I’m assuming you read my post yesterday which observed that in these times we have no real events to talk about with friends and family.
You didn’t read it? Better do so now because you won’t understand what I’m going to say here without knowing what I said yesterday.
First, the Event. Our sister, Dr. Deb, called me yesterday sounding concerned. Seems our brother had called her home earlier and since Dr. Deb was on weekend duty at the hospital, spoke to our bro-in-law, Dr. Rob. This was after our bro had called his own internist to report he was really ill with some wretched intestinal thing. He’d been sick all night.
Those medical calls occurred only after he’d run through internet sites involving signs of COVID — one of which was indeed an intestinal thing. (“You can’t trust the internet to tell you anything factual,” he says now.)
Both MDs said he probably had an intestinal virus. Drink a lot of water, eat saltines and drink ginger ale. If it lasted for three days, he should call the doctor again. (Three days of intestinal virus????)
My brother was really sick — the way intestinal viruses make us really sick — and didn’t sleep all night. So, after his initial MD calls, he went back to sleep. His phones were turned off. My sister texted him. No response.
We reached him finally. He was much better and today he’s entirely better — enough to say, “It was a twenty-four hour virus that kept precise time.” And “I don’t think I lost any weight.” And to suggest maybe this virus was the one Trump had been talking about a while ago, when he said this whole virus thing would go away immediately and had only affected a couple of Americans. Of whom my brother was apparently one.
I praised my bro to the skies for having been sick and getting immediately better because he had provided us with an Event to talk about, with friends and family. An Event that could be a topic of avid discussion for, I don’t know, maybe a week or so. If no other Event intervenes, perhaps we can stretch my brother’s Event through the month.
After I’d thanked him for giving us an Event, my bro said something like, “You’re welcome.”
So that’s the Event part of this. Now I have to deal with some amendments to my report of my brother’s mescaline-enhanced visit to Busch Gardens.
Amendments
The reason the rock/folk star’s band, including my bro, had a lot of spare time in Tampa was because the star had flown to Ohio to do a radio show, leaving his band for a few days.
The star strictly eschewed all drugs for himself and for his band. Strictly. Which is why the mescaline appeared when the star disappeared.
Mescaline was ingested via a pill (I asked as part of my ex-post facto fact check), which kind of flattens the peyote-cactus-religious experience picture into something more like watching someone ingest generic Lipitor.
There were three members of the band at Busch Gardens, all on mescaline. Understandably, my brother doesn’t remember what instrument the third member played.
I just repeated the story about the bear to my brother — who’d told it to me in the first place years ago. He said, “I don’t know that it was a bear. It could have been some exotic bird.” I said, “WHAT?” Busch Gardens apparently had exotic birds which flew free within the park. OK, but an exotic bird, I pointed out, was not like a bear, for a number of obvious reasons, even with mescaline. “That’s true,” he said. “And besides,” I had to point out, “you told me decades ago it was a bear. More or less contemporary confirmation.” “OK,” he replied. “I guess it was a bear.”
That’s all I’ve got for today.