Good morning. Hello. How are you? #820
Mostly about colonoscopy prep, delivered straight to your inbox at 7AM Monday morning.
Good morning! How you been? Have a nice weekend? I do hope so. Man it got cold in Boston that is crazy that is like Alaska cold. I don’t recall it ever getting -10°F the entire time I lived there? That seems… extreme.
I’m pretty far into this colonoscopy prep. Man. People do not like to talk about colonoscopies, but then, when you get to talking about colonoscopies, turns out all sorts of people have had them! We are silent, we are the scoped. But I don’t care, the whole poing of GMHHAY is writing about life and this stupidf thing has pretty much been my life for the weekend.
The prep is a lot less bad than I thought it would be, honestly. The low-fiber diet is absolute garbage and it’s so, so weird that our medical community recommends we east like that. White bread, cheese, boiled vegetables what am I, five? But honestly it was kind of fun. So was the Jello I haven’t made Jello the old fashioned way on the stove with boiling water since I was a kid. Really took me right back, a flood of Jello nostalgia. The smell, the little granules of gelatin stuck to the bottom of the pot. The taste. The squishing the jello back and forth between your teeth until it becomes liquid again. The way after a day or so there develops a hard film on one side of your jello cubes that sort of starts sapping the joy out of the whole affair. Huge part of my life for years, these Jello memories. But then just laid dormant for almost forty years. Then they just come rushing back. Really crazy.
And Yogurt. I don’t realy eat yogurt regularly and I did not, like, choose the most posh brand or anything like that. I just got some generic nonfat vanilla yogurt, since I could only eat nonfat plain or vanilla and I couldn’t find plain except in a quart-sized tub I would never finish. But my god! I had no idea Yogurt is basically just a secret delivery mechanism for sugar? I thought that stuff was healthy. It was significantly more sweet than vanilla ice cream. What a racket. All those yogurt eaters are just sugar junkies, I never new. A vaneer of respectibility over an unhealthy practice. Like civil asset forfeiture or Instagram not having porn wink wink.
The liquid diet day was surprisingly fine, actually. Every once in a while I’d absentmindendly think that I wanted to go eat some Wheat Thins or something, but then I’d remember the situation and I’d be fine with it. It’s been… 32 hours since I’ve eaten any solid food at this point and it’s fine. I had a lot of broth and a lot of jello and a tiny yogurt at each meal and a Zevia and all four of those felt like a meal so I sat and ate with my wife and daughter at lunch and dinner as they had delicious food and it wasn’t bad at all. I am mildly shocked about this and may do it again.
Except for the gallon of Gatorade mixed with Miralax of course. Started that stuff at 4:30 PM and by 8:30 PM my colon was clean as a whistle and I was basically just pooping out unadulturated Gatorade which was actuall quite pleasant. The biggest surprise of the whole thing is I was convinced there was some giant blockage in there. My intestines were like a clogged pipe and the Gatorlax was chipping away at it from the top like Liquid Drain-O and it was only a matter of time before the whole thing blew like Moby Dick’s blowhole when surfacing or something. But no such luck, the whole thing was anticlimactic. Really makes you wonder where all that pizza and all those saltines went, but I guess the answer is “my belly” so I just won’t think about that. The Gatorlax really wasn’t bad, though. Every fifteen minutes I’d have an 8-ounce cup of it. I used one of those Radio City Music Hall plastic cups you get when you order Champagne at Radio City. I would routinely steal them and we have a nice collection of them. They take me back. A gallon has 128 ounces, you’re drinking 8 at a time, so you are doing sixteen rounds of this, every fifteen minutes.
And, reader, wouldn’t you know it, on the fifteenth round, as I was drinking another cup of this admixture, massive amounts of liquid audibly sloshing around inside me, I absent-mindedly thought: “You know, I’m kind of thirsty.”
This is a picture of some girls in the clouds. The main girl is standing on a cloud and she is counting by five in the righthand speech bubble, and saying “heesh heesh heesh” in the larger one. The girl on the right is hanging from a cloud, and the girl on the left is jumping up and down on a cloud like it is a mattress. On the bottom is a boy who is standing on the edge of a pond feeding bread to fish. The rectangle at the right is, for some reason, a one-way sign.
I think it was Annie that asked a while back and I forgot to answer but yes, Jane does draw more than kitties, though rarely. I had wondered the same thing for a while. But she is branching out.
Also, get a load of this calendar event Jane made in her phone:
And why yes, that is a Thousand Leaves tour Sonic Youth hat, thank you for noticing.
I did get some stuff done this weekend. I made the Walmart run, though it really is a lot less fun if I can’t come home and immediately write to you about it, and also Walmart is way more crowded at 10 AM than it is at 7AM so it is slightly less fun. Took out the compost, got a bunch of work work done, because I have a bunch of work that needed to be done today but I assume I will be completely out of commission today. Made waffles, made broth. Finished ripping my mother-in-law’s Dr. Katz box set. Made a story with Jane. Did bedtime Friday, Saturday and Sunday and will do tonight. Still making up for the deficit from my quarantine, and I’m going away for one night this week so I gotta make up for that too. We figure somewhere around late February we can go back to taking turns on bedtime.
Emma and I watched Wakanda Forever and it had a lot of good things about it but I didn’t really love it. I would hate to be a Marvel film director. You gotta have a chase scene you gotta have a really long battle scene, and you gotta shoehorn in the other Marvel properties, all while you’re trying to do your own thing. And in this case, you’re trying to do your own thing when your leading actor has suddenly died of colon cancer (colonoscopy call back right there). They did a good job all that considered. Chess pieces moving on a chess board so everyone is where they need to be when the next set piece happens. I am utterly confused about Wakandan lines of succession and kings and whatnot and that weird scene at the waterfall, but I suppose it just happened because it needed to happen.
Oh and I got my podcast done. I know you’re excited. Topics include: Colonoscopy wooo, CAT Scan, heart shit, work work work work work, NYC Wednesday, Bonfire, Neighbors and smores, Jane texting, Jane and learning, emotions, periodic table, Gardening, Kindle Scribe, Babylon, Bubba Ho Tep, Wakanda Forever, Freeway, Lily 4-ever, The Menu, Peral, X, Wings of Desire, Halber Mehsch, The White Room, Tetsuo The Iron Man, The Player, In the Mood for Love, Eternal Daughter, EO, Salvation!, The Farewell, Sholay, Titane, Putney Swope, Encanto, Bonnie and Cluyde, Spiritualized, Mojave 3, Victory at Sea, Mich Harvey, Samia, John Cale, Nation of Language, Liela Moss, PTERODAN, Au Suisse, Castlebeat, Revenge Body, Meule, Material Issue, Belle and Sebastian, Final, iggy Pop, Guided by Voices, Young Fathers, Ladytron, Mary Cassidy, Danielle Ponder, atmos bloom, Blush Response & Warm, Perla, LA Timpa, Have a Nice Life, deathcrash, No Sun, H.C. McEntire, Laura Stevenson, Bara Gisladottir, Oren Ambarchi, The Dream Eatwers, Caterina Barbieri, The Soft Pink Truth, Sirom, Pan·American, Labaradford, Sam Prekop and John McEntire, Diamanda Galas, Breadwinner, His Dark Materials, Star Wars Bad Batch, The Witcher Blood Origin, The Last of Us, Legend of Vox Machina, Letterkenny, SNL, Poker Face, Task Master, RRR, All Quiet on the Western Front, EO, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Jane’s been pretty good this weekend. We’ve been dancing every night, to Youtube videos by women artists. I’ve shown her the Slits and Raincoats and ESG and Siouxsie, of course. She doesn’t seem to care that they’re women and mostly wants to watch the Pet Shop Boys. Emma bought her a book on gender and a book on race and she read them as if they were common sense. She tells me she is a girl. I suspect she’s right. She’s very into her new Periodic Table book. Can’t think of any major new concepts we covered this weekend I can’t say I’ve been at the top of my game. Lotta math. Working on basic multiplication. Still very sad she didn’t get into the good school down the road. No idea what we’re going to do. Emma talked to a neighbor about the Montessori school and it sounds great but apparently the self-directedness makes kids a bit more weak in math and… they don’t dress up for Halloween, which is obviously turning Emma off to it. We’re looking at an interesting Farm School I learned about from a family member, but it’s only Kindergarten so we’d just be punting the problem but honestly that’s kind of temptin.
Feel like we’re running out of time!
Got a punkish playlist for you today my god these playlists take so long to compile because the songs are so short and you can only put one song by an artist on each playlist so it just takes months and months to make one. Also I don’t listen to that that much punk? Lotta noise, lotta metal but not punk punk. So this is always necwssarily a little wider ranging. Anyway, enjoy.
Tomorrow will presumably be the last issue relating to colonoscopies so you could probably just skip that one if this is not your thing and on Wednesday I’ll.. I don’t know, complain about Elon Musk or iOS or something. Ta!