monday update

Still no word on if or when they'll do the graft. Walsh is rolling through it up on the eighth floor Burn Unit, marking off the days on the calendar on the wall like she's doing time, which she is.

Thank god for Percocet and her big brother Morphine.

The cruel thing about this particular dance is that the more she heals the more she hurts. And she's healing. Those tiny little skin cells are being born like crack babies, already damaged and screaming. But they have to keep coming.

What a horrible fucking thing.

The nursing staff are all amazing up there. Always humbles me when I watch people who've decided to spend their lives and make their money by helping people in pain. We've been under the kind care of Kathleen, Joy, Sarah Jane, Nelson and the implacable Zen. There's a Polish guy named Zen, walks around unsmiling, muttering to himself, whacking people in the face with a frying pan. Well, no frying pan, but he does mutter.

Other things have been going on as well, of course, like the five year anniversary of the Most Incomprehensibly Stupid and Damaging Thing This Country Has Ever Done, which is saying a lot.

We've been around for awhile, after all.

I keep thinking about how it would be different if Shame and Honor were still useful and effective societal tools. In earlier, more civilized times, when a public official did something so enormously foolish and then worse, bragged about it and kept insisting, against all evidence, that it was the right thing to have done, he or she would have been met by jeering and ruthless mocking whenever he or she stepped into the public view.

The idiot would have been shamed.

Nowadays, a guy says something to Cheney in Colorado and gets arrested. To paraphrase Ed Koch, "How we doing?"

I'm off to the hospital. Keep the good thoughts coming. No flowers or fruit and please no stuffed animals. She's not eight years old and where are we going to put a teddy bear in a New York one-bedroom?