Someone's Knockin' at the Door

The black dog, whom I call Takut, meaning 'afraid' in Bahasa, is about to give himself better reason than usual to actually be afraid. 

As is his usual  habit, Takut had gone outside the apartment complex for the night, and then, as is also his usual habit, showed up at the entry at about 4 o'clock in the morning wanting back in. Given that my own front door is only feet away from the entryway door, it is I who he has cast in role of 24 hour personal doorman. 

Generally, I am able to get up and stumble out to the entryway to open the door. I had had a hard night, however, and just couldn't quite rouse myself, despite the growing violence of his assault upon the door. I figured he would go away eventually.

By the time I woke again, at about 7 o'clock, the dog was still scratching. 

Upon opening the door, I found that he had made large gouges in the wood, and had actually torn off an ornamental part of the door's surface. 

"Boy, are you in trouble now," I said. 

Unimpressed, Takut simply headed back to his daytime home beneath the floor of the back patio, from whence he will not emerge until evening. 

The worst thing about this, really, is that I can't help but suspect that I will be blamed, merely because I am kind to the dog whenever I see him, and throw him a bone if I happen to have one in the house. That's enough to make him my dog.

Who does Takut actually belong to? I have no idea. Just as I have no idea who little Viana belongs to. Is he a stray dog, and is Viana a stray kid? I don't know. I am friendly to Viana as well, but that does not make her mine any more than the dog is mine. 

Nonetheless, I can hear it now. That's the guy who invites dogs and children into No Dogs and No Children allowed villas.

Good grief. Another fine mess a dog has gotten me into. 

Augmentin

Looks like I was right about this persistent infection in the sinuses being bacterial rather than fungal. After two days of Augmentin, I woke up this morning  to find that all of the congestion had flowed to the surface and could be expelled by some vigorous nose blowing. My God, what a relief it is to be breathing freely again and to feel clear and free from the pressure in the face and head.  There is some residual sniffing, and some tenderness in the throat, but I 'm hoping that those are the final gasps of this long, depressing illness. 

Blockhead

Boy if I thought I was sick before, I guess I gotta think again. Woke up this morning to find that my head had somehow been filled with cement from chin to brow. The original blockhead. This of course was accompanied by a tremendous headache, perhaps the worst headache of my life. My nose and eyes felt as frozen as those of a figure on Mt. Rushmore. My throat was sore as well and I felt nauseated, as if I was about to muntah at any moment, which in Indonesian means you know what. Wobbled about the room for a bit, gave my nose a couple of mighty shots of Afrin, swallowed down a pseudoephedrine tablet and a small handful of Advil and by noon or so I was feeling vaguely human again. Just sat around the house for the rest of the day watching old Ozzie and Harriett shows. My exciting like in paradise. 

Naturally, under the circumstances, I have nothing else to write about other than being ill. In fact, I think I'll change the name of this blog. Everyone Here is Sick as a Dog? Hmm. Or  how about Tedium: A Chronical of Illness? 

So anyway, I've given up on doctors for the time being. I've had three weeks of miconazole, one week of itraconazole, various antibiotics, steroid nose spray and non-steroid nose spray, allergy meds and antihistamines. What else is there? One may as well run his own experiments. It's cheaper and just as effective, or ineffective. So I have decided that the nose/sinus congestion problem is not a fungal infection (as with the throat) but a bacterial one and have therefore begun treatment with a course of Augmentin, the antibiotic most often used against sinus infections. I believe that the fungal infection is actually gone now, and that the sore throat is a result of irritation from the Afrin spray.

Snore. 

Truly, I hope to do something more interesting tomorrow. Ozzie and Harriett are certainly entertaining, but one hopes for a bit more out of the day nonetheless.  

Chat

I've had the opportunity over the past week to have a couple of extended chats with my second wife, kicking around old times--those times that we so casually threw away and which seem now to have been worth infinitely more effort than we invested. I doubt whether either of us could say now just exactly what happened, how it had happened, why we let it happen. Maybe it's because we were both just strong and proud in the full vigor of our years, and we look back now with the brittle conscience of old age. We were raising our children at that time, with the usual lavishing of love and carefulness, and we forgot to raise ourselves with the same sobriety. We forgot to protect ourselves. 

I'm so happy, in any case, to see that she has landed in the care of her daughter and her husband and is able to every day enjoy her two grandchildren in the same house. It is a large, spacious house, as I was able to see on video call, resting on an extensive plot of wooded land--a little paradise, really. As with all who have grown old, she has a number of health problems, and so I am thankful for the fact that she is with a loving family, people who will watch over her, just as we did, once upon a time, for my mother, and for her mother as well. What goes around comes around. Sometimes.  

Matahari Terbit

Finally made it down to Matahari Terbit today, and, as often happens, my knack for picking the wrong day to go the wrong place manifested itself as I found myself in the midst of a perfect hoard of motorbikes--too late to turn around once you're in the stampede. The best you can do is keep moving with the flow until it settles down to graze somewhere, somewhere, in this case, being a grass and dirt lot off to the side of the main street. So it would be a walk just to get to the beach I had come to walk on. 

"What's the crowd all about," I asked a man as I moseyed long with the now dismounted crowd.

"Libur," he said. "School vacation." 

Ah. 

Anyway, I did my so-called exercise walk once we got to the beach proper and soon encountered an additional crowd, a separate herd, this one composed of tourists come to take the tourist boats out to the outlying islands, Lembongan, Ceningan, Gilli and so on, and found the usual chaos associated with this exodus in full gear as tourists tried to understand the directions squawking over loudspeakers, jostled in line for their boats and trudged into the knee-deep surf to board.

Matahari Terbit (which means sunrise) is otherwise populated with small food booths, sellers of sate and corn fried on the spot, miniature minimarkets selling whatever the tourists had suddenly remembered they had forgotten, candy for the children, and so on. This is also the beach often used for the launch of boats bearing the ashes of a loved one to be spread at sea.

Sleep Sickness

Meant to take my walk this morning on the next beach in line, Matahari Terbit, but I was just too damn tired. More than tired, really. Unworldly tired, rather like when I had mononucleosis. I got up after a long night's sleep, made breakfast, watched a bit of the news on TV, got dressed, thought I'd lie down for just a minute, and straightaway feel asleep. 

What is it? The long illness I've had, and still have? Blood pressure medications? Neuropathic medications? Antihistamines? All of the above?

But then again I have to admit that this is  not new. Long before I came down with this fungal plague, I noted that I was unusually tired, and on many occasions experienced the same pattern in the morning. The only difference is that now it is multiplied ten times over and the tiredness does not go away when I renew my day, as it tended to do in the past. 

What a mess. I keep waiting to live again, and become more and more bedridden, or house-ridden anyway. Life has become a joyless drudgery. 

Now I've forced myself out at least to Starbucks, falling far short of a walk on the beach, and I'm sitting here in my chair feeling like I'm about to fall asleep.  

How long? Where is the end? What is the cure? 

I can only wait, and rue the passing, unused days. 

In the meantime, whilst I've been waiting to live, I have come upon an uncommonly engaging collection of short stories--Exhalation, by Ted Chiang. The book was listed in my 'Recommendations for You' section of my Amazon page and had, as I found on further reading, been the recipient of some fairly extravagant praise. So I went ahead and purchased the book for my iPad and very soon saw that the praise was entirely justified. I'm three stories in and already regretting that I've consumed so much so quickly, as that means I will reach the last page of the final story all the more quickly and will have to return, still thirsty, to the desert otherwise known as contemporary American literature. But I suppose that perfect gems like this are uncommon in any age or literature, and will therefore content myself with the nourishment derived from these intriguing pages while my body sleeps away the days.

Hari Selasa Lagi

This morning's walk started at Sindhu Beach and proceeded up toward the Grand Bali Hotel, the first large tourist accommodation to be built, many years ago, on the Sanur seashore. (Only a year ago I regularly walked from Sindhu to the hotel in the evening. Now I make it about halfway, at best. How times have changed). Somewhat ironically, this long-ago developed stretch of land stands nonetheless as the quietest stretch on the entire Sanur beachfront, from the Grand Bali to Mertasari. This, I suspect, is because most of the land here is occupied by old, established beachfront vacation properties, built in traditional, more sedate style, unlike the sprawling, flashy resorts of the present day. On this stretch of beach, businesses do not spill out onto the sand, obscuring the view of the oceanfront, but leave that soft carpet open and uncluttered but for some respectful, unimposing trees.