Written on 09/10/20.

O what a hideous morning!
O what a hideous day!
I’ve got a hideous feeling
The smoke isn’t going away.

The horizon is glowing bright orange
The horizon is glowing bright orange
The angst is as high as a cyclops’s eye
And it looks like we’re going to straight up just die

O what a hideous morning!
O what a hideous day!
I’ve got a hideous feeling
That more shit is coming our way

On September 10^th, 2020, this is how I am facing disaster. Dark humor is my most potent tool against depression. The smoke, the fires, the financial distress (this past week I’ve fallen victim to identity thieves), the politics, the virus—it all seems like the perfect objective correlative to the state of my inner life.

But I try honorably to wield the most valuable weapon to hand: I am determined to go down laughing. I try honorably. I am determined. Nothing stands in the way of my fight for dignified survival.

I feel as I felt nearly two years ago, in the Fall of 2018, when I was hospitalized for 12 days after a botched appendectomy. I was on the edge of delirium. My guts had fallen out when the sutures burst. I had lost track of day and night. I asked the doctor, “Is this likely to be my final illness?” I screamed for morphine. My digestion was as dead as a doornail, so I was being nourished via an intravenous tube. One day, I was finally allowed solid food and the floodgates of digestion were opened. In the middle of the following night, I felt a grumble in my tummy and joyously realized: “I’m gonna poop!”

Flushed with excitement I managed to rise from the bed in my flimsy hospital robe and, clutching the cart with the intravenous tubing, I began to shuffle my way towards the bathroom. Suddenly, I knew I wasn’t going to make it. I stood in the middle of the room and let loose onto the floor.  Poop ran down my leg, soaked and soiled my hospital robe and the bandaid inside the right pocket, then squished around my bare feet as it pooled on the floor. The stench was revolting. The color of it all under the fluorescent institutional lighting of the hospital room is beyond my capacity to describe.

For a moment, I thought I was going to burst out crying. Then, I drew myself up as tall as I could, and holding the pole of the cart for support, I thrust back my shoulders and puffed my chest, tilted my skin towards the sky, turned my profile towards the door, and striking a pose of victory I called out: “Nurse! I need your assistance.” The nurse’s laughter, when she burst through the door and saw the ridiculous tableau I had created, was the sweetest sound imaginable, under the circumstances.

When I told my friend, Hugh, of this escapade, he said: “My God, Charles, that’s the gayest thing I’ve ever heard.”

And that was one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received.

In short, life goes low, I go gay.

So, everybody, let’s thrust back our shoulders, tilt our chins to the sky and make with the musical comedy.

O what a hideous morning!
O what a hideous day!
I’ve got a hideous feeling
That more shit is coming our way