Mexico: Come for the Sand and Surf, Stay Because You Can't Leave Your Bedroom!

Thanks are due to The Hot Librarian for that lovely photo, and the following sentence.

I am far from the Land of Walruses and Respect right now. I don't know what Mexico qualifies as. I can't think of any good, imaginative names for it because right now, for me, Mexico is the Land of Purging. The Land of barf, billow, disgorge, exhale, expand, gag, groan, huff, keck, palpitate, pant, puff, puke, retch, rise, sign, sob, spew, spit up, surge, suspire, swell, throb, throw up, upchuck, vomit. Oh but not only that. (Squeamish, turn back now. Well, I guess if you made it past that photo you're probably good to go.) It is also the Land of Endless Watery Explosive Diarrhea. It is the Land of Soiling Ones Own Pants in Bed in the Misguided Belief that One Was About to Merely Fart. It is the Land of Throwing Out Ones Own Underwear as a Result. (But not before attempting to wash said pants and underwear together with similarly soiled pyjamas only to find that the whole "clean" load of laundry now smelled altogether vaguely of shit.) It's the Land of the Very Far Bathroom and consequently the Land of Shitting in a Bucket that is Kept Outside the Bedroom Door. It is the Land of Throwing Up in a Different Bucket! Oh, all those buckets. All that puke and shit. It was like my very own little World War I, where I got to play both the troops and the medical personnel. My favourite part was when I'd hauled my shit bucket down to the Very Far Bathroom with the intention of cleaning it out. I thought I would fill it partway with water and then toss the resulting sludge in the toilet. Only, in the middle of this episode, I faltered; no more a nurse but a weak soldier was I, overcome with weakness and fumes, and the sludge poured all over the toilet seat before it met its target, the bowl.

Good times.

On the third day of this (no more vomiting but a pain like an inflating balloon under my sternum; and the diarrhea, which as I mentioned before, was endless) I finally got myself to a clinic and got medicated. Now I'm on a course of antibiotics that make my stomach feel weird in a different way, painful and burpy, but no diarrhea!!!

Come to Mexico for the sun and sea, stay because you can't leave your bedroom! I have not been out of the house (except to visit the clinic) in four days! Well, I suppose it gives me time to write lots of good material for this here blog. And to rediscover the pleasures of food. In three days, I ate half a bagel, one bowl of rice and a dozen soda crackers. After taking my first antibiotics, I began to have extravagant visions of foods I wished to consume: mainly, I was haunted by the thought of Indian chick-pea stew. With a sprinkling of cilantro and perhaps a squirt of lime. But the doctor said: no chili, no fat, no nothin'. (She didn't say no beans, but you don't have to be a doctor to know the tried and true wisdom concerning beans and bowels.) So, once I could eat again, it was more bagel halves and soda crackers. When I finally broke down and ate a tiny piece of forbidden cheese, I thought of that Zen-in-a-Raisin guy, the one who believes that if we took the time to fully appreciate every mouthful, there would be no obesity problems. As a guided exercise (I can't believe I know this) he talks a room full of people through eating a raisin.

Pause to enjoy, raisin-like, that image in your mind.

He claims you can taste heaven in a raisin, if you put your mind to it. And I'm here to tell you that four days of white flour will do the same thing. No raisins, thank goodness, since I think they're fiendish things. But I tasted heaven in a grain of cheese. Apple juice was sweeter than Honey of the Bees (as it's called in Spanish -- "Miel de Abejas" just so you won't confuse it with that other honey, honey of the rhinoceri, or whatever). And not having to run to the bathroom to immediately expel said morsel of cheese? Priceless.