Daily Blague

Yesterday was a gloomy day, inside and out. The building's heat has been turned off for weeks - perfectly legal - but temperatures in the high fifties and low sixties keep the apartment unpleasantly chilly. My ambition, this week, has been simply to live until tomorrow's appointment with the rheumatologist, which will entail, I hope, a reconsideration of Remicade. The chronic pain and debilitation of unmedicated arthritis get worse every week, and not surprisingly a low-grade depression has taken hold. Everything seems impossible, too much. It hurts to walk from one room to another. These symptoms are horribly familiar. I could bear with them before Remicade drove them off, but their return makes me feel that I'm being buried alive.

I wasn't the only one ailing yesterday. Kathleen didn't feel well when she woke up, and she decided to take a sick day, just to catch up on her sleep. But she did get sick. Her temperature rose throughout the day, and when it reached 102.5, at about nine o'clock, we called Dr Scofield, and Dr Scofield called back within the hour to recommend Tylenol. A few hours later, the temperature was dropping (although Kathleen was rather more palpably feverish and hot), and this morning it's below normal. I don't know why I was so freaked out by 102.5, but I was; perhaps it was refreshing to take a break from worrying about myself.

Worry was definitely called for. In the morning, I read most of the current issue of Harper's, which this month is devoted to "Soldiers of Christ." Taken together, Jeff Sharlet's "Inside America's Most Powerful Megachurch," Chris Hedges's "Feeling the Hate with the National Religious Broadcasters," and Gordon Bigelow's "Let There Be Markets" will shake up anyone who doubts that today's virulent evangelicals pose the same threat to our democracy that Hitler & Co posed to Weimar Germany.

After lunch, I started off on The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow's 1953 breakthrough. I haven't read it before, and I don't think that I should have been ready for it before now. It's rocky elegance makes for slowed reading, and, as in Henry James (of all writers to compare to Bellow!), there are numerous instances of highly prepositional bits of slang that refuse to disclose what they mean. I have reached the point where Augie backs off from a creepy adoption scheme by the Renlings. The gallery of characters in Augie's life - no matter how respectable, they all seem picaresque - draws attention from the not-so-ingenuous hero, but the very sophisticated handling of these mortal creatures draws attention back to him, in his capacity as first-person narrator. 

Kathleen thanked me for taking "such good care" of her. But I hadn't done very much, and if very much had been required, I don't know how I'd have managed. It's a little gruesome, when the two middle-aged members of a two-person household are both under the weather. I'm glad to see this morning's sunny skies, and I'm hoping that it will be warm enough to allow me to open a window or two later.