My Time as a Human

A lot of people are still asking, “wait, what happened? You were POISONED?!” Instead of making everyone read the whole story I think a quick, easy to read recap would save a few sanities.

• Most likely hypothesis: On a twelve hours overnight bus back from Hong Kong, China to Fuzhou, China the bus circulation wasn’t working properly and/or there was a carbon monoxide leak into the bus. (CO poisoning)
• I arrived to two days of extremely intense headaches that made everything feel like a fog.
• For the next two weeks I had a hard time focusing and my brain felt really tired and confused.
• I went to the hospital and they weren’t much help.
• I suddenly deteriorated rapidly to the point that I couldn’t use a web browser.
• My friend helped me get at ticket to Taipei, Taiwan, where the hospitals are much better.
• By the time I tried to get to the hospital, I couldn’t open a door or speak clearly. I was experiencing the same symptoms as advanced Parkinsons combined with confusion.
• I saw three doctors, including two neurosurgeons, and got another MRI.
• By the end of it all, when the last doctor was seeing me, I was coming out of the worst of it. The MRI looked clear. I was given blood flow drugs and told to chill out and see if it improved.
• I could now open doors, walk around, and talk at almost full speed.
• Basically functional, I decided I couldn’t miss our movie opening at IDFA and, although weird, flew to Amsterdam.
• During the time in Amsterdam I overdid it enough to have the shaking and confusion come back for little visits. I decided to return to the States and rest and recover in a safe environment.
• I am now at my parents’ place outside Chicago recovering from a combination of jet lag and the poison, hoping to be feeling much better in a month or two. I’m still a little shaky here and there and my brain gets tired but nothing like the near-death experience I was having in China.

There is a lot to process emotionally. I really thought it might well be my last few days, if not of life then of being a functional human being. At this point it looks like at best I’ll be right back to myself and at worst I’ll have these minor shakes and slightly diminished mental capacity for the rest of my life. Carbon Monoxide poisoning is a gnarly and unknown beast. So, you know, avoid it!

Amsterdam, as with much of northern europe, had a special familiarity for me. The streets and buildings, playing hide and seek in the fog, were built of old stone and brick. Climbing into an old pub or restaurant was like entering a hundreds of years old womb, thick ancient wooden surroundings from trees of even older forests. Handles and hinges of brass. Mugs of clay. My parents spent their early marriage in Europe, and gave birth to me there, and it profoundly affected them. So this, too, is the feel of the childhood home we built together in North America, raking out the foundation in the cold winter, laying the tile floor, installing electricity and plumbing. I’ve returned here to rest and recover from the poison, to return from whence I come, to, as Gabriela Jovanny put it, “be a baby again”.

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My head and blood are still in the process of clearing. This place is both comfortable and familiar and subtly strange during the times when my perceptions are slightly off. I’m hoping once the jet lag clears this too will fade. I’ve started small bits of ashtanga yoga to keep the blood flowing and I’m slowly building up work on the elliptical to get my knees back to kung fu.

There are a lot of reminders here, along with the heavy tile and brick and wood, of what has shaped me. There is a pipe organ built into the house, the console completely refinished in oak to match the rest of the house. What seems crazy is so comfortably familiar to us. We carried the pipes out to a rental truck as children. My mother plays it and my father keeps it working. There is now a second pipe organ in the process of being rebuilt and I sleep near its frame in the basement. It, too, is of old wood, extracted from a church. For a hundred years the huge pipes’ deep tones shook the chests of singing faithful. Now the two of us are quiet, resting together, waiting patiently for recovery.

There is a sports car in the garage, but every other thing in the house was bought at a garage sale for less than five dollars or built by my parents by hand. There are stereo systems, some with 8-track cassette players, that cost less than two dollars but are now nestled into custom oak housings and mounted against oak cabinets. There is a 486 computer still being used in the front room to teach my mother’s piano students. It’s attached to a casio keyboard from somewhere in the 1980s. There are curious brass bells tucked around the house and visitors are welcomed by a huge gong, sent by my uncle from Thailand and mounted on a custom wood stand my father built.

Everywhere are reminders of frugality, of hand made things, of old europe. It is a place that speaks of a joy of creation, of novelty, and yet of connection with the past. Before my mother left her library career and started selling them online we had books and oak bookshelves throughout the house. Now there are literally thousands of books filling every space in which we once played. Tucked in the back I can still see the originals, classic books like, “Freedom of the Hills” that taught us rope belays and camping tricks.

Before I return to the earth, before I am clay and brick and old stories, I have another moment to pause. I didn’t plan for it, but no one ever does. It feels like the slow birth of the next round of adventure, a reassuring touch of the sandy bottom of the sea to be sure of its solidity before being carried away by the waves once more. To deepen the appreciation of the ocean’s movements, I’ve been given another glimpse of how lucky I am.

As I creep my way out of the cold, fog-filled stone streets of Amsterdam and into the hotel, they eye me with suspicion. “They’re on to me,” I think, and then realize that I have a giant poster of an obscure homeless musician duct taped to the front of my body. It’s either that, or the towels. Every day we open the door but a crack and leave the “do not disturb” sign on the handle. They’ve responded by leaving bundles of towels and soap outside each day. Each day a giant bundle of towels goes in… but nothing ever comes out. We’ve also been obsessively calling the front desk, demanding that they give us our package from Germany. Each time, they’ve refused, claiming it’s never arrived.

On the desk is some kind of survival spork and I carry metal chopsticks at all times. A long line of parachute cord is stretched tight across the length of the room from the door to a gas line. It’s continuously dripping with socks and long underwear. In a wild attempt to overcome wasteful weight in travel, Kevin and I have stripped our wardrobes to the barest essentials. We arrived with nothing but a book bag of clothes that we wash with hotel soap in the sink each night. Anything else we need to keep warm or look good can be produced with duct tape and towels.

The posters have been a master tool for meeting people. Everyone loves asking me about the guy on my chest and I have a pocket of postcards with the dates of our screenings at gunslinger height. I have it down to a smooth snap and the cards are in their hands. If I talk enough about our insane twelve years of working on this film their eyes glow and their grip on the cards shifts like they are more likely to survive the trip home.

Our second screening of, “Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah” went pretty well. Kevin wasn’t able to get an HD tape made in part because that Tsunami you heard about destroyed the factory that makes tape. He decided that the Beta copy of the film didn’t look nearly good enough and so he got them a digital copy of the film by using the sd card in his pocket camera and a laptop. A good sized crowed stuck around past the QA to hear Gurf Morlix perform and while the funny but crude, “Wouldn’t That Be Nice” got a few on the run they all loved the beautiful songs like, “Ooh Love” and most made a point to meet us afterwards. The legend of Blaze is definitely continuing to spread.

As a random bonus I ran into Andrew Berends at one of the schmoozfests. I still insist that it was my blog post that finally tipped the scales and had Hillary Clinton calling for his release. He doesn’t disagree. Fortunately Kevin hasn’t thought up a scheme to get us arrested in Amsterdam for the same kind of publicity. Yet.

Above: Kevin Triplett sporting a custom duct tape tuxedo made by a fan of Blaze and Kai Mantsch with the poster. We’ve been telling people that it’s a playfully told, fun and uplifting movie about a homeless musician who gets killed.

The nice thing about fires, hurricanes, mudslides and terrorist attacks is that, if you survive, you have fellow survivors. Without them, there is no one to validate the experience or share the outcome. Here in Amsterdam, even more so than in Fuzhou, people continue to confound and even irritate me by going about their lives as normal. “Here, have one of these delicious beers.” Don’t they see that little more than a week ago I could hardly speak or walk because my brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen? Don’t they know what it means to watch, consciously, as the ability to interact with the world goes away and hands become trembling, useless flags on the ends of slow moving sticks?

And yet, the worlds continue. People stand cold and shaking, smoking behind barroom exits, too lazy to end the addictions that continuously pull them away from time with friends. Meaningless relationships continue, neither person willing to make the first step to improve or end them. Everyone’s universe exists when their eyes are open, and ends when they drift off to sleep. My own sleep has no effect on them.

But this is not true either. Some of the earth’s humans were very aware of my potential sleep and cared that I existed, that I continue to exist for a bit longer. The outpouring of concern and affection was truly wonderful and my response to it was, sadly, an old pattern of mine played out yet again.

It took a long time to go public with my plunging health. For some reason I have always been obsessed with putting my own needs behind the needs of others and I refuse to become a burden or worry to anyone, to the point of absolute absurdity. The more I need help, the more fervently I refuse, captured most vividly in a moment years ago when I was homeless.

I was emotionally upset because of a breakup and without anywhere to go was living in a car, as one often does. (Well, OK, this one.) I managed to get internet access by going to the public library with a tiny parade of homeless people each morning and washed my face in restaurant sinks. At some point I stopped by my friend Eric Peterson’s house. As we were talking, he noticed that I hadn’t eaten much and pulled out a bowl of grapes and put them on the table. They were fresh and cool and I love the feel and sweet taste of grapes. When I didn’t take any, he began offering them to me. I refused. The more he insisted, the more angrily I resisted. I couldn’t possibly accept the grapes or anything else.

It was Angela Lee who used her shrewd powers of human understanding to trick me. She explained that she needed help. Her lawn needed mowing and she needed someone to watch her dogs while she was away. If only someone would live in her spare bedroom for a while and take care of the place… I couldn’t possibly refuse to help a friend. I moved in and suddenly had a roof over my head and a kitchen to cook in. I had dogs to care for and a way to earn my keep.

Posting publicly from China to let people know the severity of my situation was extremely difficult. It was an acceptance that something really was horribly wrong. It put the burden of worry onto my friends and family. It implied a need for help.

By the time I had to get to a hospital or buy a ticket out of Fuzhou, I had no choice but to accept help. I couldn’t even type well enough to buy a ticket and I was too confused to find my way around a hospital. At the same time, people from around the world began flooding me with concern and offers to fly in or fly me out. I was overwhelmed by both the outpouring of concern, the sense that my situation mattered to other people, and a tremendous sense of guilt. I was forever trying to find ways to keep people updated, and assure them that things would be fine, at the same time I was working towards an acceptance that there was every chance I might not recover. (Carbon monoxide poisoning has an extremely variable recovery rate. Many times the damage is permanent, while just as many times people recover over years.)

Once in Taipei I made two big counterintuitive decisions. The idea of struggling through a 23 hour flight to the US and fighting lawyers and doctors through cold heartless hallways to an almost certain debt for life made the decision to not fly home easy. The oddest decision, for me, was around who might have flown to my aid. Following the same pattern as above, allowing my parents to come meant accepting that something was terribly wrong. It meant bringing people I cared about into a situation where they didn’t know the language or culture and wouldn’t have anything to do but worry about me. I would, effectively, be a burden. Allowing my friend Ori to come, a guy who has sworn to travel to Asia for a year and never left, a guy who can delight in sleeping on a train station floor, was a way to help him get into motion and do what he’s wanted to do for so long. There was no guilt in that, in helping a friend, although in the end I decided against having anyone fly in.

I still have some recovering to do. I’m here in Amsterdam because I couldn’t possibly miss the opportunity to help show a film that I’ve been a part of for twelve years. In classic form, now that I’m stronger and more able I’m now exhilarated by the idea of having my parents in Taipei. But following this I am going to do my best to slow down and give myself a break for a while. I’ll give myself a few grapes that, perhaps, I’ve earned. One day maybe I’ll learn to accept the grapes when I have nothing to offer in return.

photo links to photographer’s site