Capital of Nasty Electronic Magazine
Volume V, Issue 13, AD MM
Friday, October 27, 2000
ISSN 1482-0471
-------------------------------------------

"I'd also say that although the term is strictly female, no woman 
could ever be as much a bitch as him.  He's not even an asshole 
really, but a bitch.

If he went to prison, you'd be able to drive a truck up his ass 
after his first three days there."

-------------------------------------------

Like...Well [Leandro] was really good at organising a mass class 
rebellion during the classes I taught.  I heard he made one teacher 
cry.  He is a great leader (of leftist leaning antiestablishment 
groups).
- Marty Timusk

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1.  Editorial
2.  Closing Time Bloody Closing Time
3.  EuroTrash Diary
4.  The Colour of Culture
5.  Stress, diarrhoea and other stuff you shouldn't read about.
-------------------------------------------

This week's Golden Testicle award:

http://www.plif.com/archive/wc245.gif

"All their magic kingdoms are burning"

-------------------------------------------

1. Editorial

The issue's rather long, and since the general tone of editorials 
seems to lower people's spirits to that of meagre slaves, this is 
it.

I RUN REDHAT

Ron Chmara, writes:

Goatboy might do well to invent his own routines, not plagarize the 
Travaglia BOFH series.

http://frolic.dhs.org/humor/bofh/



Goatboy admits his horrible crime for attempting to write a humorous 
pastiche clearly based off the BOFH's original stories (hence why he 
titled it "The Bastard Assistant Editor from Hell").

CoN actually ran some original BOFH stories last year with the 
permission of the Bastard himself (You can check it out here on our 
text archives:
http://www.disobey.com/text/capital_of_nasty/volume_iv/CoN17.txt).

Goatboy was duly arrested, processed and finally executed.  His last 
words were: "Just for the record, Simon's official BOFH site is this 
one: http://bofh.ntk.net/Simon.html ... UGH!".  He left many 
scattered kids.

OUT FIGURE ANYONE CAN WHAT SAYING HE?

Eelco den Dunnen kicks my ass:

Leandro,

Been awhile, no?
So, where's the humor?
Well, let me *particularly long* flame it to you. 
Me just had to react on the V.12 issue, since you blatantly invite 
full-scale mediocrity into the CoN feed by complying to 

>  a request from contributors and some readers, we're 
>  going back into the Theme based issues of CoN.  As usual, send in 
>  your suggestions (not that I am expecting any.  Damn you all!
>  Damn you all to hell!)

Two things seem appropriate here: 
One, don't ever, ever, ever utter that you, in any way, will ever 
conceive, let alone support, the notion of meeting any request 
whatsoever from whoever. Makes assholes like me write (back). And 
that's like inviting immigration officers to perform a preventive 
anal search: you'll *always* get more then you bargained for (unless 
you missed a much anticipated weekly sado-orgy at the Whip-'em-Till-
They-Blow club).

Two, *as usual* thanks for the damnation, but this is kicking in an 
open door, right? Or does your pamphlet actually needs the rantfeed 
from readers? (then this email may serve some purpose) If it's to do 
with quality, don't bother asking: It better be send-in suggestions! 
Reading the latest flood of CoNs, it's obviously not fill you're 
short on. Moreover, one gets puzzeld by the word *contributors*, but 
let's not stray on that path already. Or should we?

Right then. Let's examine your sorry Rant-contributor Jason 
MacIsaac's "Being Misquoted" (Get it, J?). Better yet: let's not. 
Me'll give you why. Because we're confined to Hell (which is, well, 
the very bottem, right?) and frankly, you couldn't hit it more hard 
rock-bottemed then this pulp, me reckons. To think that me was 
master, me stand corrected: in this MacIsaac got the better (..er.. 
me mean worse) of me.  OK, one for you, Leandro. The need for 
contribution is definitely there. So much for the quotation lessons.

Who's next?
Goatboy.
Me'll get back on him soon. Me suspect him (or the likes of him) to 
be working at my office as well. 

Who then? Right, Jeff is on. Burry this bloke right where you dug 
him up. Unbearable. Mov(i)e One: don't give off on the dumb majority 
of FILM visitors. They make festivals possible (read: affordable) 
for most dedicated followers of anti-Hollywood shite. Most people 
still don't *get* 2001 A Space Odyssey neither, but without them you 
wouldn't even know what film me was talking about. Embrace the vast 
shitload of people on this planet, without the amount of these 
mindless hordes of idiots there wouldn't be a place for the few 
goodies. By the way: if something is "Needless to say", try not to 
say (or write) it then. Stating what should be left out is actually 
putting it in, sort of omissioning the omission. Just trust me on 
this one.

Mov(i)e Two: damn laddy, are you goin' mental on us here? Believe 
me, people catch your drift if you tell them that a theatre, made 
for plays, makes a bad movie screening place, that's inherent to the 
purpose of the bloody building! Quit babbling convert reasons like 
"because it's big and looks fancy".

And then you do it yet again: First you please us in telling that 
you won't discuss the dumbest aspect of any coverage, namely the 
commentator's personal uncomfort, immediately followed by the 
remarks that it will be dealt with in full later on. Really, fool, 
nobody is interested is them. Not then, not later. Never!
Worse still, when you finally come to *a* point (e.g. the bleeding 
FILM) you're not going to give us any plot synopsis, instead you 
give us your rant about your personal opinions on the stars, your 
irk, the audience and believe it or not the actual actors 
playing...actors. I know it's confusing, but hey, you're the pundit 
here, or what?

Skipped the rest of Jeff's FOURTEEN mov(i)es, it could only get more 
"irky" from there on. Two-nil, Leandro. Confine Jeff to one key 
only: the spacebar. Or just lose the bugger!

Rounding up here.
Bad news: you do need help, man. Badly.
Good news: by the looks of it, it can only get better.

Unsubcribingly mine,

Eelco den Dunnen (Below sealevel, ebb or flow)
http://edd.www.cistron.nl

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2.  Closing Time Bloody Closing Time 

By Will Torrens aka Reverend Martinez

The store was empty as I began locking up. Seeing that there were 
tons of chocolate bars lying around, I took a few; no one would 
know. Anyways, we lost pretty much everything when we got robbed by 
Jojo the dog-faced boy earlier today. Holy lord, what a mess.
The jingle of the door chimes interrupted my reflection.

"Hey. Is it too late to get a Lotto 666 ticket?" My god a customer! 
And my store in such a state...
"Not at all" I responded. Just then the telephone rang.

*brrrriinnngggg*

"Can I get that? I'm expecting a call" asked the gentleman. He 
looked well dressed and responsible enough so I let him answer it.
"Carlito! Damn, how's the drug cartel, ese?" he said as he drifted 
into conversation.
As I stuffed the last chocolate bar down my pants, a squeal of tires 
screeched past the broken shambles that was my store. Walking 
outside, I happened to see the screeching car ram into a telephone 
pole. 3 disoriented teens got out the back of the car, stumbled 
towards me and asked if they could use my bathroom to wash off the 
blood of the deceased driver. I didn't see why not.
"Sure go ahead."

As I re-entered the store, the well-dressed chap had just hung up 
the phone.
"It was for me" he said as I handed him his lottery ticket from the 
tray. As he walked out, he was recognized by one of the teens who, 
in a flash, whipped out a baseball bat and proceeded to pound the 
lotto-man in the crotchal area. After the rest of them had joined in 
and taken turns in the beating, they nabbed some chips and ran off. 
I took the opportunity to search the gentleman near death. 
Apparently, he was a tax collector on his way to (according to a 
blood-stained memo) the residence of 4 tax-dodging teen delinquents 
who, in an attempt to avoid him, had escaped in their car and run 
into a telephone pole.

So naturally there would be hostile feelings on both sides.

I cleared my brain with an emergency tequila I kept behind the 
counter and passed out. When I woke up the store was gone.

Goddamn that Jojo. 

---
"The Rev. is a known recluse and operates out of his East York 
basement.  Many lonely hours howling at the moon and typing these 
stories for CoN have ruined any kind of friendship with the 
neighbours."

-------------------------------------------

3.  EuroTrash Diary

BJ Sutton

It's been a strange year so far.  The Xtian millenium passed in a 
fog of abject pecuniary humiliation;  I had churned out 60 paintings 
for a group show and as a result I owed money all over the place.  
So I made the great intellectual leap forward most artists are 
familiar with, and decided I had to find A Job that would pay for 
this bad habit of painting in the months to come. I made a few more 
begging phonecalls, dug the ancient work clothes out of a box, and 
spent my 
last francs on a train to Geneva.  I have a Swiss passport and can 
work there.  Here in France I don't even have a dog license but they 
let me stay, an exotic ornament of my village.

When I first got there I thrust myself on the mercy of The State, 
hoping perhaps to avoid any actual labouring, but while they were 
helpful and even came up with a wodge of cash, I could see that this 
approach wasn't going to solve anything in the long term.  So I made 
the rounds of the employment agencies, looking for lucrative 
temporary placement for a couple of months or so.

I have to say I have a very weird CV.  I wasn't always an artist;  I 
came back to this after about 10 years of a Respectable Career which 
I dumped in favour of poverty, debt, and a wardrobe of shabby, 
paint-stained vestments.  So when I began the groveling process, I 
got a lot of confused feedback:  You did what?  And now you do what? 
And you want to do WHAT?  My main, my only advantage, is that I have 
been using computers since year N, and was hoping to find work of 
any kind on the basis of being able to feel my way around a lot of 
machinery.

Anyhow, just when I was beginning to panic, I got a call from a 
helpful lady at Manpower.  She said, I think I might have found 
something, and she gave me a name and an address.  So I put on a 
Suit and tottered down to the Swiss Permanent Mission to the UN, 
where I met with a swiss ambassador and a guy from the Danish 
Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  They seemed to like me, and the next 
day (whilst idling on a street corner debating whether or not to 
start panhandling, have mercy Leo) my cell phone went off and lo, I 
got the job.

So for about six months I worked with a small team of mixed nuts, 
coordinating the (breathe deeply) Special Session of the United 
Nations General Assembly on the Implementation of the Outcome of the 
World Summit for Social Development and Further Initiatives (held in 
Copenhagen in 1995).  The Swiss government's contribution to this 
circus was a six-day event called the Geneva 2000 Forum, "The Next 
Step in Social Development".  Within that Forum I organised an 
International Symposium, somewhat ungrammatically entitled 
"Partnerships for Social Development in a Globalising World". 
(Aside:  For those of you who might not know this, Geneva is the 
Euro HQ for the UN and HQ to many of its agencies, like the ILO and 
the ever-popular WTO.  This was, however, the first time the General 
Assembly ever met outside of New York, and as a result the Swiss 
were all a-twitter.)

I was shown to an airless office and told to get on with it.  I 
didn't know who anyone was or what they were doing.  The ambassador, 
my boss, informed me he didn't know anything about social 
development, organising symposia, or anything remotely relevant to 
the job.  Well, this looked encouraging.  I did, however, have some 
experience in these things in a Past Life, which is why I suppose 
they hired me.  So I started to make phone calls, write letters, 
pester people, do lunches, network, make plans.

When the word started to get around I found myself at a sort of 
nexus of desire:  these high-level, public events are like food and 
drink for professional talking heads, dozens of whom suddenly wanted 
a seat on a panel so they could deliver their views to the promising 
cyclopean eye of the TV cameras.  Thus many important people 
shimmered into my radar screen and attracted my disdain.  
Ambassadors begged for favours, Heads of Agencies pled for a 
platform. Journalists, activists, academics, staffers, and toadies 
sought me out.  I was ruthless, mirthless, deadly, and took none of 
it in the least bit seriously.

When the last week of June finally rolled around and all this shit 
hit the fan, I was having a ball.  I got to bark at people on the 
phone with impunity.  I got to crawl through the bowels of the 
Conference Centre with some very serious-looking security guys from 
the Secretary General's office.  I got to issue ultimatums to the 
host broadcaster.  I delegated most of the shit work to a team of 
logistical people so I could sneak away and drink coffee with other 
staff members and some interesting new pals.  I could ask for a 
chauffered car if I wanted one and started using those to go to the 
lake and drink beers, work on my tan.  They gave me a free cell 
phone with WAP that I used to send menacing text messages to 
unsuspecting friends (this phone deal actually backfired a couple of 
times when, after finishing a 15-hour day I'd be drinking wine and 
smoking controlled substances and the bugger would ring at eleven 
pee em and there would be the Chief of Staff of Someone Important 
and I would have to act like I knew what the fuck was going on).  
Still, not bad for someone who spends her real life painting large, 
unmarketable canvases of sexy chili peppers and androgynes with very 
small feet.

There was a social side, too.  I was invited to attend many 
receptions and functions at the Palais des Nations and posh hotels; 
at a few of these, Prime Ministers, diplomats and Special 
Representatives, wrongly assuming that illusory power could somehow 
transform their fatuous features, tried to get into my trousers over 
warmish glasses of bad swiss wine.  I heard the party line from 
wildly diverse action groups, altruists, and self-aggrandisers 
around mouthfuls of tiny toasted snacks.  By the time the week was 
up, millions of swiss francs had been spent on food, wine, ice 
sculptures, fireworks, and cultural events to celebrate a conference 
on, primarily, the Eradication of Poverty.

I love the UN.  Anyhow, that's what I've been doing.  I made it 
through the minefield of Things That Can Go Wrong and it all went 
off beautifully.  When it was over, I came home again to my leaky 
cabin, debts paid and another gallery show to prepare (which will of 
course deplete any capital I have accumulated).  Cognitive 
dissonance, or maybe just a reality check: one week I'm sipping 
champagne with Heads of State, discussing issues of supranational 
import, the next swilling beer with vignerons in the local bar and 
nodding understandingly about Sugar Content in Grapes.  Back to 
chaste anonymity in la France Perdu.  An occasional thank-you letter 
finds its way here, an occasional email from someone I worked with.  
But aside from that, it sorta feels like it never happened.

---
BJ Sutton is not a French name.  I'm originally from Detroit, the 
true Capital of Nasty.

-------------------------------------------

4. The Color of Culture

By Kunal Ganguly

On a scale of one to ten on the skin color scale, one being "dying 
of AIDS" or "I can see your veins" white and ten being "smile.. I 
can't see you in the dark" dark I rate a six. I am an Indian, Asian 
not American and all people from my part of the world have a similar 
skin tone as me. Does that mean that my people and me are inferior 
in any way to the lighter skinned people? No, inferiority cannot be 
gauged on the color of skin. For the people who do, they make their 
inferences and other incorrect assumptions on ignorance, apathy and 
misinformation.

I like to tell people that in my country a majority of the people 
are born with much lighter skin than me, and the harsh sun makes all 
of us dark. A fact that would be proved if I were to take off my 
clothes and show people the extreme damage done to my skin on my 
face and arms - the parts of my body exposed to the sun. That 
statement confuses most people of lighter skin here in America. 

Most white Americans assume that all lesser developed nations have 
dark skinned people and in more advanced countries, like the United 
States, people are white. Another discriminatory assumption is that 
all the colored people living in these developed nations are an 
offshoot of politics and immigration laws. 

Of course, assuming that all Americans think this way would be false 
too, but unfortunately the majority of the populace of white America 
seems to be afflicted by this disease of complete and utter 
ignorance. The more knowledgeable therefore open-minded people of 
America, a very small group, get badly overshadowed by the former - 
sometimes even influenced by them. 

I sometimes extract malicious fun from my ignorant American friends. 
I tell them that in my country we don't have electricity, telephones 
or computers and that we ride elephants to work (the elephants have 
built in fare meters). Building on that, I tell them that the 
autocratic government changes many times a year and that I am 
actually the heir to the throne of my kingdom and had to flee to 
America because they poisoned my pet purple canary, which signifies 
that all the members of the my family will soon be jailed, unfairly 
tried and put to the guillotine. 

After 10 minutes of similar nonsense to my new and dumb white 
American friend, he or she usually figures out that I am being 
mendacious. But the look on their faces while I say this stuff to 
them is priceless. The look on their face is akin to the pitiful 
look on a parent's face when they see a young child (not their own) 
struggling to get their heads unstuck from some big and dangerous 
household appliance. 

My fellow brown brethren might extract a sense of sad but knowing 
amusement from this article, but at the same time a realization of 
what is wrong with white America becomes clear if in any way they 
had any misconceptions about the amount of knowledge about the rest 
of the world a typical white American harbors. Indians (from Asia, 
not the `original Americans') and natives of other countries come to 
America expecting the American world-view to be open-minded and 
friendly, but alas, that misconception fades as quickly as the smile 
on a parent's face when they see their nice all-American white 
daughter holding hands with a brown-skinned foreigner. 

A white girl I became involved with said she would never be able to 
have me meet with her parents because they would probably be 
horrified at the very prospect of the brown skin cells from my hands 
depositing under her fingernails, let alone think of any emotional 
involvement between the two of us. I stopped seeing her in disgust. 
It was not her fault - it was what is wrong with white America in 
general.

Most white people tend to have sympathy for the darker lot, they act 
as if they understand how hard in must be living in a country where 
killings are commonplace and watching your sister getting raped by 
religious terrorists from the next village is a once-every-2-weeks 
event. I usually don't bother to correct them that these ideas, 
propagated by the western media, are completely wrong. 

That's one of the problems with western media - they tend to show 
only the negative side of the story. But who can blame them, that's 
news ethos the world over. People like to read and watch only the 
bad things that happen in the world and the media complies in 
earnest. Most of the news reports that come out of Asia are the ones 
that deal with the worst of human behavior; therefore if one is 
ignorant about that country then he or she will automatically 
generalize rest of the people in that country as the same. Everyone 
likes to think in generalities, the world becomes a lot less 
complicated. But when these generalities are applied to the 
different human races, things become quite offensive.

When CNN Headline News guest anchor David Goodnow carried a story of 
a teenage couple in India being killed in response to religious 
tension between two tribal communities, an American friend asked me 
whether all teenagers in India are killed if they have any sort of 
relationship before marriage. Teenagers in India have all sorts of 
relationships, and face the same problems like most American 
teenagers. The exception being that Indian women usually do not 
pregnant until after marriage. 

Offensive stereotyping of `different' a.k.a. foreign people can be 
seen in popular entertainment too. For years Apu from "The Simpsons" 
(along with his accent by white actor Hank Azaria) defined America's 
image of many people from South Asia. British comedians Jasper 
Carrot and Rowan Atkinson are known for their frequent comic 
imitations of the way most South Asians talk, their lifestyle and 
their, albeit sometimes funny, reaction to a western environment. 
For years, it's been an ongoing joke among South Asian comedians and 
leaders that no real-life urban emergency room resembles NBC's hit 
show "E.R.". The sets of the popular show never have a single South 
Asian medical staff in sight. 

A light-hearted statistic conducted by a popular Asian entertainment 
weekly showed that Asian-Americans could comprehend over 20 percent 
of the medical terminology and acronyms used on "E.R.", while the 
average American lauded himself by understanding less than 5 
percent. This statistic did not include medical professionals. 

After seeing a show on India on the Discovery Channel an American 
girl told me that she believed all Indian men were warlike and their 
women wore big headdresses and had their hands painted in weird 
designs all year round.  In my home country, the only Indian men who 
are warlike are the ones enlisted in the army and the women dress 
like that only once in their lives - when they get married. 

When India conducted its nuclear tests in 1998, all news broadcasts 
across America carried reports on concerns regarding the physical 
safety of the nuclear weapons production plants - a concern that 
exists even with the (supposedly non-functional) nuclear weapons 
plants in America. While chatting on the Internet, soon after that 
world-changing event, I was asked by a concerned American female of 
unknown age (possibly a teenager or early twenties) as to when would 
India drop the bomb on the damn Iraqis. When I told her I had no 
idea about the ICBM (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile) technology 
that India has, she causally commented that someone could just drive 
over to Iraq and detonate the bomb - she thought Iraq was just north 
of India. 

It might be worthwhile to add that although she had no clue what 
ICBM meant, she did a pretty good job of deducing that it has 
something to do with launching a weapon across long distances. That 
gem of knowledge dawned on her after I described in detail what the 
words `Inter-continental' and `Ballistic' meant. Realizing I was 
chatting with the future of America here, I pressed her for her 
opinion on nuclear weapons. She said they were a good idea. After 
all, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ("u know, those 
f**king jap joints") did stop World War I ("the first big f**king 
war, when those f**king nazis did some stupid sh*t"). I was too 
amused to correct her. But to her credit, she got some things right. 

While enjoying some pizza at Pizza hut, a former army captain, 
sitting across from me and some of my Indian friends, announced that 
if it were not for America, we (I assume he includes India, and the 
rest of Asia) would still be hunting and gathering for a living. I 
really did not want to waste my time telling him that advanced 
Indian civilizations can be traced to over five thousand years ago 
while American culture is only a few centuries old. He said that we 
were sucking this country dry by taking all the high paying jobs 
such as doctors and technical staff. Again, I looked at him and 
decided not to tell him that over ninety percent of South Asian 
students return to their respective countries to pursue a career 
related to their major.

Negative media stereotyping of Asian countries and their culture is 
true in reverse too, most people in my country believe that all 
Americans do in their spare time is take drugs and have sex with a 
multitude of partners - male or female. In their working hours, 
white Americans work respectable jobs at law firms and banks while 
black people just shoot each other.  Shows like COPS, Jerry 
Springer, and the media frenzy over the Clinton scandal and the 
Columbine massacre do little to portray America to the outside world 
for the country that it is. MTV, which is aired to almost half the 
globe, is also largely responsible for giving a lot of non-Americans 
(and some Americans) the idea that Americans have very few 
inhibitions, which may directly translate to morals for some. 

When Americans compare their living standard to the rest of the 
world, it is not very hard to understand why they may feel sympathy 
and a deep feeling of superiority. The average American's energy use 
is equivalent to the consumption of two Japanese, six Mexicans, 
thirteen Chinese, thirty-two Indians, one hundred and forty 
Bangladeshis, two hundred and eighty four Tanzanians, and three 
hundred and seventy two Ethiopians. 

Americans live well when compared to developing nations. Although 
Americans comprise only five percent of the world's population, they 
use 25 percent of the world's resources and produce more trash and 
pollution than citizens of most other nations.

My Residence Advisor at the dorms last semester used to talk to non-
Americans very slowly. He believed that most international students 
find speaking and understanding English hard, true, but if you are 
an international student who can speak perfect English the 
experience can be extremely infuriating. Not knowing English 
automatically makes you a savage - universal rule of white man. 
Somehow, that statement makes me want to do something violent - like 
grabbing the nearest leafy plant, screaming at the sky while waving 
my hands (the leaves of the plant evenly distributed to both hands 
and green dribble running down my fingers for shock value), every 
now and then looking at the nearest person and saying things in a 
strange alien tongue and spitting after every two or three words. An 
important part of this fantasy is choking some poor white fellow to 
near death and then claiming it was part of my ritualistic cultural 
right to do so.

If you are white and have come to this paragraph without dismissing 
this article as just another piece of misdirected misanthropic 
literature, please, the next time you see a dark-skinned foreigner 
greet him the way you would a fellow human, treat him the way you 
would a fellow human, share with him the way you would with a fellow 
human, laugh with him you would with a fellow human. Your opinion of 
him is yours and yours alone but at least avoid being branded a 
racist by careful people just like you by keeping any racial slurs 
you might have learnt from your peers to yourself. We are just like 
you - the same anatomical specifications that makes humans human, 
just a different shell. 

Lastly, if you are a single attractive white female looking for a 
man who is committed, faithful, non-beer-guzzling, not a couch 
potato, no major psychological problems, does not think his car is 
most likely faster than the next one and therefore needs to be 
tested immediately: regardless of the fact that it is a school zone, 
has not practiced promiscuity (i.e. not slept with more women than 
fingers - hands and legs), does not have any venereal diseases, and 
most importantly - firmly believes that women are not objects and 
capable of infinite orgasms, I am available.

---
Kunal Ganguly feels very much like he's from Canada.  Nobody 
believes them when they say that they don't live in Igloos.

-------------------------------------------

5.  Stress, diarrhoea and other stuff you shouldn't read about.

By Jeff Coleman

Oh baby, I'm high on Tylenol 3s. Mmmmmmm. Very OK. Feeling horny 
even. Yummy!

Seems like the late nights, Advil popping for my back pain (I'd 
taken my sons to Florida for Disney World and carried the youngest 
on my shoulders pinching my sciatic nerve), the tonnage of wine, a 
wee impotence, lack of exercise, overwork, and numerous other 
stresses (you can imagine!) all contributed to put a big hole in my 
upper intestine. It exposed a capillary and well, anyway I was 
bleeding but not really paying much attention to my stool (uhm, are 
we talking about my chair?). I mean, who gets down on their hands 
and knees and examines their shit??? Sorry, but I don't. Well, 
Sunday I basically had an anxiety attack. I was freaking. You know, 
going back into the class room... and I'd been reviewing student 
evaluations for the first time and some of them were really awful 
("From 1 to 10 how would you rate the teacher?": 1 -- yes, they came 
from four of the worst students, two who I failed but I really put a 
lot of work into giving them what I felt was GOLD).

The Old Fort William Game CD-ROM programming project was going badly 
and I'd lost a lot of time during the holidays making simple repairs 
(instead of programming the major components). The project 
management, design and programming was all on my shoulders.  
Programming it was quite complex (and I had lost the programmer who 
was assisting me). For maybe the second time in my programming life 
I realized I'd bitten off more than I could chew (I had the 
capability just not the bodies nor the time to finish it).

Despite my anxiety, I decided to continue working and eat some 
pizza. MMMMmmmmmm. Yeah, like lactose-intolerance was the least of 
my problems. So about two or three AM I'm groaning and kicking 
myself (but sometimes I can eat a lot of pizza and nooooo 
problemos). Any who, I'm groaning and moaning and trying to get all 
the sympathy I can and suddenly the pain goes way beyond a foolish 
cramp. Stop reading because it gets worse. I suddenly feel as though 
I'm dying. Not exactly a bad idea I was thinking but the pain is 
bad. I can't move and my body breaks out in a series of these cold 
sweats. It lasts too long for anything routine like the flu (which 
maybe visits once a year).

This is new, and bad. After minutes, hours? it goes away and I go 
the bathroom. Out comes a bucket'o'black stuff. It's over in 
seconds. It comes out too quickly and I feel light-headed. Again, 
more cold sweats while I'm relieving myself. This is not, you'll 
excuse me, diarrhea. This is completely new. Black tar is the best 
way to describe it. So I try and tell the world, go back to bed and 
in the morning I repeat this. Jools (my wife) suggests the hospital 
but I'm telling her that I'm the boss, etc., and in the morning 
while she's getting her hair cut I continue my insanity. When she 
returns I offer her a look (not that I want to, but a part of me is 
freaking out) and then I'm off to emergency whether I like it or 
not. She's furious and I'm beginning to clue in the possibility that 
I'm NOT immortal. Hey wait, you mean, this is serious? In emergency 
I try apologizing for her -- "You see, doctor, she's a nurse and 
thinks I have an ulcer or something!" I blather on about possible 
haemorrhoids (which I don't have) and lactose intolerance as the 
correct diagnosis! until, that is, I have to go again! The doctor 
insists on taking a look (ewwww! NO WAY) but this time I've got to 
in a special big, plastic basin. I fight the process but even the 
nurses are willing to punch me in the face. It's all stupid until I 
get up and realize I've just filled this plastic thingy with old 
blood. O H  B O Y. I move out slowly and I'm no longer the smart-
ass. I ask the Doctor his take. Suddenly I'm on a gurney and being 
RUSHED upstairs.

Hmmmmm. They used this cool black scope and went down my throat to 
watch my guts on colour television. They made the mistake of letting 
me see it before going in and I swear it looked like something from 
Alien. Had a kind of organic quality to it and appeared multi-
jointed (she carried it heavy, come to think of it, like it was a 
section of MY intestine -- like you'd carry a garden hose, all 
coiled up and dripping). Using the same scope (it was equipped to do 
a host of things) they injected the area to stop the bleeding and I 
think tried to cauterize the area as well. I was awake for this but 
I'd been given a heavy dose of IV Valium not only relaxing me but 
made me quite forgetful. I DO remember it wearing off in the hallway 
some three or four hours later as I'm farting blood. This sounds so 
gross and it was soooooo embarrassing. Damnit, I told you to stop 
reading! 

I spent most of my time in ICU with a Mr. McFarland. He was a good 
roomy because he kept quiet and read lots of Arthur Conan Doyle (a 
short story anthology -- must have been heavy on his legs) and Clive 
Cussler. The only time he weirded me out was when he chewed and I 
swear it sounded like he had two sets of teeth. We didn't get much 
sleep because my blood pressure was too weak and they thought maybe 
he needed a pace maker so both our monitors kept going off and we 
kept waking each other up. I began to suspect toward the end it was 
all about breathing, something I was never able to prove. I just 
wished each of us had our own tone (you know, a sound that made our 
monitors unique) and then we could have slept better instead of 
wondering which of us was having the heart attack. I knew I'd 
watched too much teevee when air bubbles started creeping around my 
IV tube (where they'd injected the Zantac) and, you see, I tried 
telling the nurse. But she just tut-tutted me. Finally, I freaked. I 
hadn't been paying attention and this this HUGE bubble started 
moving toward my arm and I was slapping it and waving my wrist like 
I had a spider on me, causing Mr. McFarland to choke a little on his 
Turkey dinner. The nurse patted my arm like I was a child and told 
me "The whole tube would have to be filled with air to do you any 
harm!" Had she seen the same programs I had?! I wondered. Mr. 
McFarland ate with his back to me from then on. But I didn't relax 
until I heard the same story from two or three of the nurses. I'm 
almost ashamed to say this now, but I wrote my wife a secret message 
giving her the details of my paranoia! Only I can't find it now. Not 
sure what that means ...

Well, my hemoglobin dropped to 91 -- a lot less than what I'm 
suppose to have, which I'm told is suppose to be about 140-- about 
33% of my blood volume.

Doctor says that if I start bleeding again I could die. The feeling 
of dying is terrible -- horrifying. It's bad mojo, it's pain, and 
it's overwhelming nausea. It is the horror, the knowledge that what 
is happening to you is so serious, that either the knowing, the 
pain, or some chemical released by either immobilizes your body. As 
you break over one mountain of pain your body soaks the bed and 
everything with WATER.  Not sweat but water from every pore. You 
continue to climb a series of mountains of pain and somehow, 
eventually, it stops (and I remember gasping in relief). That I 
couldn't move (literally could not move) meant for me that life was 
withdrawing from me.   And as stupid as this is going to sound 
that's really cool.

Well, now I'm taking Losec to close the hole and Tylenol 3s. 

It's dizzying and it makes me ... well, horny... but it's better 
than the headaches I seem to wake up with.

---
Jeff Coleman enjoys spanking young cheer-leaders while he's not busy 
writing his novel.  You can read other parts of his novel at 
www.digeum.com

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ZimID 708EC8D1  1994/09/14 EC B0 97 59 1D FE 7C 32  7E 04 2C 66 47 41 FB 7D
