Diogenes and Dentistry
Oh it kills/I ain't chill at all
It's been an eventful week at Magpie HQ, but not exactly an exciting one. Work is going full-blast, and I've been able to get a bit more sleep, if only because I'm solidly exhausted. My two days off this weekend were dominated by work too - first the Christmas party, and then the 24hr hangover I was left with the next day. I did it to myself! I have no excuses. I know I can't drink red wine without suffering, but my boss has such excellent taste in beverages that I ended up having a few glasses too many. It was a ton of fun though!
As of Wednesday morning, Whistler has yet to receive a significant snow dump, and obtaining my ski pass has fallen down my list of priorities. Other things I've forgotten about - making a big batch of lentil stew so I don't have to eat sad canned soups for work lunches, getting in touch with several Whistler acquaintances, and daily showering.
It's so hard to remember to stay clean! At least, hard to stay clean enough for 21st century standards. I don't feel the need to shower until my hair is visibly greasy and my skin starts to itch, a product of thru-hiking. The boundary between needs and wants becomes crystal clear in an environment where you can take only what you really, truly require. Since I have to drive to the gym to wash, it's another task on my to-do list that consumes about half an hour, and then requires a considerable amount of drying time spent lounging in The Core's foyer, so my hair doesn't freeze and turn into a puff-ball. In the Early Modern era in Europe, a weekly bath was considered quite enough, aided of course by fashions that required the use of layered cotton undergarments. I can't remember where I read this, but I recall an experiment done by some lifestyle magazine where the journalist in question wore Victorian underlayers under the same period outfit for a week, and found that changing her underthings daily made her no more smelly than your average hippie health store clerk. Cotton takes up the sweat and bacteria that would otherwise stay on the skin and make you stink - laundering these is sufficient to remove most offensive bodily odors.
But sadly, I live in the present, and so I can't get away with washing fortnightly. And I do enjoy feminism and synthetic clothing, so I suppose it's a net win overall. In between my gym visits, I use dry shampoo and baby wipes to keep myself reasonably fresh, relying on a healthy skin microbiome to take care of the rest. I'm of the opinion that filth is good for you - the more bacteria, the better. It's just a trick to find a deoderant that doesn't make me break out in rashes, but smells good even after a day or two of sweat. I wonder if there's ever been a study done on microbial population changes after significant time spent in the outdoors. I drink from streams, sleep on the ground, poop in holes, and just generally get the environment all over myself. Surely I must have a different range of bacterial tenants than a typical office worker, maybe even a better one? Anecdotally, I've noticed that my skin and digestion improve significantly after time spent on trail, and I wouldn't be surprised if my intestinal flora has shifted to a more efficient array of carbohydrate-digestors. I never was naturally thin before thru-hiking, having the sort of metabolism that gained weight just by looking at a sugary treat. But after years of sleeping out, I've become one of those annoying people who eats a random assortment of garbage and yet remains svelte. It could be a side effect of my many medications, some of which suppress appetite or cause nausea if taken on an empty stomach (a fun combo), but I think there's something more going on. I smell different. The feeling of being full has changed, and I crave different macronutrients. My sweet tooth is still omnipresent on trail, where I need to pack in as many calories as possible, but in civilised life I find that I more often wish for salty, cheesy snacks or a fatty protein bomb. Cheese popcorn and a bag of cold cuts is my most common bedtime snack. Pizza and Thai curries are the height of indulgence. You can pry this samosa out of my cold, dead hands!
My sweet tooth got me in some trouble this week though. Driving to my bedtime spot, I stopped at the grocery store to reward a long hard day with box of my favourite cookies - mint-chocolate milanos. I bit into the first delicious wafer and - crunch! A sharp jolt of pain shot through my front tooth and up into my sinuses, initiating an immediate runny nose and a whimper of surprise. In my bike accident in 2016, my two front teeth were severely damaged, necessitating an emergency root canal on the right incisor and prosthetics on both. The left tooth was topped with a temporary cap until the swelling went down and then I left on my cross country cycling trip, immediately forgetting that I needed to get it replaced with a permanent crown. Four years later, the filling had deteriorated to the point that an infection had crept into the interior of the tooth, causing the natural enamel to crumble. Another root canal was in order.
I went to work the next day delirious with pain, unable to drink or eat anything other than room-temperature tea and yogurt. It sucked. It sucked so much. Still, I powered through with extra-strength advil and infant's teething gel, and managed to get an emergency after-hours appointment with the local dentist. He confirmed that I did indeed have a low-grade infection that had probably been simmering for years, which explained the intermittent fatigue and mild fevers I'd been struggling with. I've received a few tentative auto-immune diagnoses over the years, but most doctors chalked it up to IBS or psychosomatic symptoms of PTSD. The dentist prescribed targeted antibiotics, gave me an injection of Novocaine to let me eat a real dinner, and sent me off with a three day supply of opiate painkillers and an appointment for surgery the next day. I promptly got stoned out of my gourd on codeine and spent a very pleasant evening in a trance of writing and bad TV.
“I'm going full opium den on this shit,” I texted my friend Kelly. “I've got candles and incense and grapes and everything. The candles are in my empty sink in case I fall asleep, don't worry. I'm not gonna burn the house down.”
She texted me back the next morning and I cracked up - Kelly doesn't share her writing publicly, which is a shame, since she's perceptively hilarious and has a fine turn of phrase. But I have her permission to share this response, which made me snort with laughter.
“I hope to hear how your main procedure went, but all in good time. You deserve to lay low in the den for some days as you recover, like the defiant, wayward son of an aristocrat who has taken up residence in the 'slums', found himself an unsuitable paramour and can be found nightly in the furthest corner of the notorious opium den; reclined upon a low bench with faded red velvet cushions, a German philosopher's book open and resting on your chest. And look, just because you're an "I've been to depths and back" Scorpio does not mean a root canal counts as a ‘mild thing!’”
I was in fact reading Hegel - well, I was propped up on pillows with “Phenomenology of Spirit” open to the introduction - so all I needed to complete this picture was a handsome lady of ill-repute, and a fine wool coat bearing the stains of my indulgence. If you find such a lady, give her my number. We can compare notes and set off on a international affair of devious harlotry, bilking unwise sons of royalty out of their money with our scanadalous ankle-flashing skirts and forthright boyish manners, before retiring to a sumptuously decorated set of apartments in the countryside to enjoy our spoils. I've always wanted to live in a romantic Victorian novel, except for the part where we both die of syphilis at the end. I've been working on my sonnets - let's do this thing!
The online writing course I'm taking has proved to be extremely fun. I spent my convalescence catching up on assignments, and thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of writing univocalic rhyming poems. Univocalics, if you're unfamiliar, are poems that use a single vowel. The example given by Jefferey and Joseph in the podcast was Ballad in A, by poet Cathy Park Hong. The first two stanzas go like this:
A Kansan plays cards, calls Marshall
a crawdad, that barb lands that rascal a slap;
that Kansan jackass scats,
camps back at caballada ranch.Hangs kack, ax, and camp hat.
Kansan’s nag mad and rants can’t bask,
can’t bacchanal and garland a lass,
can’t at last brag can crack Law’s balls
And so on, using only words that contain just the letter A.
My own attempts at this technique are rather clumsier but no less satisfying - the prevalence of silent “e” in the English language has frequently stymied me, forcing the poem's subject to change when the language becomes unrecognizably tortured or confused. I'm going to keep writing them, with the help of an online thesaurus. It's such a fun puzzle, akin to solving a crossword without needing to know about famous people from the 70s. “Words that rhyme with…” has become an autocompleting Google search, since I have yet to find a univocalic dictionary to help me cheat. Here are a few I'm proud of:
Extended fever
Enter the experts’ steel
See, here’s the spleen
Bleed then mend, feel
Redress never seen
LSD? Y/N?
My shy sybyl, fly
Hymns by pH synths.
Sky'd sylph, why cry?
Syzygy, thy myths
Peers
The legend begs defense, when vexed,
Few men bend serene,
Lest reverse, the reverence hexed,
the sexes level-seen.
Evenness perplexes these
Sere less-gentled gents.
Severest deeds, the present freeze,
The gendered scheme yet rent.
The help they seek -
Themselves, yet meek,
Feeble, sweet. She went.
A mad play, a walk
Dark black day,
A gal can't stay
Sad, as sharp as ash.
A man’s grab, nay,
Alarm, away!
A glass, a wall, a smash.
Unsub? Lunch.
Slush guts, yuck
Fun upchuck bug
Burp usurps luck
Run! Ugh. Rug.
What I'm Listening To:
You're probably wondering about the “Diogenes” part of this title, huh? Well, my rodent houseguest is still with me, though thankfully he has not yet reproduced. Since he lives in my trashcan, I considered calling him Oscar, but a mouse with such good digs could hardly be a grouch. I settled on naming him after the ancient Greek cynic, who famously lived in a barrel. Now that I've named him, it's even harder to convince myself to set kill traps, but if he makes my van his home for another week I'll sort of have to. I'm tired of cleaning down the stove with bleach and washing my dishes both before and after use.
Anyway, I'm listening to him rustle around every night. It's not great! He continues to be remarkably unbothered by my presence, and yesterday I almost succeeded in trapping him under a pot, only for him to wriggle out via the gap between the handle and the floor while I was grabbing a newspaper to slide under. I feel like Alexander the Great in the town square, truly. I too would like to be Diogenes, although maybe without the toxoplasmosis.
I've been listening to Elder Island's newest album fairly frequently - I could see this song being great for a ski-porn montage, if only for the lyric “falling to make you function” and the steady beat.
I'll report back on the mouse's progress in driving me insane. Leave your attempts at univocalics in the comments, if you like! You should try it, it's fun.
Talk soon, and take care!
-Magpie