I had it, after what's become my usual fashion in the last ten years. Nobody else would have noticed. I could tell I had the virus because I felt chilly even in a room where people who hadn't been walking briskly outdoors were comfortable, because my eyes got tired easily, because I felt tired by ordinary routine chores or even by eating...you know, that fighting-the-flu feeling. It was not a stomach flu (norovirus is the one that always gives me noticeable symptoms). It did not affect the digestive process.
In my forties I had this feeling for hours, maybe a day, at a time. This winter I noticed it for about ten days. Is that because I'm now in my fifties? I don't think so. Up to about age thirty, as a young undiagnosed celiac, I did not shake off that fighting-the-flu feeling. I came down with the flu. Yes, and as a child, when I was forced to eat everything other people thought I needed to eat and bundle up when other people thought I needed to bundle up and go outside when other people thought I needed to go outside, I didn't even have separate cases of colds and flu during the winter; basically, if it was winter, I had a cold; the question was whether I was sick enough to distract the teacher when I went to school coughing and sneezing at people. Because the law required children to be sent to school on 145 days of the year, even when what they were learning at school was to stay home when they had a cold, and even when they had one...which was why, as a teenager who was a little healthier and finally able to enjoy some of my classes at school, I was still very keen on school choice.
I don't know about you, but when I talk about changes in the quality of my life during the past ten years, I'm old enough to be told "Well, of course, you're getting older." What is getting old, stale, and tired of living is that cliche phrase. We are all getting older. My Nephews are noticing the same sort of changes, and although not all of them have even reached their full height yet, fourteen years old is older than four. However, the changes in the quality of my life (1) correlate pretty precisely with my exposure to glyphosate, and (2) feel to me like being younger. Like aging backward. I was not a healthy person until age 30 so when I feel sick it brings back memories of youth or even childhood. Not the sort of childhood I wanted The Nephews to have.
There are some changes we can all expect to happen just because, after a certain age (it varies, and seems to be determined by genes), the human body's hormone balance changes. In between one range of birthdays we grow taller, then grow heavier, and the texture of our skins changes to allow the skin pores to become bigger, and some of those pores tend to clog up, etc., etc. In between another range of birthdays we start growing more white hair in place of black or brown or whatever it used to be, and the texture of our skins changes again to allow the skin to dry out and form wrinkles more easily, and those of us who don't get enough exercise find ourselves losing weight in the form of calcium from the bones, etc., etc. I am actually starting to grow white hair, although during glyphosate reactions it falls out so it's not showing yet. The other changes normally start later in my family; no doubt they'll come along in due time.
Illness is a separate thing from age. The two things are correlated to some extent because, the older we are, the harder it is for our immune systems to recover from some kinds of illness--notably flu. However, young people can be ill and old people can be healthy.
One thing that definitely cheats some people out of enjoying a healthy old age is confusing age with illness. No symptom of illness is a valid indicator of age, but the belief that low-grade chronic illness is part of "growing older" keeps some people from correcting imbalances in time to avoid more serious illness...and illness definitely makes the body "older," slower to recover, more vulnerable to the next attack on our health.
So I had this dopey-sneezy-sleepy-grumpy-bashful feeling for ten days, and finally shook it off. Then on Wednesday morning I woke up at two o'clock, sneezing and sniffling. Having been well hydrated to help keep off the flu, I didn't dry out enough to go back to sleep until after six. Then my brain kept remembering that six o'clock is time to get up, so I caught three separate ten-minute naps before it was time to go to work, still losing water as I trudged through the drizzle that didn't become a real rain. At least only water was draining out of my face (nose, and also eyes). When I used the toilet I lost about a tablespoon of blood.
Where had that come from, I asked myself. What had I eaten that might have been contaminated? I decided to stop sweetening my coffee at the cafe, just in case.
It was raining when I went home. I felt dopey, sleepy, sneezy, grumpy, bashful, and a few more little guys Disney overlooked: lazy, weary, whiny--and the last one wasn't "Doc," he was "Blocked." Disney mis-heard that one. He mis-heard "Happy," too, but this web site's contract bans mentioning that Dwarf's real name.
On Thursday morning the junior cats Silver and Swimmer came to breakfast, one with her left eye swollen hut, one with her right eye swollen shut. I was sniffling again, and had the predictable gas bloating that means the sniffles were caused by glyphosate vapors rather than a cold. The junior cats had, too. Poor little things, they probably remembered it from when they were kittens...that was how Swimmer got her name; she was trying to climb up my coat, wasn't strong enough, and fell into water. Most cats hate to swim, but they can.
When I came in on Thursday evening my nose was clear enough to notice just one whiff of a smell I've learned to loathe, as I walked past a house someone has been trying to sell. Then my nose clogged up again and all the water in my body started trying to pour out through my face, again.
Then I came home, and my Queen Cat Serena, who snuggled against me for many a kitten-nap but does not think snuggling befits a Queen...snuggled. Yes. Serena was snuggling. Serena didn't have a real fever but her nose was warmer than it ought to have been, from inflammation, from breathing toxic vapors. Serena wasn't feeling well either. Serena didn't seem positively ill during any of last year's glyphosate episodes. Well, she didn't seem ill enough to be taken to the vet yesterday, either, but she was not her tough and sassy healthy self, not the cat who always shrugs away any petting and tries to redirect me to throw or drag something she can chase. What was bothering her was closer than the railroad.
I went into my home office feeling not just grumpy, but seriously angry. I can be too soft when it comes to forgiving or even pardoning things people do to me, personally. Touching my loved ones is the way to see the fighting side of me. I know who poisoned Serena. I'd always thought of them as a nice family, before. I'd even presumed to pardon them for poisoning some valuable wineberry bushes, because the poor idjit had not looked them up but only asked the guys at the shop, who'd told him they were poisonous. However. I went into the office, closed the door, and I started praying out loud: "God, please heal these cats and all the other innocent animals this fool has poisoned, and transfer all of their suffering to him, now."
Even if I felt any compassion for people who torture other people's pets, I couldn't forgive them. That would not be possible. Only those animals and the God Who made them can forgive those who poison animals. And I hope to live to see those disgraces to humankind suffer much, much more than any individual animal...enough to balance all the misery of all the animals who did and did not survive.
I got up this morning knowing that it might be a good market day, but I had too much to do online. One job to collect payment for, one to finish, one to negotiate. Cyberchores to wrap up. Yes, although the big glyphosate news story hasn't broken enough to be worth reporting yet, it's been a month; there ought to be a Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter. And also there had to be a blog post about what the cell phone's cheap little camera doesn't quite show you: the three-colored grass. No direct sunlight, no true colors in cell phone pictures. You might think this photograph of the lazy fool's side yard shows just the usual wintertime mix of tiny green plants and frozen dead ones. Look again. The colors are grayed, but you'll see that two of those grass stalks, and a few of the blades of crabgrass, have a much redder color than the other yellowish winter-killed grass...
What produces that three-colored grass? New, green grass (including crabgrass) pops up, even in January, whenever the temperatures are not actually below freezing. Idiot and his sons used, when his children were living in the house, to mow this sloping patch of yard every week. That was bad enough, because the slope is below a road and Bermuda grass will not hold a steep bank below a road in wet weather, as we have all seen along Route 23...but on Thursday, probably in the morning, one of this idiot family had swung by and thought, "I don't have time to mow but I don't want any prospective buyers to see unmown grass--horrors!--so I'll just spray poison on the whole lawn." During the next few hours, glyphosate had no effect on the yellow vegetation, which was already dead, nor on the new vegetation, which continued to pop up, but it dried out the stalks of those other little plants and some of the tips of the crabgrass, producing that brighter, redder color for a day or so before those plant parts will fade to the same color as the parts that died naturally.
What woke me in the night would have been glyphosate vapors drifting up from the railroad, which was lined with three-colored vegetation this morning too; the Southern Railroad Company always spray poison on the railroad in the middle of the night. What I smelled yesterday evening would have been a fresher application of glyphosate to the idiots' yard. Maybe it was even some "helpful" real estate agent, rather than the idiots themselves, who poisoned the yard; I wasn't watching. But that three-colored yard tells us all we need to know.
I'm not going to post the idiots' name here, but I am going to post the picture of the property they're trying to sell, so that they can keep paying taxes on it for another ten years or else pay somebody to take it over.
One thing we can do to build a healthier world, Gentle Readers, is to look for three-colored vegetation around houses for sale. People poison their yards because they think that will help them sell houses for higher prices. We can help correct that mistake. We can publicize the fact that these properties may contain residues of poisons that may make people sick for who knows how long, so their market value has dropped below zero. We can tell owners who are trying to unload real estate with three-colored grass around it, "I might take that place off your hands if you pay me a couple of thousand dollars an acre, just to pay taxes on it while it recovers from having been poisoned! It's not worth anything now, for sure. Maybe in ten years, if the soil is assayed and all that stuff you sprayed on it has completely broken down, it might be worth some money again. Maybe. It's a very risky investment."
Do not buy this property, Gentle Readers. Do not let anyone else buy it. That lovely, scenic little brook runs below the poisoned grass shown above. It is washing glyphosate residues, AMPA and other nasty stuff, down toward Tennessee now. Whoever owns it might be considered responsible for making people sick in Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, or even Louisiana. Yes, the idiots who poisoned that grass need to pay anyone who takes the risk of owning that field now.
We should be snapping pictures of poisoned properties, whenever it's possible to snap a blurry image that proves that plants have been poisoned. We should be posting them on social media with tags that include #GlyphosateAwareness and the name of the nearest town, e.g. #GateCityVA, so people will know better than to pay for these properties.
Further along the road, before accepting a lift into town with a neighbor, I saw further evidence of glyphosate poisoning along the railroad. Some poor soul had spewed blood-flecked mocha-colored froth into a napkin and thrown the napkin out beside the road. Since it landed on the passenger's side, who knows whether the sufferer spewed upward or downward, but it had definitely come out of a human body. Maybe the body belonged to the fool who poisoned the lawn; I hope it did, rather than to some innocent child who waited for the school bus at a railroad crossing. It was too cold for frogs, dead or alive, or for birds to be flying and singing. I did not see a dead bird...yet. At least the robins I've often seen flitting over the lawn photographed above are probably still further south.
I came in, sat down, bought coffee, went to the bathroom, and instead of anything a healthy person would see floating around a water-flush toilet, what I flushed away this morning was about a tablespoon full of blood and little separate semi-solid blood clots. That, too, is now on its way to promote the growth of cancers, the loss of valuable native animals and birds and insects, and the growth of Bermuda grass and Johnson grass and Spanish Needles and kudzu and very little else, in Tennessee. Sorry, Tennessee readers, that's what youall get for having sewer systems so you can keep those nasty old water-flush toilets. Nobody in Virginia would be dropping poisoned blood into your water supply if we could help it.
Maybe it's a symptom of glyphosate poisoning, too...I think people need to have the evidence of the harm glyphosate does shoved in their faces. I snapped a picture of blighted grass. Maybe I should have snapped one of the blood clots. Maybe I should have saved the actual blood clots, themselves, and thrown them at the idiot's white door frame. Maybe what worked for the homosexual lobby is what it will take to convince Americans to stop the insanity.
There is not, there never was, and there never will be a "weed" as ugly as glyphosate. Friends don't let friends spray poisons...especially on yards they are hoping to sell.
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