The key to happiness is your sense of function and utility, if you’re an iron lung. You are respirating another being, unlike an oxygen chamber, which is nothing more than a glorified bed for people like Michael Jackson. Happiness for an oxygen chamber hangs from a thin string tied to a twig of self-deception about as big around as your little finger.
We iron lungs, on the other hand, replicate the pulsation shared by all life forms, from the contractions of birth, pulse, peristalsis to the ultimate contraction and release that expels a being from this life.
Miners retired at 32, staring at pictures of God pinned to the ceiling, wishing their kids would stop singing those plaintive songs about them in the next room in their nasal voices; resigned polio victims; little children taken tragically ill, imagining walks down long corridors holding hands with healthy alternate selves, we’ve breathed them all.
In and out.
Your photo looks distressingly like an elongated r2d2 tipped over, but you are a lovely writer.
Once, when my father was still at a rehabilitation clinic for paraplegics and was building cyborgs, I smuggled a lung pacemaker from Vienna to the small town in germany where the hospital was. The thing was as big as a pack of matches, hellishly expensive and subject to all kinds of paperwork for getting it across the border legally.
For all I know, they did the paperwork afterwards. I think I was only used to accelerate delivery. And to get somebody out of that box above. I don’t know how that specific case turned out, but as far as I know they’re getting these things into common practice nowadays.
Admit it, TH, you’ve used that first sentence as a pickup line at parties, haven’t you?
Because it would totally work.
At the right party.
I’ll have to try it. (but only at a party where nobody ever meets my beloved. Otherwise I’d be a patient at that hospital)
Hmmm. I can’t remember what exactly I used to “pick up” my love. I think it was something along the lines of “I love your writing”.
step off–that one’s mine, Fremder.
Ooops, sorry, jillbur. My only excuse is age. That particular pickup line was 20 years ago.
No harm, no foul. I’m just always looking for opportunities to say ‘step off.’ It just rolls off my tongue, or my fingertips.
I spent way too much of my life wondering about how you work…just how do you cradle the soft human inside and gently keep breath coming and going? I also think about the man on the hill behind my house who spends many hours each day inside his iron lung…the man we all worry about when the power fails and yet, none of us know….yes…Mr. Iron Lung, I think about you often enough.
Dear Mig,
My name is Julien and I am the webmaster of http://www.expat-blog.com . I am myself an expat (I am French, I lived 2 years in London and I am now in Madrid -Spain since last September).
I had the idea to create a blog to share my expat experience, to keep in touch with my family and friends. I was also interested in other expat blogs, such as yours, and I thought it would be interesting to create a classified expat blog directory.
I began to program the http://www.expat-blog.com website during my free time; and realized it would be pretty cool to create a free blog hosting platform for expatriates (it should be ready in a month).
Do you think it is a good idea?
Would you like to add your blog in the expat blog directory?
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours truly,
Julien
julien@expat-blog.com