Twenty Five Sides of Beef and Fifty Hasidic Jews

Some people say there are two sides to every story. I say there are two sides to every story and one side is bullshit.

I went to a triple A baseball game once in Arizona. They were giving away a side of beef to the first twenty five people who arrived. People were sitting in their seats with, I swear, sides of beef as big as small horses. Thank goodness it was a night game.

I went for my second vitamin drip today. Interesting crowd. Not everyone is there for vitamins. Some get something called chelation therapy and I think that is for people who have had heart problems. All new fangled stuff and I personally am willing to believe in almost anything. There was a very handsome fellow there in a wheelchair. Very handsome. He was 51 years old. I know that because he told me that 33 years ago when he was 18 he dove into a pool on Martha's Vineyard and broke his back. His hands were all curved and he was sort of stooped over in his chair but there he was with a big handsome smile on his face taking some sort of IV drip. I hope I see him again.

Then there was a young girl, couldn't have been more than 26. If I had to label her I would say she was a goth. Dyed black hair. Very, very pale skin. And no eyebrows. And I realized that this young girl had had cancer and lost her eyebrows. And her paleness was from much chemo. She was so beautiful. So cool. So was used to getting IVs put into her body. It is an amazing thing being in the "sick" world. I see so many people who take it so casually. Do not make a big deal out of it. It's what is happening and there you have it. This girl ate pistachios and drank water and listened to her IPod and I think she said she was going to be there for four hours and she did this two times a week. Wow. I just thought, wow. And this handsome guy in the wheelchair who was probably amazingly handsome at 18 and there he was smiling and dealing with the biggest bummer I can think of and I sit here half the time thinking poor me and what a raw deal I was given but I can walk and I have friends and I'm not 26 with cancer and I'm not in Pakistan right now and I should be shot every time I complain. Or tweaked or something.

And here is the best news of the day. I HAVE AN INFECTION! I am so excited because I was feeling like shit and I thought, okay, this is it, the big casino, I'm outta here but I went to my surgeon who took out the feeding tube and I showed him the "hole" (pardon my language) where it had been and he said that my hole was infected. ( I am so sorry but there is no delicate way to put that.) The hole in my stomach, you know. And I thought, hallelujah, I'm not going to die I just have to take antibiotics.

When I woke up this morning the fingernails on my left hand were blue and because I wasn't feeling so well I thought this must be the first body part to decay as you take the long walk to the end of the tunnel but then I realized that I had bought a pair of pajama bottoms at Target and I didn't wash them and the dye had come off on my fingernails in the middle of the night. You should have seen my legs. And the bottoms, of course, were made in China. So I jumped immediately into the shower to wash off the poison and it took FOREVER to get rid of it. Oh God, after all this I'll probably die from a pair of poison pajama bottoms.

But you gotta laugh. It's all so ridiculous that you gotta laugh. And the people who got those sides of beef also got an extra seat...For their beef...I got on an airplane once going from New York to LA and it was full of Hasidic Jews. And when I got to my seat I could not sit down because it was taken up by a Torah. I asked the nice Jew if he would please move his Torah. He wouldn't. I asked him again nicely if he'd please put it in the overhead compartment. No. "But it's my seat!" No, it was his Torah's seat so I had to call the stewardess who got into a big fight with the little man and she finally picked up the Torah and carried it up to the cockpit with the little man following her all the way up front and yelling something in Hebrew. So the Torah spent the flight in the cockpit and I had to sit next to a very angry man with strange hair. Surprise, he ordered a kosher meal that looked exactly like my meal but I didn't say anything except, "How's your food?" To him I was invisible. I was in his Torah's seat. At one point during the flight I looked up and fifty Hasidic Jews were starring daggers at me.

I don't know why I thought of that. Guess the antibiotic is working.