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I've gotten enough people sending me concerned, well-wishing messages over the last couple weeks, and enough "I'm not sure what's going on here" episode comments, that I sposed I would explain – planned to do this weeks ago, but the sickness came back over and over:

Beginning around the end of June, and then really hitting in early July, I got a certain kind of sick that I'd never encountered before. Anytime I ate anything more than, say, a very small bowl of rice, my whole digestive system started acting like it was trying to expel a poison, and I would shit (and/or occasionally vomit) the entire contents of my intestines. And I know, "Oh there's actually much more in you than you would" – nah, dog. I'm talking 3-act plays of shit and vomit. The only thing even remotably comparable I've felt was the stomach part of opiate withdrawal.

And at first, they wanted to diagnose me with that parasite from a tainted lettuce outbreak, I think?, but that was very wrong – not least because nothing bad would happen if I simply didn't eat. So for a minute now, I think every episode after the Sydney Sweeney show, you've been listening to a guy who (all combined since this started) has eaten 2 meals in 6 weeks. And the dashing young (old) fellow in question, this artiste of non-eating, requires quite a collection of prescription pills to keep him alive; first they were all fighting for supremacy in an empty stomach, and then I'd subsisted totally on pills for long enough that my stomach couldn't handle any more, and I started vomiting my medications.

The short version here is that I think I'm OK, I think I know more or less what happened, and now I've strung together a few days of not feeling like the Reaper had an eye on me. (Well, no, more like he didn't have both eyes on me.) I'll spare you the actual long version, maybe useful for a show at some point, but a couple of the people I love most in the world were very scared for me, so I decided to let them take me thru the Official Channels, with no hope of anything, just so they wouldn't feel like they could've helped me more.

So Thursday: 16 consecutive hours On the Town, two nurses who didn't know shit, two doctors who didn't know shit – one of whom wrote me a "shot-in-the-dark prescription," without mentioning that it gives some people fucking lupus – and 6 hours in an ER waiting room. I left for 2 main reasons: #1, I wasn't supposed to hear that I was "slow-tracked," but I did, and their average "slow-track" wait time was 20 hours, and #2, I had to watch 3 fucking rent-a-cops (who are allowed to have guns, tasers, and cuffs now, at least in Missouri!) shove a woman out of the ER. She came there during a nervous breakdown. 4 hours later, she was having a secondary nervous breakdown about never getting help with the FIRST one, so she approached the desk and said something true in a remarkably calm voice: "You don't care. I've been here 4 hours. You don't give a fuck about anyone." That was sufficient cause for the all-male Pawg Patrol to hustle her out of the ER, saying things like "Now ma'am, I am legally entiitled to carry and use this firearm, and I sure hope it doesn't come to that, but if necessary, I DO have that right."

(People say "to a fault" in all sorts of dumbfuck illiterate ways now, it's just a verbal tic, but it once meant something. In fact, it meant exactly what it says: you have some element in your basic makeup that's strong enough to overrule the alternatives, even when you know the alternatives are better or necessary. It's weird, trying to keep track of who knows what about you, when your job is talking on the internet, so in case I've never said it: on the strictly personal level, I am a pacifist to a fault, and in the most literal way. I understand that there are probably times and places where nothing is changing without violence, where some motherfuckers gotta GO before anything good can happen. But the recognition is intellectual, not visceral, and I don't think I could do what the Bolsheviks or Cuban revolutionaries did, because I really, really don't want to kill anybody. I have seen way too many people die, seen the instant of death way too many fuckin' times. I don't want to see that shit any more than I have to, for purposes of understanding the real world, and I don't want to be on the killer's side of the gun. "To a fault." People take armed action, sometimes I accept it and even celebrate it because it was the only real choice, but I will not be holding the gun.

All of which is to say, in terms that seem to get more necessarily euphemistic with every fuckin' 72 hours of surveillance: those cops, and what they did to that woman, might be the closest I've ever come to deciding that it was time for some unpacifist work. REAL pigs are bad enough; fucking Paul Blart in a Gundam, shoving a desperate woman out of the ER doors, in what's probably the worst moment of her life, on the worst day of her life ... fella might just find himself becoming Tactical.)

That wasn't a particularly short version, by most standards; you brave people, however, are aware that I could go 4 hours, easy, on just the ER waiting room, so I humbly beseech you: takest thou these gifts, meagre tho' they be, in contemplation of that frailty whereby they are bestowèd.

Point is, on your end, that I'm not drunk or strung out, I haven't touched a goddamn thing in years, you were just hearing starvation and the nerves it failed to fire, plus a (legit, legal) sedative – it's fucking hard to sleep when you can't eat. A LITTLE bit of that was also intentional on #290, nowhere near all of it!, but a little bit, for reasons that will hopefully be self-apparent when I finish the circle I'm presently drawing.

Thanks for your patience. I am now going to say 3 things:

#1. Gaza is hell in all the old ways and horrendous in new ones. If you can, please keep Rulin's family and the newlywed Amjad & wife in mind. If you haven't seen recent footage, you will be actually, violently shocked at the fucking rats that effectively run chunks of the Gaza Strip now.

#2. I would be amazed if most of you haven't seen Michael Clayton, but anybody who missed that movie, watch Michael Clayton before Thursday.

#3. Iain Sinclair went to see William Burroughs in Lawrence, KS, very shortly before Burroughs died (1997), and in 2012, Iain told me something Burroughs said – loudly, unprovoked, to nobody in particular – that still scares the hell out of me:

The dead are starving, but they can't eat.

Thanx 4 bearing wiv me

MSJ