The Immune System As A Death Warrant

❧

Generally I get up in the morning, take care of my toilette, walk over to my computer in the same room I sleep, check my e-mail, read the news, and sometime, if I don't have a lotta e-mail I wanna respond to, I sit down and compose an entry for this blog.

Writing something creative every day requires me to go into a different than usual mental mode than any of my other morning activities. Occasionally I don't want to go there or I dread going there because I like where I'm at and I don't want to switch horses in midstream.

This morning there wasn't any e-mail much but some spam I inadvertently signed on for when I bought some stuff I didn't need from Amazon.com. I don't actually mind their "newsletter" because I like to watch and see what their servers choose for my economic profile. It's pretty much cheap shit because they've figured out I'm poor.

It's not like flagrantly writing insulting remarks is a fixed stance I've taken with my e-mail correspondence these days. Being nasty is just something I've fallen into that has no teeth, but not everybody perceives it as irony. I'm fairly careful who I'm nasty to. They gotta have a strong self-image by their own hand, but not always. I use people as mirrors in order to discover what rules of conscience I installed in my own world view for my own purposes.

It's hateful when I attract unwanted disharmony because I infrequently and unwisely expect other people to obey the rules of conscience I adopted exclusively for me. When and if I come to realize I've placed such an unfair expectation upon an undeserving person it really embarrasses me because of how I interpret the Golden Rule. In effect, by treating other people with disdain I'm demonstrating to them how I must wanna be treated. It's not true as far as I can detect. I don't want other people to treat me like that.

Projecting my own idea of myself upon some external object beyond the perimeters of my aura is a natural behavior I attempt to be as conscious of as possible as often as I can remember to do it in the specious present. By "specious present" I mean to indicate the Eternal Now!

It's not an easy feat for my me to accomplish. To do it I have to stop anticipating the future and stop getting carried away with the past, and keep my stopping still. It's the last part of it that plagues me. It seems like I am is either dueling to lop off the past or defending against the invasion of the future, and not being still enough to ken that I am is God.

I am is God because it's so forceful in demanding that I am be this or that for it's own amusement. Its the sa-me force it is ordering around as God. I expect to be understood by at least a few when I suggest that this struggle is observable by using the human immune system as an example.

For the last few years I've been struggling with some rather severe aches and pains that wouldn't ga away with a few aspirin, and then, even Tylenol3. The doctor at the VA Hospital diagnosed me with rheumatoid arthritis and sent me to a special arthritis clinic at the VA Hospital in Durham, N.C. for treatment.

The rheumatologists I see there are in some fellowship program associated with Duke University Medical Center which is right across the street and special passageways between the two hospitals to make it convenient.

Basically the government keeps these autoimmune specialist wannabes furnished with military veterans for the Duke University hotshots to experiment on until they get certified by Duke as official rheumatologists, and get too rich to contaminate themselves with the great unwashed ever again. No blame. Who wouldn't like that?

The immune system in homo sapiens is a mysterious creature. It appears to have a life of it's own. I avoided taking any science courses I could during my years of formal schooling. I think maybe I just got a lousy start for reasons I still don't understand.

I remember dissecting frogs in a library class, but it didn't intrigue me like it did some other students because I was already killing and butchering cows, hogs, and chickens at home. Why I wasn't interested in learning the names of all the parts of the testicles I removed by castration is not even a small mystery to me. I knew what I was doing it for. What else mattered?

How I started paying attention to the medical term "autoimmune" probably had something to do with me Googling up the prescription medicines these not-yet-ready-for-primetime rheumatologists had me taking. In this way I became aware that rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease.

Researching for the formal me-and-thee-ing (meaning) of "autoimmune" hasn't been much of a priority, and it might not be for a while, if ever. I like to hyphenate words first to find out phonically what the sounds of the various expressions suggest, and then go from there. A surprising number of my own experiments with what the various utterances actually say never get to the formal part.

Right now, it's the "auto" part of autoimmune that attracts my attention. I'm taking it to mean automatic. Like in auto-pilot. The immune system seems to be on auto-pilot from the ti-me it co-me-s into play (conception?) to protect the body from external invasions until the tide turns and it begins to attack what it once protected.

The immune system first protects and defends the human body, and then turns on it like rats deserting a sinking ship. The "auto" part of autoimmune appears to signify that traitorous act happens automatically and not because the inhabitant of the body did anything specifically right or wrong to induce the immune systems behavior.

My disclaimer is especially important in regard to this topic. I'm not trying to tell the God's own truth in writing about autoimmune diseases. Frankly, I don't really wanna know all the gory details. I'm attempting to capture the drifting thoughts that seem relevant to my specific reactions to what's going on with the aches and pains I am is hosting.

Diabetes and certain heart problems are considered autoimmune diseases. I don't remember all of them. Autoimmune diseases are incurable. According to which direction the genetic history takes is how the body will eventually croak. I'll probably write about autoimmune diseases until I grok them rather thoroughly, or not.

❦