Siamese Twins Caught Making Out With Self

 

his morning, I woke up around 7:30 with a stiff back, and having had a series of tumultuous dreams, in which I was trying to get somewhere but ran into obstacles every step of the way.

Posthumous chart-topper, Chris Cornell

I had eaten about a pound of chicken liver the day before, thinking that I was boosting my iron levels, all the while suspecting that the low "iron" level that the Octapharma place had purportedly measured had been fabricated by the girl who was doing my pre-donation screening.

I had shown up about 15 minutes before the place was to close; and was the only one in line, and the whole staff would have been able to go home in 15 minutes, if it wasn't for me.

"Your iron is low, we're going to have to defer you..." said the young African American who often wears a Tulane University shirt. It was most likely due to some degree from that school that she was qualified to work in the rewarding field of "plasmapheresis."

After I had asked: "Are you serious?" and then told her that I hadn't even brought enough money with me to take the bus back over the river, producing the 47 cents from my back pocket to illustrate the point, she went through the motions of re-measuring the iron level in my blood, before sheepishly telling me that I could "go back there" and donate my plasma.

It usually only takes about 25 minutes for me to fill the jar with plasma, but mostly due to the staff's attempt to speed up the process, it wound up taking me about an hour. Instead of letting the machine course through its cycles normally, the technician was manually tinkering with it. 

I think she was trying to override the process by which the blood is returned to the body, so that instead of taking a small amount, separating the platelets out, then returning the rest, she was trying to get it to take enough out of me so that the required amount of platelets could be extracted in one go, rather than having the machine pause, the way a washing machine sometimes does in between the washing and rinsing cycles; sometimes the machine will sit there a couple minutes after draining, before it starts to refill again, type of thing. The result was that something that has usually taken 25 minutes had the staff there almost an hour past closing time. There is a lesson to be learned there...

So, here I was, eating a lot of liver, probably behind the faulty assumption that my levels of iron had indeed been low, 5 days ago; and then enduring poor quality sleep, degraded by disturbing dreams; and waking up thinking of hanging myself.

I then wondered if there was a parallel between this and the hours of Chris Cornell songs that I had listened to the day before, while eating liver.

Cornell hung himself about an hour after playing a concert for thousands of adoring fans. I hardly knew who the guy was, before hearing the few songs that got played on FM radio in the 90's.

But I had heard his name mentioned enough over the years, to want to check out his Wiki page. That made me want to hear a bunch of his music. If someone's Wiki page doesn't make you curious enough to do so, then it is either not a very well composed Wiki page, or his stuff really isn't noteworthy. Hell, I even listened to some Sex Pistols songs after being blown by the random cyber-winds to the page devoted to Sid Vicious. It might have been because of an interview of Brian May of the band Queen, where Brian mentioned how much of a jerk Mr. Vicious had been the one time he (Sid) walked into the studio control room where the Queen members were mixing and sarcastically asked Freddie Mercury: "Have you managed to bring opera to the masses yet?" alluding to a published quote that Freddie had made to Rolling Stone magazine, or something.

The Chris Cornell music was more haunting than catchy in the Radiohead sense, and I woke up depressed and realizing that the Sacred Heart Apartments are all bereft of any convenient fixtures that could facilitate a resident hanging himself. I had even had to buy my own shower curtain rod after moving in.

Cornell had written songs in tribute to friends he had, who had hung themselves, and one of his better friends had hung himself after a couple months of mourning Cornell's own hanging. There was just a lot of hanging going on in that circle of acquaintances, I would say...
But, me waking up depressed after a day of listening to a lot of Sound Garden and Audioslave and solo Cornell work; made me wonder if there is a connection; if depression can be spread through music, type of thing....