Auntie Weasel's Year of Suck

The sluggard's dilemma

Prologue

July 4 weekend, 2006

For years, Uncle Badger has tempted me with his wild, swashbuckling tales of the endless white sandy beaches, the azure skies and indigo waters, the handsome, friendly natives, the warm sunny days and cool tropical nights of the South Coast of England.

Eh. It's okay. I told him there were no snakes in Tennessee.

I don't know what he thought we were going to do with those topless girls in the grass skirts, anyhow. Perhaps they could be taught to serve us cocktails and little roasted pigs.

On sticks. Little roasted pigs on sticks. With little roasted apples in their mouths.

Truth be told, he got hisself a pretty good gig over there. Up noonish, unless he decides to sleep in. Makes tea, does some work. Walks on the beach for a while. Shops for supper. Comes home, naps, does a bit more work. Opens a bottle of something lovely in the evening and gets quietly sozzled before a coal fire arguing politics with morons on the internet. In the wee hours, he enjoys a large, traditional English supper in front of a traditional episode of the Simpsons. Up next day and does it all again.

Weekends, he takes it easy.

Reading the above is going to make him a Very Sad Badger.
Poor bastiche has had piles of extra work on this year.

Now, there's nothing wrong with the life I've got. I enjoy it very much, thanks. But I'd be a fool not to recognize the deep personal satisfaction that would grow from such a life of service and, you know, drinking good champagne and sleeping until noon.

Also, he doesn't mind my housekeeping, he smells extremely nice, and he prefers to do the cooking.
No-brainer, really.

Yo ho, yo ho, a badger's life for me

You see the problem, right? I'm lazy and moving is hard. Moving to a foreign land, across the wide Atlantic is really, really hard. Plucking yourself up by the roots and starting a whole new life in middle age is...

oh, god, Weasel. You fool! Don't look down! DON'T LOOK DOWN!!!

...let's just say, before I get the good life, I get a big ol' heaping helping of the bad life. Before I can take it easy, I'm going to have to take it hard. Before the decades of joy, the Year of Suck. Before the tall, cool cocktail on the veranda, the long, dry, hot...

...all the little, tiny people...like ants...

My own personal kick up the weasel

So, here's how I got off the fence after a decade of the barbed-wire wedgie: May 17th of last year - the eighth anniversary of the day I quit smoking, ha ha - I woke up with a lung infection. I guess. It started out with a tightness in my chest and rapidly progressed to a 'my lungs are filled with scrap metal' condition. My doctor's office phoned in an antibiotic for me, which may or may not have helped. I probably should've been in the hospital, but by the time I realized this, it was all I could do to drag myself from the bed to the bathroom and back. I got over the worst of it in a week, but it took months and months to recover.

When I was near my sickest that Saturday morning, I had two separate proselytizing groups appear at my door, Jehovah's Whatsits and some local church. I must've looked and sounded dreadful. When I croaked that I was too sick to talk, they thanked me and promised to come back when I felt better.

Hel-LO, Missionary-type Persons! How about, "are you okay? Need anything? Pint of milk from the store on the corner, maybe?" I really needed a pint of milk, too. I wouldn't have accepted anybody as my personal savior over it, but you know Jesus would've made the offer. Or sent a junior apostle, anyway.

When I had my regular checkup a couple of months later, I told my doctor how sick I had been. He looked shocked and and started flipping through my file. I suspect his nurse forgot to tell him. He scheduled me for a chest x-ray.

A few days later the nurse called and said there was a spot on my lung, and could she schedule a CT scan in the next few days?

At least, that's what she said she said. What I heard sounded more like, "OH MY GOD! THING! THING ON YOUR LUNG! THING ON YOUR LUNG! THING! THING! THING!"

I've been expecting that call, see. I smoked X packs of cigarettes a day since I was a fetus. Seriously, the doctor attending my birth smacked my bottom and then gave me a light. Doctors were cool about stuff then.

I could've told her right where that "spot" was, too. For years, I've had a sensation slightly to the right of my spine, like a finger poking me in the back. A nasty, secret worry of a nagging poke under the shoulderblade, like "hey, dumbass! It's me, Mortality."

I think it was ten days between the phone call and the follow-up appointment with my doc, by which time I had picked out the hospice I wanted to die in. It was in Hastings, I think. They give real, live heroin to the terminally ill in England.

To everyone who has walked in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, you have my sympathy. And my admiration. I was terrible at it. I was a wreck. A pussy. A giant, raw nerve ending on legs.

My doctor looked like wanted to slap me. He said, "you don't seem like the type." By which he meant shivering hypochondriacal nutbag, I guess. He said, "do you really think I wouldn't call you immediately if I thought it was serious?"

"Hm," I thought, "you're the sadistic bastard who pokes a finger up my weasel once a year for reasons that have never been entirely clear to me? Pass."

Well, I have a granuloma. Four of them, in fact. Basically, despite the scary -oma on the end, they're just tiny knots of scar tissue. The biggest one is about three millimeters across.

"Do you know how big a millimeter is?", he asked sweetly.
And I'm, like, "shut up, Doctor Wiseass."

He said nearly everyone over seventy has a couple of them that show up on x-ray, but it's unusual to find them in anyone younger. It's the result of an old inflammation or infection, most often exposure to TB. They're benign, as a rule.

"Have you ever lived in a third world country?", he asks.
And I'm, like, "Well, Tennessee. And art school."

So anyway, I learned things from my week on Death Row. I'm not haunted by anything in my past, apparently. I don't seem to have much in the way of regrets. There isn't left in me a hard kernel of unrealized ambition. I don't care about my stuff as much as I thought. All in all, I'm going to make a boring ghost. If I liquidated everything, there would be about enough to pay off my debts and ease myself out gently. Provided I don't linger. When you get right down to it, if I had a year to live, there are only two things I really want:

I want to be with Uncle Badger.

And I want a really good laptop. I mean a really good one, like an IBM Thinkpad. Or that Sony Vaio...you know, the little one with the titanium chassis.

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