Illustration: Dominique Corbasson, http://lookingfordc.blogspot.fr/
Originally published in The Scrambler, 2011.
Mother of Montmartre
Mother of pearl
Paris is your oyster
Black waves at your feet
In your heart
a shelter
Virginie Colline
Crawling like lice looking for a way home
I was crawling along a suburban road
With other metal entombed insects
With frowning faces
And pantomime hands
No angels in this queue.
I saw Satan
In a BMW
He was an advertising exec
And his legion of horned helpers
Were real estate agents
Happily extract your soul
With a handshake
White teeth
And a business card.
The music played
God bless it for trying
But it could not drown out
The urban frustration
Scattered like lice
Each seeking the perfect follicle.
Ebola and the GORGONS
Diseases can be terrible; how much more epidemics? It was barely a week ago that I came down with fever, malaise and highly disturbing diarrhea. It was just after I’d (unsuccessfully) treated malaria with drugs of questionable originality; they had been much cheaper. So my first differential was of course relapse. Then I realigned my sentiments with prevailing public opinion and arrived unquestioningly at Ebola (note the capital E; na respect be that). And I automatically began a rather paranoid contact tracing in my head…
All these before I remembered that I had made a warm culture of anaerobic organisms, don’t ask me how, and swallowed it, don’t ask me why. Suffice it to say I was not recolonising my gut, I do not have pseudomembranous colitis. It was a mistake. Mistakes happen, even with the most careful and most experienced of doctors. That is why God made PPEs, personal protective equipments, to discredit our paranoia as much as we’d allow.
Paranoia.
“ι ρυт ση му ησкια ρнσηє тσɗαу αηɗ тнє тωσ нαηɗѕ ʀєƒυѕєɗ тσ ѕнαкє. ι тнιηк тнєу αʀє αƒʀαιɗ σƒ євσℓα.”
Not all flowers are what we would consider beautiful. Some are simple and delicate, some are strikingly colorful and included in bouquets, but still others are rather plain, open only at night when we usually can’t see them, or even smell like rotting meat. We have to remember we are not the plants’ primary audience.
Dr. Debra Trock, Senior Collections Manager in Botany at the California Academy of Sciences, discussed the co-evolution of flowering plants and their various animal pollinators during her monthly enrichment talk. Held the third Tuesday evening of each month in one of Chabot’s second-floor classrooms, these free talks from local researchers are open to Chabot staff, volunteers and guests.
Dr. Trock began her talk by clarifying the concept of co-evolution. Evolution happens within populations over time, as natural selection favors the individuals best able to reproduce in any given environment. And co-evolution occurs when two or more species evolve together, each adapting to changes in the other. She also illustrated the basic internal biology of a flower, labeling the various regions of the pistil, the female reproductive structure, and the stamen, the male structure.
“Evil” Itself—Our Greatest Foe
The horrific beheading of American journalist James Foley by radical militants of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) forces civilization to face its greatest foe—evil itself.
On August 19, a four-minute, forty-second video titled A Message to America was streamed online via social media networks and was swiftly routed around the globe. The malicious intent of the ISIS video was undeniable, and the careful crafting that produced it added a sense of stealthy eeriness to its message.
A Message to America stunned the international community. British Prime Mister David Cameron denounced the video as “brutal and barbaric,” while US Secretary of State John Kerry described Foley’s murder as “ugly, savage, inexplicable, nihilistic, and valueless evil.”
World leaders and media outlets grapple with words to describe A Message to America. Adjectives and nouns are strung together in carefully prepared texts. Yet, despite the horrific nature of the act, some media sources are loathe to interject the language of good and evil in describing terrorist activity.
A case in point is an op-ed published in The New York Times on August 22 titled “The Problem With ‘Evil.’” The article was written by Michael Boyle, an associate professor of political science at La Salle University.
Boyle argues against the use of moralistic language in denouncing foes. “Condemning the black-clad masked militants as purely ‘evil’ is seductive,” he contends. He fears what he calls “a disturbing return of the moralistic language once used to describe Al Qaeda in the panicked days after the 9/11 attacks.”
The argument is not without substance or merit. Boyle has a point, but the point Boyle presses would be far more sensible if evil did not exist. Evil does exist. Evil itself is our greatest foe.
Ode to the Archipelago
It’s becoming a tradition, I suppose. Last year, we exchanged vows wearing nectar-scented plumeria leis. We stood barefoot between onyx lava rocks, water pooling around our ankles; our intimate ceremony officiated by a conch-shell-blowing minister who had survived a shark attack. The ginger glow of the Maui sunset erased our wrinkles long enough to trick the camera lens. Curious onlookers wondered if we were newlyweds or oldyweds renewing our vows. We kissed like it was the first time.
This year, I’ve come to heal: to remember who I was before I squeezed life through a computer screen.
I’m more myself here than anywhere. How inconvenient. An archipelago, 2,500 miles from the continent I call home; exposed peaks of a great undersea mountain range. Life is fragile here and will, one day, return to the sea.
The first thing I do is inhale the moist, oxygen-pumped air, my body craving deep, enriching breaths after 365 days of arid high-altitude breathing. I perch at the edge of land and sea. The rhythmic lull of the Pacific draws me into the primordial ooze, reminding me where I’ve come from and where I’ll return.
“I solemnly pledge myself before God and in the presence of this assembly,
To pass my life in purity and to practice my profession faithfully.
I will abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous,
And will not take or knowingly administer any harmful drug.
I will do all in my power to maintain and elevate the standard of my profession,
And will hold in confidence all personal matters committed to my keeping,
And all family affairs coming to my knowledge in the practice of my calling.
*With loyalty will I endeavor to aid the physician in his work,*
And devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care.”
– The Nightingale Pledge, 1893. (Asterisks added.)
Those are the words of the original version of the Nightingale Pledge. Back then, the health team was one, had a doctor as the captain and the nurse as his sidekick, and worked. Back then, daughters of Nightingale were not averse to swearing loyalty to Doctors, the men of honor were yet men of honor, and no one thought he had to displace the sons of Hippocrates to “reach the peak of their careers”. Back then… before the envy and strife and hypocrisy that we see now.
For now we have a health team wherein everyone wants to do everything that is a doctor’s job even when they can barely master theirs, where everyone wants to take everything that is a doctor’s pay even when theirs is relatively more, where everyone wants to be the doctor’s public foe yet private friend so that they may keep those free, secret, consultations aboard. Now they want to be doctors (and consultants), do not want to go through medical school to be such, and definitely do not want to endure the rigors of residency.
And what is worse? Rather unlike when they threatened strike actions, cut ICU power supply, and locked everything up, even bedpans, whenever they go on their political strikes; now they form a coalition against the disciples of Hippocrates so that they can challenge our rights to freedom of association and of decision, malign us, and sue us to court– and actually do.
So that now government hospitals are paralyzed, people are dying, and privatization is looming. And all these because of insincerity, for JOHESU wants to have its cake and eat it too, yet he who comes to equity must come with clean hands… They feed the common man with lies to turn him against his doctor, Boko-Haram style, and hope, foolishly enough, that their propaganda will survive. Of course they won’t; falsehood may endure for a night but truth comes in the morning…: