Walking home from work today, I took a bit of a detour to drop something off for Artie at the Vortex, and I noticed for the first time that the erstwhile all-night gay dance club Backstreet and a couple of attached businesses were gone. Like, gone gone, nonexistent gone, and when I say “noticed for the first time,” I don’t mean that this obvious detail had been escaping me for weeks, I mean on Sunday there was a whole lot of brick and mortar there, and today there’s a few piles of red clay with backhoes and bulldozers on top. They have become very efficient at scrapping and rebuilding this city seemingly overnight; they ought to have, it’s been happening to one block or another every month for the last 3 years. Building falls idle for more than a couple weeks, it’s liable to wake up one morning flattened to dirt.

Coincidentally enough, I’ve recently become intimately familiar with this kind of rapid-fire urban renewal, a little too close to home for my taste. Last week, I finally decided to start living the cleaner life, really knuckle down and do it this time, and my body rewards me with all-out rebellion. Insolent bastard.

In this case, however, it wasn’t going idle for a few days that led to sudden destruction; it was suddenly being put to good use. “Oh, you actually want your lungs to work right now? Well we’d better get to work,” quoth the backhoes and bulldozers of my respiratory system. “Right this way, boys, wrecking balls and shovels over there, dump trucks up to the top!” Macrophages began breaking down all the old crusty bits and kicking it upstairs for ejcection in a steady, raspy stream of demolition; or maybe it was gay interior decorator cells, scraping all the charcoal-colored wallpaper off my alveoli for a new, bright, clean look. Brand new lungs, comin’ right up!

That was the first couple days, anyway. Now I’m suspecting that it was only the carbon monoxide, tar, and nicotine keeping the natural flora and fauna of sinuses, throat, and lungs in submission, and now that they have access to unencumbered oxygen, they are amassing an army to make Mordor quake. Or, being the anaerobic little pricks they are, it’s more likely that in spite of my own lack of cravings, several trillion microorganisms are going through wicked little nic-fits of their own and are taking their frustrations out on every mucus membrane in my body. If it’s nicotine they want, they’re certainly being counterproductive; considering that the entirety of surfaces from my nostrils up to my brain and down to my bronchi are as raw as Eddie Murphy and don’t even like regular old air if the humidity is below 80%, the last thing I want to dump in there is some hot, acrid smoke. Huh, a positive feedback mechanism, go figure.

The respiratory aspects of my current infirmity are tolerable enough, at least for sleep purposes, but the attack on the lining of my brain is totally uncalled for, and makes it very hard to get to sleep at night. That is in fact why I write this now from the friendly neighborhood geek bar, with wireless internet and a cold PBR 24oz tall-boy at the ready — to help me fall asleep in a few minutes. I suppose I could just take a couple of Tylenol for the headache, but you know, I heard that acetaminophen and alcohol together were really hard on your liver and stuff.

Like I said, you know, cleaner livin’. For real.



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