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was I full of maggots?
Monday, August 21 2023
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
As expected, my intestinal problems (and associated weakness and achiness) vanished overnight and I began the day feeling pretty close to 100%. By late this afternoon I was out in the garage working on that honey do item. My subtask for now in the garage cleanup is still to deal with all the crap piled against the oil tank. Today I dragged most of it out into the parking area to sort it by size and see what was too small or oddly-shaped to keep. If that was the case, I cut it up into pieces suitable for the woodstove and immediately added it to the indoor woodpile.
At about 3:00pm a youngish guy from Uptown Kingston drove up in a pickup truck to take all the old luan doors that had been taking up space for over twenty years. He was a good-natured guy and seemed to have no trouble loading up all the doors into his truck despite the fact that he only had two or three fingers on his right hand (he didn't offer to shake my hand, probably for that reason). Gretchen had told me this guy plans to "DIY everything" at his place, and the doors will be used for things like tables.
As I worked, the mosquitoes were so bad that I had a scented candle burning on top of a piece of tree-of-heaven trunk out in front of the garage. (Ideally it would've been a citronella candle, but I couldn't tell what was what in our disorganized candle stockpile.) Initially I'd had the lit candle inside the garage, but then I realized that if anything knocked that candle off or over, the entire space would be a blazing inferno within minutes, fueled by cardboard, wood, and numerous solvents including actual gasoline.
I tried to go to bed early, but I've been sleeping a lot lately and I was avoiding any sleep medications, so all I could do is lie in bed and fuck around with a Chromebook while Diane and Oscar snuggled against my legs. When Gretchen tried to go to bed, the dogs were taking up all the room she would need to occupy, so she went out to sleep on the new L-shaped couch in the teevee room. She didn't have to stay there long, though; the dogs heard something and went whimpering down the stairs (even Neville, despite his still-gimpy right front paw). Later I went out to see if the dogs were being naughty (by, say, loitering in a neighbor's yard). I couldn't find them anywhere and discovered that they were on the couch in the living room. I think they've completely aged out of all the naughty behaviors that used to have our most annoying neighbor call the dog warden (though she still occasionally does, blaming our dogs for coyote shit that appears in her yard).
By this point, I realized my problems with diarrhea had returned in full force, causing me to visit the toilet several times to disgorge a foul watery fluid from my posterior. (This was such a noisy and humiliating procedure that on one occasion I went to the basement master guest room bathroom to do it.) When I looked in the toilet afterwards, I saw all these light-colored oval objects. Was I now full of maggots? But then I realized that these were completely undigested cucumber seeds. I've been eating a lot of cucumbers lately, though cucumbers don't seem to be causing my recent lower intestinal troubles.
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