Ah, Memories

At long last, I have gotten a new phone. But now is not the time to talk about that. First I must eulogize my old phone. My old phone and I have been through many things together. There was that period where I could only take calls standing in a certain spot next to my chair. Not in the chair, of course, but next to the chair. There was that period where I would get cut off four times during one conversation. There was that period where I had to charge it daily, when I wasn't even using it, because its battery ran down at three times the speed of a normal phone. Happy times!

I feel like there should be a genre of jokes like the "yo momma so fat" jokes, except instead it would be like, "yo phone so old . . . it has an antenna." Yo phone so old, it only has eighteen buttons. Yo phone so old, it has buttons. Yo phone so old, you can't type parentheses on it. Yo phone so old, you can cover its whole screen with your thumb. Yo phone so old, it folds out. Yo phone so old, it can't take pictures. Yo phone so old, it doesn't have a calendar. Yo phone so old, it can't play music. Yo phone so old, you wait to answer it on three rings because you can't be sure it isn't a party line.

My phone is really old. My phone is so old I couldn't get my contacts and old texts off it, so I had to take pictures of the good ones.

This is like practically my first text ever. Sent to me by my boss. While I was sitting next to her. While we were manning the booth at the medieval conference at Kalamazoo.

This was followed by "Bill O'Reilly waxes his legs," which is almost certainly not true, and moreover not our business if it is, but we were really, really bored. Hence this text from Matt during that conference: "Personality assignment of the hour: Ann Coulter, drunk, and convinced she has a parrot on her shoulder."

Others that amuse me, and probably only me, include:

From Ivan: New favorite word for fin-footed mammals: pinnipeds. Second only to “dugongs” in awesomeness.

Also from Ivan: It’s all fun and games til someone drops their pants in the fire.

Also also from Ivan: We’ll just shave a normal cake. It will be fantastic.

From Matt: Gatie. Hdjekn. I aqe upridemfnxd. Ru are akso sassz. Pleare enej kibke ne   jtj!? <3Matt

Also from Matt: Was Ingrid Dutch? I can’t remember . . . (This really is only funny to me. But I find it hilarious.)

From Katie P, who never texts me, but felt it was important that I know who she was sitting across from on the train: Dark hair, olive skin, super light eyes, and no smart phone.

And this one, from Dan, who was standing outside my door at the time:

Goodbye, phone. You have served me well. Sort of.

Just Checking In

In case you wondered how Meridian: The Original Alpaca is doing, he is as handsome as ever.

His profile is still very distinguished.

And he has a healthy appetite:

My sister tells me one of her coworkers recently started an alpaca farm out of the blue. I anticipate this happening to me someday. I imagine it is like waking up one morning and realizing that everything is now clear. All the things you thought you wanted were just nonsense. What do you really need in life? To have a good-tempered and huggable alpaca nearby at all times. That is all. That, and maybe a capybara, a tiny house, and a snap-bracelet watch. Nothing else matters.

Halfway There

We have snacks at the office-- nothing fancy, but there's a good assortment of crackers, chips and granola bars. And apparently we also have someone at the office watching their weight, because half-eaten packets of food keep showing up in the snack basket. And someone, fed up with these rejected bags of partially handled comestibles, put up a sign... a warrant if you will, for "The Half Bandit", wanted for the crime of eating half of something and putting it back-- like anyone else would want it. This sign was seen as universally clever and stayed fixed to the cupboard door for several weeks. And today, I went to the kitchen for a coffee and found this:
Whoever ripped that sign in half... please be my friend?

Teeny Tiny

My dear friend and pen pal Natalie recently went to Ecuador. She wrote me a beautiful letter about her adventures and included some incredible pictures, including one of some butterflies that I honestly thought were fancy hair combs someone had for some reason dropped on the ground. I'm a bit slow sometimes.

Anyway, inside the envelope there were also these wee folks:

Look how tiny! They are about an inch tall. They look like worry dolls, but they don't seem to be worrying. I like them. I'm going to put them with my little alpaca (who is the size of a skyscraper to them, but whatever) and it will be my Very Small Exhibit of Very Small Things From and/or Relating to South America.

Great Giver of the Alpacas Keeps On Giving

My second issue of Alpacas Magazine has arrived. In this issue I learned about:

Attracting a barn-full to my farm event
It turns out that marketing in the alpaca industry is exactly like marketing in any other industry. Personally, I don't see why you would even need to market alpacas. If you just put up a sign that says HILARIOUS-LOOKING ANIMALS NEXT LEFT that would probably do it, right? Who wouldn't stop in?

Reinforcement in Applied Behavioral Analysis
The behavioral articles are always my favorite. Last time we learned about berserk alpacas. This time we learned how not to freak out alpacas so that they won't even come near you. Tip: don't lunge forward and hug them. They don't like that. In fact, nobody really likes that.

Sustainable Farming
"Can you make money out of your manure? You bet! Call it 'Pacapoo' and sell it to the local gardners and small farm producers." This name is a winner. I would totally do this. Apparently there are big bucks in poo.

Fiber
Fiber as in alpaca fleece, not "how to make your alpaca eat bran muffins." The guy who came up with "Cotton: the fabric of our lives" has been enlisted to give a boost to the alpaca fiber industry. I am all for this, but I foresee one problem. Every single garment shown in the magazine is hideously ugly. There may be places where people would wear these things and not feel shame, but to reach the rest of the country I would recommend moving away from the colors of the seventies.

Bizarre(ly Effective) Advertising
Once again, there is some exemplary advertising, and I am not being funny about this. I genuinely love these ads and they would work on me if I were at leisure to purchase alpacas. Also, they happen to be very weird.

Joe Camel's cousin, Vinny Alpaca, with his bingo babe, Ginger. They always promise each other they won't blow their winnings on fresh blackberry brambles this time, but then they can't help themselves.

In some alternate universe, there's a statue of this in the Louvre, because the "farmer with an alpaca head" is a powerful, yet mysterious, figure in the ancient mythology of that world.

There was also an ad for a 3.5 million dollar alpaca ranch in Oregon. It had lovely gardens, mountain views, and of course alpacas. If they threw in a capybara and a maybe just a small paddock of unicorns, I would take out a loan.

Linwood Gardens

Tree peonies

Every year, Linwood Gardens holds a Tree Peony Festival, and last weekend I finally got around to going. It's on the estate of the Gratwick family, who built it in the early 1900s. They were a wealthy family from Buffalo, and Linwood Gardens was their summer home for many years. Right before the Depression, they lost all their money, and decided to move there. One family member still lives on the property.

Large feline

William Henry Gratwick III was an artsy fellow, and created new gardens, added sculptures, developed the Rare Plants Nursery, and became obsessed with tree peonies. "Obsessed" is not a word that the brochure uses, but there are a lot of tree peonies, and at least three of the sculptures are of tree peonies.

Folded-up tree peony bud

Not to mention, it takes twenty-five years of grafting and whatnot to create the color peonies that he wanted. Apparently they only naturally come in a few pinkish colors. He went for yellow, and eventually he got it.

This is not yellow. This is pinkish-yellowy-dawn. Better, I think.

In addition to obsessing over flowers, Mr. Gratwick III displayed a rather unique personality. In the house, there is a room he bought from Louis Comfort Tiffany's son (all the rich people, they're pals), which the son had disassembled and brought over from a manor in Europe. Gratwick really just wanted the fireplace, which was the only part that was being used, but Tiffany the Younger said, "Sure, I'll sell you the fireplace, but you have to take the rest of the room, too. It's in my garage." Okay, I don't know if he had a garage. But I'm trying to illustrate the ridiculousness of this. It cost $13,000 then, which is something like $165,000 now. I'm not saying it wasn't a nice room. It was a nice room. But it wasn't even that big, and half of what's great about it is the view, which it didn't have when he bought it.

You can see the view reflected in the glass. Sort of. It is the Genesee Valley, apparently.

This Gratwick person was kind of a hoot. When the local railroad stopped using its station, he tried to buy it. But they wouldn't sell it to him. So he and a friend when down in the middle of the night and stole it. They used it as a pool house and then a shed. I'm not quite sure what struck his fancy, as it's not much to look at, but it makes a good story, and I can believe a shed that really speaks to your soul, as this one evidently did to his, is hard to come by.

Victorian cupolas repurposed as play houses. Presumably not stolen, but who knows?

There was also the obligatory walled garden. I love obligatory walled gardens. I wish I could have an obligatory walled garden, but at my pay rate, they make exceptions as to your obligations. In the gift shop you can buy a book of old pictures of what life used to be like there, which is entitled something like "This place sure must have been pretty . . . when it was kept up properly." It's true, it does suffer from a lack of money. It also suffers from fire: the "big house" is only a third as big as it used to be. The rest burned down in the 1973. I'm certainly not happy there's no money and that the house caught fire, but it is sort of atmospheric the way it is. The house looks modest, like a large farmhouse, and the gardens are lovely without being intimidatingly regal. You don't feel that you should have worn a hoop skirt just to fit in with your surroundings.

The bricks in the obligatory walled garden have shifted and now resemble beaten dirt paths.

The air of dilapidation is slightly melancholy, which suits old houses that nobody lives in. It would be indecent if one forgot that people used to live there -- who threw parties and had the philharmonic down to play by the lily pond and planted vegetables and spent twenty-five years creating a yellow peony -- and aren't there anymore. The book of old pictures testifies to a lively, cheerful, and interesting family. If that period is over, then by golly, the fountains should be left to grow moss just out of respect.

Is it moss? Or is it algae? They must be related.

As delightful as all this is, my favorite part was the idea of having breakfast on the terrace with the whole valley in front of you, or sitting out on the lawn and reading a book on Sunday afternoon. The tour guide said that you can see Rochester on a clear day. The day I went was distantly hazy but blue-skied most of the time, and breezy and very pleasant; excellent for wandering around taking pictures.

To the left of this photo are four librarians. The office is obviously following me around.

It only takes a couple of hours to see everything, so after I took five thousand pictures, I had a slice of lemon icebox cake from their extremely enticing display of incredibly quaint food and went home. It was the perfect day.

Of Symbols and Snails

Italian word for the "at" symbol: chiocciola. Bonus meaning: snail. It really does look like a snail...

I learned this word by watching many hours of an Italian children's show called "L'albero Azzurro" where a talking Dodo implores me to write him a letter. 'Tis strange the ways we absorb language.

Sweet Succulents

Succulents are exceptionally easy to grow in southern California. They don't need much water, they're super hearty, and the way you grow more of 'em-- chop off a piece of another succulent, leave it on the table and wait for it to grow some roots.

This process was a mystery to me, until I asked a friend of mine how to grow succulents-- and in response, she went to her backyard, chopped off a bunch of bits and handed them to me. Good to know. And I lovingly waited for them to grow roots, and when they did, I planted the little munchkins in my dirt patch. And I waited. For about two months. And they looked the same the whole time. Still green, still rooting. Still chugging along.
And then this morning, the gardeners came.

And I can't express to you the extent of the devastation. My dirt patch was like a horror film. I had to dig the poor little bodies of my plants from under two inches of soil. Some of them chopped in half, some of them uprooted-- their new growth exposed to our harsh world for the first time. But I was so proud of them! My babies growing extra arms!
I reassembled them as best I could... here's hoping they survive their second replanting.
Good luck little guys-- I'm pulling for you.

The Ham Sandwich Hallelujah

I've witnessed some strange things in this town. There was the time that guy drove into the Masonic Temple. There was the time I was sleeping in the living room and I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a megaphone saying WE HAVE YOU PARTIALLY SURROUNDED. There were all those times I heard bagpipes and couldn't figure out why. There was the time our local Tim Riggins rode down the sidewalk shirtless on his bike and caused a woman in her car to forget to go at the green light. And, my personal favorite, the time I saw the drunken fool walk into a brick wall and bounce off again. But last night was truly surreal.

I was sitting at my desk, writing an e-mail, when I happened to glance out my window and saw two guys with huge packs, the kind you hike around Europe with. I was trying to figure out how they got here when I realized that one of them was wearing a top hat with a red feather in it. The other one had a hat that I described on Facebook as a "Holmesian affair" only because I couldn't think of a better term fast enough. In fact, it looked like something a troubador would wear. That is the word that I thought at the time, "troubador," and I think it was because of the hat.

I didn't think they actually were anything of the kind . . . until they stopped on the stoop across the street and the tophatted one set down an instrument case. Then he took out a banjo. Then he tuned it. Then they put some money in the case and set it out on the step. The other one got out a harmonica. By this point I was just staring, open-mouthed. Anyone who has lived here will probably understand why. We do not have buskers in this town. We simply do not. It doesn't happen. But it was happening. They started to play.

Twenty minutes later, they were still there. I don't know what happened, but something came over me. I guess I was so fascinated by the very idea of buskers in this town, with hats, that my desperation to know how this had come about grew stronger than my normal fear of striking up conversations with strangers. I gathered what cash I had -- all of three dollars -- and went down and put it in their case. And I stayed for three hours.

On closer inspection, I discovered that the tophatted banjo-player was curly-haired and bearded, dressed in dark plaid, with tattoos of f-holes on his forearms. I said, "Where are you from?" and he said, "Burlington, Vermont," and I thought Yes. You could not be from anywhere else. That was James. Dylan played the harmonica, and he was from everywhere. He had "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" on one arm and something about bearing no malice on the other. He's spending the summer travelling with James, and will go back to school in the fall, where he is triple-majoring in photography, documentary something or other, and something else. (I'm a great listener.) Dylan was brightly sunburned, and was concerned that there was cement dust in his hair. There wasn't. James and Dylan were at the very beginning of a hitchhiking journey from Vermont to Washington state, where they planned to attend a "big hippie party" for like a month. James has lived off his banjo, on and off, for three years or so, and imparted a few helpful tips on sleeping in abandoned buildings (crack addicts are an issue) and finding food for free (dumpsters).

They knew a pretty incredible number of songs, and remembered the lyrics for the most part. They were fans of Tom Waits, and a lot of songs were about whiskey and revenge. I didn't know most of them, but somewhere in the middle, Dylan did absolutely beautiful renditions of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More" and "Slumber, My Darling." Two things about this: I didn't know the same guy who wrote "Camptown Races" was capable of such lyricism, and I didn't know harmonicas were capable of such lyricism either. I think that was my favorite part. Dylan was very smart and funny, and he learned all his songs by ear, and happily admitted to playing with tons of emotion, and even did an impression of himself being overly emotional about a sad song which was kind of hilarious. I wish I could convey this better. James, by contrast, had once locked himself in a room for six months with a hundred-year-old book on how music works, and now suspects he's lost his ear for emotion on account of knowing too much about the notes. To hear him, you wouldn't think so. They were both very talented, but they don't play festivals. James has stage fright.

A couple of people came by and gave them some cash, but it was a windy night and there weren't a lot of pedestrians. At one point, a guy parked his car in half of a parking place and hopped out to listen. He was barefoot. I kind of wanted to know what his deal was, but after a few minutes, he gave them a rather generous check, and drove away. Later, someone driving by chucked a ham sandwich out the window. We were not sure whether it was generous or obnoxious. So they sang a song about the sandwich, which was deeply moving. It went like this:

Ham sandwich
Ham sandwich
Ham sandwich
Ham sandwich
Ham saaa-aaa-aaandwich!

Then James sang another song about the ham sandwich, this time to the tune of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." I wish I could remember the lyrics, many of which where original, but all I remember now is, "It's a cold and it's a broken ham sandwich." There might have been a part about, "It's a warm and it's a moldy ham sandwich," which was closer to the truth. It was warm. Evidently it wasn't moldy, because they ate it.

At some point James got out his trumpet and put on his sunglasses and posed for Dylan's pictures as a blind jazz player, which was not convincing. His trumpet skills are a work in progress, but it is hard to dislike the sound of an even moderately-good trumpet under a streetlamp at night. He also had the rubber part of a plunger to serve as a damper. He said some stuff about having soaked the plunger six times in vinegar and soap. For some reason I thought this process did something to plunger that made it a better damper. Because I am an idiot, it wasn't until I was in bed later that it occured to me: the plunger was used! The part of the story that involved him bravely licking it then made more sense.

I learned a great deal about hitchhiking (it is illegal to hitchhike on I90 until Ohio, or something like that, which is why they were here waiting for a friend to pick them up and take them out of the state), harmonicas (they come in different keys! I never realized that), Stephen Foster (see above), Tom Waits (wrote unbelievably depressing songs on his honeymoon), how many pop songs use the same four chords (they sang quite a lot of Total Eclipse of the Heart: Literal Video Version), and more about hitchhiking (if you are not actually in the road, it is technically legal). Oh, and James also claimed that it is not totally inappropriate to eat hot sauce with pineapple (I disagree).

Eventually I had to go to bed, but when I got inside I really could not stop thinking about how readily they ate a tiny ham sandwich thrown to them out of a passing car, and how they had sung for me for three hours, and how I only had three dollars, so I made some rice, heated up some leftovers to dump on top of it, and brought them some food. I told them it would not hurt my feelings if they put hot sauce in it (they carry it with them). They were genuinely surprised and very thankful, as all they had was peanuts. In the morning, I opened my door and saw the two plastic containers there on the sidewalk, and had a very strange moment. That actually happened?

Tonight I kind of missed them. Their music was great, and they were good company. I always feel sympathetic toward people who are not traditionally employed, and these two were particularly pleasant, interesting, and talented people. Happily, Dylan gave me his blog address, so I will be following their travels. It would be rather sad to meet people like that, feed them, and know they're going to disappear in the middle of the night and you will never, ever know what happened to them. So Dylan had better update his blog.

Violets and Blues

So back in my crazy mixed up college years, I learned a lot about the undertones of dye. I gathered this information from a year or so of adding blue streaks to the back of my head. The process began with a application of the traditional Manic Panic BLUE dye . Sadly, blue Manic Panic streaks fade to dingy green Manic Panic streaks... and your "cool cred" falls significantly when you look like "swamp thing". Now PURPLE Manic Panic on the other hand, fades to a lovely shade of blue and keeps you looking... like an 18-year-old with an eyebrow ring and blue hair. Which was totally what I was going for.

I've recently returned to the dying process with a crop of formerly white shirts that were cluttering my closet. I usually shy away from purchasing white clothing because it takes me about 45 seconds to spill coffee or chocolate or some other impossible substance down the middle, rendering the clothing unwearable forever. But my new thrifty solution is to dye all my rejected clothing black. My first attempt at this went well, but it turns out RIT dye you leave in a cupboard for two years doesn't really stay black, but becomes a lovely shade of midnight blue. Turns out, midnight blue tshirts are really cool and hide coffee stains well. Yay.

For my second attempt at shirt rejuvenation I bought a brand new bottle of black dye, boiled my clothing, and then threw them in the wash machine to set... and because my white bathmat was looking a little tired, I threw that in for a cycle too. I figured it would pick up the excess dye, turn midnight blue and match the rest of my decor (decorating theme for my apartment: salvaged IKEA chic) quite well.

Sadly, the undertone of the new bottle of dye was not blue, but red, leaving my hacked bathmat a garish shade of purple.

I left this on my floor for a day before I decided it was hurting my eyes and tossed it in the closet... I can't bring myself to throw it out... I suppose it will join my next batch of beverage stained clothing... perhaps forest green undertones would even everything out...

Light My Fire (The Non-Spork Version)

So I finally came to terms with the fact that I'm living in California semi-permanently and stopped subletting/crashing at friend's apartments... and I've (semi-permanently) settled in a little 1940's bungalow that's so California it hurts. It lives amidst a pack of other bungalows, and each bungalow has a tiny garden-- people compost... people grow vegetables... everyone uses the clothesline to dry their clothes. The rent is cheap and the owners "honestly don't believe there's any lead paint left." Dude, I cannot express to you how much I LOVE this place.

But the one worrisome aspect of my new apartment (is not that the kitchen is so small I can't open the fridge door all the way) is the slight odor of gas that came and went for the first three months of residency... the smell had no correlation to heat or stove or shower... no real centralized point of stink... I would just walk in from getting the mail and go "that's not quite right." I finally called my landlord after a friend confirmed her apartment was the same way-- it was probably the pilot light in my 1940's heating system. A heating system so ancient you have to turn it on with a little key inserted in the grate.

Super high-tech.

So two maintenance men showed up at my little apartment at an obscenely early hour and commenced to light my furnace. Biff looked at it first and exclaimed, "gosh, I hate this model... they must have had a special tool for lighting these things." Chuck looked at it next, "we can probably just throw something down there and it will catch." Biff looks at me "I've seen people do this one... you just turn the gas on and light a match and it goes pfhwhoom (large explosion gesture) and it's all good..." I gave him a look that said "I am tired and that is a terrible plan," and he and Chuck went back to the drawing board. Sadly, the drawing board led them back to the first plan-- turning the gas on and dropping lit things into my heater... Italian flash cards I'd (hopefully) memorized, popsicle sticks they found in the community garbage... coupons for the local grocery store, "one of these things is bound to catch," they said, as my apartment started to smell more and more like a forest fire. Finally, the pilot light caught (a combination of the slow burning popsicle stick and a quarter turn of the gas key). "We'll stick around til the popsicle stick burns out."

Thanks guys.

And there you have it, I have a working heating system just in time for summer.

This is not about Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetry, but if I tell you what it is about, you won't read it.

This is going to be one of those roundabout posts where I spend several unnecessary paragraphs setting up a single quote. At least I'm warning you this time so you won't be disappointed at the end because you already knew it wasn't working up to much.

My non-poetic interest in Samuel Taylor Coleridge started when I began reading The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes, which is the most interesting book I have read maybe ever. I know I say that about all the books I read, but this one is seriously great! It's about the history of science during the Enlightenment, which is interesting because during that period, they were still referring to scientists as "philosophers" and thought that heat was an invisible substance named "caloric" and that electricity was an invisible fluid called "electricity." Basically, if you didn't know what was going on, you declared it invisible and gave it a name. Sometimes it worked out, and sometimes it didn't.

What is also interesting, and more to my point, is how many of the Romantic poets show up in this book alongside the scientists, and how many scientists wrote poetry. Disciplines we now think of as opposites were happily united, as if the poet and the scientist were just different kinds of philosophers. I knew from the one class I took on the Romantics that there was a strong connection between science and poetry during that period, but even so, I was surprised at first how often Coleridge came up in the chapter on Humphrey Davy, the chemist who discovered nitrous oxide. Then I thought about it a little and I realized: nothing makes more sense than Coleridge, famous for his opium addiction, getting to be pals with Davy, who, in the name of science of course, inhaled vast, vast amounts of nitrous oxide. Or as it is better known, laughing gas. Unfortunately, Davy was too busy making himself and all his friends artificially hilarious to realize it would make a great anesthetic, and surgeons went on giving their patients nothing but whiskey for another fifty years. Then they started using ether. Nitrous oxide wasn't involved in anesthesia until 1876. That seems totally ridiculous, but then again, someone only just invented a rib-spreader that doesn't break the ribs, like, last week. Clearly we have some distance to go before we are doing the full-on Beverly Crusher and healing people with a painless, non-invasive magic beam.

Anyway, while I was reading this, I realized I knew almost nothing about Coleridge except for his opium addiction. I know Byron, Keats, and Shelley all died very young, and it seemed likely Coleridge did, too, considering his obvious issues. But in fact, he lived to be 61, which is twice the average age of a Romantic poet. Many felicitations to him for surviving so long, especially since it was not easy. Everywhere I looked, people were constantly referring to his terrible health problems, which they blamed on his being a drug addict. I do not doubt being a drug addict is bad for your health, but I started to think maybe he was getting a bad rap. No one ever said what his health problems were, just that he was always "in poor health." Then they would allude to his being morally and spiritually impaired, as if that could cause a physical ailment.

Well, this kind of mystery DRIVES ME NUTS. I subsequently discovered that Coleridge wrote about his health constantly, and if no modern doctor could diagnose him from what is basically the world's most well-written medical chart, I was going to be very annoyed. During my hour at the reference desk today, I asked myself a reference question, "What was wrong with Coleridge?" and then I set about answering it. Here is what I found out: he got a cavity, or cavities, which gave him sinus infections and also infected his tonsils. His tooth was pulled, but somewhere along the way, the infection very likely got into his bones and gave him osteomyelitis, which means bone infection, which is redundant because I just said that, but I like the word. It reminds me we are probably due for another disease week.

But back to poor, suffering Coleridge: on top of what the first article called "chronic sepsis," Coleridge probably also had something else. This is where it gets slightly confusing. Coleridge had one of two types of cholera, neither of which were really cholera, and neither of which he actually had. Thus sayeth article number two. Though Coleridge was convinced he had cholera, what really caused his symptoms was opium withdrawal; he used to quit cold turkey every so often. The symptoms are the same. I could not convince myself to read thirty-five pages on the effects of cholera, so I must omit the specific details. Let's just say, Coleridge should have either quite the opium altogether or not at all. It would have been much less gruesome.

In regard to the moral matter of becoming an opium addict, if I had terribly painful rheumatism due to an ongoing whole-body infection, starting at the age of 24 and lasting almost forty years, I might treat opium like the eighteenth-century equivalent of medical marijuana, too. Plus, severe pain is a much better reason to trot on down to the Pneumatic Institute every evening and get a noseful of happy-making gas than "science" is. (To be fair to Davy, he really did think laughing gas was curative, and when he finally realized it wasn't, he moved on to more productive work.)

Now we're coming to the part which is the entire point. I could have just said, "This is funny," and left it at that, but I felt you needed to know about Coleridge's personal issues because you never know when you'll be on Jeopardy or something. This is Coleridge's account of his general ill-health, early on, right after he's had a bad tooth extracted. The "it" he refers to in this letter is pain:

"On Friday it only niggled, as if the chief had departed from a conquered place and merely left a small garrison behind, or as if he had evacuated the Corsica, and a few struggling pains only remained. But this morning he returned in full force, and his name is Legion. Giant-fiend of a hundred hands, with a shower of arrowy death pangs he transpierced me, and then he became a wolf, and lay a-gnawing at my bones!"

My favorite part is a shower of arrowy death pangs. I'm sure I would not laugh if he were in front of me, suffering in my face, but a shower of arrowy death pangs. I mean my goodness. You'd think the man was a Romantic poet . . . or on drugs . . . or both.

He admits in his next letter: "I wrote you on Saturday night under the immediate inspiration of laudanum, and wrote you a flighty letter, but yet one most accurately descriptive of both facts and feelings." I believe both claims. It's tempting to think he couldn't have been feeling that terrible if he was lying around thinking, "How shall I conclude my pain-as-military-commander conceit? Ah yes, I think 'his name is Legion' would be dramatically Biblical." I've read a lot about writers, and they all cope with adversity by thinking about either how best to describe it later, or how it matches up with what has been described before. The "giant-fiend of a hundred hands" is a reference to the Hekatonkheires, three giants who, in Greek mythology, helped overthrow the Titans. I admit the allusions do convince me that he was in a whole lot of pain. But I also admit that I laughed. A shower of arrowy death pangs. That is immortal.


The two articles I read, or in the case of the cholera one, skimmed with one eye shut, are these:

• John D. Rea's "Coleridge's Health," Modern Language Notes, January 1930.
• G. S. Rousseau's "Coleridge's Choleras: Cholera Morbus, Asiatic Cholera, and Dysentary in Eighteenth-Century England," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Summer 2003.

Incidentally, cholera morbus, Asiatic cholera, and dysentary are all in the running for Disease of the Year, so if you have a preference I will consider your comment a vote, and also did you catch that clever if disgusting pun? I tell you I am on fire here.

Compost Can Be Art Too