On healing and hurt

I had a dream that Liza Thorn pulled out my fang with her sinister face and the blood was hemorhhaging and we were in the desert and now my smile had a gap of bloody nerves. In acupuncture the other day, as we three patients were relaxing in our treatment, we heard a man detail the fight for his liver, which wants to leave his body in favor of a stand-in, which is probably still in the belly of the man who will die in a motocycle accident. One of the other patients was a junkie, and the other one was a man who spoke only Spanish and missed his wife because she had been in Mexico for the last two years. Maybe you modest Westerners think it's wrong to hear the details of other patients, to ear spy, but I think it's a vital part of the healing process. As we all received our currents from needles, we listened to that cancered man detail his medicine regimine and his cauterized stomach, his murky energies. The junkie, who was a couple days into recovery, soberly told his practioner about how sad he was to hear of that man's plight. And that is the importance of this ear-shot healing arena. When we heard that man's story, we all said a little prayer for him and his sad eyes and blistered lips, and a prayer for ourselves, for the scariness of being fertile matresses for any illness to slumber in.
A couple of years ago my sisters and I were in Florida on our way to the Fort Lauderdale airport and a man on a crotch-rocket motocycle spotted us. We smiled meekly, but the man was floored by our attention and started doing gruesome tricks, like holding himself up with his arms and then swinging his body around one side of the rocket and scraping his feet. We were nauseous. We covered our faces and my mom said, "This guy had better be an organ donor." The man continued this dangerous rooster action for a couple of minutes until my sisters and I found our same-pitch whine that goes right to my dad for immediate attention, "Dad, drive faster, get away from this guy." My father, who feels most confident in the presence of children when he is driving them in a luxury car at over 100 mph, quickly obliged.
I remembered a couple days ago when I went to Vegas with my family in February and we were in a limo on the way to the airport. I was very depressed while I was there, the offenses started immediately. My family thought it was my judgement and exasperation was about them, but I just found Vegas so repulsive that I was surly the whole time. When I arrived from Oakland, the cabdriver that took me to the hotel told me he has to work 18 hours a day to make ends meet. OK, great, on my way to my luxury destination in a chariot manned by a slave. Then, I get into the hotel and these foxy schoolteacher types in sequins are pimping parrots, which I also just find repugnant. Then I got very serious at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant and told my father, "It is my mission in life to prove you wrong," in such a serious and passionate tone that even a baby sitting next to us, who was suckling on truffles and cream, stared at me. The teenage petulance still ferments when I am in a family setting, I need to relax.
Anyway, in the limo, on the way to the airport, I see myself in the reflection of the tinted window, we are in airport traffic, we are surrounded by minibuses, and I think, In Israel, you might feel a twinge of fear here, surrounded by buses and potential bomb targets. And it dawns on me, again, that this kind of fate is in the workings for Americans. What will it be like during and after the decline? Vegas, which is an unfathomable waste of resources, deserves to be crippled first. Our hotel in Vegas had a bath tub in every room, which is pretty remarkable for a hotel with hundreds, maybe thousands, of rooms, in an area where water is so precious that a cactus will hold it and hold it and hold it.
Nicole, if you read this, I hope you aren't offended.