Reactive Mind

Delirious from hypoglycaemia and the indignity of another failed ‘Pheasant Woman’ novel, L. Ron Hubbard conjured up Dianetics which combined both aspects of his poorly controlled Diabetes and the future Heretics he envisioned would audit the minds of the innocent in an attempt to rid the world of depravity and recapture the monolith. Unfortunately, all the allegories involving molecules, experiments and hard fact were too cumbersome and required narcotic free rationality so Hubbard decided to promote his new science (fiction) by establishing a foundation. Like the rusty sign that indicates the red light district of Nepal, L.Ron too had gained legitimacy through advertising, donations and shock factor. By 1950 he was bigger than the foundation for gluten intolerant Negros and was gaining momentum fast.

The practice of ‘auditing’ which has been described in various Dianetic journals as a ‘lukewarm lobotomy’ combines Freudian psychoanalysis, vivisection and Pepsi. “Basically it’s a spectrum from scalp massage all the way to decapitation”, says one auditor who used to work for the Inland Revenue Service. “Sure there have been casualties, but if you want to find those engrams you gotta dig deep”, the auditor confesses remembering how he once extracted an engram with a spoon without anaesthesia. “But the psychiatrists are much worse”, he offers. “Not only were they behind 9/11 and sub-prime, but they also raped and murdered Michael Jackson”. “Raped”, he mouths silently for emphasis as blood begins to trickle down his left nostril. I politely run out of the building.

Specialty Horoscopes

Medicine March 21-April 19

Unfortunately the House box set you ordered (complete with cane and Vicodin prescription) will not be delivered on time prompting you to swab the neighbourhood trash cans for evidence of Neisseria and foul play. You will see red when a fellow colleague manages to attach his name to a new fashionable bowel ulcer but you realise that you are actually more beautiful than he is and have an eternity of bowel ahead of you with which to be immortalised.

Pathology April 20-May 20

Don’t lose focus. The pinks bring elation, the purples bring malice. The pinks bring excitement to your life. The dots sometimes possibly bring elation. The squiggles may mean something too. Spiculated.

Psychiatry May 21-June 21

This month brings vague nebulous feelings of despair and elation. You will meet a patient claiming to be a ghost, a ghost claiming to be a patient and a chair claiming to be one of the Jackson five– in each, the tea-lady will accidentally diagnose and treat them correctly using your Samsung DVD manual instead of your DSM IV manual. Sprinkling Valproate on your cornflakes does little to steady the highs and lows of patient consultation.

Aneasthetics June 22-July 22

This month you will drift in and out of success, luck and consciousness. Taking coffee without propofol puts you on edge and you tend to defibrillate first, ask questions later. You connect your iPod to the Boyles machine to smooth over the usual beeps with some Enya. Unfortunately ‘Orinoco Flow’ sends the surgical team into a brief coma which you expertly reverse with neostigmine. Your new book ‘Cooking with Morphine’ is an instant bestseller in Tajikistan but your fame is eclipsed by a jealous colleague who shoots to stardom by comparing the sedative properties of Norah Jones and Halothane.

Family Medicine July 23-August 22

Hugging patients does little to thwart the ebb and flow of real diseases this month. After 17 analogies, allegories, fables and Xhosa slang words the petrol attendant is still confused about his hypertension and how many litres you would like to put in your car.

Radiology August 23-September 22

Left in the dark once more, you must retrieve the secret fragments of dust that the elders request. The ability to see through others has left you cynical, sedentary and above all, pale. Several emergencies will plague you this month including a particularly obstinate cappuccino machine.

Obstetrics and Gynaecology September 23-October 22

Unfortunately the cosmos don’t work on a 28 day cycle and tend to favour only half of you this month. While delivering an alleged second twin, an unsuspected ‘third’ assailant snatches your favourite Rolex in utero in what is later described as an ‘unprecedented violent attack on an Obstetrician’. You use the press to catapult your career in the ‘Gynecologist to the stars’ direction you had envisioned in medical school. Sadly many of the starlets who were celebrities back then are now golden oldies.

Paediatrics October 23 - November 21

The child in you embraces what is now damp.

Orthopaedics November 22-December 21

This month you will learn how to put yourself back together again. Distracted and displaced, you can barely remember that C- for woodwork that catapulted you into this job in the first place. After changing the oil in one of your patients you realise that no amount of nailing can mend your own broken heart. You attempt to create a new heart using an avocado, some dental floss and plaster of Paris but abandon the project when your angle grinding skills are needed to install a new toilet in the department.

Dermatology December 22-January 19

Beware the superficial. This month an emergency pedicure will turn pear shaped requiring scrubbing, swabbing, dabbing and if critical, an ointment of sorts. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

Surgery January 20-February 18

This month is a cut above the rest. What you put into the abdominal cavity, you will get out. Not only will you be featured on the cover of SAMJ, BMJ and those salmon cutlets from I&J, but you will also be featured in ELLE/ERCP as a centrefold highlighting the ‘you’ side of varicose veins. One night when diagnosing diverticulitis and ordering Nandos over the phone you discover that yelling at patients has the same effect on them as cutting them open (and to a lesser extent placebo). Without good evidence, you decide to test this theory daily for the foreseeable future.

Plastic Surgery February 19-March 20

This month you are the celebrity. You will successfully change Hellen Zille back into Louis Luyt complete with peck, buttock and eyelid implants. Your Essay ‘1001 uses of human fat’ will earn you time on Jerry Springer where you can promote your new controversial prenatal facelift surgery. You will break several mirrors this month mostly by staring at them for too long and growling excessively.

Death of a Car Guard

The air is as hot as ironed laundry in the shade of the Jacarandas. It is summer in Johannesburg. The suburban street is quiet save for the distant hum of the main road. A dog walks alongside a child on a tricycle which squeaks as she peddles on the sidewalk. I parallel park in a space between a bakkie and a sedan and begin to roll up my window when a calloused crocodile stump penetrates the disappearing gap of the window and lunges blindly towards me. “My Baas!”, hisses the weathered, pock-marked face spraying the window with saliva like a cobra. “My Baas!”, crows my assailant quivering and groping – the stench of his hand beguiling me. “I am Johannus”, he announces from the floor where he now kneels, perhaps beneath my car. “I will look after you, and your car”, he shrieks licentiously, now facing the window with his pathetic, beggarly eyes leering straight at me.

I hear a grey Lourie call from the canopy of trees above the street and reach for an uzzi which has been modified and loaded with 5 cent pieces. I empty the first round into his chest which fragments and splutters before collapsing under the weight of the contribution. “My Baas”, he offers one more time overcome by cunningness and depravity. “No”, I reply, addressing him for the first time. I empty the second round into his head which explodes with a final smirk and soils the nearby wall with copper-streaked blood.

The Curtsy

At a local rally in Harare, President Robert Mugabe is believed to have curtsied in front of thousands of supporters. The gesture came moments after the announcement that sanctions had failed to dim the light bulb that is Zanu-PF. The function, which had been organized by the War Veterans Automobile Club convened to celebrate the redundancy of the $100,000 bank note, which appeared to rain from the heavens like worthless confetti.

Guest speaker Robert Mugabe had only been inciting the crowd for perhaps 40 minutes when he took a step back from the microphone and meandered into the center of the stage. At first it appeared as if one of his syphilitic knees had given way but then, unexpectedly, he did not keel over and die but instead his half-squatting form deliberated into position as if giving birth or passing a stool. His knobby fingers and their dyed knuckle hair began to fumble with the edges of what appeared to be a very loud shirt. And before anyone could stop him, before anyone knew what it was or whether it was good or bad, the President was curtsying - curtsying like a polite 12 year old girl might in the presence of the Queen. Curtsying and smiling.

Several henchman in the vicinity nearly choked on their strawberries (indeed the event was catered by Marks and Spencer).

It was reported that many of the young Veterans had to be given additional (f)arms in order to better understand President Mugabe’s episode of ‘heat stroke’.

Extinguished

Today residents of Santa Cruz were shocked by the by the bizarre murder of yesteryear singing sensation Belinda Carlisle. The 49 year old vocalist was discovered hanging from an energy saving light fitting by a cell phone charger, allegedly not plugged in. 58 year old Alicia Erwin discovered Carlisle at 4pm when she apparently came round to borrow some low GI butter. “It was just awful seeing her floating there. She looked so peaceful. I had to prod her with a broom to make sure she wasn’t sleeping. But then I smelt the smoke” Erwin found that much of the desert style parlour had been burnt with what police would later discover was jatropha seed biofule. Carlisle’s Pomeranian ‘Nooka’ was among the carnage. The dog had ostensibly sustained smoke inhalation injuries but on closer inspection a white, dog-eared segment of paper was protruding from his mouth. Ten A2 sheets of paper were later extricated from its tiny canine jaw. Forensic analysis revealed the papers to be nuclear power plant plans, drawn up and shelved in 2002. No suspects have been named in what has been described as foul and ‘dark’ play.

Darling leave a light on for me
I'll be there before you close the door
To give you all the love that you need
Darling leave a light on for me
Cause when the world takes me away
You are still the air that I breathe
I can't explain, I don't know
Just how far I have to go
But darling I'll keep the key
Just leave a light on for me

A Magical Outing

While I’m sure the memories of Ms Frizzle and her supernatural school-bus are dear to us all, I am referring rather to the posthumous outing of Albus Dumbledore by JK Rowling. The information was revealed to fans at New York’s Carnegie Hall on Saturday. “Dumbledore is gay”, announced Rowling to a momentarily petrified audience. She then went on to explain how he was in love with his evil rival Gellert Grindelwald. Unfortunately Grindelwald, a former Durmstrang-expellee, was interested in little else but nasty things once he had acquired the famed Elder Wand. Dumbledore’s love had gone unrequited – stifled somewhere into his (in retrospect) camp beard. But it wasn’t always like that. Albus and Gellert were meant to be great together – well at least good. Dumbledore no doubt had visions of them skipping through Hogsmead gowns billowing in the air, overcome by butterbeer and fire whiskey, tearing behind his designer half-moon spectacles. Albus learned to forget such feelings. He soon discovered that nothing helps repress occult sexuality quite like a good old fashioned male wand-romp, one in which he would acquired the Elder Wand, banishing Grindelwald to the Nurmengard prison.

Of course it all makes sense now. In our limited necromancy we realize that not only was Dumbledore a homosexual, but he was flaming. He never had a relationship with another woman, he wore a lot of purple (note the luster of the fabric) and his only companion was a bird (also flaming). I just wish he had come out in one of the books. Perhaps Harry plus guests weren’t quite ready to hear it. Sure we can handle Hippogriffs, Snidgets, Bowtruckles and Minotaurs, but what about gays? Do you know any spells?

Do ut des -

Ten people were now crammed into the small consultation room – one of four in the antenatal clinic. I noticed that there were no windows or ventilation slats above the door: it was a room within a room. The air was filled with a sour aseptic odour, warming up with each communal breath exhaled by the room’s occupants. The door had been closed on account of the weather, and out of respect perhaps: we were in a private room after all, sealed off from the patients waiting in the hallway. A rudimentary examination bed, two plastic chairs and a veneered desk hugged the walls of the room and the students dispersed themselves amongst them. The lucky ones were sitting on the examination bed which was covered in transparent plastic, now opaque with fine scratches. The rest of the students squashed themselves backwards, into the wall, standing and leaning with effort. The further from the center the better. The ones in the front were always picked on: names were asked, politeness demanded, nodding was necessary. Two students managed to find space on the cluttered desk where they sat hunched over in waiting. The desk had packets of condoms, sheets of birth control pills and clean syringes all neatly partitioned and stored by cardboard separators. Some STI pamphlets lay folded and piled on the desk but toppled over silently when one of the students whipped open his bag, apparently to find something to eat. I caught a glimpse of the pamphlet: an exposed pubic region with text in blocks of primary colours. The stuff that fear was made of.

Sister Peppy or Dr Pepper or whoever was speaking deliberately and fervently. I only caught the gist of what she was saying because I wasn’t really listening. Daydreaming I suppose. It was a long drive out there. I was tired and my mind wandered to more immediate and prosaic things, things that concerned me beyond the clinic’s isolated needs. The word ‘community’ was repeated several times and suddenly I felt the conjured eyes of the clinic’s 200 waiting patients grow into thousands of expectant eyes – eyes that were depending on my lukewarm indifference to Sister Peppy and her plans. I shut it out. It was too late to care about anything, I had already passed my threshold and was sated. Perhaps with food or some other filler?

My eyes drifted to the wall above the desk, Sister Peppy’s desk, where various HIV posters and A4 sheets of paper with nursing schedules and friendly morale boosters like ‘I can only do 12 things at once’ shielded the paint beneath them from view. ‘Hope Worldwide’ was now being discussed somewhere in the room and I noticed that this organization, too, was represented amongst the chaotic wall collage that extended out of human reach toward the ceiling. Meetings could be held with them. Things could be done. Somewhere in the room someone suggested a ‘partnership’, a ‘coalition’ – the word ‘strive’ may have been used. Some-one mumbled the word ‘community’ again under their breath but it was hard to tell who had said it, or if, for that matter, it had been said at all. But I had already stopped listening. My attention turned abruptly to the postered wall where I allowed my eyes to go out of focus. The blur seemed to hum with the buzzing fluorescent light overhead and it seemed like only a moment passed before we were shuffling awkwardly out of the clinic into the harsh sunlight of the day.

Galaxy

In a surprise press conference David Beckham has announced that he will join Tom Cruise’s ‘club’ of Scientologists in a bid to assimilate himself and his family into the American way of life. Struggling not use the word ‘football’ or ‘Mars-bar’ for fear of offending his new Californian hosts, Beckham explained that Scientology was exactly what him and Posh need to break into the American social scene.

“Tom has already promised us we can meet Oprah yeah. And Deepak Chopsticks. And he’s a good guy yeah. Katie is just great. Great cook”

Beckham went on to explain that he had loaned their youngest son Cruz David Beckham to the Scientology club for the weekend. He’s around three years old.

“Lotta stuff you should teach a young lad. But I ardly ave the time. Maybe they can show him yeah”.

Under all the bright lights of the press room David Beckham could hardly fit another thought in his tired brain. He rose bashfully and dismissed the reporters with a single Dianetical wave.

Face

Madeleine McCann has a face. She has been abducted. She may be alive or dead. These are the terms by which she exists for us. Her face is known and we commiserate with its innocence. She is on all news channels, the internet and radio too. A photograph of her has been blessed by the Pope.

If only all children had faces. They don’t. Thousands are kidnapped or brutalized or sold into slavery. Millions die. Somewhere in Africa a faceless baby is found in a garbage dump wrapped in a Checkers packet. From far away its faceless, lifeless body looks like a doll. Aids and starvation have become tired now. The Pope hasn’t set foot on this continent in years.

It is a doll.

Yoga

The instructor wears nothing but a pair of black lycra hot shorts ill-disguised beneath a salmon pahmina which flicks its tassels coquettishly in the air. He is a man, of sorts. Today he is clean shaven, based over, with eye-liner to boot. ‘Hello darlings’, he lisp-shouts into the small crowd of people in the studio - now on mats. A general greeting is mumbled and returned unanimously. ‘Ok everyone! Let’s start with a simple Half-Cobra or Ardha-bhujangasana.’, he announces, spluttering out the last bit in an effeminate Indian accent. Soon everyone is contorting on the mats – mimicking the instructor’s compromising and often theatrical positions. In the background, incense fills the mirrored studio with the scent of cloves and a meditative ‘hum’ wafts from the boom box speakers. I am told to embrace ‘peace’, ‘love’ and my ‘vaginal chakra’. I’m suddenly aware that I don’t have a vagina, and neither does he. Unperturbed, I begin to hone my camel pose – a rather lopsided affair. When the session is over, the instructor thanks the class, Buddha and God and scampers out of the studio with a camp fluttering of a pashmina trailing behind him.

Shortbus

For those of you who have already had the pleasure, ‘anorgasmia’ denotes the state of not being able to achieve orgasm. In John Cameron Mitchell’s film Shortbus, Sofia played by Sook-Yin Lee dives headfirst into the sex club of the same name in order to achieve the impossible – her first orgasm. Debaucherous threesomes, remote control vibrators and a kiss with a gay man do nothing to boil her sexual experience over and she remains on one side of a barrier which separates her from womanly happiness. The film ensures that the rules of sexual discretion are bent (along with actors who flout them in several compromising positions). Although intimacy is revealed underneath the raging sexuality of the characters, this emotional depth is largely lost in the films culmination, which unlike Sofia’s elusive orgasm, fades into the lime-lit background orgy.

Glamorama

He stares into the mirror at his naked body. His halved stomach reeks of imperfection, he thinks to himself. Thousands of abdominal crunches haven’t defined him enough, haven’t scratched the banality, that is his front. Bending backwards, he strains to cast shadows upon the blocks of his abdomen in the fading afternoon sun. He fails to see them. He lifts his arms upwards hoisting massive pectorals around his neck and faces his head towards the window. Occasionally, he roles his eyes to the side catching glimpses of his pirouetting self in the mirror. “Baby, I’m cool. Be cool. “, he mutters into the reflection, a tear seeping out of one eye – the one not seen in the mirror. He’s smiling now, towards the window - avoiding the reflection. He dislikes how it translates. Closing his eyes he imagines himself wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, sipping martinis in SoHo. Everyone compliments his outfit. Even Madonna. Suddenly his eyes open and he’s in darkness. All he can make out in the reflection of the mirror is the glittering of confetti which pours relentlessly from the ceiling above him.