Halloween Reading

 

I usually like to read something classically spooky this time of year. The time of year when the air is brittle and crisp and nights are eerily lit by starlight through slender clouds. When half-bare trees cast moonshadows along the dead leaves on lawns. When neighbors decorate their yards with tombstones, spider webs, and things with glowing orange eyes.

Halloween, and the ten-day lead up to it.

Now, down here in Texas, we’re really about a month behind seasonally. Leaves still haven’t fallen that much. As I write this it’s 82 degrees out. But since we lack mountains and forests and thus have long horizons, there’s plenty of moonlight and there’s plenty of starlight through slender clouds.

So it’s kinda sorta Halloween down here. To help push it forward, to help me get in the mood, I began my Halloween reading on October 20th.

It’s a ritual I quite enjoy. I’ve read some good novels this time of year over the years: Weaveworld by Clive Barker, The Terror by Dan Simmons, A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (twice! in ’07 and ’17), The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson. And when a scary book doesn’t jump out to me in the run up to Halloween, I go to the old faithful: Edgar Allan Poe, and, on occasion, Jorge Luis Borges.

But this year I’m feeling nostalgic for some old time horror. Some universal horror, if you catch my drift.

A few weeks’ back I steamrolled through Frankenstein, and though I enjoyed it immensely, it seemed a bit overrated to me. However, that did not keep me from moving on to its spiritual companion, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

So far I’m about a quarter of the way through. As I mentioned in a prior post, I read Frankenstein way back in high school, but I never read Dracula, though I am very familiar with the plot due to seeing about a half-dozen movie versions of the story (the last one was last Halloween during Covid when the wife and I watched the Bela Lugosi flick with the girls). Like Frankenstein, it, too, is a fast read. I am really enjoying it and look forward to my evening hour of reading before bed.

Originally I bought the book so I could do a dual-read with my youngest, who got a brand new copy for her thirteenth birthday six weeks ago. We did something similar two years ago with The Count of Monte Cristo. But she is very temperamental, and even though she’s agreed to read it with me, and says that she wants to, she still hasn’t cracked the novel. Which is okay. If she keeps it on her bookcase and gets to it next year, or the year after, or five years after, I’ll still smile and be proud of her.

In fact, I might re-read it again then.

Physics and Eastern Orthodoxy

 

Two quotes ponging around my empty head of late:

“All creation is a gigantic Burning Bush, permeated but not consumed by the ineffable and wondrous fires of God’s energies.” – Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity

 

“Wolfgang Pannenberg has suggested that there may exist a previously undiscovered universal energy field … which can be regarded as the source of all life, and which can be identified with the Holy Spirit … I shall argue that the universal [quantum] wave function …. is a universal field with the essential features of Pannenberg’s proposed new ‘energy’ field. … If this identification is made, it becomes reasonable as a matter of physics to say God is in the world, everywhere, and is with us, standing beside us, at all times.” – Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality

 

Hopper vs the Vax

 

Earlier this year I decided I’d hold off as long as possible on getting the Wu Flu vaccination. I’d heard and read too much anecdotal and not-so-anecdotal stuff that made me uncomfortable with it.

For starters, the rush to get it to market so to speak. Prior vaccines had taken five to ten years to gain FDA approval, yet these vaccines had been approved in about a year. Then there is the complicating issue of testing the vaccines against stem cell lines from aborted fetuses. That video of the doctor / nurse / high government official passing out at a press conference minutes after receiving the jab also put subliminal and not-so-subliminal messages into my brain. Finally, add the whole statistic thing in: the fact that if I ever did come down with Covid I’d probably have a 96 or 97% chance of surviving it. Plus I even might have had it when I had flu symptoms for 24 hours back in February of 2020.

I decided early on I’d play a wait-and-see game with the vaccines. Maybe in the Fall …

Well, as I left my job at the health care company in NJ to move to TX, they had just mandated that every employee must be jabbed by September 20. That didn’t sit well with me. To me, “mandated” means coercion, and I think individuals should be free to make such a choice as to have a foreign substance injected into them. My body, my choice, right? Nuremburg Laws, right? Good thing I was leaving the company and wouldn’t have to bother about these issues.

But then I was newly unemployed. And though Texas is a lot more “freer” when it comes to masking, etc., a lot of corporations in Texas are national or multinational. My wife’s company just mandated the jab. I didn’t want my un-vaccinated status to nix any possible future employment, and that seems to be where we’re heading.

So … should I get it to keep my options open? To protect myself not only physically (if I didn’t have an adverse reaction) but financially?

My wife suffered no ill effects when she got vaccinated a few months back. Neither did my older parents and mother-in-law. But I do have a co-morbidity, in the fact that my left lung only operates at about 5-10 % capacity and I’m probably 25 pounds overweight.

I decided to get the jab of my own free will.

I started doing some research but it very very quickly became a question of Who Can You Trust? My problem became I couldn’t discern the answer to that question. I grew frustrated. It boiled down to one statistic, which I have no idea is true or not: those who took the Pfizer vaccine reported a 1 in 10,000 chance of an adverse reaction and those who took the Moderna reported a 1 in 400,000. So, Moderna all the way, right? That’s the one the Mrs. took. Then I realized the Pfizer was a one-time shot while the Moderna was two. What if the first Moderna shot resulted in a 1 in 10,000,000 chance of adverse reaction but the second was a 1 in 400?

In the end I put it in God’s hand. I got the first Moderna jab the third week of August. Apart from a little soreness in my left shoulder, there was no adverse effects. Life blissfully went on and I continued my job hunt, eventually landing a job with a large multinational corporation. I’d be starting on Monday, September 20. Problem was, my second shot was scheduled for 4 pm on September 19.

As the CVS pharmacist stuck me I asked her what I might expect the next day. “What does the average person encounter, in your experience.” She said that generally the “sweet spot” would be 18 hours from the time of the jab and I might then peak experience some fatigue, aches, maybe some nausea or dizziness. Oh great. 18 hours away would be 10 am on my first day at my new job.

So we were proactive. My wife had me hydrate all that afternoon and evening. We bought some chicken soup for me for lunch Monday, and I took some Tylenol that night and planned on taking some more in the morning. I had plenty of green tea to drink, and I started at 8 am, when I clocked in (I’m currently completely remote) and my new boss called me to walk me through my first day.

I was fine until noon. Then I began to feel sweaty and gross. It became hard to focus. I clocked out for a 30 minute lunch and laid in bed with the covers on as I had my soup. At 12:30 my training resumed. I had to watch some videos, which was OK, then I had a WebEx with an HR rep and then more time with my boss. I was declining, feeling more and more yucky. Flu-ey. I had a break at 2:30 and I went out on my backyard deck, in full clothing (long sleeve shirt and black workout pants) and laid in a chair in direct sunlight in the 95 degree heat. It was lovely – it stopped the uncontrollable chills racking my body.

I was able to power through the last 90 minutes of my orientation. I’m a good actor, I don’t think my boss noticed anything and I certainly did not bring it up. At 4:30 I clocked out and then had to go pickup Patch after volleyball practice. I was shivering and dizzy and nauseous. Probably shouldn’t have been driving. But I got her, drove through a nearby Sonic (had no strength to cook her something and I wasn’t particularly hungry), got home and tried to take a hot bath. That didn’t work, ’cuz I couldn’t concentrate on my book. Couldn’t listen to music either, as my achy body wouldn’t let me relax. So I got out, threw a t-shirt and sweats on, and laid in bed.

Patch checked up on me every now and then. We watched some Beavis and Butthead – her new obsession – but I was dozing in 5 and 10 minute increments. She left and I lay in bed moaning. I got up and went to the fridge and guzzled an orange Gatorade – ah, had I ever imbibed a more tasteful, nourishing drink before? This must indeed be what ambrosia, the nectar of Olympus, tasted like! I lay back down in bed and about an hour later my fever broke and I found myself bathed in sweat.

The Mrs. slept on the couch upstairs and the next day I woke at about 80 % capacity. This is 38 hours after my second Moderna shot. I washed the bed linens and by the end of the day, my second day of work, I was around 95. By Wednesday morning, I was again healthy as a horse.

So that second shot was a doozy. It knocked me on my butt, hard. As a result, I am refusing any future “booster shots.”

But I do think it should be left up to the individual.

YMMV.