I’ve described some of my experiences in the hospital here, but there are a couple things that I didn’t mention at the time for brevity’s sake.
When you’re wearing a FALL RISK bracelet, the hospital staff is naturally concerned that you’re likely to fall down and injure yourself (more) if you try to walk. So they put an alarm on your bed that will go off if you get out of bed without a nurse or PCT there to help you. While standing and walking was agony, and using the trucker bomb was somewhat dehumanizing, having the bell put on my collar (so to speak) made the entire experience of micturation even worse. When they put the alarm on my bed and left I tested it to see what would happen. What happened was that four staff members rushed in as I stood there gritting my teeth in pain while the alarm on my bed blared loud enough to wake the Australian dead. So every time I had to piss, I’d call for a PCT who would come in to turn off the alarm. Then he or she would watch me hobble to the commode under the sink, drop my shorts under the hospital gown, and sit down. The PCT would then leave to give me a modicum of privacy. I had to piss a lot: the constant IVs guaranteed it. Pleasantly, they turned off the alarm during the final couple days of my stay so I had the freedom to urinate without permission, something I’d taken for granted since graduating secondary school. Don’t be a FALL RISK if you can avoid it.
The potassium tablets they made me take were awful. Everyone jokes about having to swallow horse pills, but the potassium tablets were something you’d give an elephant. I had to take two every day or so. Huge and uncoated, you had to break them in half to swallow them piece by piece. They went down like chunks of sandstone. I’d choke and gag every time, spraying water on myself. Once, after the PCT left, I choked so hard trying to swallow one that I accidentally spit it up into the little cup of water. It dissolved into sludge in seconds, so I threw back the sandy, grainy stuff like a man doing a shot of tequila. You need your potassium, you know. I imagine it could’ve been worse: I could’ve choked on a potassium tablet, stood up in my struggle to breathe, set off the FALL RISK alarm, vomited up potassium chunks, pissed all over myself, and collapsed for the nurses to find me in a puddle of my own urine on the floor. So I’m thankful that didn’t happen.
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I recently watched Fire Walk with Me again in preparation for seeing Twin Peaks: The Return. I’d seen the film in the theater when it came out and wasn’t impressed. This second viewing has me surprised at its depth. (Younger me missed the nuances, I imagine.) Sheryl Lee’s portrayal of Laura Palmer is as wrenching a performance of a profoundly abused young woman as you’ll ever see. Overall, the movie’s horribly disturbing, and Lynch put a lot more care into it than you might think. It goes off the rails in some places, but even then you can’t help but be riveted. I never want to see it again. Too disquieting.
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There are a number of issues surrounding James Gunn’s ouster from Disney that haven’t been addressed in the popular press, so I’ll outline them here.
- Disney is in the business of entertaining children. It would be an extremely troubling business decision to employ a man given to making jokes about raping children, so they wisely canned him.
- James Gunn didn’t just make a few little jokes about raping children. He made a lot of jokes about raping children. So many jokes that a normal person would conclude that this was an issue that took up a great deal of Gunn’s mental space. Whether he was a perpetrator, a victim, someone with pedophilic fantasies, or just a man with a horribly sick sense of humor wasn’t something that Disney, as his employer, needed to get to the bottom of. Best to let him work that out on his dime, not theirs.
- Through frequent public pronouncements, Gunn made himself a political activist, railing against the current presidential administration. When you’re a political activist, you become a target for political activists on the other side of the aisle. It’s possible his collection of disgusting jokes would have remained under the radar if he hadn’t decided that about half his viewing audience were racists, bigots, or idiots because of who they voted for POTUS. But he did decide that, and he’s reaping the consequences of that decision.
- James Gunn celebrated the firing of Roseanne Barr for making an unacceptable joke on Twitter. He made himself part of the outrage mob when it would have been easier to just keep his mouth shut. Does he really deserve pity after that? Now that he knows how it feels, he’s not likely to join another outrage mob again.
- The American left has weaponized social media against anyone it disagrees with since the first Facebook profile was uploaded. That normal people are now doing this to the left should come as a surprise to no one. It’s ugly and divisive, but the alternative is to allow an unhinged, amoral mob to continue to use a tactic that works. It’s a delight to see the left, embodied in an intellectual lightweight like James Gunn, eat it the way normal people have had to for years. Like it or not, normal people are now looking for Hollywood scalps. These new rules sure do suck, don’t they? This isn’t going to end, either. The progressives should’ve considered that.
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