~b

My brother Robin passed away, early this morning. Complications related to Parkinson's. He, more than anyone, is probably responsible for my love of science fiction, b-movies, b-movie science fiction. Robin was 10 years older than me, so when he snuck me into see Zardoz with Sean Connery when I was nine, I thought that was the coolest thing ever. That same year, he gave me The Hobbit. The last time we were together we watched Killer Tomatoes Eat France. He owned it, had it with him in the nursing home.

Rob was diagnosed with PD 15 years ago. Nonetheless, it's still shocking.

If you're waiting for something from me, it might have to wait a bit more.

Later.

[Daddio holds Isaiah in his arms and rocks backwards. Daddio doesn't see the elaborate wire bead game/scultpure behind him and clangs it loudly with his head.]

Isaiah: [looking startled by the noise] More.
Barth: More what? More rocking?
[Isaiah points indignantly at the wire sculpture]
Barth: What? You liked that noise?
Isaiah: Yeeeeaaaahhhh.
Barth: But that hurt Daddio.
Isaiah: [eyes gleaming] Yeah!
Barth: You want Daddio to hurt himself?
Isaiah: Yeah, yeah, YEAH!
Barth: You *want* Daddio to clock his head on the toy again?
Isaiah: Yeah.
Barth: You want Daddio to have a concussion?
Isaiah: [growling] Yeah!
[Daddio laughs and stands. Isaiah grabs him by the front of the shirt, like a young tough ready to beat him up. Iko points to sculpture again] More!
Barth: You're serious? You *want* me to bang my head again?
Isaiah: More, more, more!
Barth: OK. [Headbutts sculpture to peals of laughter]

I count my days by the bruises.

My silver bullet, the Maxalt, doesn't work anymore, I don't think. I took one last night, right at "the onset of migraine symptoms," and...nada. Goose egg. The vampire walked right up to me, slapped my crucifix outa my hand, and fed.

Luckily, yesterday morning, my doctor gave me a big handful of samples of something else, another triptan(Imitrex)-family product. Garden variety Imitrex makes me deathly ill for two days, and now the Maxalt has proved ineffective. But obviously, I'm right in the peak of my season, so I'll try anything. I mean, it was nice of him, if nothing else. It's about $250 worth of free pills.

Speaking of being deathly pale with fear, there's good horror reading at CSM, about an evangelical conference that's joining forces with Great Big Fascist Churches. A small conference with big plans. I especially loved this bit:

In material given to conference attendees, the Rev. D. James Kennedy, Coral Ridge pastor wrote: "As the vice-regents of God, we are to bring His truth and His will to bear on every sphere of our world and our society. We are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government ... our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors - in short, over every aspect and institution of human society."

Here's another good one:

"The country is getting further away from Christian values, and we're being stifled," says Debbie Mochle-Young, of Santa Monica, Calif. "Other nationalities are coming to live here and say, 'We want our beliefs,' but they don't let you have yours."

Given the choice, I'll still take the cranium-piercing migraine, thanks.

Three bills have cropped up in the Minnesota legislature in the past month: one to ban the use of atrazine in Minnesota, one to ban it after January 1, 2006, and one that would test well water and, if atrazine was found at dangerous levels, the soil above the well would be banned for ag use.

Minnesota is at the center of a nationwide fight over atrazine because (a) it's widely used on corn, (b) ethanol production, as you know, is going to save Minnesota family farms, he said, sneering with sarcasm, and (c), at shockingly low levels (.1 part per billion), atrazine turns male frogs into hermaphrodites - and humans and frogs have nearly identical hormonal cues. The work of Dr. Tyrone Hayes, despite corporate pressure to shut the fuck up, has been instrumental in these findings.

So if you live in Minnesota, especially rural Minnesota, contact your representative TONIGHT - and ask him/her to support HF 1224, HF 1248, and HF 1246. Atrazine has to be controlled at the state level now, since the EPA has sold us down the river: Ron Kendall, chair of the EPA's scientific advisory panel that refused to heed warnings on atrazine, is on the payroll of Syngenta, the corporation that produces atrazine.

Got a nice email from Juliet Ulman on Friday. Looks like my book, Patron Saint of Plagues, is on the Bantam Spectra calendar for a Spring 2006 release. Mark your friends and tell your calendars!

My love affair with Maxalt, wonder drug and migraine "silver bullet," is going sour. Thought I'd finally found something that works for me. Alas: Five migraines since Friday afternoon.

My prescription is only good for 9 tablets per week - which seemed pretty good when they were coming every day or every other day. This means that in the best case scenario, it'll be me alone against the skull-eating beast, mano a mano, by Tuesday - and four days after that till I can get a refill.

Oh well. Back to acupuncture and oxygen therapy? Why not...

I balanced the Minnesota state budget today (you have to log in to play, but do it - it's kinda fun).

How, you ask? Why, by closing corporate loop holes, raising income taxes to pre-1998 levels, hiking tobacco tax to absurd heights, and giving the green light to turning downtown St Paul into a giant casino (I justify this by telling myself that I'll return all surpluses to the Tribes, whom I'm screwing in the process).

Furthermore, under my administration, we've increased funding to every school at every educational level in the state (with class sizes reduced to 17 kids per class and college scholarships for low income students, naturally), repaired health care caps, increased state grants to artists, expanded organic ag in the state by $8 million (the game says I'm funding food safety efforts, but I know where the real money is: Organics), fully funded the required clean waters program, and put firefighters and police back to work after my Republican predecessor canned them in 2003.

The net result: Minnesota is back to being the tax and spend neocon nightmare that it ought to be.

Even though I have the silver bullets now, and I can knock out a migraine with shocking swiftness compared to, oh, 15 years of clutching the side of my head and waiting for the demons to leave my skull alone, I still have to act quickly and take the medication within minutes of feeling the first tremors and flutters of the coming headache. In the midst of a party? No problem. At work? Fine. But in the middle of the night, fast asleep, the whole strategy falls apart. I wake up with the migraine in full bloom, and then the medication seems to take centuries to hit my bloodstream, close up all those capillaries (so easy to imagine this as a diabolical counter-strategy to the silver bullet on the migraine's part). Last night, I had to crawl out of bed and walk around the dark house for 45 minutes, waiting, waiting, waiting. It's an agitated wait, too - can't just lie around or read or watch tv. Light hurts. Sound. And for whatever reason, even sitting in one place seems to intesify the stabbing. So, despite the fact that Maxalt really has no immediate side effects, I'm still losing sleep from even these abbreviated migraines, and that makes me muddy headed, sluggish, and generally low in spirits. Trying to write this morning, I was forgetting things as soon as I thought a thought, as if the migraine had breached a crack in my skull, and cool ideas dribbled away when I wasn't looking.

But even this is a huge improvement, as I've said, over the way things used to be with these headaches. Ever see the movie Pi? One of the most realistic movies I've ever seen...

The words and complete thoughts seem to be blooming right behind Isaiah's eyes. His mouth is still forming and his language centers are still wiring themselves, so these thoughts don't come out in sentences yet, but he sure wants them to. So instead, they come out in Tarzan talk.

"Ahz." Points to himself. "Da da da." Points to me. "Ma ma ma." Points to Lisa. "Pa pa pa." His shorthand for the Children's Museum, a syllable that's morphing into a catch-all phrase meaning "fun." Then he points to the front door. Thought: He wants us all to hop in the car and have some fun. (Or more likely, he's just bored and letting us know.)

Or this, while we sat together in that comfy chair in the sun room: "Ozza." That's Auggie, a friend of his. We were at Auggie's house to celebrate his 2nd birthday this weekend. "Hont." Yes, Hank was there. "Hayza." Hazel was there, too, yep. "Da da da." Right, Daddio was there. "Pa." Huh? "Pa." Fish? "Pa. Pa!" Potato? "Yeah." Oh, right, Daddio fed you some sweet potatoes at Auggie's party. "Yeah, yeah, yeah!" Then he dives on me, hugs me. He was remembering me feeding him in the only calm moment of a hurricane toddler party. We stay like that on the comfy chair in the hot sun, Isaiah on top of me and letting me hold him while he's still this small.

This is it. We just passed the official Quagmire Milestone, haven't we? News organizations can start refering to the Iraq War as "the quagmire," and tearful parents will be testifying before congressional committees, beseeching them to bring home the troops, yes? I mean, when your occupying army is firing on journalists and recently freed hostages, citizens of a major ally, then you're obviously descending into the Apocalypse Now dregs of warmaking. Troops being sent into hair-trigger craziness, where they can't tell ally from suicide bomber - shit, Viet Nam was a walk in the park compared to this.

I feel for the circles of blood and love waiting for someone to come home from this nightmare. But along with my sympathy is a feeling that they have to wake up, too, that they have to own up to what this war is: The elections are passed; Hussein is imprisoned; there's no meaningful talk of departure timelines in the press. You've been lied to. Repeatedly.

This is what a quagmire looks like.

Big Brother isn't your biggest worry. It's Little Brother who will put you away for double-plus ungood thinking.

In Kentucky, a boy's grandparents' found a zombie story in his bedroom, saw that it mentioned the kid's high school being destroyed - and turned his private papers over to the police. His fiction wasn't published, it wasn't passed around the halls or found in his locker, and from what I can tell, he didn't willingly share it with his grandparents. But that's irrelevent, apparently. From Lex 18:

[P]olice say the nature of the story makes it a felony. "Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it's a felony in the state of Kentucky," said Winchester Police detective Steven Caudill.

His grandparents fucking ratted him out and had him arrested and detained. Maybe he was a misfit. Wore black and one false eyelash. Swore. Maybe he kept to himself, the dirty little writer - I mean - terrorist.

There's probably a layer of family drama not being reported, but, nonetheless, this shows what many Americans have allowed themselves to become: Cowering participants in a burgeoning fascism.

(Via Vandermeer).

Variant CJD (Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease) may or may not be the human version of so-called Mad Cow disease, but whatever it is, it just got a bit scarier.

Back in the eighties, Microbiologist Stephen Dealler was one of the first scientists to warn the UK about the 90's Mad Cow outbreak that, at the time, was silently spreading through British herds. Needless to say, he was summarily ignored and Britain was forced to "cull" hundreds of thousands of cattle over the next decade. Now Dealler predicts that the British vCJD outbreak, currently on the wane with just 9 deaths last year, might actually be the tail end of what he calls the "first wave." His theory is that the incubation period of the disease is lengthy (anywhere from 25-40 years) and that many of the people dying from vCJD now were infected in the '70's by eating BSE tainted meat byproducts used in children's food, and that new waves of vCJD deaths may be on the way. From The Guardian:

[Dealler] argues that there were further infections in the mid- to late-1980s, when teenagers and others ate contaminated meat, including burgers. By then hundreds of thousands of cattle were carrying BSE and the tissues most likely to contain infection were not banned in food until 1989.

Babies are more susceptible to infection because their gut walls are more permeable, Dr Dealler said yesterday. But even in them the disease took about 25 years to take its course.

People infected later would take far longer, up to 40 or 50 years, to develop the clinical disease, indeed might never do so at all, but could still be in fectious; a nightmare for blood transfusion services, which depend on the under 40s for donations.

All this, of course, presupposes a link between vCJD and Mad Cow - a theory that has yet to be proven - but Dealler's track record with predicting future behavior of prion-based diseases is better than most.

An organic farming conference and a science fiction/fantasy convention have surprising similarities:

* Both are populated by a fringe group that assumes the majority culture despises them.

* Both have a very specific vocabulary and mode of communication that nearly prevents them from communicating outside their subculture.

* Both sport a near fanatic devotion in their attendees.

* Both are treated like freakshows by local media.

* Both have a trade show jammed with products you will probably never see for sale outside the con.

The big difference is in the general life-attitude. Unlike sff communities, organic devotees proseletyze with evengelical fervor and amazing effectiveness (the industry is growing at a 20% annual clip - unlike sff) and consequently, it's a surprisingly big tent. In the span of one meal, I'd had conversations with a conservative Iowan hog farmer, an earnest neo-hippie/punk, an urban diva turned ginseng farmer, and the patriarch of an Amish or Mennonite family.

It was a good convention for me. I passed out lots of business cards, hung out with old friends, chased Iko around the convention hall, and generally got my battery recharged by the heady atmosphere.

Elsewhere in the news, I made it to the doctor yesterday and got my script refilled for Maxalt.

I'm loaded for bear.