The Ritual of Coffee, Revealed

There’s nothing special about The Ritual of Coffee. It’s just a ritual, a time of focus before the meds kick in. I don’t cast a circle or anything, although I do light candles. I like working by candlelight in the winter hours.

When I wake up, usually without the alarm, sometime shortly before six, I get out of bed and walk to the kitchen and turn on the kettle, which I filled the night before. I go back to the bathroom and light a candle. My clothes, which I also laid out the night before, are hanging on a butler hook on the inside door, and I do my business and get dressed, take my meds. I try to put my socks on balancing on one foot, just to test my balance. I snuff out the candle.

I go back out and the kettle is almost ready. I turn on a small overhead lamp under the cupboard to see what I’m doing. I take out a hand grinder, measure two scoops of coffee, take out a coffee mug and my big travel mug. The coffee I’ve come to love most is Vashon Island Roasterie, Medium Roast. I grind the coffee in a calm, measured way, turning the handle until it spins smoothly. I put it into the french press and by now the kettle is done so I fill the press one-quarter full. I set a timer for four minutes.

In that first minute, I make a circuit of the kitchen and feed the cats. Then I return to the counter by the kettle and fill the french press the rest of the way, gently breaking up the bloom. I use the remaining water to pre-heat the mugs.

At about forty seconds remaining I pour out the mugs and put in a teaspoon of sugar, each. Just before the alarm hits zero I stop it– don’t want it going off and waking Omaha, after all. Then I put the filter on the French press and slowly, gently, “with the weight of one hand,” press it down. Then I pour it out into the coffee mug and the travel mug. I add a shotglass of 2% milk to each and cap the travel mug.

Then I go outside on the back porch and sit for 15 minutes if the rain will let me, sipping my coffee and looking at my schedule for the day. I drink about half of it. Then I go back inside and make breakfast. If it’s raining, I sit at the kitchen table and look out the glass doors leading to the porch.

That’s it. No casting circles or knives, but it’s a centering ritual that orients me toward being awake, is a genuine pleasure that I can take, a time when the noösphere is almost empty, everyone is mostly asleep, and I can have a moment of soulful quietude and prepare for my day.

My COVID Hospitalization II: Vile Boogaloo

The story so far:

When last you left our hero, namely me, I had been discharged from Broward Regional Medical after being “observed” for three days following a diagnosis of Covid-induced spontaneous retroperiteneal hematoma. Omaha consulted with Alaska Airlines and I met their criteria (not mine) for flying, and I religiously kept my mask on the whole flight home because by all the unholy gods in the aligning stars’ sky I did not want to give this horror to anyone else.

I got home on September 25th and recovered fully from the ’Rona. I worked a full week. I had ordinary meals, performed The Ritual of Coffee consistently, cooked my own breakfasts, that sort of thing.

I made a comment to the nurse that on the 4th I had tried 5mg of cannabis for the first time since leaving for Florida on September 8th, and wondered if this was the infamous cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome. “No way,” she said. “Five mil? No way. The people who get that do a lot of pot. Like, tons, every day. They don’t have jobs.”

On October 5th, I thought I had a bout of food poisoning. I began to throw up, badly. It got worse, and on the 6th, I went to the ER at St. Anne’s, formely Highline Medical Center. Burien’s population has grown by 60.5% since Omaha and moved here in 2020 to start our family, but St. Anne’s still has the same sized ER it had in 2000. (We should know; Omaha’s epilepsy brought us there many times over the years.) I waited eight hours to be seen. The guy who saw me ordered a blood draw, saw I had a pancreatic lipase number over 100 (normal is less than 70, “bad is over 1000,” he said. “I’ve seen a few.”), diagnosed me with pancreatitis, and sent me home with an anti-nausea medication and told me to adopt a liquid diet– clear broth, black tea, apple juice, jello.

The pain and vomiting got worse. It established a very distinct pattern, two hours of cycling up to purge, followed by a few hours of relief. We went back the next day, and were told the wait was 9 hours. We bailed, and I made an emergency call to my GP. They immediately scheduled me for the next day.

Dr. Hsu saved my life. My gods, she was furious. “They did no imaging? They can’t just diagnose you with pancreatitis! You had a hematoma, what if this is pancreatic hematoma? That number makes no sense. Go back to the ER! Go now! Go to a different ER, a bigger ER.” I suggested UW Valley View. “Valley? Very good. I will call ahead to make sure they see you, but go! Go now! Go! GO!”

In 2021, despite being the most vaccinated town in Washington State, our population contracted by 1.3% for the first time. Part of that was Burien has a lot of nursing homes, and COVID was brutal before vaccines became available.

We took a Lyft. I was early enough in the cycle I didn’t think I would throw up in his car, and fortunately I was right. I was admitted and scanned immediately.

The stomach’s outlet is called the pyloric valve. Just below that is the start of the small intestine, including the bile ducts that transfer bile from the liver to the intestine to aid in digestion. Just below that is the start of the intestine proper, the duodenum. The blood mass of the hematoma had shifted and was pressing against the duodenum, blocking it and causing the bile to back up into my stomach. My vomiting was bile reflux disease. The liver produces as much as two liters of bile a day. Gross, huh?

I was immediately put on a stomach pump, which is one of the most traumatic and disgusting medical procedures that has to be done conscious. It’s unnatural to shove something up your nose and then past your gag reflex. It hurt, and the tube rubs against the gag reflex constantly, causing pain and irritation. I’m allowed menthol lozenges and “icewater swabs” to reduce the pain.

My collapse from dehydration was almost comical. They couldn’t find a wheelchair on the floor, so they used an office chair to transport me back to my room. It was humiliating.

I was then wheeled into endoscopic surgery, where a second tube, a feeding tube, was inserted (thankfully while I was unconscious) through the constriction into the “still functional” part of my small intestine. And for the past six days, I have eaten or drunk nothing at all. It’s all been pap and water forced down that tube. Oh, and extra water put intravenously, because… I don’t know why. They won’t explain why they won’t give me enough water. But I feel dehydrated constantly, and I’m getting weaker by the day. On Tuesday I did a few knee push-ups and four laps around the building; on Wednesday I just did four laps; on Thursday I did half a lap before almost passing out from dehydration.

Nothing else is being done. I’m being “observed.”

Thursday morning, I had a minor emergency: the stomach pump tube had come loose in the early morning and I woke up soaked in my own bile. I was helped into the bathroom to take a shower, rigging up the “child’s height” showerhead so I could sit on the floor and wash my hair and body while the staff changed the linen and cleaned the bed. While I was there, another nurse came in and found me on the floor of the shower and was this close to triggering the “patient fallen” alarm when the first team returned with the clean linen and explained that I had sat down deliberately. “He wanted to sit that way instead of a chair. He says he can’t fall off the floor.” That incident used up all my spoons that day. When Omaha and Julian came to visit, I fell asleep, and they waited three hours for me to wake up.

Oddly, when I did wake up, we played a round of Boggle and my words are still all there; I scored the highest of all three, although both of them were close.

My friends and family have been visiting regularly. My daughter gave me her lip balm, “the dial has been chewed a bit by my pet rat,” but it’s wonderful, it’s the only thing that keeps my lips from falling off since I’m now a requisite mouth-breather. Both Julian (my son) and Omaha have brought me my gear– my laptop, books, headphones, and the charger for my phone, plus USB cables to recharge everything else. They’ve been so understanding and wonderful, and I have come to realize how much I’m loved, both by the real people in my life, and by my alters, so I guess that means in the final analysis I a like myself too, although as always, I could do more.

The nurses are awesome and patient, but they say I’m not a very difficult patient. I’m trying not to be. But I’m so tired of this. Today is the sixth day without eating or drinking, and last night all I could dream of is food and cool, clear water.

ADHD makes learning Shibari that much harder

One of the symptoms of my ADHD/interictal syndrome/whatever the fuck this is has reared its head in my learning how to tie people up.

When I was a small child, one of the tests they did to determine my ADHD was a orientation test, and it went something like this:

“You are facing north. Turn left, turn right. What direction are you facing?”

“North.”

“You are facing South. Turn left. Left again. What direction are you facing?”

“North.”.

“Okay. You are facing north. Turn left. What direction are you facing?”

“East.”

You are facing north. Turn right. Turn right. Turn left. What direction are you facing?"

“East.”

Essentially, my north and south were always correct. My east and west were always random. And they couldn’t figure out why. But I knew why: I didn’t know what direction “left” or “right” was.

But I knew that if I was consistent, then “left” always meant turn their same way. “Right” meant, for that particular session, turn the opposite way.

Every time I started, when they said turn left or turn right, I could easily have gone clockwise or counterclockwise. At random. Because I had ADHD, I couldn’t pay attention to directions like that.

I remember when I was learning to tie my shoes, my mother had such a trial teaching me which direction to wrap the string around my thumb to make the loop for the bow. I could never know if I was going up over the the thumb or below the thumb. Of course, every kid was taught to go up and around the thumb, not down and around the thumb, and with enough effort I eventually memorized “tie up, tie up.”

I have rediscovered this problem while practicing my Shibari knots because I can’t remember which direction to make the loop for the final tie to make the cuff for a single column. I do it clockwise or counterclockwise at random. That information doesn’t stick in my brain.

I’m going to have to repeat it a lot until it does stick.

The special irony of the shoelace anecdote is that it has long been known that going under the thumb while making your loop actually creates a stronger and more balanced knot that is less likely to come undone during the course of the day.

Here's a TED Talk (eyerolls are acceptable, but it's only three minutes long) documenting how the "going under" version of the knot is better:

Watch on YouTube

Yes, my lacerated face is "from COVID," not "with COVID."

I’m stuck in the hospital again with very little to do, so I’m Very Very Online now, going through Twitter, and there’s been a spate of COVID denialism and or “The COVID emergency is overblown.” And I really want them to come say that to my exploded abdomen, lacerated face, and broken intestines.

And the worst is that “How did you get a lacerated face from COVID?” I explained that I developed “Covid-induced retroperitoneal hemorrhaging.” The blood loss caused me to pass out, smashing my face onto the floor. The resulting blood mass in my abdomen is pressing against my duodenum, making it impossible for me to digest food.

“Ah, so COVID didn’t lacerate your face.”

If you’re sitting at a traffic light and some drunk douchebag slams into you from behind at 35 miles per hour and pushes you half over the car in front of you and you land into the left lane which is oncoming traffic and the oncoming car there hits you hard enough that through the deflating airbag you still fracture your nose against the steering wheel, you don’t blame the steering wheel, or the guy in the oncoming car, or the car you careened over, for fracturing your nose. No. You blame the douchebag who set the whole accident in motion.

This is common sense logic that any mature adult understands. So, yeah, by this common sense logic, my lacerated face is “from COVID,” not “with COVID.”