I think my health has more or less returned to baseline. The stamina is back. I’m not feeling unwell in any particular way. I took a weekend out of town (under appropriate supervision) without incident so back to the usual grind I go starting tomorrow morning. With luck, I will be able to avoid further abscesses, episodes of sepsis, emergency surgeries and the like for the foreseeable future. I now just have to close up the unexpected two week hole in my life that is just now ending. Most things should track into place without much difficulty but I’m definitely behind on learning I Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana and will have to do some score pounding the next two weeks to bring myself up to speed. I’m also behind on a couple of legal cases but those can wait. I’ll get myself reoriented to all of that this next week.
This last two weeks taught me how very lucky I am. This is the first time in the nearly three decades I’ve lived in Birmingham that I have required significant physical help and my village proved to be quick to respond and the outpouring of concern, offers of help, actual in home help (I was nursemaided by a few friends for nearly a week once I returned home from the hospital), offerings of food, cards, texts, messages, and all the rest was a bit overwhelming. I’ve always been a little nervous about aging alone here in Birmingham but I think the life I have built for myself is going to see me through, no matter what the challenges may be. All of you who pitched in, and you know who you are, you have my deepest gratitude.
I was pretty much back to normal by Thursday of this past week so I kept to my long laid plans to spend a weekend out of town with my friend Patti Steelman doing the theater thing. We went to Atlanta on Friday and had a very good vegan dinner at Cafe Sunflower in Buckhead followed by a trip to The Shakespeare Tavern theater to see a production of Much Ado About Nothing. (Not my favorite Shakespeare comedy – I find Dogberry, Verges and the watch painfully unfunny and I really dislike the shaming of Hero scene as it’s so mean spirited). But it was well done and a good time was had by all. On Saturday, we continued on to see Frank Thompson on stage in Columbia, SC as Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls (quite a good community theatre production). Got to spend a few hours catching up with Frank overnight before we returned back to Birmingham today, fighting our way through the early rainbands of the promised storm system and through far too much construction on I-20 throughout the state of Georgia.
Time to look at the state of the world, something I’ve been rather successfully avoiding most of this past week. The public health sector seems relatively quiet. They’re still trying to make an MD without an actual license the surgeon general and she seems to be trying to hold fast to antivax credentials while acknowledging the wisdom of vaccinating children. It’s a sort of contortion that’s likely to snap her spine but I’m not sure she actually has one. A number of Republican legislators seem to have come to their senses and recognized that the anti-science anti-medicine movement within MAGA may be going too far and they are quietly pushing back and some of the more ridiculous bills that are being brought forward are being quietly quashed. I’m still expecting more measles outbreaks and I won’t be surprised if we see the return of polio this summer.
On the immigration front, we seem to have reduced the pressure on Minneapolis but ICE is popping up all over the place and continues to violate judicial orders and constitutional norms on a daily basis. Every time I look, there’s another story about the illegal detention of an American citizen, legal immigrants being disappeared from courthouses as they go through the process of obtaining citizenship, and symbolic targeting of family members of political opponents of the administration. The most recent one being the taking of a veteran who lost both legs in Iraq, husband of a Democratic house candidate, and legal and on path to citizenship and holding him in squalid conditions for weeks.
DHS, with their untold riches courtesy of the Big Beautiful Bill, appears to be buying up property to use as mega detention centers holding up to 10,000 detainees in relatively small areas. Might as well refer to them by their proper designation, concentration camps. From what I can discern, the contracts for creating these facilities and their operations seem to be held by insta-companies created by administration insiders. I’m interested in the practicalities. How are they going to feed that many people confined in small space? None of these buildings are equipped with large commercial kitchens. Where is the water to come from? The federal government does not appear to be dealing with local governance regarding such things as water/sewer/power grid. How would they be evacuated in an emergency? I have a feeling in a year or two we will find that hundreds of millions were spent and there’s little to show for it. Sexual abuse of young female detainees appears to be rampant with little being done to curb it but this is the same administration which won’t confront the Epstein files so there’s little surprise there.
Then there is the situation on Iran. The two basic conclusions that the last fifty years of geopolitical strategy has come to in regards to an attack on Iran is that 1. They would shut down the strait of Hormuz which will prevent a significant fraction of the world’s oil from reaching market (not to mention fertilizer, major precursor chemicals for most industrial processes etc. etc.) and 2. They would immediately activate their proxies such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis leading to escalation into regional war. The administration (or at least those with the decision making power which seems to be the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense, the president’s son in law and a couple of others) seems to have chosen to not pay attention to the conclusions of fifty years of study and, guess what, the strait is closed and the regional conflict is escalating. There were reasons why no previous administration attacked Iran.
Now we’re stuck with a war effort that’s costing a fortune, starting to cost American lives, and for which the administration can give no coherent report as to either strategy going forward, or objectives to be achieved. Instead, they seem to be flailing around looking for allies to help at least get the strait back open. Guess what, you spent the last year alienating all of our traditional allies with tariff idiocy, decimation of soft power programs, and downright insults. They have no interest in helping us out of a boondoggle of our own creation. There’s one person who could really help, and that’s Zelenskyy as the Ukraine has learned an enormous amount about modern drone warfare, both offense and defense. But Trump has more or less screwed that relationship with his Putin worship.
I’m prepared for gas, power, food, and travel costs to spike over the next few months. We may think it’s bad now but I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet. I can’t fix it. I’m just planning on getting up tomorrow morning, getting dressed, going to work, and saving the world one patient at a time. That’s all I’ve ever been able to do.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 