January 4, 2022

"If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise" -- William Blake, Proverbs of Hell.

I have been thinking about this quote a lot lately, when reflecting on what I learned in 2021. At the beginning of 2021, I believed I would be able to travel and return to "normal life" by May, or maybe June at the latest. However, the pandemic never truly came under control, and my plans were somewhat curtailed. So I spent a year making stone soup of sorts, trying to broaden my horizons with the limited resources I had available.

And some of those things were kind of silly. I wrote write-ups about things like comic books, 45 RPM records that I bought for a quarter each, Ace Double Novels, and books that I found at The Dollar Tree (and one of the reasons for Dollar Tree shopping was that it was a place where I could stock up on a lot of staples for cheap, and find a book or two to keep me occupied). Sure, I also found some serious literature, such as All the Names and The Double, by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago (which I found in a Little Free Library), but much of what I read was driven by necessity. So what have I learned by obsessively cataloging pop culture detritus? Well, more than I can say. During November and Iron Noder, I hit 40 writeups (although, of course, some of those were low on content. In December, I decided to see if I could repeat at least 30 writeups, and it turned out that I could. And that period of activity made me think about, and realize many different things. Not as a direct consequence, but just as part of the process of writing about things, I came to a deeper understanding of the world, and also invented a way to do arithmetic with transfinite numbers. Does that seem like a silly thing to say? Well, check the quote at the top.

To be serious, though, we are constantly bombarded by messages, at various points along a spectrum from innocent to sinister. One of the reasons why we are now entering the third year of a deadly pandemic, with some of the blame going to a societal problem with being unable to filter out bad and malicious information and propaganda. Yesterday, as a joke, I wrote several paragraphs about a snack I ate. But I also take these things seriously: by examining the social contexts that even small things are presented to me with, I realize how much my conscious and experiences are constructed. My thesis here, in serious terms: if anyone takes 30 minutes to explain a common phenomenon or experience in a structured way, they will start realizing things that are both useful and enjoyable. And so that is my challenge for the year, our collective path back to sanity: pick something to experience and explain, enjoy looking at it from different angles, and see what you learn from it. No matter how silly it seems at first, you will get somewhere with it.

I am now half-way legitimate.

The rare disease site, here: https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/ has a section on PANS. It says "Symptoms typically begin during childhood but may begin at any age." So, an adult can have PANS.

But why half-way, you ask.

Well, the trouble is that United States pediatricians still mostly don't believe in it and adult physicians either haven't heard about it at all or have heard about it and say, "But that is pediatric."

Yes, but it's an antibody disorder and antibodies are lifelong. At least, sometimes the immune system doesn't work as well in the truly old, which in my book is over 90.

This reveals something curious to me. Almost NONE of the doctors I have been to are curious about it. My primary care doctor, who I'd been seeing for seven years and who sings in chorus with me, did not read the link about update on treating pandas. I got fairly annoyed. She says, "I have 3200 other patients." I switched primary care doctors, to one that I think DOES have intellectual curiosity. This explains a little why some doctors can see 18 or more patients a day. They stay in their wheelhouse. The cardiologist says, "It's not your heart. The pulmonologist needs to find an overarching diagnosis." I point out that I am on my fourth pulmonologist since 2012 and none of them have come up with one. The only person who suggested any overarching diagnosis is the psychiatrist who retired in 2013. Clearly he had intellectual curiosity to the end of his career, because he was reading about pediatric neuropsychiatry even when he did not take care of children. The physician who first told me about PANDAS is an Infectious Disease specialist and he already believed in it in adults, so I had no idea that it was controversial. He is now head of my state Health Department for fighting infectious disease.

So I am still in the category of rare diseases where no one in my state can or will believe me and/or diagnose it. They also don't know how to treat it. However, I found a conference.

https://pandasnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/1018110_Childhood_Encephalitides_Broch-8_5x11-122321-4aDIGITAL_Final.pdf

Virtual and inexpensive, so I am signed up. The physicians are mostly neurologists and in New York State. This should be very interesting.

No wonder I have trouble with 18 patients a day. Because if I had a patient with something unusual or new or different, I read about it. I am curious. I am here to learn every day.

And no wonder I don't fit in with my doctor peers here. I feel like I am a different damn species than them.

A while back, I discovered an issue with my name at Goodreads. The curators or "librarians" there had identified two of me. One had the first name "J.D." and had written The Con. The other used my preferred "JD" and he was the author of the forthcoming Live Nude Aliens and Other Stories. They promptly addressed the problem. Since I had taken possession of the original author page, they found it easiest to just merge "JD" with the existing "J.D."

Amazon now has a similar issue. "JD" wrote The Con but, apparently, "Jd" is the author of the forthcoming collection. Amazon is taking longer to respond, beyond the bot that has informed me that I may be inquiring about two authors with similar names. I await the inevitable human who might clean up this mess, with two months before the next book release. Fortunately, the situation does not affect the ability for people to order either off Amazon.

The return of COVID restrictions has complicated our lives again. Wanting to clear my head, I went for a walk around four to the local park. In the 1870s a private company started excavating the land, seeking stones for building construction. In the 1930s it became city property and took on the status of an informal park and parking lot. It became a maintained park proper in 1958.

As a result of past excavations, the land sits flat between two levels. If you approach it from the south side (an alleyway between houses) or the east side (a dead end street), you approach at ground level. The park opens up at the end of each roadway. If you approach from the north or west sides, you walk along the top of a steep embankment with an unobstructed view of the park. With school delayed two days to reopening, those embankments were filled with kids and families on toboggan and sled and crazier conveyances. One toqued man and his child achieved maximum speed due, I suspect, to his weight and their excellent positioning, and crossed the midpoint of the park, further than I have seen anyone go. The stood up with a sense of triumph, the envy of the people who'd had to move out of their way.

So long as people are hurling themselves down dangerously steep snow-covered hills for fun, I know the pandemic has not broken us.

The animals who typically use the park in winter might be less impressed.

On my way back, and just around the corner from our house, I looked up to see what seemed large flapping wings high up a roadside tree. I picked up my pace, taking from pocket my cell and setting the camera to video.

A raptor was engaging something in the knothole of a tree. I managed to capture footage of the hawk (I originally identified it as a falcon after looking at pictures of various birds of prey that might be found locally. A friend tells me it's a red-tailed hawk) flying out with a squirrel in its claws. The prospective meal proved uncooperative and, frankly, heavier than I think the hawk had hoped, and the bird dropped the mammal before flying up and landing on a wire.

I think we have all felt like that squirrel.

The hawk stood, somewhat awkwardly. The squirrel took positions around the nearest tree. I had not intended to provide protection for my fellow mammal. Where I stood to get the best shot, however, proved a bit intimidating to the hawk. It looked down at me, like, "hey, dude! I can't swoop down with you there! You do understand I want to eat that guy, right? That’s my lunch!”¹

I think we have all felt like that hawk.

I eventually moved across the street, but the squirrel had evidently found a new hiding spot. It was cold, and I returned to my house. Nature red in tooth and claw, on St. James Street.

1. Jet-Poop's version went: "Begone, unfeathered biped! I seek the tasty wiggling mammal! You are in my way, biped!"

Birds of prey can be annoying. Last summer, something very large dropped the remnants of a skunk into our back yard. We suspect an osprey, since we have them locally, they don't exclusively feed on fish, and I had seen one twice in our area. That is, I had seen something flying overhead, clearly a bird of prey, that was far too big to be hawk or falcon. Our feathered friend in my video could not have taken off with a full-ass skunk.

In any case, our back yard reeked. I easily disposed of the head and tufts of fur that remained, but we kept coming across skunk vertebrae for the next couple of weeks.