all this practice, all this saying, all this scrambling about. god i need a cigarette, it’s been so long. how many days now? three? four? it’s hard to tell here, they do little to keep us in track, they do much keep us from knowing. first they blocked out the windows so we couldn’t tell if it was day or night, but i tried to follow my own internal clock. waking and sleeping and marking the cinderblock during the intervals. who knows how off i had gotten during that first week. they just took us of our cells and repainted the walls.
http://www.lifelinecryogenics.com/ http://www.cordblood.com/ http://www.viacord.com/
and every one of them has a picture of a goddamn kid on their front page.
here’s the skinny. the woman gives birth. while they wipe the kid down, the doctor goes back in. the placenta is delivered. parts of the umbilical cord are harvested. parts of it goes into a plastic bag. said bag goes to a place where they grow it. then they store it. you pay a yearly fee to keep it around. stem cells. just in case. in case one of your other kids develops bone marrow cancer or leukemia or anything else that’s sure to kill them. they just go back to the harvest. ninety percent match between siblings. shit, sixty percent match to the parents. it’s a potential cure-all that costs only pennies a day.
nevermind whether or not you can afford the procedure that would actually take those cells and make something useful out of them. these people are just a bank. what you do with the cells is your business, your problem, your responsibility. nevermind that they use pictures of happy and healthy children as if, when you store those stem cells with us, we can guarantee your child’s happiness, your child’s future, your child’s very life.
what’s even sicker is that health insurance doesn’t cover any of this. you can bang on our dime until your heart stops, but you cannot ensure any part of your kid’s future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/world/europe/28greece.html http://abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/08/28/2016953.htm?section=world http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_5270000/newsid_5275200/5275284.stm
and the conspiracy theorists say it’s terrorists with a political agenda since elections are coming. and the environmentalists say it’s global warming that has caused all these droughts. and the people say it’s mismanagement on the part of the prime minister. and the ex-pats say it’s because they are using the army to fight fires and they’re nothing but kids too stupid for college. and the news says a woman tried to flee her village but the fire cut off the road. the news said she and a dozen other people rush into the olive groves instead. the news said they found her remains, arms wrapped around her four children, amongst the charred olive limbs.
The city during the day is just barely orchestrated chaos. Millions of people hustling into a million directions. I’ve always had a fondness for the west side, particularly around mid-town: it always seems a little unsure of itself, constantly under construction, always trying to catch up with its sibling, the more polished and well established east side.
Sibling rivalry amongst canyons of buildings.
What truly knocks my socks off is the people. From everywhere. Italians and midwesterners dressed to the nines, dressed like tourists, dressed for the summer, all out here, being engulfed, caressed, being buoyed about, with their cameras, bustling up against the natives, awash in the traffic and buildings and proof of life that the city reveals over and over again.
Without the people the city’s just one lump of historical landmarks ridden with asbestos
it doesn’t matter what or how you put it down, only that you
put
it
down
put it to rest, keep it restless, keep the fingers moving, in and out of here, in and out of the page, the screen
whatever this is
it doesn’t matter, the act matters, the fact of the act
the who you be when you’re no longer me
all these little fragments of a life real and imagined, of writing and the joy of it, of loose talk and even looser words, of half thoughts, half scenes, of couples on the rocks, of lovers on the mend, of gangsters and killers and clowns as children, of angst ridden poets, all of you, some shattered whole, some cracked mosaic, and i am happy in that, to have found you again my dear, dear old friend. you never did abandon me, and i had thought i could go on without you.
it’s truly amazing what people can get away with, he said, putting out the cigarette. what’s funny, and completely absurd, is what they convince themselves they can get away with.
he looks dead at you. but you my friend, you can’t get away with shit.
