donate blood

Namaste,

You follow the 39 steps through blood bank doors. You fill out forms answering 20 questions on the donor consent form, such as:

1. Are you in good health today?

2. Do you have an infection now, or are you taking antibiotics now?

3. Since the age of 11, have you had yellow jaundice, liver disease, or hepatitis?

4. Have you ever tested positive for hepatitis?

5. Have you ever used a needle, even once, to take any drugs?

6. In the past three years, have you lived outside of the U.S., except Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan or Western Europe?

7. In the past 12 months have you traveled?

8. In the past 12 months have you received a blood transfusion?

9. In the past 12 months have you had a tattoo, ear or body piercing, acupuncture, accidental needle stick, or come into contact with someone else’s blood, or snorted cocaine or any street drug?

10. In the past 12 months have you ever had sex, even once, with anyone who has ever used a needle for non-prescription drugs?

11. In the past 12 months, have you had sex, even once, with anyone who has taken money or drugs in exchange for sex?

12. In the past 12 months, have you given money or drugs to anyone to have sex with you?

13. In the past 12 months, have you had sex, even once, with anyone who has had AIDS or tested positive for the AIDS virus?

14. Are you a female who, in the past 12 months, has had sex with a male who has had sex, even once, with another male?

15. Were you born in, or have you lived in, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Niger, or Nigeria?

16. Have you had sex with anyone who was born or lived in any of these countries?

17. Have you been injected with bovine beef insulin?

18. Have you ever had a bleeding problem?

19. Are you a female who has had two or more pregnancies? 

20. Have you or any blood relative ever had a dura mater or brain covering transplant during head or brain surgery?

The questions are endless.

Finished circling N answers and doodling in margins, you agree and understand your blood and plasma will be tested for the AIDS virus and other diseases and if there is a risk your blood will not be used and you will be notified and you understand the answers are truthful and to the best of your knowledge and you sign the form and sit in a comfortable deep brown chair watching donors thumb old magazines, devour recipes and eye candy.

Your name is called. Outside plate glass in August haze shadow hills full of dense dark evergreens in hot sunshine beam down white blast furnaces magnifying brilliance.

Nurses pull air conditioned nightmare identity theory cards from files peopled with conversations and delight a slight acquaintance. Take a seat as a smiling nurse pricks your finger with a thorn asking thermometer questions, checking arms for signs of Needles, a California desert town.

You sign more forms you witness you provide credentials you slide into a main room where volunteers direct you to a reclining seat asking which arm left arm you say as she tightens the belt around your arm conditioning blood pressure pump as she swabs down arm holding needle veins out handing you a styrofoam ball telling you to squeeze every three seconds as a machine ticks off down below out of sight out of mind as your blood rocks back and forth inside a new time measurement piece measuring platelets.

You drink lemonade squeeze release squeeze release when machine stops she takes the pressure off takes the ball gone tape off needle out gauze band aid arm up for three minutes drink lemonade make small talk blood in plastic bag dark red liquid sealed documented evidence with bar coded lot number you get off table walk down a hall receiving a key chain after 100 donations.

You sit in shade looking at a universal key chain environment.

This implies you need to find keys, alphabets, script, bones, dust and calibrated songs of ghost dances for the space-time chain.

Two months later you will do it all over again with joy. Your blood goes to any Childlighter child with A negative. One in 16 (6.3%) with statistics, there are lies, damn lies and statistics not knowing who, just knowing  someone out there young and alive lives with your small anonymous gift of red language.

Metta.

Listless the listener

Greetings,

Before I became a storyteller I was a listener. I traveled the world listening, collecting creation stories, myths and legends. I listened and collected sharing these stories with others so they would know, understand and feel the energy, the power inherent in the stories. They listened. They absorbed the creation stories into their creation stories, expanding their universe. They became storytellers. They accepted their nomadic storyteller destiny to listen, walk and tell stories. 

One listener in a village was not really a listener. Listless was, in their language, lazy. Pure and simple laziness. Listless passed their lazy disease to others like a story, or in Listless's universe, a nightmare. Listless was a living, breathing artifact of Neanderthal survival instincts. Hunt, eat, sleep, procreate, dream.

Listless loved dogs. Listless was clever, trapped wild dogs and beat them. Listless was the Alpha animal. 

Every night Listless and their pack of dogs hunted. It was around midnight when the dogs began barking. They patrolled around rusty steel gates, junk yards filled with broken machines, abandoned colonial buildings, detention centers and narrow paths near caves where women addicted to controlling their men continuously gave birth to howling children. 

Around midnight wild dogs flushed rats. Big rats. Rats prospered because humans casually discarded fruit rinds, meat gristle, fat, corn, fish paste, vegetables, and children in trash containers fashioned from old tires. Listless sent 20-30 dogs after the rats, all yipping, baying, quarreling, angry, hungry for blood. They cornered a rat, it cried Yip! Squeak! as sharp white teeth pierced its neck. 

All the dogs howled, shrieking long guttural ravishing celebrations of the kill. Deep, shallow, sharp. This chorus echoed inside a black night, as Listless listened to Hellhound on My Trail by Robert Johnson.

Metta.

Dysfunctional decisions

Greetings,

After the kind man flew away from the archipelago on short notice with years on his extensive resume, for a new job in the Middle Eats to pay life's support expenses I returned home from his fare-thee-well dinner of delicious grilled fired fish and giant prawns swimming in garlic to find a medium sized cock-a-roach scurrying in from the back garden heading toward the dark safety of bags and boxes in a spare room.

A room filled with Turkish delight, a sweet gooey substance made of nuts, berries and flakey pastry. A room resplendent with bird songs, echoes of silk warbling blues riffs, improvisational bass lines and the sweet smell of a flute.

A room filled with sad, lonely spoiled crying children. Dysfunctional family futures.

A room dancing with the autocratic sensation remembering how he perceived his past decision late last year to decline a doctor's advice and proceeded with a dangerous medical exploratory option to check out the source of his internal distress. "No anesthetic," he said to Doctor Death. 

How this decision almost killed him. How this decision at that microscopic moment inside time, oh time, such a valiant teacher, an educator, how this decision cost him vast quantities of flood blood. How he claimed he saw and felt a warm light swarming him, flashing along his skeleton bathing him. How he needed transfusions. Lots of transfusions. Understanding by design. A frayed fabric. A needle dripping volunteered slavery.

Why do simple medical problems escalate into a life threatening crisis? Rash misunderstanding of how and why the human body says one thing and the ego intellect extinguishes flashing emergency lights, ignoring warning signals? 

Being a Super Hero has it's risks.

Plant a seed.

So it goes.

Metta.