But this meant that my weekly moment of intellectual engagement had crashed. Teaching doesn't count, not only because we're slumping into the Victorian realm, leaving behind Keats and Romantic fellow travelers--but because there in class, I have to guide the discussion, and not say outrageous things, or at least make sure students don't write them down. Monday, though, in that early-morning-window of early-caffeine-jacking-into my deprived (no, not depraved) biochemistry, I instantly knew Soren had given me something to investigate.
First, there are the remedies that automatically come to mind. True, beer doesn't seem the ideal treatment for a virus, nor, I think wine. For sore throat or congestion, go with a Prairie Fire, a process which you can visualize this way:
(and I felt the need to generate my own authentic images, so I ordered one at D&D explicitly to take a picture...
But sadly, in the excitement, I forgot to photo the first one, and had to order a second, which appears happily above. The price of research...).
Or for just ordinary out of sorts, low energy, lethargy, probably this combo which Matt imported from Denver for us, the tequila shot with powered cinnamon and orange:
And there're remedies like 4 weeks of beer and yogurt, which I found successful in those days without health insurance, after swimming in the Amazon, and getting some never-known bacteria or parasite. Quite effective.
Beyond remedies, though, Soren offered that virus/micro-critter-sharing is "what we do here in the 'burbs.'" I have had one student out a couple weeks ago with something that sounded like that stomach affliction, so I looked in the official media for local epidemics. Found a report of "early flu," from December 16, 2014, a report on fatal deer illness from this March, and a February report, "Shigella Outbreak in Columbia/Boone County, Missouri," in which we're informed that this is caused by a feces-related bacteria. Cool.
Yet all of these, and the absence of more reports, given how often something "goes around," tells me that we miss out on a whole layer of reality, that realm of bacteria, viruses, and invisible parasites. Sure, we hear plenty about recent pandemics and their apocalyptic threat, but this misses the hourly lives of our little buddies, how they jump from one human to another, their colloquiums on strategic mutation, their treaties with human cells, their declarations of war. For any of this to reach the official media, one consistent strain would have to expand to bloated proportions, sort of like the human population, which continues to blossom like algae in an increasing fetid pond. Most of our encounters with the invisible world are tiny events, local or micro-local, ever-shifting, perhaps county-wide, perhaps networked through day-care, or an event in the 'burbs.
To really see these, we'd need to crowdsource, to gather reports, symptoms, anecdotes, draw lines of contact... Oh, crowdsourcing-- visualize it like this--
For Columbia, population about 100k, maybe 100 'spotters'? 200? For Boone County, about 170k--maybe 400, spread out in all the little human pockets?
A goal? Maybe to see a different reality. Try Googling "ontology of bacteria." That's not what I'm going for. More a sense of different states of being, of a very different agency--of lifeforms that, after all, numerically dominate this planet.
The whole planet, though, well, we've never been good at thinking in those terms. Wouldn't it be fun to begin to see, to map, just some of what lives right here in Boone County? What kind of map could do justice to the types, the numbers, the absurdly fast leaps, the temporal shifts? Even the idea of what a map is would collapse.
later, bob
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