Hey, I’m still alive, but I haven’t posted since May 27th and people are starting to ask. A lot of my writing energy is being sucked up into the final pieces of The Everything Machine, which is a full-length drumlins novel where I (finally) spill the beans about what the drumlins are and where they came from. Carol and I have been “going to church” online since COVID, and a couple of weeks ago we decided to attend in person. Four days later, I came down with the worst cold I’ve had in years.
Wait. It was the only cold I’ve had in years: specifically, since I began taking quercetin and zinc in the spring of 2020. Now, we both got COVID some time back, but we knocked it out with a 5-day course of HCQ and zinc. What this means is that we now have reliable natural immunity and I’m not worrying about catching the damned thing again. And just in case we do, I got a telemed firm to prescribe some ivermectin for us.
But this cold hit me in spite of the quercetin and zinc. I’ve begun to wonder if taking quercetin for four years has developed a tolerance for the drug in my system, rendering it less effective. This has happened a number of times in the past with other drugs. My response to drugs has peculiarities: A root canal procedure years ago showed that I do not respond at all to nitrous oxide. Nothing. I asked the dental tech if the gas was flowing. She took a whiff from the cannula and said, Yup, it’s flowing. Regardless, I ended up as tense as always, watching some movie in the TV mounted on the ceiling while they excavated a bad tooth.
After Colorado legalized RMJ in 2014, I bought a vape and tried it. Nothing. And I do mean nothing. I sometimes wonder if (as the first girl I ever dated said) I’m too weird for words. Shortly after Coriolis imploded, I got an acupuncture treatment to make me feel better. It worked! I felt better for…a week. I went back for another go. Nothing. Placebo effect? Probably. I’ve never entirely understood how sticking a bunch of needles in people acts against depression—or anything else.
As June wound down, we were delighted to have my sister’s family stay with us for a few days. They drove down from Chicago, visited some relatives in Texas, and stopped along the way to see the Painted Desert, Meteor Crater, and us. Gretchen stayed with us while my BIL Bill took their kids to VidCon in Anaheim. She’ll be here until next Sunday or Monday, when the rest of her gang heads back from Anaheim. In the interim I have some high-quality sister time, something that’s been scarce for the past few years.
I do have a couple of entries planned, but one of them has been in the works for months and I have yet to put a single word down on it. I have enough bullet points for an Odd Lots, which I intend to post today or tomorrow. June hasn’t been empty offline, which is why Contra’s been empty online. Time to get that particular train back on its track and steamed up.
