Isolation Report, Week #33

[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]

Another two weeks gone in this seemingly endless pandemic, but of course it still doesn’t feel like we’re any closer to ... anything.  Honestly, even though the election will be done in another two weeks, it doesn’t feel like much of an accomplishment.  In the first place, two weeks these days can easily last two years, and, in the second place, the chances that we actually know who’s won on Election Night are so fucking slim that it doesn’t matter anyway.  I don’t give a shit: I’ve already voted.  It’s all waiting to see how it comes out in the wash for me at this point.

Today, I’ll give you thoughts on two things, one political, and one personal.  First, the political.

I’ve mostly been trying to ignore the whole Amy Coney Barrett thing: she’s going to get on the court no matter what happens in the hearings, so what’s the point in following them?  But I couldn’t help but hear about the moment where (Republican) John Cornyn asked her what she had been referring to during the hearing and she held up a blank notepad (to which Cornyn replied “impressive” ... because, you know, it takes a lot of effort to write nothing on a piece of paper).  This has been a source of many jokes, from both political camps: an unknown conservative described the blank page as a “list of Joe Biden’s accomplishments,” while comedian Kathy Griffin said it represented a “picture of his [Trump’s] brain scan.” What I haven’t heard anyone point out, though, is that a blank page is actually the perfect inspiration for Barrett’s “testimony”: it reminded her to keep her experssion entirely blank, her voice entirely neutral, and her statements entirely devoid of content.

And, honestly, it’s not even fair to pick on Barrett: any liberal judge in her position would do (as has done) the same.  Judges are full of opinions—it’s their fucking job description, for fuck’s sake—until you put them in front of Congress, and then all of a sudden they have no viewpoints on anything whatsoever.  There’s a metric shit-ton of “it wouldn’t be fair of me to talk about a case I might adjudicate one day” and “I have to keep an open mind until I hear the facts of such a case” and many other such empty platitudes.  So, if the point of Senate confirmation hearings is not to hear a judge’s opinions on the law, what the hell is the fucking point, anyway?

And we don’t have to stop there.  Over the past 4 years, we’ve seen and heard a whole fuck-ton of people “testifying” before Congress, and magically none of them remember any details about the stuff they’re supposed to be experts on, or the stuff they actually did themselves.  Sessions has appeared before Congress, and Dejoy has appeared before Congress, and Barr has appeared before Congress, and DeVos has appeared before Congress, and Mueller has appeared before Congress, and Zuckerberg has appeared before Congress, and can anyone name one single thing that has changed because of it?  It’s all pure theater at this point.

And then of course we have the debates ... it’s a fun little time where two people refuse to answer the questions they were actually asked or follow any of the “rules” set forth at the beginning.  At the end of the allotted time, you know absolutely nothing that you didn’t know going in, and all the “analysis” is centered around who flubbed a word or had a fucking fly on their head.  Let me be clear: the Democrats are not any better than the Republicans here.  I’ve often said that all answers in a debate—or even your average press conference—can be classified as one of 3 animals: a duck, a weasel, or a dead horse.  West Wing often gets accused of being “liberal porn,” but part of the reason it was so good was that even the Republicans on that show were better than the Democrats we have in real life.  Remember the episode in season 7 where Alan Alda’s character got his (Republican) campaign back on track by holding a press conference with the radical idea of just fucking answering all the reporters’ questions until they couldn’t think of any more?  When have you ever seen that done in real life?  Yeah, me neither.  And they wonder why we’d rather live in televsion land than in real life.

For the personal thing, I’ll let you know that this week I had my first, and quite possibly my only, colonoscopy.  I’ve told everyone I can think of that, if a doctor ever comes to me and says “you have to get another colonoscopy or you might die” I’m going to reply “let me think about it.” (And so I apologize if you’re one of the folks that had to hear that bon mot more than once.)  Now, if you don’t know what a colonoscopy is, it’s where they jam a camera on a tube up your ass and see how far they can get it up there, taking pictures and whatnot as they go.  Now that sounds horrifying, but the truth is that they knock you out completely for this whole thing, so you don’t actually feel anything.  You just go to sleep, and then you wake up, and you’re a bit bloated because you’ve had some extra air injected into your guts, but basically it’s like nothing happened.

So why do I say I’ll never do it again?  Well, those of you who’ve had this procedure before already know the answer: it’s the prep.  See, the day before, you can’t have any solid food.  Which is not great, but not terrible either.  I mean, you can still have water, and coffee or tea, and fruit juice.  I mean, no milk or cream in your coffee or tea, and no pulpy fruit juice, just clear stuff like apple or white grape, but that’s not bad.  And you can have chicken broth, which is not super filling, but better than nothing.  And you can have Jello and popsicles and sports drinks like Gatorade or VitaminWater, but certain colors are out (presumably because of the dyes): no red, no blue, no green, no purple.  Now, one of the (many) medical people I talked to in preparation for this preparation described this as “only leaving the crappy flavors.” But, as it happens, I love orange, as a flavor at least, so drinking orange Vitaminwater and “eating” orange Jello all day was just fine by me (orange popsicles, as it turns out, were not as yummy as my nostalgia had portrayed them).  So, still: not great, but not awful either.  Then there’s the medicine.

The first problem with the medicine is that someone decided that it was so disgusting that they needed to make it taste like fruit.  Unfortunately, this just makes it taste like disgusting fruit, which is still not great.  You have to mix it yourself, and then you have to drink it, slowly, but finish all 16 ounces within 30 minutes.  Slightly oxymoronic, but okay.  And you do this 3 times over the course of the day.  And the function of this medicine is to make you shit your guts out.  Because, you know: they don’t want any yucky stuff on their nice camera that they’re going to jam up your ass.  So they want you to get it all out.  All of it.  So, fine: spending more time on the toilet than not for roughly 7 hours is not my idea of a fun time, but, you know what?  We have technology for that now.  My kids spend 7 hours on the toilet all the time: you just need a phone or a tablet or what-have-you and you’re set.  But here’s the problem: after a while, you’re done.  There is literally nothing more to expel.  Except you’re still drinking this nasty-tasting shit, which somehow manages to come out exaclty as fast as it went in, and it’s all so violent and ... I dunno, repetitive.  And you know how you get when you have diarrhea for even just an hour and you start trying to raid your kids’ diaper ointment?  Yeah, multiply that by 7.  A fun time, it was not.

On the other hand, I now know that I do not have any polyps, cancerous or otherwise, that I do have diverticula, which are the breeding ground for diverticulitis, and I have some lovely pictures of the inside of my guts.  I thought about sharing them with you, but my family discouraged me.  They seemed to think you wouldn’t find them as fascinating as I do.  Ah, well: your loss.

In any event, my next virus isolation report will be from the far side of the election, so perhaps things will look better then.  But, given 2020 thus far, I shall not be holding my breath.