Never Give Up, Never Surrender

I love Galaxy Quest.  How hot is Gwen in that movie?  Not as hot as as the octopus chick who’s banging Antonio from Wings, but still.  Much has been said about how Demi Moore has defied the aging process, but what Sigourney Weaver is doing right now is bananas and nobody says a thing about it.  She is about a thousand times hotter now than when she was in Alien, and that was 30 years ago.  She’s like 75.  A Wonder Woman movie starring Sigourney Weaver must be made and it must be made now.

What I was going to say before my geek got out was that my offensive capacity has reached a low point such that I have to contemplate giving up non-essential operations altogether, for the time being at least.  I mentioned already the Lexapro withdrawal.  That has induced in me an unacceptable level of emotional instability and, furthermore, drained all the strength I would ordinarily have in reserve.  I had not disclosed the gout attack I have been struggling with for the past ten days now, but it has become severe enough that I have resorted to using the crutches I inherited from Mom.  That should tell you you all you need to know about the pain, because of course crutches are for sissies.  Ordinarily I can suppress a gout flare with anti-inflammatories and, if necessary, set aside a day to take a course of colchicine.  Colchicine is a nasty, nasty medicine, and possibly a mean trick played on me by my doctor.  The instructions on the prescription bottle are as follows: “Take one tablet by mouth every hour until gout relieved or diarrhea.”  I am not kidding.  The side effects of colchicine are very reliable, the intended effects, not so much.  I did a 9-hour course last Saturday and it didn’t take and a 7-hour course yesterday that seems not to have stopped the gout attack either.  Promised side effects, on the other hand, present and protracted.  So the facts on the ground are: it looks like there is a golf ball embedded in my left ankle; it feels like a golf ball is embedded in my ankle; my intestines are going Gordian; and I’m grumpy and weepy.  That leaves me unable to walk, unable to stray far from a bathroom, and unable to rely upon normal energy reserves to push past the pain.  What to do now?  I could sit here and feel sorry for myself, but honestly, I don’t enjoy that.  Mom was all about self-pity and it consistently didn’t help her improve her situation even a little bit.  What I do enjoy is facing difficulties, logging them meticulously, then taking outsized risks and audacious actions that I consider to be low-probability and high-impact.  That means I’m going to try something that probably won’t work, but if it does work, it’s going to be awesome.  I ask myself: what would Commander Taggart say?  More to the point: what would Maréchal Foch do?

You know what Maréchal Foch would do.