Eight Feet Deep

Do you ever read the literature that comes with new prescription drugs? Well, I think you should unless you feel your pharmacist explained the medicine, how it works and its side effects to your satisfaction. Even then, I would still read about the drug.

Sometimes a medicine will come with a warning that side effects may include “vivid or disturbing dreams” or words to that effect. I often wondered what that meant. Now I know.

I have had difficulty sleeping lately because of the pain caused by neuropathy in my feet. I once had a prescription for helping me sleep occasionally as I have had insomnia on and off for years. That prescription worked very well but it ran out and my doctor, or primary care provider (physician’s assistant), decided to prescribe another drug. That medicine bore the warning about disturbing dreams.

Here I should make an explanation. I have never been troubled with nightmares or what I consider frightening or disturbing dreams. That is, I didn’t have such dreams until taking this medicine or that I can remember. I say “that I remember” because I have been told of disturbing others in my sleep and not just with snoring. When I worked as a firefighter and slept in a room with other guys, they told me I used to scream and yell in my sleep. They even went so far as to jokingly say “you’re possessed!”

And I have had my share of odd dreams including a couple in which the situation of which I was dreaming would in some way present itself upon waking. But I have never had nighttime excursions like I have had the several nights, including last night, on this drug which is generically called Temazepam, or by one of its trade names Restoril. The medicine itself has not worked well at all in helping me go back to sleep after waking, which is why I needed it in the first place. I have some Lorazepam on the way, which is what I previously used with success. But I have been desperate for sleep a couple of times like last night so I took this other drug.

One thing about the dreams I have had on Temazepam is that they include a lot of clutter. When I say clutter, I mean that a lot of what is in the background is often a myriad of complex items that often tend to prove a physical challenge for me. Last night, this clutter appeared in the way of junk, as one might see in the History Channel series “American Pickers,” about a couple of guys who go around the countryside buying junk they sell as antiques and collectibles.

The site in which my dream occurred was a very large and rambling house — this has often been something I’ve dreamed about even before my most recent excursions — that is the site of what appears to be something like an estate sale.

Some of the people with me on this outing I know although I cannot remember any of my close friends there. The woman who apparently owns the home and I meet said that I know one of her cousins and mentions a name. This is really odd. The guy’s name is of someone whom I don’t know other than having talked to him once, interviewing him for a news story in 2004, the story being a one-year anniversary piece on the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster over East Texas.

Now I have had some scary dreams on this sleep medicine. They occurred the first couple of nights I took them. As I noted they were disconcerting experiences because I don’t have frightening dreams. Well, I say I don’t. Sometimes I do have dreams that most people and even I would think are frightening. I just don’t react frightened in those dreams. You see what  I am saying?

The scary dreams included men whom I thought were out to do me harm and I managed to escape them although I went through a very disturbing experience to do so. My getaway was helped by standing upon a steel platform even though I was being threatened at the time by a bunch of half-rat, half-monkey creatures below who were bouncing off the ground. You see what I am saying about scary? If this was the old days, 60s and 70s, people would just tell you that you’re having a bad trip.

Last night’s dream wasn’t so scary as it was just plan weird. My outing around the big home where the junk sale was enhanced  by riding a pig.

The pig was about the size of a horse and very friendly. I had a very fun ride on the pig whose name, believe it or not, was “Babe.” One difficult terrain Babe and I encountered before returning to the large house was plugging through part of the estate’s yard which was  full of molten chocolate.  Yum.

I believe I know where the clues to the pig’s existence lies, at the very least.

I am reading a book about a man’s canoe journey down the Neches River, here in East Texas. Richard M. Donavon’s “Paddling the Wild Neches,” is about his experience, which was to call attention to a fight to have the Neches designated as a National Wild and Scenic River. This would help prevent development such as the building of two dams on the middle reaches of the river. In addition to his description of the wooded Neches country, Donavon recalls stories he heard from his youth and his own experiences growing up in the 40s and 50s near the Neches. Among his stories are about killing wild hogs that roamed the river bottom, some of which can be quite large. (When I ran a small weekly paper in the area which he writes about, a couple of guys came by to have their picture made with the “Pineywoods Rooter” of some 800 pounds that they had killed hunting. They had the pig tied upside down on their ATV in the back of their pickup with its feet –hooves, whatever — sticking in the air). I wish I had the picture available.

The “Babe” reference also was easy to pinpoint. I never saw the movie “Babe” but am familiar with it. It was a 1995 family film, for those who are not, about a pig who wanted to be a sheep dog. A sequel was made. In the midst of all the talk recently about threatened violence on politicians came news of an actual threat against U.S. House minority whip Eric Cantor of Virginia. The man arrested after someone reported his rants on a You Tube video was described by neighbors as “a loon.” In addition to Cantor, suspect Norman Leboon also threatened movie studios over “Babe.” You got it. Pig movie. Capitalist pig?

Just where the chocolate ride on a pig comes from, who knows? Somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind I am riding down a path on a pig and am detoured on a chocolaty path by the drug Temazapam. Bring on old faithful, Lorazepam and hopefully pleasant dreams along with a good night’s sleep will be somewhere around the bend.

Being bald I sometime find myself wishing I had hair again just so I could tear my hair out.

I am finding out the more I deal with cellular and computer companies that if you think something needs fixing, you should just keep it to yourself lest somebody screws things up worse. That is the ordeal I have found myself in over the last day or so. I finally had to restore my operating system to factory settings.

In a way it’s kind of good. You can get rid of a lot of stuff you didn’t need. But I also ditched a lot of data I would like to have kept. A lots of bookmarks and things of that nature, nothing too serious. I would have done some massive backing up if I had more time but I just needed this thing to work and it wasn’t working very well after Verizon and Dell got through “fixing” it.

So in the next days, I shall be seeing what I can recover and what I need to recover. Spring cleaning for a computer.

This afternoon I feel a need to decompress so I won’t be banging away at the keyboard for very long. If you don’t know to what or whom I refer below, I am sorry. I think most people who keep up with political news will recognize what I have to say. I just don’t feel like spoon-feeding today.

I will say though that after this week of seeing the opposition party at what unfortunately appears to be their finest it seems the Republican party seems to be headed headlong toward self-destruction.

It isn’t just that GOP congressional members at the height of their biggest defeat in at least 40 years did their best spoiled brat act. It isn”t that half of the GOP seems to have joined the “bat s**t crazy” wing of their party by egging on the nuts to violence. It isn’t that the GOP continues to excommunicate its best and brightest such as David Frum when given a cold taste of truth.

No it is all that and more. This very well could be the prelude to a “Whig moment” for the Republican party. Maybe that is what it needs to get on track or perhaps to let the more thoughtful members move to the Democratic party while the remainder form their own Party of Nuts. Personally, I prefer the former option, for either of the first two options.

One can reason with those who are sane and listen. I don’t even want to think about the other alternative.

Sarah Palin was in town today supposedly to sell motivation. Just how she is supposed to be motivating who knows? Maybe she was hawking the message: “You too can be an obscure politician with the sense of a pissant who can help lose a presidential election and then make millions of dollars by being a famous person!”

In keeping with the current trend of pissed-off, right-wing rhetoric, she told the crowd in the city just across the river from a one-time Ku Klux Klan haven “Don’t retreat–reload.” What a genius.

Her appearance at the forum,  which supposedly includes former New York mayor Rudi Giuliani and former Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw, comes the day of news that Palin will be the focus of a reality show on TLC. That ought to be interesting especially considering the subject is known for making statements that have no basis in reality. Someone once said Bradshaw couldn’t spell cat if you spotted him the “c” and the “t.” I think he’s kind of funny though. Giuliani, not so much.

People are just getting their bowels in an uproar over national politics and having a black person as president. I think a good number of folks, I am just guessing, probably hate the fact that Seamus O’Bama, is not a black Irish but rather a black Kenyan-American. Of course with his health plan and the opposition party which has just decided not to do diddly squat on anything, a lot of people are being whipped up in a frenzy. They are threatening Democratic politicians and being all nasty and s**t.

Me, I am more pissed over this.

Our local police department apparently hasn’t been catching enough people speeding by stopped patrol cars lately so they use a decoy. Now I know that police officers are in danger on the side of the road, as they are on the road, in the office, out on the streets and hanging in cop bars. That, plus the fact that you can get a ticket if you don’t, is the reason I try to get into a far left lane if I can or slow down 20 mph below the speed limit in the lane next to the stopped po-lice car.

Here in Beaumont, they are parking a patrol car on the shoulder and stopping people who violate the police-passing law.

I just have this pet peeve about being entrapped. Police seem to have more and more reasons to pull you over and get in your business. There is a database here in Texas where officers can instantly run your license plates and tell whether you have liability insurance. If you don’t, you get a big ticket. I wonder how many of these same people writing tickets complain of the mandatory insurance provision of the new health care law? Don’t see the iron in the irony?

Another trap I don’t like is where game wardens use fake deer to lure hunters to illegally shoot their weapons. To me that is just wrong and I don’t even hunt. I wonder how many Sarah Palin has shot? Decoy deer that is. And, what’s next fake fish? Fake bald eagles or whooping cranes? The nerve of people.

Perhaps it is an ominous sign that little has been heard recently of the seafaring war against pirates along the east African coast.

I would have given little or no thought about the goings-on there had I not read an article a short time ago about a Somali pirate having been fatally shot by a private security guard on board a Panamanian-flagged freighter owned by the United Arab Emirates. The incident appears to be the first such pirate killing by a private contractor.

In fact, some quick reading showed just how clueless I was about the situation over there. First, I had no idea of the military structure among international navies patrolling the Indian Ocean for pirates. Operation Atalanta is what the mission is called and involves the European Union Naval Forces, an entity I had largely forgot had existed.

The EU Navy is made up at the present time of navies from eight European states: Italy, Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg and Greece. Other countries, notably the United States, Australia and Japan are also among nations in the pirate-fighting business there.

But what I likewise didn’t know and is most disturbing is the extent of the problem right now over there. Two more cargo ships were hijacked Tuesday. One is a Bermuda-flagged vessel with owners from the British Virigin Island and a Maltese-flagged ship with a Turkish owner. This was the same day that the pirate was killed while the MV Almezaan managed to repel hijackers.

The fatal shooting of the pirate has set off alarm bells among some in the shipping industry. There are worries that the killing might spur more violence among pirates. Legal issues also complicate the situation especially where Somalia is involved as that country stews in anarchy.

It’s not a good situation over there and, as much as I would like to get back on the high seas, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that east African coast.