pink eyes

I got pinkeye from a hug. I've had a whole bouquet of elementary school afflictions the last couple of months: strep throat, 3-month runny nose, babyish outbursts toward authority figures, unrealistic but devoted secret crushes, now pink eye. I'd better watch out for my pumpkin--I could get lice.

I think I got pinkeye from giving Mark a hello or adios hug cause he had it too. I woke up Tuesday morning with eyes like blood marbles, garlands of spidery veins in my eyeballs and the eyes were gooey. I looked like a fun glassy zombie. I drank a gallon of water, thinking the redness was just dehydration. Later that night at Melt Banana, Mark diagnosed. I was highly contagious but went and danced into the crowd anyway. I assume most people have a more powerful resistance than I do. I shouldn't even read about something like ebola, I am such a petri dish that the vermin virus could just jump off the page to be hosted by my tonsils. This blind mole jackass punk was trying to give hysterectomies in the pit and became more astonishingly violent even as I tried to touch him kind of ternderly and look him in his eyes to calm his tornado down. Mark said sometime that night that he thinks that anything goes in the pit cause that's the freedom of it, and I almost agree. In the right enviornment, like a house show, I think people can be trusted to put each other's femurs and dentals in a little danger. But Albino Mole was sweating glass because he seemed so high on meth, and he was being outrageously stupid and unpredictably insane and hurting people. So anyway, I rubbed my eyes into his T-shirt and blew in his face, trying to spread my pink--amazingly, he thought I was flirting with him and he finally made eye contact, smiled and settled down.

I went to the acupuncture school the next day for my pink eye and 10-day-old cold. I left my home and all the schoolchilds were in bright-color T-shirts in the streets and the palms hustled on dark skies and all of the lights were out--traffic, liquor store, all of them. The acupuncture school was dark, power was out there too but I waited until the lights hummed back alive because I needed treatment very badly. Sitting in a room without electricity, after a few moments you feel like a potted plant. I like it. A doctor and five interns analyzed my tounge and called my pulse "slippery" and "hovering" and ordered many needles and teas which need to fester for two hours in a ceramic pot and have pussy willows and bark in them. The tea is terrible to drink, thick and dank, but the cure is almost instant. My eyes are much less red and my lungs are not so swampy. I feel very relieved because I started to get lonely and sad, being so weak and not wanting to ask friends to prop up my head.

After I left acupuncture, there was a bomb scare at a federal building in the center of downtown Oakland. It was very disruptive and exciting. It was frightening though too because Oakland seems like the kind of place where something very bad could happen because it is always happening in frozen time. I sit and look out the windows of my house at night and there are two men every night, drinking beer out of a gas can and riffling through plastic bags in their pickup truck, which is piled high with the limbs of dead machines and piled higher with stained mattresses. They burp and fart and fall asleep sitting up, side by side, covered with woolly blankets. I wonder when I see them, just barely nourished on the milk and rust of the fringe, what would happen to them if there was a crisis? Oakland is a great place to launch a huge crisis with a little flick of the terrorist cortex. If somebody dropped a nice egg of bubonic on Market Street, we would all incubate it willingly and spread it accordingly; nobody has health insurance, nobody is in good enough health to battle that kind of reaper, and there's a lot of people with spare time just happy to hitch up to Berkeley and snot on whitey's sheltered and immune-deficient infants.

Speaking of whitey, I get called "white girl" every day by a little ensemble of boys down the street from me. The other night I stopped my bike and said, "Listen, I may be white but I am no honky. My name is Eva. Let's be friends." The dudes each moved in about four feet to breathe in my face and ask to fuck my ass. I'm so frustrated.