Thought That Came Unbidden

Fact: The first sign of heart attack for most people is death.

I think about death a lot mostly because I’m afraid of it, and I know it’s going to arrive too soon. I also think about death a lot because, frankly, I was raised on night time dramas: cop shows (and now the forensic analysis shows), medical shows, and lawyer shows all deal with death to a greater or lesser extent. Too, the way I’m bent as a reader and writer has led me to a lot of mysteries, more true-crime than is probably good for me, and the unavoidable, and often inescapably bad, private eye novel.

The upshot is that I’ve thought a lot about death and the ways it can be administered. It’s oddly simple, boiling down to just five different categories with a lot of different methods in those categories:

• poisoning: includes the obvious like arsenic and cyanide but it also includes the possibly not so obvious like dioxin and other chemical toxins as well as alcohol, caffeine, and just about every pharmaceutical, illicit or otherwise, known to man.
• suffocation: drowning and strangulation (manual or ligature) are but two examples. Suck all the oxygen out of a sealed room with a bunch of halon and you’ve got a tailor-made suffocation chamber.
• exsanguination (which is just a fancy word for saying: blood loss so total it’s fatal): typically, but not uniquely, caused by your average stab wound.
• blunt force trauma: blow to the head, leaping off a building, and yes, electric shock (technically, an electric shock is considered a crush injury) are all classic examples in this category.

and last, but by no means least,

• deprivation: withholding of food and water are the two most common methods here.

I think, though, that last category is incomplete. I’ve been wondering lately if it’s possible to die of joy deprivation, if it’s possible to “sad” someone else, or yourself, to death. I hope I never find out but some days I’m afraid I will.

^* Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes. – Benjamin Franklin

I haven’t been sleeping well. That in and of itself isn’t news; I’ve suffered from chronic insomnia for about a decade, and, unfortunately, it’s not the kind of insomnia on which BigPharma has chosen to concentrate. Falling asleep is never a problem: it’s staying asleep, not waking up every single time I move, and I move a lot, that’s the issue. Lately, though, I have been sleeping right through no matter when I go to bed which is unfortunate since the reason I haven’t been sleeping well is that I’m having nightmares.

When I was a kid I managed to absorb the old wives tale that if you dream you die you actually do die. Somehow that got wound up with falling so I had a lot of dreams about falling when I was a kid, the kind where I’d wake up just before I hit the ground only to find that I was about to fall out of bed. Oddly, though, the one time I remember actually falling out of bed when I was a kid there was no associated dream.

Some of the nightmares I’ve been having have obvious causes – it doesn’t take a genius to figure out where the dreams about rushing water, searching for loved ones, high winds, and being attacked by water moccasins come from (note to self: stop reading hurricane coverage). Some of the nightmares, though, confound me.

Last night there were two, one that was simply disturbing, even given its content, and one that had me awake in bed, scream literally dying on my lips as I listened to my heart pound in my ears. In DC every Halloween we have an event in the gay area of town called the High Heel Race. It’s exactly what it sounds like, a bunch of drag queens in full get up racing the two blocks that run through the middle of bar district. In last night’s dream I was going to the race with some friends but my costume wasn’t quite together. I still needed the Superman shirt with the big S on it in red. During the search for said garment I some how wandered into the equivalent of a biker craft fair where the artisans were none too friendly what with me being and outsider to their community, dressed like a freakzoid superhero, and obviously queer. I suppose I should have been more disturbed by this dream seeing as how I woke up right before someone stabbed me to death.

The dream that really bugged me though was short and terrifying. I was having a perfectly ordinary meal, I think I was eating with my mother, during which I moved my jaw to chew something and all of my lower teeth fell out in a bloody clump. Just thinking about it now, more than a dozen hours later, sends a horrible little ripple of fear through me. At least I’ve stopped wanting to scream.

I have no idea what’s going on in my head, but I do know if I don’t get some sleep soon it’s not going to be pretty.

The first of many in an occasional series examining words, usage, grammar, punctuation, slang, and other aspects of this living thing we call English.

A dictionary is obsolete the day it’s published (yes, this includes the OED) for the simple reason that language is not static; it is a living, breathing organism that adds and subtracts new words as the culture of a given country changes. These changes generally occur in one of two ways: the more forced introduction of a word to the culture by simple misuse, a method made so famous by Alexander Haig through his habit of inappropriate verbing that, at least here in DC, you can say that something has been “haiged into the language,” (I’m just waiting for Bush’s “misunderestimate” to creep into common parlance because it does, oddly, have a certain logic to it) or these changes can be a more natural evolution, such as the rise in prominence of hip-hop culture and the accompanying spread of slang typically used by inner-city, African American teenagers. A third way in which language can change is by the mutation of a trademarked name into a commonly used word (Xerox^® for photocopy and Kleenex^® for facial tissue are two common examples of this). I’ve been interested lately in two words that represent examples of these last two categories.
[Read more…] about Living language: portmanteau and slang

<rant>
For all of you living and driving in the United States: it’s right turn on red AFTER stop.

Oh, and those things sticking off your steering column, one of them probably works the windshield wipers (I’m sure you’re familiar with that one). The other one, you may have hit it accidentially at some point…makes a clicking noise and a light flashes on and off on the dashboard? That’s called a turn signal. It tells the rest of us, who are not psychic and can not read whatever thoughts might be swirling around your most likely empty little mind, what you intend to do with your vehicle.

</rant>

We now return to regularly scheduled programming already in progress.

I have proof that the “intelligent designer” (not God…no, that’s not what they’re saying) is either a moron or a misogynist: why else would there be a process inherent in being female that is 1) not necessary for the individual’s survival and 2) is simultaneously painful and completely uncontrollable?

<puts “feminine hygiene products” on the grocery list and goes to take more pain killers>