least 17 dead, including one RCMP officer and the killer himself, in a broad swath over half the province. What a horrific tragedy!

As far as the pandemic is concerned, many provinces are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, the numbers of positive tests and dead are starting to flatten or diminish. Our province is still peaking, although not as badly as some others. Like some other provinces, half or more of the dying are in nursing homes, pointing out the glaring need for reform in how we care for elders. A lot of holes in the fabric of our culture are coming to light in the glare of the pandemic.

But a mass shooting is unfathomable. Perhaps it points to yet another hole in the fabric, I don't know, too soon to tell. But it surely adds to the already big burden of shock and grief around here.