Instant Ramen Fried Rice Recipe

When I first learned about the instant ramen–fried rice craze sweeping Japan, I thought it'd make for a silly piece in which I'd make a few jokes about drunk food before sharing the method, so you all could make it at home, too. But then coronavirus swept the world, and suddenly, I'm seeing it in a new light. This isn't just drunk food; it's survival food.

With just one egg and one serving of Cup Noodle (or Cup Noodles, as it's sold in the States), you can make two servings of Cup Noodle–fried rice, four if you're rationing. And it's freaking delicious.

Beat four additional eggs, make an omelette, and plop it on top à la omurice (you could even add a little ketchup to the rice as it's frying, as per the omurice recipe), and you've got yourself a budget meal made entirely of staples, filling your belly without blasting through the kinds of ingredients that require more frequent shopping trips.

There's very little to say about the technique here: This is supposed to be easy and near-instant, so trying to optimize for every step pretty much defeats the purpose. Plus, it's delicious, so there's really no need to overthink it.

All you have to do is remove the dry ramen noodles and all their accompanying seasoning from the cup and crush them up (a plastic bag works well for this, but you could do it in a mixing bowl to reduce plastic waste). Then return them to the cup, cover with just enough boiling water to wet it all but no more.

Meanwhile, scramble an egg in hot oil, add some cooked medium- or short-grain rice (fresh or leftover will work), mix it all together, then dump the wet ramen into the pan, and cook it all together until done. While this is not how we recommend making fried rice usually (we typically will add the egg toward the end of cooking), this method is different in that it doesn't require batch cooking or a wok (which has the surface area to hold all the fried rice and still leave enough room to fry an egg).

by Daniel Gritzer, Serious Eats |  Read more:
Image: Vicky Wasik
[ed. I think I'd add some kind of meat, like Spam or bacon. See also: Comfort foods make a comeback (Marginal Revolution).]

First Grade Social Distancing in China

Image: Eileen Chengyin Chow via Twitter

Seattle’s Leaders Let Scientists Take the Lead. New York’s Did Not

The first diagnosis of the coronavirus in the United States occurred in mid-January, in a Seattle suburb not far from the hospital where Dr. Francis Riedo, an infectious-disease specialist, works. When he heard the patient’s details—a thirty-five-year-old man had walked into an urgent-care clinic with a cough and a slight fever, and told doctors that he’d just returned from Wuhan, China—Riedo said to himself, “It’s begun.”

For more than a week, Riedo had been e-mailing with a group of colleagues who included Seattle’s top doctor for public health and Washington State’s senior health officer, as well as hundreds of epidemiologists from around the country; many of them, like Riedo, had trained at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, in a program known as the Epidemic Intelligence Service. Alumni of the E.I.S. are considered America’s shock troops in combatting disease outbreaks. The program has more than three thousand graduates, and many now work in state and local governments across the country. “It’s kind of like a secret society, but for saving people,” Riedo told me. “If you have a question, or need to understand the local politics somewhere, or need a hand during an outbreak—if you reach out to the E.I.S. network, they’ll drop everything to help.”

Riedo is the medical director for infectious disease at EvergreenHealth, a hospital in Kirkland, just east of Seattle. Upon learning of the first domestic diagnosis, he told his staff—from emergency-room nurses to receptionists—that, from then on, everything they said was just as important as what they did. One of the E.I.S.’s core principles is that a pandemic is a communications emergency as much as a medical crisis. Members of the public entering the hospital, Riedo told his staff, must be asked if they had travelled out of the country; if someone had respiratory trouble, staff needed to collect as much information as possible about the patient’s recent interactions with other people, including where they had taken place. You never know, Riedo explained, which chance encounter will shape a catastrophe. There are so many terrifying possibilities in a pandemic; information brings relief.

A national shortage of diagnostic kits for the new coronavirus meant that only people who had recently visited China were eligible for testing. Even as EvergreenHealth’s beds began filling with cases of flulike symptoms—including a patient from Life Care, a nursing home two miles away—the hospital’s doctors were unable to test them for the new disease, because none of the sufferers had been to China or been in contact with anyone who had. For nearly a month, as the hospital’s patients complained of aches, fevers, and breathing problems—and exhibited symptoms associated with covid-19, such as “glassy” patches in X-rays of their lungs—none of them were evaluated for the disease. Riedo wanted to start warning people that evidence of an outbreak was growing, but he had only suspicions, not facts.

At the end of February, the C.D.C. began allowing the testing of patients with unexplained respiratory-tract infections or “fever and/or symptoms of acute respiratory illness.” Riedo called a friend—an E.I.S. alum at the local department of health. If he sent her swabs from two patients who had needed ventilators but had tested negative for influenza and other common respiratory diseases, would she test them for covid-19? At that point, there had been only sixteen detections of the coronavirus in the U.S., and only the one in Washington State. “I can’t remember why we picked those two patients,” Riedo told me. “I was sure they’d be negative. But we thought it would be good to start collecting data, and it was a way to make sure the testing lab was working.” The health official told him to send the samples to her lab.

Riedo remembered that other local researchers had been conducting a project called the Seattle Flu Study. For months, they had collected nasal swabs from volunteers, to better understand how influenza spread through the community. During the previous few weeks, the researchers, in quiet violation of C.D.C. guidance, had jury-rigged a coronavirus test in their lab and had started using it on their samples. They had just found a positive hit: a high-school student in a suburb twenty-eight miles from Seattle, with no recent history of foreign travel and no known interactions with anyone from China. The boy wasn’t seriously ill; if the researchers hadn’t done the test, the infection probably never would have been detected. The genetic sequence of the boy’s virus was unnervingly similar to that of the man with the first known case, even though the researchers couldn’t find any connections between them. The frightening implication was that the coronavirus was already so widespread that contagion was passing invisibly among community members.

At seven-forty that evening, Riedo got a call from his friend at the public-health lab. Both of the samples he had sent were positive. Riedo sent over swabs from nine other EvergreenHealth patients. Eight were positive. Riedo grabbed the patients’ charts and saw that seven of them had come from the Life Care nursing home. It didn’t make any sense: nursing-home residents don’t travel, and interact mainly with just family members and staff.

Riedo sent in more samples. Most of the patients tested positive, including a woman who had been told that she had pneumonia, another woman who had complained of sweating and clammy hands, and a man in his fifties with serious respiratory problems. For three days, dozens of that man’s family members had sat at his bedside in the hospital, coming in and out of the building and going from home to work, visiting restaurants and shaking people’s hands, inadvertently exposing themselves and others to covid-19.

At that moment, there were no known U.S. coronavirus fatalities. Schools, restaurants, and workplaces were open. Stock markets were near all-time highs. But when Riedo stopped to calculate how many of his hospital employees had been exposed to the coronavirus he had to quit when his list surpassed two hundred people. “If we sent all of those workers home for two weeks, which is what the C.D.C. was recommending, we’d have to shut down the entire hospital,” he told me. He felt like a man who, having casually swatted at a buzzing insect, suddenly realized that he was beneath a beehive.

The next day, the man with all the family visitors died. It was America’s first known covid-19 death. Riedo called his wife. “I told her I didn’t know when I would be coming home,” he said to me. “And then I started e-mailing everyone I knew to say we were past containment. It had already escaped.” (...)

On February 28th, around the time that Riedo learned of the covid-19 cluster at the Life Care nursing home, the news was also relayed to another E.I.S. alum, Dr. Jeff Duchin, the top public-health physician for Seattle and surrounding King County. To Duchin, the cluster suggested that there was already an area-wide outbreak. He told Dow Constantine, the King County Executive, that it was time to start considering restrictions on public gatherings and telling residents to stay home. This advice struck Constantine as possibly crazy. There were only two dozen covid-19 diagnoses in the entire nation. Life looked normal. How could people be persuaded to stop going to bars, much less to work, just because a handful of old people were sick?

Constantine told me, “Jeff recognized what he was asking for was impractical. He said if we advised social distancing right away there would be zero acceptance. And so the question was: What can we say today so that people will be ready to hear what we need to say tomorrow?” In e-mails and phone calls, the men began playing a game: What was the most extreme advice they could give that people wouldn’t scoff at? Considering what would likely be happening four days from then, what would they regret not having said?

Even for public-health professionals, the trade-offs were painful to contemplate. At a meeting of public-health supervisors and E.I.S. officials in Seattle, an analyst became emotional when describing the likely consequences of shutting Seattle’s schools. Thousands of kids relied on schools for breakfast and lunch, or received medicine like insulin from school nurses. If schools closed, some of those students would likely go hungry; others might get sick, or even die. Everyone also knew that, if the city shut down, domestic-violence incidents would rise. And what about the medical providers who would have to stop working, because they had to stay home with young kids? “It was overwhelming,” one E.I.S. official told me. “Every single decision had a million ripples.”  (...)

The initial coronavirus outbreaks in New York City emerged at roughly the same time as those in Seattle. But the cities’ experiences with the disease have markedly differed. By the second week of April, Washington State had roughly one recorded fatality per fourteen thousand residents. New York’s rate of death was nearly six times higher.

There are many explanations for this divergence. New York is denser than Seattle and relies more heavily on public transportation, which forces commuters into close contact. In Seattle, efforts at social distancing may have been aided by local attitudes—newcomers are warned of the Seattle Freeze, which one local columnist compared to the popular girl in high school who “always smiles and says hello” but “doesn’t know your name and doesn’t care to.” New Yorkers are in your face, whether you like it or not. (“Stand back at least six feet, playa,” a sign in the window of a Bronx bodega cautioned. “covid-19 is some real shit!”) New York also has more poverty and inequality than Seattle, and more international travellers. Moreover, as Mike Famulare, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Disease Modeling, put it to me, “There’s always some element of good luck and bad luck in a pandemic.”

It’s also true, however, that the cities’ leaders acted and communicated very differently in the early stages of the pandemic. Seattle’s leaders moved fast to persuade people to stay home and follow the scientists’ advice; New York’s leaders, despite having a highly esteemed public-health department, moved more slowly, offered more muddied messages, and let politicians’ voices dominate.

by Charles Duhigg, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Javier Jaén and Ranta Images/Getty

Toda Luna, Todo Año

Automatically, Eloise Gore began to translate the poem in her head. Each moon, each year. No. Every moon, every year gets the fricative sound. Camina? Walks. Shame that doesn’t work in English. Clocks walk in Spanish, don’t run. Goes along, and passes away.

She snapped the book shut. You don’t read at a resort. She sipped her margarita, made herself take in the view from the restaurant terrace. The dappled coral clouds had turned a fluorescent pewter, crests of waves shattered silver on the gray-white beach below. All down the beach, from the town of Zihuatanejo, was a faint dazzle and dance of tiny green light. Fireflies, neon lime-green. Village girls placed them in their hair when they walked at dusk, strolling in groups of twos or threes. Some of the girls scattered the insects through their hair, others arranged them into emerald tiaras.

This was her first night here and she was alone in the dining room. Waiters in white coats stood near the steps to the pool and bar where most of the guests still danced and drank. Mambo! Que rico el Mambo! Ice cubes and maracas. Busboys lit flickering candles. There was no moon; it seemed the stars gave the metallic sheen to the sea.

Sunburned wildly dressed people began to come into the dining room. Texans or Californians she thought, looser, breezier than anyone from Colorado. They called across the tables to each other: “Go for it, Willy!” “Far fuckin’ out!”

What am I doing here? This was her first trip anywhere since her husband’s death three years before. Both Spanish teachers, they had traveled every summer in Mexico and Latin America. After he died she had not wanted to go anywhere without him, had signed up each June to teach summer school. This year she had been too tired to teach. In the travel office they had asked her when she needed to return. She had paused, chilled. She didn’t need to return, didn’t need to teach at all anymore. There was no place she had to be, no one to account to.

She ate her ceviche now, feeling painfully conspicuous. Her gray seersucker suit, appropriate in class, in Mexico City … it was dowdy, ludicrously the wrong thing. Stockings were tacky, and hot. There would probably even be a wet spot when she stood up.

She forced herself to relax, to enjoy langostinos broiled in garlic. Mariachis were strolling from table to table, passed hers by when they saw her frozen expression. Sabor a tí. The taste of you. Imagine an American song about how somebody tasted? Everything in Mexico tasted. Vivid garlic, cilantro, lime. The smells were vivid. Not the flowers, they didn’t smell at all. But the sea, the pleasant smell of decaying jungle. Rancid odor of the pigskin chairs, kerosene-waxed tiles, candles.

It was dark on the beach and fireflies played in the misty green swirls, on their own now. Out in the bay were red flares for luring fish. (...)

Eloise wished she had a mystery book. She got up and went to the bathroom, cockroaches and land crabs clattering out of her way. She showered with coconut soap, dried with damp towels. She wiped the mirror so she could look at herself. Mediocre and grim, she thought. Not mediocre, her face, with wide gray eyes, fine nose and smile, but it was grim. A good body, but so long disregarded it seemed grim too.

The band stopped playing at two thirty. Footsteps and whispers, a glass shattering. Say you dig it, baby, say it! A moan. Snores.

Eloise woke at six, as usual. She opened the shutters, watched the sky turn from milky silver to lavender gray. Palm branches slipped in the breeze like shuffled cards. She put on her bathing suit and her new rose dress. No one was up, not even in the kitchen. Roosters crowed and zopilotes flapped around the garbage. Four pigs. In the back of the garden Indian busboys and gardeners slept, uncovered, curled on the bricks.

She stayed on the jungle path away from the beach. Dark dripping silence. Orchids. A flock of green parrots. An iguana arched on a rock, waiting for her to pass. Branches slapped sticky warm into her face.

The sun had risen when she climbed a hill, down then to a rise above a white beach. From where she stood she could see onto the calm cove of Las Gatas. Underwater was a stone wall built by Terascans to protect the cove from sharks. A school of sardines swirled through the transparent water, disappeared like a tornado out to sea. Clusters of palapa huts stretched down the beach. Smoke drifted from the farthest one but there was no one to be seen. A sign said BERNARDO’S SCUBA DIVING.

She dropped her dress and bag on the sand, swam with a sure crawl far out to the stone wall. Back then, floating and swimming. She treaded water and laughed out loud, finally lay in the water near the shore rocking in the waves and silence, her eyes open to the startling blue sky.

She walked past Bernardo’s, down the beach toward the smoke. An open thatch-roofed room with a raked sand floor. A large wooden table, benches. Beyond that room was a long row of bamboo alcoves, each with a hammock and mosquito netting. In the primitive kitchen a child washed dishes at the pila; an old woman fanned the fire. Chickens darted around them, pecking in the sand.

“Good morning,” Eloise said. “Is it always so quiet here?”

“The divers are out. You want breakfast?”

“Please.” Eloise reached out her hand. “My name is Eloise Gore.” But the old woman just nodded. “Siéntese.”

Eloise ate beans, fish, tortillas, gazing across the water to the misted hills. Her hotel looked blowsy and jaded to her, askew on the hillside. Bougainvillea spilled over its walls like a drunken woman’s shawls.

“Could I stay here?” she asked the woman.

“We’re not a hotel. Fishermen live here.”

But when she came back with hot coffee she said, “There is one room. Foreign divers stay here sometimes.”

It was an open hut behind the clearing. A bed and a table with a candle on it. A mildewed mattress, clean sheets, a mosquito netting. “No scorpions,” the woman said. The price she asked for room and board was absurdly low. Breakfast and dinner at four when the divers got back.

It was hot as Eloise went back through the jungle but she found herself skipping along, like a child, talking to Mel in her head. She tried to remember when she had last felt happy. Once, soon after he died, she had watched the Marx Brothers on television. A Night at the Opera. She had had to turn it off, could not bear to laugh alone.

The hotel manager was amused that she was going to Las Gatas. “Muy típico.” Local color: a euphemism for primitive or dirty. He arranged for a canoe to take her and her things across the bay that afternoon.

She was dismayed when they neared her peaceful beach. A large wooden boat, La Ida, was anchored in front of the palapa. Multicolored canoes and motored pangas from town slipped in and out, loading from it. Lobsters, fish, eels, octopus, bags of clams. A dozen men were on the shore or taking air tanks and regulators off the boat, laughing and shouting. A young boy tied a mammoth green turtle to the anchor line.

Eloise put her things in her room, wanted to lie down but there was no privacy at all. From her bed she could see out into the kitchen, through it to the divers at the table, out to the blue green sea.

“Time to eat,” the woman called to her. She and the child were taking dishes to the table.

“May I help you?” Eloise asked.

“Siéntese.”

Eloise hesitated at the table. One of the men stood and shook her hand. Squat, massive, like an Olmec statue. He was a deep brown color, with heavy-lidded eyes and a sensuous mouth.

“Soy César. El maestro.”

He made a place for her to sit, introduced her to the other divers, who nodded to her and continued to eat. Three very old men. Flaco, Ramón, and Raúl. César’s sons, Luis and Cheyo. Madaleno, the boatboy. Beto, “a new diver — the best.” Beto’s wife, Carmen, sat back from the table nursing their child.

Steaming bowls of clams. The men were talking about El Peine. Old Flaco had finally seen it, after diving all his life. The comb? Later, with a dictionary, she found out that they were talking about a giant sawfish.

“Gigante. Big as a whale. Bigger!”

“Mentira! You were hallucinating. High on air.”

“Just wait. When the Italians come with their cameras, I’ll take them, not any of you.”

“Bet you can’t remember where he was.”

Flaco laughed. “Pues … not exactly.”

Lobster, grilled red snapper, octopus. Rice and beans and tortillas. The child put a dish of honey on a far table to distract the flies. A long loud meal. When it was over everyone except César and Eloise went to hammocks to sleep. Beto and Carmen’s room had a curtain, the others were open.

“Acércate a mí,” César said to Eloise. She moved closer to him. The woman brought them papaya and coffee. She was César’s sister, Isabel; Flora was her daughter. They had come two years before when César’s wife had died. Yes, Eloise was widowed too. Three years.

“What do you want from Las Gatas?” he asked.

She didn’t know. “Quiet,” she said. He laughed.

“But you’re always quiet, no? You can dive with us, there’s no noise down there. Go rest now.”

It was dusk when she awoke. A lantern glowed in the dining room. César and the three old men were playing dominos. The old men were his mother and father, César told her. His own parents had died when he was five and they had taken him in, taken him underwater his first day. The three men had been the only divers then, free divers for oysters and clams, years before tanks or spearguns.

At the far end of the palapa Beto and Carmen talked, her tiny foot pushing their hammock. Cheyo and Juan sharpened speargun points. Away from the others Luis listened to a transistor radio. Rock and roll. You can teach me English! He invited Eloise to sit by him. The words to songs weren’t what he had imagined at all. Can’t get no satisfaction.

Beto’s baby lay naked on the table, his head cradled in César’s free hand. The baby peed and César swept the urine off the table, dried his hand in his hair.

by Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
Image: uncredited

Toshihiko Okuya, study #157
via:

Laurent Durieux, Gimme Shelter
via:

WHO Recommends Restricting Alcohol

Alcohol does not protect against COVID-19; access should be restricted during lockdown (WHO)

Image: Bojack Horseman

"Alcohol is known to be harmful to health in general, and is well understood to increase the risk of injury and violence, including intimate partner violence, and can cause alcohol poisoning. At times of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, alcohol consumption can exacerbate health vulnerability, risk-taking behaviours, mental health issues and violence. WHO/Europe reminds people that drinking alcohol does not protect them from COVID-19, and encourages governments to enforce measures which limit alcohol consumption. (...)

Existing rules and regulations to protect health and reduce harm caused by alcohol, such as restricting access, should be upheld and even reinforced during the COVID-19 pandemic and emergency situations; while any relaxation of regulations or their enforcement should be avoided."

[ed. Good advice if you're looking to incite a world-wide riot. See also: Why Cocktail Hour is Back (NY Times).]

Mazzy Star

Hope Sandoval

March, April, May: Mood Darkens as Crisis Feels Endless

A walk in the park brings tense flare-ups: Back off, you’re too close. Oh really? Then stay home. A loud neighbor, once a fleeting annoyance of urban life, is cause for complaint to the city. Wake at noon, still tired. The city’s can-do resilience has given way to resignation and random tears.

In Queens, Nicole Roderka, 28, knows she must wear a mask outside, fears the anxiety it might bring, and sets it aside. In Brooklyn, Lauren Sellers grinds her teeth at night; there are sores in her mouth from the stress. When a 3-year-old boy in Manhattan’s Inwood section, Eli McKay, looked around and declared, “The virus is gone today, we can go see my friends,” his mother replied as if from one of his picture-book fantasies: “Maybe tomorrow.”

A feeling of sadness shot through with frayed nerves could be felt in conversations in and around the city as the coronavirus outbreak in the world’s epicenter dragged toward its sixth week, its end still too far off to see.

“This is the week where I feel like I have accepted this, and given up,” Euna Chi of Brooklyn wrote in an email. “My daily commute to the couch feels ‘normal.’”

The journey that began in March with an us-against-it unity, with homemade masks and do-it-yourself haircuts and Zoom happy hours, has turned into a grim slog for many. It felt as if the city had cautiously approached a promising bend in the road, a new page on the calendar, only to find nothing, and beyond that, ever more of the same. (...)

The most recent weekly survey of 1,000 New York State residents, about half of them from the city, by the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy asked how socially connected people have felt. Just over two in five said “not at all.” That was about double the number that answered that way four weeks earlier.

Forty percent of the latest poll’s respondents said they had felt anxious more than half of the time in the past two weeks; 32 percent said they had felt depressed.

“There is this grieving of life as we once knew it that wasn’t there before, as we try to come to terms with the new reality,” said Greg Kushnick, a psychologist in Manhattan. “I’m seeing it much more in my practice. People are really starting to get more depressed. And people who are prone to depression, it’s now kicking in.” (...)

“I think my ‘wall’ earlier this week was me finally dropping out of the ‘denial’ phase … it’s no longer ‘a fun change of pace,’” one of them, Annalisa Loeffler, wrote in an email to friends that she shared with The New York Times. “Things that are super important to me and make the rest of life bearable may not be physically possible for a very long time. I’m trying not to ‘borrow trouble,’ but there is definitely validity to accepting grief for what has been lost.”

by Michael Wilson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Marian Carrasquero for The New York Times

[ed. I feel it too, a growing sense of resignation and defeat. The uncertainty and open-endedness of it all, a dawning realization that life as we know it will probably never be the same again. So many unresolved issues: possible mutations, a seasonal reappearance in the fall, no imminent vaccine, even the possibility that once you contract the disease you still might get reinfected. Then there's the economy, poised on a knife's edge. It's like no one will escape without some measure of personal tragedy. In the mean time we live in isolated little silos, like mole people. For a worst case scenario (as if more depressing news is needed), see: The Scariest Pandemic Timeline (The Atlantic).]

Rise of Insomnia and Vivid Dreaming

Zyma Islam noticed her sleep began to change soon after the lockdown began.

Islam is in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which has been under a strict lockdown for over three weeks. All forms of public transport are suspended. That means scores of daily wage earners—domestic helpers, rickshaw pullers, construction workers, and garment workers—have lost wages, and are now battling hunger.

Islam is typically an early riser, but she had to adapt to a new routine of working during the night. “All day long there are queues of hungry people outside my house begging and crying for food,” Islam said. The streets get quieter after 11pm, which is when Islam now gets most of her office work done. She gets to bed around 7am—and most days, she’s barely able to sleep for four hours.

“I don’t have control over whether these people actually end up getting food or relief,” says Islam, which has left her in a constant state of anxiety. “As a result of this, I’m aways sleep-deprived in spite of constantly actually being home.”

Islam isn’t alone. “Everything about this situation is dreadful. It’s full of dread all the time,” says Orfeu M. Buxton, who directs the Sleep, Health, and Society Collaboratory at Pennsylvania State University. All around the world, people’s lives are being impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic—along with their typical sleep patterns.

Whether it’s insomnia, strange dreams, or even sleeping too much, sleep disturbances are part of our body’s response to trauma and anxiety. Everyone will react to these situations differently—but experts have helpful information to share about ways to improve your rest.

Insomnia

“We are in the midst of collective trauma,” says Christy Beck, a therapist based in State College, Pennsylvania. “Something none of us have experienced in our lifetime. And sleep disturbance is a common trauma response, along with anxiety and depression.” Beck says that stress can cause a variety of sleep disorders, including insomnia—not being able to fall asleep—and its opposite, hypersomnia.

Anecdotal evidence seems to agree. Google searches for the term “insomnia” hit an all-time high recently. Hailey Meaklim, a psychologist and research scientist who is investigating the impact of the pandemic on insomnia symptoms, says that it is the most common sleep problem.

The pandemic is an invisible threat, Meaklim explains, “one that we can’t fight or run away from like we would from a sabre-tooth tiger.” But it still puts our bodies on high alert. “When you can’t actively do anything about these concerns, that still elicits a stress response. You want to sleep, but the rest of your physiology is actually telling you to mobilize, and that can put you at odds,” says Tony Cunningham, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard Medical School.

“This may be due to the physiological arousal of the “fight or flight” system that accompanies anxiety that is in opposition with the “rest and digest” system needed to sleep,” says Courtney Bolstad, a doctoral student at the Mississippi State University. “This arousal may also cause difficulty returning to sleep in the middle of the night.”

There’s one more reason for trouble sleeping: People may also be staying up later to be on their phones, as they don’t have to get up early for work. “The light emitted from phones signals to our “clocks” that it is still daytime,” says Meaklim, which can lead to disruptions to our circadian rhythms and ultimately our sleep.

by Amanat Khullar, Quartz | Read more:
Image: Nuca Lomadze/EyeEm via Getty Images
[ed. I know my sleep patterns have seriously gone to hell. See also: Insomnia and Vivid Dreams on the Rise With COVID-19 Anxiety (Smithsonian). Also indications of dangerously escalating mental health issues: A high-risk perfect storm': loneliness and financial despair take toll on US mental health (The Guardian).]

U.S. Blowjobless Rate At All-Time High

In the wake of a recent drop in the sexual-interest rate, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao announced Tuesday that blowjoblessness in America has reached a record high.

According to Labor Department statistics, the overall blowjobless rate swelled to 37.4 percent in July, causing widespread deflation of egos.

"Cutbacks in oral services have left 55 million Americans unsatisfied," Chao said. "Although June saw a promising jump in the age 15-19 demographic, with many teenagers finding summer blowjobs, almost 82 percent of married men are completely blowjobless."

The historically fluid blowjob market reached its climax in 1996, when millions of wives and girlfriends vigorously stimulated the privates sector. But while demand has remained extremely high, supply could not, or would not, keep up. As a result, the blowjobless rate has climbed steadily, and today's limp market shows few signs of immediate expansion.

According to Chao, long-term relationships are responsible for the loss of many of this year's blowjobs.

"Over time, traditional blowjob providers prioritize other services, eventually eliminating those blowjobs that they deem unnecessary," Chao said.

"Blowjobs are not as plentiful as some Internet sites would lead you to believe," said blowjob-market analyst Tom Cochran. "Overall, it's an extremely dry market. I myself haven't had a blowjob in years."

"And it's not from a lack of trying," Cochran added.

Some professional men who once had a steady source of outcome have begun looking for freelance blowjobs. Fairfax, VA resident Dave Abbott said if he can't find a blowjob in his field, he'll move to a throbbing market such as Las Vegas.

"I heard they'll offer a part-time blowjob to just about anyone in Vegas," Abbott said.

According to Labor Department statistics, almost half of blowjobless Americans are living below the oral-poverty line, and benefits packages that include sexual intercourse are not enough to sustain them.

"For many of these orally disenfranchised men, a hand-to-mouth existence is but a dream," Cochran said.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

via:

Saliva is More Sensitive for SARS-CoV-2 Detection in COVID-19 Patients Than Nasopharyngeal Swabs

Abstract

Rapid and accurate SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic testing is essential for controlling the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The current gold standard for COVID-19 diagnosis is real-time RT-PCR detection of SARS-CoV-2 from nasopharyngeal swabs. Low sensitivity, exposure risks to healthcare workers, and global shortages of swabs and personal protective equipment, however, necessitate the validation of new diagnostic approaches. Saliva is a promising candidate for SARS-CoV-2 diagnostics because (1) collection is minimally invasive and can reliably be self-administered and (2) saliva has exhibited comparable sensitivity to nasopharyngeal swabs in detection of other respiratory pathogens, including endemic human coronaviruses, in previous studies. To validate the use of saliva for SARS-CoV-2 detection, we tested nasopharyngeal and saliva samples from confirmed COVID-19 patients and self-collected samples from healthcare workers on COVID-19 wards. When we compared SARS-CoV-2 detection from patient-matched nasopharyngeal and saliva samples, we found that saliva yielded greater detection sensitivity and consistency throughout the course of infection. Furthermore, we report less variability in self-sample collection of saliva. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that saliva is a viable and more sensitive alternative to nasopharyngeal swabs and could enable at-home self-administered sample collection for accurate large-scale SARS-CoV-2 testing.

by: Anne Louise Wyllie, John Fournier, Arnau Casanovas-Massana, Melissa Campbell, Maria Tokuyama, Pavithra Vijayakumar, Bertie Geng, M. Catherine Muenker, Adam J. Moore, Chantal B. F. Vogels, Mary E. Petrone, Isabel M. Ott, Peiwen Lu, Alice Lu-Culligan, Jonathan Klein, Arvind Venkataraman, Rebecca Earnest, Michael Simonov, Rupak Datta, Ryan Handoko, Nida Naushad, Lorenzo R. Sewanan, Jordan Valdez, Elizabeth B. White, Sarah Lapidus, Chaney C. Kalinich, Xiaodong Jiang, Daniel J. Kim, Eriko Kudo, Melissa Linehan, Tianyang Mao, Miyu Moriyama, Ji Eun Oh, Annsea Park, Julio Silva, Eric Song, Takehiro Takahashi, Manabu Taura, Orr-El Weizman, Patrick Wong, Yexin Yang, Santos Bermejo, Camila Odio, Saad B. Omer, Charles S. Dela Cruz, Shelli Farhadian, Richard A. Martinello, Akiko Iwasaki, Nathan D. Grubaugh, Albert I. Ko, medRxiv |  Read more:

[ed. Pre-print and not certified for peer review at this time. From the Yale School of Medicine and Yale School of Public Health. See also: Contact-Tracing Technology: A Key to Reopening (Johns Hopkins).]

The Great Distractor/Schrodinger’s Trump

One of the many things Donald Trump has done badly for the country in recent months is focus this debate – largely around himself – about whether to ‘open up’ or not. This argument is good for generating intractable arguments. But it’s not terribly productive. Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Obama administration official involved in the US ebola response and other international aid efforts, suggests this analogy. Your house is on fire. You can shut the windows to deprive the fire of oxygen. That will slow it down. But eventually you’ll suffocate. We’ve now got a public debate which amounts to whether to be incinerated or suffocate. What we need is the fire brigade to show up and hose down the house. The fire brigade, as Konyndyk explains, is a system of widespread testing, contact tracing, isolation for the infected and beefed up hospital capacity to make an interim new normal possible.

This is very hard work to do.

It would be too much to say that’s not happening. Various states are groping toward a version of that. Some is happening at the federal level. But it’s not happening anywhere fast enough. Nor is it being done on an organized national basis. We’re largely distracted by this open vs don’t open food fight in which the President is on one side or another each day depending on his mood and who he’s talked to in the previous few hours. Different parts of the country will require different approaches. But having each state devise their own strategy is as ridiculous as leaving it to individuals to make their public health decisions. Life in general is a constant mix of cases in which we are either individuals or parts of a much larger social organism. In a time of epidemic disease we are emphatically in the latter category.

TPM Reader TB flagged another key point for me. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) has now become that comic figure, the dutiful party lickspittle who in his eagerness to ingratiate gets just slightly out ahead of a mercurial paramount leader and then gets cut off at the knees for having zigged when he was supposed to zag. (Read more: The Great Distractor - TPM)

***

One of the enduring features of the early Obama administration and the 2008/2009 global financial crisis was how quickly the Republican party pivoted to being the chief critic of efforts to clean up the mess their incumbent President and party had in many respects created. Suddenly the GOP barely knew George W. Bush and the 43rd President was retrospectively rebranded as the exponent of something called ‘big government conservatism’ that the GOP absolutely had nothing to do with and had never truly supported. Months into office Barack Obama was the spendthrift leading the country toward hyperinflation, decadence and ruin.

Six weeks ago I mentioned that it was now conceivable that for the second time in a generation a Democratic President – and perhaps a Democratic Congress – could come to power in January 2021 charged with picking up the pieces for a financial collapse on the GOP watch. Suddenly deficits which haven’t mattered for three years will matter again with a vengeance when it’s Democrats doing the spending.

We don’t know what the result of the November election will be. But what is remarkable is how Republicans and actually Trump himself haven’t even waited for Trump to be driven from office. Trump is now both the head of state saving the country from the global pandemic and the hidden leader of the resistance to pandemic overreach and the forces which destroyed the best economy in the history of the universe. He is both fearless leader and embodiment of the state and rebel commander goading supporters to ‘liberate’ their country. [ed. Emphasis added. Maybe this is why everything seems so surreal?]

The Trump administration has always had similar features: Trump both leads the government but often remains out of sync with or rebelling against many of the people he has appointed to run the government. (...)

Governors who are holding the line against a premature reopening of society are sometimes pointing out that they are actually operating in line with the guidelines President Trump himself has at least nominally promulgated. But Trump’s partisans know instinctively, if only because he says so so often, that Trump doesn’t support them at all. Or rather, that he supports them when he does and not when he doesn’t, whenever it is situationally convenient to do so. (Read more: Schrodinger’s Trump - TPM)

[ed. See also: We Are Living in a Failed State (The Atlantic). Recommended. And: The President is Unwell (The Week)]

Oliver Nelson

Five Threats to US Food Supply Chains

The coronavirus pandemic has upended food supply chains, led to closures of meat producing plants and left Americans with the unsettling experience of seeing empty shelves at supermarkets.

Coupled with the run on toilet paper that led to severe shortages, recent events are leading Americans to wonder if the nation's food supply is secure.

Experts say that by and large, Americans don’t need to worry about food running out, but that does not mean all food will be readily available.

“I think we have a strong food supply system, and it’s diversified enough to provide the products to consumers,” said Olga Isengildina Massa, an associate professor of agriculture and applied economics at Virginia Tech.

“Obviously it has a lot of hiccups right now, but we’re working through the system,” she added.

Here are five of the major challenges facing food supply chains.

Virus outbreaks at food plants (...)

Agricultural reliance on guest workers (...)

Supply chain mismatches (...)

Increased food insecurity (...)

Crunch on delivery capacity (...)

by Niv Elis, The Hill |  Read more:

Image: Dave Sanders for The New York Times
[ed. Important. See also: Here's why you can't find frozen fries, while U.S. farmers are sitting on tons of potatoes (Reuters); and Severe coronavirus outbreaks stagger some meat-packing plants in Washington (Seattle Times):]

"So far, Corral has maintained his health, and has stayed on the job even as many co-workers opted to stay home. The facility, during normal operations, processes enough beef each day to feed 4 million people, according to the company. And Corral takes pride in his support of that effort."

“I don’t want to have a shortage of food later,” he said. “That’s my motivation. I feel like my job produces something that benefits the community.”

Smoking and Virus Protection

French Researchers to Test Nicotine Patches on Coronavirus Patients

French researchers are planning to test nicotine patches on coronavirus patients and frontline health workers after a study suggested smokers may be much less at risk of contracting the virus.

The study at a major Paris hospital suggests a substance in tobacco – possibly nicotine – may be stopping patients who smoke from catching Covid-19. Clinical trials of nicotine patches are awaiting the approval of the country’s health authorities.

However, the researchers insisted they were not encouraging the population to take up smoking, which carries other potentially fatal health risks and kills 50% of those who take it up. While nicotine may protect those from the virus, smokers who have caught it often develop more serious symptoms because of the toxic effect of tobacco smoke on the lungs, they say. (...)

The renowned French neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux, who reviewed the study, suggested the nicotine might stop the virus from reaching cells in the body preventing its spread. Nicotine may also lessen the overreaction of the body’s immune system that has been found in the most severe cases of Covid-19 infection.

The findings are to be verified in a clinical study in which frontline health workers, hospital patients with the Covid-19 virus and those in intensive care will be given nicotine patches.

The results confirm a Chinese study published at the end of March in the New England Journal of Medicine that suggested only 12.6% of 1,000 people infected with the virus were smokers while the number of smokers in China is around 28%.

In France, figures from Paris hospitals showed that of 11,000 patients admitted to hospital with Covid-19, 8.5% were smokers. The total number of smokers in France is estimated at around 25.4%.

“Our cross-sectional study strongly suggests that those who smoke every day are much less likely to develop a symptomatic or severe infection with Sars-CoV-2 compared with the general population,” the Pitié-Salpêtrière report authors wrote.

by Kim Willsher, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images
[ed. Hard to believe but maybe smoking (at least at low to moderate levels) stresses the immune system enough to make it a little more robust, or, as the authors suggest, that nicotine somehow affects virus receptors. Wierd. (But not as wierd as waking up this morning and seeing the President suggesting people should try swallowing disinfectants in the sun or something. It's like living in an insane asylum). Anyway, here's the study: Low incidence of daily active tobacco smoking in patients with symptomatic COVID-19 (Qeios):]

There are however, sufficient scientific data to suggest that smoking protection is likely to be mediated by nicotine. SARS-CoV2 is known to use the angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor for cell entry[14-16], and there is evidence that nicotine modulates ACE2 expression[17]which could in turn modulate the nicotinic acetyl choline receptor (manuscript submitted). We hypothesize that SARS-CoV2 might alter the control of the nicotine receptor by acetylcholine. This hypothesis may also explain why previous studies have found an association between smoking and Covid-19 severity[1, 9, 10]. As hospitals generally impose smoking cessation and nicotine withdrawal at the time of hospitalization, tobacco (nicotine) cessation could lead to the release of nicotine receptors, that are increased in smokers, and to a “rebound effect” responsible for the worsening of disease observed in hospitalized smokers.

Cold Calculations

The Cold Calculations America’s Leaders Will Have to Make Before Reopening (NY Times)

Image: Desiree Rios for The New York Times

[ed. Businesses can re-open if they want, but if people don't feel safe they're not going to expose themselves or their loved ones to unnecessary risk, no matter what politicians and agitators want (and it leaves employees in a very conflicted position). The economy will get going again when everyone feels the problem's finally under control (or at least risks have been reduced to acceptable levels). Unfortunately, many innocent bystanders could be affected/infected in the process.]

Emergency Room Notebook, 1977

You never hear sirens in the emergency room — the drivers turn them off on Webster Street. I see the red backup lights of ACE or United Ambulance out of the corner of my eye. Usually we are expecting them, alerted by the MED NET radio, just like on TV. “City One: This is ACE, Code Two. Forty-two-year-old male, head injury, BP 190 over 110. Conscious. ETA three minutes.” “City One … 76542 Clear.”

If it is Code Three, where life is in critical danger, the doctor and nurses wait outside, chatting in anticipation. Inside, in room 6, the trauma room, is the Code Blue team. EKG, X-ray technicians, respiratory therapists, cardiac nurses. In most Code Blues, though, the EMT drivers or firemen are too busy to call in. Piedmont Fire Department never does, and they have the worst. Rich massive coronaries, matronly phenobarbital suicides, children in swimming pools. (...)

I like my job in Emergency. Blood, bones, tendons seem like affirmations to me. I am awed by the human body, by its endurance. Thank God — because it’ll be hours before X-ray or Demerol. Maybe I’m morbid. I am fascinated by two fingers in a baggie, a glittering switchblade all the way out of a lean pimp’s back. I like the fact that, in Emergency, everything is reparable, or not.

Code Blues. Well, everybody loves Code Blues. That’s when somebody dies — their heart stops beating, they stop breathing — but the Emergency team can, and often does, bring them back to life. Even if the patient is a tired eighty-year-old you can’t help but get caught up in the drama of resuscitation, if only for a while. Many lives, young fruitful ones, are saved.

The pace and excitement of ten or fifteen people, performers … it’s like opening night at the theater. The patients, if they are conscious, take part too, if just by looking interested in all the goings-on. They never look afraid.

If the family is with the patient it is my job to get information from them, to keep them informed about what’s going on. Reassure them, mostly.

While the staff members think in terms of good or bad codes — how well everyone did what they were supposed to do, whether the patient responded or not — I think in terms of good or bad deaths.

Bad deaths are ones with the manager of a hotel as next of kin, or the cleaning woman who found the stroke victim two weeks later, dying of dehydration. Really bad deaths are when there are several children and in-laws I have called in from somewhere inconvenient and none of them seem to know each other or the dying parent at all. There is nothing to say. They keep talking about making arrangements, about having to make arrangements, about who will make arrangements.

Gypsies are good deaths. I think so … the nurses don’t and security guards don’t. There are always dozens of them, demanding to be with the dying person, to kiss them and hug them, unplugging and screwing up the TVs and monitors and assorted apparatus. The best thing about Gypsy deaths is they never make their kids keep quiet. The adults wail and cry and sob but all the children continue to run around, playing and laughing, without being told they should be sad or respectful.

Good deaths seem to be coincidentally good Codes — the patient responds miraculously to all this life-giving treatment and then just quietly passes away. (...)

I saw blind Mr. Adderly on the 51 bus the other night. His wife, Diane Adderly, came in DOA a few months ago. He had found her body at the foot of the stairs, with his cane.

Ratshit Nurse McCoy kept telling him to stop crying.

“It simply won’t help the situation, Mr. Adderly.”

“Nothing will help. It’s all I can do. Let me alone.”

When he heard McCoy had left, to make arrangements, he told me that he had never cried before. It scared him, because of his eyes.

I put her wedding band on his little finger. Over a thousand dollars in grimy cash had been in her bra, and I put it in his wallet. I told him that the denominations were fifties, twenties, and hundreds and he would need to find somebody to sort it all out.

When I saw him later on a bus he must have remembered my walk or smell. I didn’t see him at all — just climbed on the bus and slumped into the nearest seat. He even got up from the front seat near the driver to sit by me.

“Hello, Lucia,” he said.

He was very funny, describing his new, messy roommate at the Hilltop House for the Blind. I couldn’t imagine how he could know his roommate was messy, but then I could and told him my Marx Brothers idea of two blind roommates — shaving cream on the spaghetti, slipping on spilled stuffaroni, etc. We laughed and were silent, holding hands … from Pleasant Valley to Alcatraz Avenue. He cried, softly. My tears were for my own loneliness, my own blindness.

The first night I worked in Emergency, an ACE ambulance brought in a Jane Doe. Staff was short that night so the ambulance drivers and I undressed her, pulled the shredded panty hose off of varicose veins, toenails curling like parrots’. We unstuck her papers, not from her gray flesh-colored bra but from her clammy breasts. A picture of a young man in a marine uniform: George 1944. Three wet coupons for Purina cat chow and a blurred red, white, and blue Medicare card. Her name was Jane. Jane Daugherty. We tried the phone book. No Jane, no George.

If their purses haven’t already been stolen old women never seem to have anything in them but bottom dentures, a 51 bus schedule, and an address book with no last names.

The drivers and I worked together with pieces of information, calling the California Hotel for Annie, underlined, the Five-Spot cleaners. Sometimes we just have to wait until a relative calls, looking for them. Emergency phones ring all day long. “Have you seen a — ?” Old people. I get mixed up about old people. It seems a shame to do a total hip replacement or a coronary bypass on some ninety-five-year-old who whispers, “Please let me go.”

It doesn’t seem old people should fall down so much, take so many baths. But maybe it’s important for them to walk alone, stand on their own two feet. Sometimes it seems they fall on purpose, like the woman who ate all those Ex-Lax — to get away from the nursing home.

There is a great deal of flirty banter among the nurses and the ambulance crews. “So long — seizure later.” It used to shock me, all the jokes while they’re in the middle of a tracheotomy or shaving a patient for monitors. An eighty-year-old woman, fractured pelvis, sobbing, “Hold my hand! Please hold my hand!” Ambulance drivers rattling on about the Oakland Stompers.

“Hold her bloody hand, man!” He looked at me like I was crazy. I don’t hold many hands anymore and I joke a lot, too, if not around patients. There is a great deal of tension and pressure. It’s draining — being involved in life-and-death situations all the time.

Even more draining, and the real cause of tension and cynicism, is that so many of the patients we get in Emergency are not only not emergencies, there is nothing the matter with them at all. It gets so you yearn for a good cut-and-dried stabbing or a gunshot wound. All day long, all night long, people come in because they don’t have much appetite, have irregular BMs, stiff necks, red or green urine (which invariably means they had beets or spinach for lunch).

Can you hear all those sirens in the background, in the middle of the night? More than one of them is going to pick up some old guy who ran out of Gallo port.

Chart after chart. Anxiety reaction. Tension headaches. Hyperventilation. Intoxication. Depression. (These are the diagnoses — the patients’ complaints are cancer, heart attack, blood clots, suffocation.) Each of these patients costs hundreds of dollars including ambulance, X-ray, lab work, EKG. The ambulances get a Medi-Cal sticker, we get a Medi-Cal sticker, the doctor gets a Medi-Cal sticker, and the patient dozes off for a while until a taxi comes to take him home, paid for with a voucher. God, have I become as inhuman as Nurse McCoy? Fear, poverty, alcoholism, loneliness are terminal illnesses. Emergencies, in fact.

We do get critical trauma or cardiac patients, and they are treated and stabilized with awesome skill and efficiency in a matter of minutes and rushed to surgery or ICU, CCU.

Drunks and suicides take hours of time holding up needed rooms and nurses. Four or five people waiting at my desk to sign in. Ankle fractures, strep throat, whiplash, etc.

Maude, beery, bleary, is sprawled on a gurney, kneading my arm like a neurotic cat.

“You’re so kind … so charming … it’s this vertigo, dear.”

“What is your last name and your address? What happened to your Medi-Cal card?”

“Gone, everything is gone … I’m so miserable and so alone. Will they keep me here? There must be something the matter with my inner ear. My son Willie never calls. Of course, it’s Daly City and a toll call. Do you have children?”

“Sign here.”

I have found a minimum of information among the rest of the mess in her purse. She uses Zig-Zag papers to blot her lipstick. Big smeary kisses, billowing like popcorn all over her purse.

“What’s Willie’s last name and phone number?”

She begins to cry, reaching both arms for my neck.

“Don’t call him. He says I’m disgusting. You think I’m disgusting. Hold me!”

“I’ll see you later, Maude. Let go of my neck and sign this paper. Let go.”

Drunks are invariably alone. Suicides come in with at least one other person, usually many more. Which is probably the general idea. At least two Oakland police officers. I have finally understood why suicide is considered a crime.

Overdoses are the worst. Time again. Nurses usually too busy. They give them some medication but then the patient has to drink ten glasses of water. (These are not the stomach-pump critical overdoses.) I’m tempted to stick my finger down their throat. Hiccups and tears. “Here, one more cup.”

There are “good” suicides. “Good reasons” many times like terminal illness, pain. But I’m more impressed with good technique. Bullets through the brain, properly slashed wrists, decent barbiturates. Such people, even if they don’t succeed, seem to emanate a peace, a strength, which may have come from having made a thoughtful decision.

It’s the repeats that get to me — the forty penicillin capsules, the twenty Valium and a bottle of Dristan. Yes, I am aware that, statistically, people who threaten or attempt suicide eventually succeed. I am convinced that this is always an accident. John, usually home by five, had a flat tire and could not rescue his wife in time. I suspect a form of manslaughter sometimes, the husband or some other regular rescuer having at last finally tired of showing up just in the guilty nick of time.

“Where’s Marvin? Must be worried sick.”

“He’s phoning.”

I hate to tell her he’s in the cafeteria, has gotten to like their Reuben sandwiches.

Exam week at Cal. Many suicides, some succeeding, mostly Oriental. Dumbest suicide of the week was Otis.

Otis’s wife, Lou-Bertha, had left him for another man. Otis took two bottles of Sominex, but was wide awake. Peppy, even.

“Get Lou-Bertha before it’s too late!”

He kept hollering instructions to me from the trauma room. “My mother … Mary Brochard 849-0917 … Try the Adam and Eve Bar for Lou-Bertha.”

Lou-Bertha has just left the Adam and Eve for the Shalimar. It was busy for a long time, then an answer, and Stevie Wonder for a whole record of “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing.”

“Run that by me one more time, honey … He OD’d on what?”

I told her.

“Shit. You go tell that toothless worthless nigger he better be taking a lot more of something a lot stronger if’n he expects to get me outta here.”

I went in to tell him … what? She was glad he was okay, maybe. But he was on the telephone in room 6. Had his pants on, still wore a polka-dot gown on top. He had located the half-pint of Royal Gate in his jacket pocket. Was just sort of lounging around, like an executive.

“Johnnie? Yeah. Otis here. I’m up here at City Emergency Room. You know, off Broadway. What’s happening? Fine, fine. That bitch Lou-Bertha messing ’round with Darryl … [Silence.] No shit.”

The charge nurse came in. “He still here? Get him out! We have four Codes coming in. Auto accident, all Code Three, ETA ten minutes.”

I try to sign as many patients as possible before the ambulances arrive. The people will just have to wait later, about half of them will leave, but meanwhile all are restless and angry.

Oh, hell … there were three here before this one but better just sign her in. It’s Marlene the Migraine, an Emergency habituée. She is so beautiful, young. She stops talking with two Laney College basketball players, one with an injured right knee, and stumbles to my desk to go into her act.

Her howls are like Ornette Coleman in early “Lonely Woman” days. Mostly what she does is first, bang her head against the wall near my desk, dump everything off my desk with a swoop.

Then she starts her cries. Whooping, anguished yelps, reminiscent of Mexican corridas, Texan love songs, “Aiee, Vi, Yi!”

“Ah-hah, San Antone!”

She has slumped to the floor and all I can see is an elegantly manicured hand, extending her Medi-Cal card above the desk.

“Can’t you see I’m dying? I’m going blind, for crissakes!”

“Come on, Marlene — how’d you get those false eyelashes on?”

“Nasty whore.”

“Marlene, sit up and sign in. Ambulances are coming, so you’ll have to wait. Sit up!”

She sits up, starts to light a Kool. “Don’t light that, sign here,” I say. She signs and Zeff comes to put her into a room.

“Well, well, if it isn’t our old angry pal, Marlene.”

“Don’t you humor me, you dumb nurse.”

The ambulances arrive, and for sure they are emergencies. Two die. For an hour all the nurses, doctors, on-call doctors, surgeons, everybody is tied up in room 6 with the two surviving young patients.

One of Marlene’s hands is struggling into a velvet coat sleeve, the other is applying magenta lipstick.

“Holy Christ — I can’t hang around this joint all night, right? Seeya, honey!”

“See ya, Marlene.”

by Lucia Berlin, Maxima-Library |  Read more:
Image: A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
[ed. I'm currently reading Lucia Berlin's "A Manual For Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, and am so impressed (like discovering Raymond Carver for the first time). She's not well known (and died in 2004) so I Googled some reviews to learn more about her work and background. Guess what? I found this website with the entire book reproduced! I'm sure there must be some copyright issues involved, but I don't know. Anyway, here's one (lightly) excerpted story (while the link still exists) for readers who want to get acquainted with her. Purchase the book. Only half way through so far, but also recommend: the title story (AMFCW), Detox, and Tiger Bites.]

Oil Industry Braces for Devastation

‘I’m Just Living a Nightmare’: Oil Industry Braces for Devastation (NY Times)

Image: Bing Guan/Bloomberg
[ed. Not just the oil industry. See also: An Extinction Level Event for the News (TPM)]