This was a state of emergency. . . . . . emergency surgery.

Up to this point, "immortality" and I had been great friends-- myself akin to a red-bearded Aeleoeus, the jolly king of the winds who greeted Odysseus and his band of men on his rock-strewn palace grounds, held a feast of great merriment in their soldierly honor, and sent them home at last with a cap o' wind in their sails like the mightiest host in the world.

There I sat around in the great hall of the joyous-- full of great, throaty, full-bellied laughter-- reading the vulgar truths penned forth in "Ragnar Redbeard's "Might is Right" and pounding my leather-sheathed fist on the table as the golden wine goblets shook and tears of merry-making streamed down my cheeks. It was an over-the-top social-Darwinist tract published in 1905 that made short bloody work out of all the sacred precepts found in Christianity, Democracy, and charity like a Viking taking the diseased skull of liberalism and splitting it with the pagan axe of hatred out in the public square for everyone to see. The fact that the heavens did not open in a hail of white light and send down angels and cherubs with the calling of trumpets was the running punch-line as weevils & maggots squirmed on the table.

Then the pain in my side came, and I might as well have been a shivering cur stalking around a low-haunt with preposterous, snaggle-toothed circumstance. It felt as if someone had stuffed Thanksgiving stuffing inside of me and like I was a swollen turkey walking on two legs and flapping about my business. No less a man than an animal, I tried to "chase it away" with over-the-counter medicine but soon realized something deeper was wrong. The pain kept getting worse as I laid on the couch in a teeth-gritting doze. My Jungian mythic impression was one of this this sickly green light coming out of a dark wood, and as you go deeper into this wood of rocks and mossy trees you find this glowing stone that's oozing poisonous rays throughout the kingdom. Somehow, a great ancient evil has been aroused from the depths and must be stopped at the source.

As it turned out, my appendix had exploded and needed to be removed pronto.

When I woke up in the hospital, I now realized a new kind of pain-- the one of a deep incision that had cut through me like a carved roast. So entered the dark twilight of recuperation's shadows. Nothing but sleep. . . . . and drugs. . . . . and time.

And a strange sense of humility as you depended on others for things you always took for granted, like getting out of bed or even reaching for your glasses. You weren't aloud to drink anything, except to allow ice chips to melt in your mouth like a beached killer whale lying on its side with its jaws flexing open. If you waited enough hours then eventually you would have some ice water that the nurses pretended not to notice.

They gave me pain-killers. . . . . not enough to "walk amongst the stars" in shamanistic ecstasy, but I had become very gentle and passive like "a flower-child" sitting in a tee-pee of some pretty strange half-awake visions. All of a sudden, the idea of crushing the diseased skull of liberalism with the pagan axe of hatred and yanking the picnic blankets underneath the bottoms of Woodstock attendees seemed to come from a previous life very unlike this one, when I was the ward of others and in no shape to sit up and beat on my chest like "King Kong"-- even in jest.

In fact, I couldn't get out of bed at all. . . . .

The most dreaded part of the day was being helped up by a nurse-- folding my gut forward and creasing the raw, dripping, bandaged wound-- and padding around the hospital in a walker sooner so it didn't become harder later. This was nature at it's cruelest, and my most humble moment was sitting on an open toilet with a 300 pound black nurse who sternly directed me to wash myself off with a soapy washcloth as I half collapsed against her shoulder.

It made me think of oil canvasses from the romantic age of everyday life, of nurses and patients living in the ruins of Rome. Grape clusters sprouting from Doric columns and the healing baths of hot spring water, the fine linens of the lusty Italians like the backdrop of a bad "Yanni" album.

In about a week, they sent me home with a bottle of Oxycontin. What I noticed about my regimen of medicine and recuperation, was how sluggish and tired I felt. It was almost as if my body was hibernating while my mind was not as sharp or quick as it used to be.

Something else I noticed, was that when I ate food-- and this is when it gets really strange-- it's almost as if you were throwing rocks down a deep well yet hear no "splash". Drop money in a piggy bank, shake it around, but hear no rattle. And when you unplug "the cork" at the bottom and peer inside with one eye closed, you notice that all the change is glommed up there and "isn't moving".

What gives?

I shrugged and figured that when it was time, my body would tell me. . . . . like an Indian warrior standing on top of a misty mountain and consulting with the gods, his Manitou telling him "the caribou will come, my son. The caribou will come". Yes, the cycles of nature and its concomitant arrow of inevitability that struck sure for all my years wandering around the trees and rivers and dropping my britches like a twitch-mustached Kit Carson.

One night when I was watching television seven evenings later, I padded down to the bathroom in my slippers and gently closed the door. What followed should have been put to a Wagnerian score, "Overture of the Rebel Angels Storming Heaven".

This was the armored hordes of Genghis Khan and screaming horses, this was demons being run through with a sword with their faces twisted into the rictus of a bellow, the Panzer tanks crushing the naked belly of Europe, the great ice-wolves tearing out the intestines of a honking platypus, frost giants of the convulsing end of "Ragnorak" casting down boulders, "Chief Thunderfuck" burying his axe into the skull of "The Great While Buffalo" with a chilling war whoop, and finally, "The Beast"-- Satan himself-- thrown down in a hole so deep, so wide, and so forsaken from God's grace that nothing was left but for the fiery belch of magma jetting out of the earth like vegetable juice of warning. . . . . to eat a balanced diet and take in more fiber.

To make a long story short, we had to call a plumber.

You may want to know what happened to those towels. . . . .

Dad took them outside and torched 'em. And there was my dog Buckley, dancing on the end of a chain and panting. He thought it was a game as a foul stench licked toward the sky in a black fog.

Dumb dog!

We called the doctor about this "little problem", and he said that was to be expected. It was well known that Oxycontin and such things slowed your bowels to a crawl, even with the tiny little amount I was taking, except that no one ever told me the news. He prescribed a giant tub of "TurboLax"-- but I won't even get into that story.

(It's too vulgar)

That's a private joke shared among the men in our family. . . . . and that plumber's drinking buddies when he had to come out a second time.

If any of you out there haven't stopped already, quit before the next "house-call" is going to be your local undertaker, because he's going to be the one professional paying you a visit with a shovel. . . . .

*******************

"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Rheeee of Crickets)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

("I heard that, Missy!")