Yesterday I went to a shoe shop to buy a pair of boots. An Eastern European woman in her 50s served me and brought out several pairs of similar elastic sided boots – the type that have been popular in Sydney for years - for me to try. I chose a pair and told her I need them in and 8 1/2, she’d given me 8s to try on.

The woman started insisting that the 8s were best saying that shoes should fit snugly because the leather will stretch as you wear them and ‘fit like a glove.’ She put her own foot on the edge of the chair where I was sitting and pressed on the toe of her shoe to show me that was how she wore her own shoes. Then she did a little jig in front of demonstrating how well her shoes fit, gesturing at her feet with both hands like a tap dancer.

I thought that maybe they didn’t have any 8 1/2s and she was desperate to make a sale. In the end though I insisted that 81/2 was my size and that’s what I needed and she reluctantly went to the back of the shop and came back with a pair of 8/12s. While I paid the woman hovered behind me and as I was walking out the door she called after me ‘Wear thick socks!’

 
I dreamt that I was on holidays somewhere near a beach. I was staying in a very run down old house. I remember looking at it from the outside and seeing that it was made from different materials: fibro, chipboard and old wooden planks. Where there was paint it was old and peeling. Inside the place was comfortable, there were a number of beds with old fashioned mosquito nets.

Nearby there was another, much bigger, house. I could see the people inside. Occasionally, I would see someone walk past a window.

Walking back from the beach I saw a group of girls from the house next door and realised that they were much younger than they appeared from a distance. They seemed to be in their young teens rather than twenties as I had assumed.

As I walked along the road I felt something in my ear and with my finger removed what seemed to be a small section of some kind of fruit with something that looked like a black glass bead embedded in it. I looked at it for a second and seemed to remember a similar occurrence possibly the night before.

I dropped the object in the gutter and the black bead made a loud clacking sound as it bounced a few times on the concrete.

Back in the house there was an old woman sitting in the kitchen that I seemed to know. There was a knock at the door and it was a middle-aged man who was handing out information sheets. ‘There have been cases of Black Denver,’ he said to the woman. She noticed me looking at her and explained ‘They eat through your skull and plant voices in your mind.’

Next I was researching on the internet and found a series of animations which I took to be the stages of the condition ‘Black Denver.’ The first panels showed small creatures breaking out of a round black pod. With mouths like crocodiles and large jagged teeth they looked vaguely comical – like a child’s drawing of a monster. Each animation showed them running down a passageway with pink walls chomping through anything that was in their way.

In a final panel a lone figure was sitting at a small table in a chamber with walls the same flesh pink as the passages in the previous screens. One of the walls opened like a zipper and two cartoonish figures appeared. They both had white coats and old-fashioned headlamps that doctors used to wear. ‘It’s your turn,’ one of them said and they leaned towards the figure at the table dragging him through the opening which zipped back up without a trace.

 
I dreamt last night that I was back at school. A girl and I snuck into the classroom with a greeting card, one of the oversized cards that they pass around offices. Inside I drew a primative little picture of a person holding a cake in one hand and giving the finger with the other, I had a bit of trouble because the pen kept running out. Underneath the picture I wrote 'Happy hanukah you jerk-off' and we left the card on the teacher's desk. Next, I was telling someone about it and said 'They figured out it was me when they compared the handwriting.' I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep because I was laughing.

 

 
Walking back from my class last Saturday morning I wasn't really paying attention to what was going on around me. In the dressing room I got my foot caught in the fly of my pants and broke the zipper which meant that I had to walk to the bus stop with my bag slung low across my groin area. Walking past the psych hospital attached to Sydney University with my head down I heard a voice whisper 'Hi buddy' and I looked up but couldn’t see another person anywhere around. I looked around and saw a young shirtless guy standing behind a heavy grate covering a window. He nodded like he'd been waiting for me to drop by. I pushed on and a couple of minutes later a body blocked the path. This time it was an old man rolling his tongue around inside his toothless mouth and holding up one digit like he was giving me the finger. He said something and I had to ask him to repeat it three or four times. Each time he moved his hand up and down so that he looked like a preacher pointing to heaven. Finally I understood 'Can I have one cigarette?' The finger represented the single cigarette he wanted me to give him.

A couple of days ago I was on the train to work and the guy next to me started asking me questions. What station was I getting off at? Where did I work? Did I enjoy work? Where did I have lunch? What did I have for lunch? I gave one-word answers as much as possible. He was a weird looking little guy: mid-thirties/early forties, wearing a black turtleneck jumper and black bike shorts, with a bumbag and metal snowboarding glasses and a spiky blond mullet. After five minutes or so he announced ‘We’ve bonded’ and took a magazine out of the bag and handed it to me. It was a glossy porn magazine called ‘Lesbian Lust’ he raised his eyebrows and nodded as he handed it to me and kept his hands poised like an antique dealer watching a customer handle a precious object. It featured a range of blond women unenthusiastically performing acrobatic sex acts on each other. I handed the magazine back and he hardly said a word until he said ‘Bye’ when he got up to leave. I noticed he was showing the magazine to a man in a suit as he waited at the carriage door.

Last night I dreamt that I was climbing Mount Everest with two other people. The mountain had been converted into a sort of tourist park though and all the slopes and ridges had been concreted and handrails put in place. It was more of a pleasant walk than a climb. At one point we stopped at a small hut that had been built by a mountaineer decades earlier. The desk was covered with things that I had owned when I was a teenager.

 
On Saturday morning I was walking to the bus stop in Newtown trying to ignore the hordes of pretentious people who flood the cafes and shops on the weekend. Near Sydney University this young guy approached me and I automatically assumed he was going to ask for money. Around the University you do get middle-class kids begging, even though they don’t appear to need the money. This guy walked up and said ‘Excuse me,’ then paused and winced like he was in pain then said ‘Can I talk to you about faith?’ I told him that I was in a hurry and kept walking though I felt kind of sorry for him.

Then on Sunday morning when J and I were lying around reading the papers in bed there was a knock on the front door. I got up thinking it could possibly be my Dad who sometimes makes lightening visits on the weekend to deliver something or pick up tools that I have borrowed. When I opened the door it was two young women holding vinyl folders. Both were nicely dressed and one was wearing a pair of transparent wrap around sunglasses that you see a lot of these days.

The dark haired girl standing closest to the door did all the talking. ‘We’re from the Jehovah Witnesses and we’re taking an opportunity to visit neighbours, we won’t take up much of your time.’ She put a heavy emphasis on ‘neighours’ as though she and her friend were actually living just down the street. ‘Can I ask you a question?’ she continued ‘I won’t take up much of your time.’ Then without waiting for me to answer she continued ‘With everything going on in the world at the moment, stuff like what’s happening in Iraq, do you think there’ll ever be peace?’

At that moment I pictured myself being stuck there for a long time and I felt a bit mean but I said ‘Yes, but can I cut this short we were just …’ then couldn’t really think of an appropriate excuse. ‘Oh, you were just sitting down to breakfast,’ she finished the sentence for me ‘That’s OK. Let me just give you something you might like to read and think about.’ I opened the door while she rifled through a stack of magazines, selected one and handed it to me. ‘Have you got a Bible,’ she asked and I shook my head. ‘Not even one tucked away somewhere?’ ‘No,’ I answered and they both giggled.

The magazine had an article called ‘How we can end war and prejudice’ which was mostly just quotes from the New Testament, but what grabbed me were the pictures. There was an illustration of Jesus looking like Pierce Brosnan. The best picture though was an artists impression of what the world would look like when war and prejudice have been abolished. It showed about thirty people in different national costumes sitting on a giant rug having a picnic. Right in the centre there is a handsome black man in a kaftan smiling as he accepts a cake from a silk clad Asian woman who’s hairstyle reminded me of something from a Parmolive commercial from the 50’s. For some unknown reason, sitting off to the side there is a lion looking very regal except that it has a colourful beachball balanced on its front paws.

 
There was a couple on the train the other day. A guy and a woman, both thirtyish, who argued constantly in a low level nick-picking sort of way. The guy refused to look at the woman but kept this fixed gaze out the window even while he was speaking. The woman, who was rather dressed up, had a tissue in her hand and kept dabbing it on the guy's neck and on his face, particularly his upper lip, the few times he turned towards her. When the train arrived at their station they had a short argument about which door they were going to exit through. The guy grunted and made a few gestures like he was directing traffic, but the girl ignored him. They ended up marching to opposite ends of the carriage, leaving by their chosen doors and continued bickering once they were reunited on the platform.

I dreamt that I was an embedded journalist in the war, but either we weren't in Iraq or Baghdad looks a lot like Sydney. I was with a group of Marines who were virtually indistinguishable from each other because of their uniforms and equipment and I realised that I was dressed the same. I was surprised by how light and easy to move in the unfit was, despite being so bulky. We had to go to an abandoned building, and though nobody spoke I knew that we were looking for someone who was not an enemy but someone who had gotten lost. Inside the building was absolutely bare except for a guitar case that was painted in desert camouflage. This seemed important.

Next we were outside and people were running by in a panic and someone indicated that there was a sniper firing from a nearby building. We joined the running crowd and I remember seeing a small child, a little Asian boy about three or four, being swept along in the rush. I thought that I should help but as I moved in his direction the crowd seemed to melt away and I found myself in the middle of a square surrounded by tall buildings. Although I couldn't hear any shots I assumed that the sniper was still firing so I tried to run in a zigzag pattern so that I'd be harder to hit. When I reached the buildings I found my compatriots, but realised that we needed to use the lifts to get to the next street which was high above where we were standing. While we were waiting in the foyer I remembered thinking that it seemed ridiculous that soldiers should have to use a lift.

Next we were in a busy street in Sydney's CBD. We were still in uniform but people streamed by and paid us no attention at all. I noticed a garbage bin that was piled high with CDs, drink coasters, key-rings and other types of merchandising material. I started looking through the pile of stuff and someone said 'That's Irish Ern' which I took to be the name of the band or performer who had produced it. I pulled a cellophane packet out of the bin and it contained a small toy gun. When I looked at it closely I noticed the gun and each of the tiny projectiles packaged with it had the same multi-coloured logo.

 
I dreamt I was standing in a small crowd who were watching two big red faced men in colourful shirts demonstrating something that looked like a toy of some sort - possibly a spinning top. They were both shouting 'See! See!' aggressively and pushing people in the chest. I woke and could still hear them shouting for a few seconds even though I was awake.

 
I dreamt that I was in charge of taking some photographs not far from where I live. I had to produce an open exposure of a yellow car against the backdrop of deep grey concrete. I could see the photo of the yellow streak clearly in my mind and then pictured it and some others I was responsible for already in an archive. For a moment it seemed that the pictures were actually very old even though I hadn’t really taken them yet. A few cars came by, all the wrong colour, and I snapped some frames but knew that they would be uninspiring shots. When I looked up next I noticed that one section of the hill on the other side of the road was covered in a palm forest which was a startlingly beautiful shade of blue/green. I looked at the forest and thought ‘It’s so close.’

 
On Redfern Station yesterday I sat down next to a very prim little Korean woman while I waited for my connecting train. The woman spent the whole 10 minutes or so putting on make-up and checking her appearance in a handheld mirror. When the train arrived it was jam packed, I managed to find a spot and the woman surveyed the situation then daintily stepped on with this pouty look like she really didn't approve of being in such close proximity to so many people. Just as the train was about to pull out this big guy covered in tattoos and concrete dust jammed one of the doors open with his foot and barged on. He shoved the little Korean into one corner then kind pressed his forearms against the window at head height and put his forehead against them like he was crying.

The guy was so tall and the woman so tiny that his armpit was right in her face. She was pressed herself up against the wall and winched but it was too crowded for her to move. After awhile she rummaged around in her handbag and put on a pair of expensive sunglasses as though they gave her somekind of protection.

 
I dreamt that I was in China. Everything seemed to be dazzlingly new and I thought 'I must be in Shanghai.' I walked for a while until I came to a point where two large canals met like a crossroad. A long craft with a ridiculous shape sped past as fast as a truck down a highway and I decided it was a submarine and wondered if seeing it could get me into trouble. When I reached the area where the canals met a giant statue that looked like a cartoon character tipped its hat which I recognised as a sign that I should cross. The water was only knee deep but a strong current and uneven bottom made it hard to walk. There were hundreds of other people crossing with me I noticed when I looked around. The ripples on the surface caught the light which was so bright that it almost blinded me.

Next I was in the garden and noticed that the fruit trees has grown long sinister branches that curled around the trunks of the trees next to them. It looked like they were trying to strangle each other. I wanted to saw the branches off but J objected because she thought they looked beautiful.

 
A guy I worked with once told me a story over morning coffee. He said that he was living in an apartment block in a economically depressed southern suburb ironically called Beverly Hills. I remember he said that he was sharing the flat with a guy who played in a Beatles cover-band, I don't remember what they were called but he said they did their show in three stages and changed costumes in each: black suits and mop-tops, Sargent Peppers and the 70s hippie look. He said that someone had suddenly left the band and his flat-mate had been promoted from George Harrison to John Lennon and the change had effected his ego and made him very difficult to live with. So Terry - the guy I worked with - used to spend his evenings sitting on the balcony smoking pot while his flat-mate packed up his guitar, costumes and wigs for the night's show (apparently they were getting more work than they could handle).

One night Terry was sitting on his balcony, four floors up, smoking a joint and listening to a screaming argument a woman was having with her five-year-old son in the flat opposite. He said that the woman, who was a young single mother, and her son fought virtually every night. But this time in the middle of a particularly loud screaming match the kid stormed out onto the balcony and slammed the door behind him, next thing he stood on the handrail, shouted GERONIMO! and jumped. It all happened a couple of metres away and Terry said that he saw this determined and totally unconcerned look on the kid's face.

Luckily, some bushes cushioned the fall and the boy only had a couple of broken bones but Terry was very disturbed and decided to give up smoking pot.

On the weekend we had a family get together at my parents place and for some reason I ended up telling the story about the boy jumping off the balcony, minus the drug references. The interesting thing is that my nine-year-old nephew was listening and thought it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. He kept repeating it interrupted by uncontrollable giggling. He even retold it to me even though I told it in the first place.

 
All my time lately has been taken up trying to finish this boring TAFE course I enrolled in. It's a distance education course, so the deal is you buy six months time and there's no deadline for anything so if you haven't finished after six months you pay for another. With a month and a half to go I realised that I had only done two subjects and started churning the assignments out (I finished a third of the course in one week). Now with two weeks to go I have three subjects to go and one of them is two thirds done.

So not much happening apart from lots of boring trips to the library. Last week J and I went to the opening of an exhibition of photographs at the 4a Gallery in Chinatown. It was called 'Restaurant Kids' and featured snaps by people who grew up in Chinese Restaurants in the 1950's and 60s. One great thing about it was that they organisers had gone to a lot of effort to invite the people who were in the photos which added a whole extra dimension to the experience.

There was one mesmerising shot of about fifty Chinese showgirls sitting on a set of stairs. Standing in front of it was an old lady who kept pressing her cheek to the photo which had been enlarged so that the figures were almost life-size. The face that she was posing next to was hers, as a beautiful young woman done up in full 50s glamour. In another section of the gallery an old man pointed to a noirish shot of a group of people singling out a cool looking woman smoking a cigarette and said 'My wife.' Who I assume is now dead, but he had this proud look and someone said 'She's beautiful' and he smiled.

 
We saw P J Harvey on Wednesday night - this amazing little woman belting out her strange songs. When she was holding her guitar it was so big in her hands she looked like a child performing in front of a mirror. The only downside was we had a soap star and friends in front of us. The guy plays a sensitive Gen X lawyer, a bit too socially concerned for the corporate world. He was dressed in full grunge but looked like he'd just been fitted out by wardrobe, and when he was getting into the music he looked like he was performing an exercise at acting class.

He had this suck up friend with him - a little Irish guy who was desperately trying to impress him. He kept shouting stupid things all the time watching the actor out of the corner of his eye. Once he yelled out 'P J O'Rouke' and the soap star laughed and that was it for the whole night 'Yeah, P J Rouke' 'I love you P J O'Rouke' then 'P J Hogan' and finally 'P K Harvey - More than just a chewing gum' which had people groaning.

Finally, someone told him to shut up which didn't do any good. It actually made him worse because they were both smashed by this point and the little Irish suck was supposedly going to beat up the person who told him to be quiet and the actor was trying to hold him back - it was just more play acting. They actually seemed to be looking around checking if anyone was watching.

During one of the quiet songs J hissed 'SHUTUP!' with such venom that they did actually, for the first time, shut up. The actor kept turning around and plucking at her arm and mouthing 'Sorry' but she ignored him.


--

I got a haircut yesterday at a local place in Marrickville. Gina, the girl who cut my hair spent the whole time talking about restaurants describing the ones that she liked as 'Yum.' She said that a Brazilian place was yum, and there's a yum Chinese place in Bankstown, and that she and her girlfriends go out for yum food every Thursday night. I told her about a Portuguese café that I like as she was finishing up - sitting behind me smoothing the hair at my temples - she looked at me in the mirror and asked 'Is it yum?'

--

I dreamt last night that the war had started, and it was happening in Sydney but most people were ignoring it. My 93-year-old grandfather arrived at my house and he was armed with an old fashioned revolver, the type you see in World War Two films. He'd dropped by to give J and I a present which was a very high-tech rifle that seemed to have camera lenses where the end of the barrel should be. Later I was in some kind of firing range where there were a row of machine guns mounted on barrier. Every second gun had a small orange light that I realised meant that it had a night sight. The guy next to me pointed to a dark strip of buildings and explained that that was where the war was happening and I should shoot in that direction. My gun didn't have a night sight and I realised that I couldn't see what I was supposed to be shooting at. In the distance a group of lights floated up around some tall buildings like fire-flies. I thought I could shoot at them but they immediately burst into tiny pieces like fire works.

In the street below a group of old men were making loud abusive comments in front of a group of young Muslims, but they were using old fashioned racial slurs that related to black people.

 
First steps in cyberspace:

An email I got from my six-year-old neighbor, the first she's ever sent (I was the only person she knew with an email address):

From: "K. Muljono"
To: d_s_b_au@yahoo.com
Subject: Hello
anything,send me anything from Sulaiha(Millie)
mary had a little lamb, from lambchops

I sent her the url for the Hello Kitty homepage.

--
Ode to a paper bag:

I found this printed inside a shopping bag from a Hong Kong:

Chemical wastes they leave none,
Precious ozone they eat none,
Paper paper paper bags,
They help keep our sky intact.

 
On Lidcombe station yesterday a small boy walks up the stairs holding a plastic M-16 in one hand, he has a plastic hand-grenade in the other, around his neck is a pair of plastic binoculars and his face is covered by a hideous plastic gas mask with bright orange cellophane covering the eye slits. Walking wearily beside him an old man - his grandfather probably - complains loudly in Arabic. Finally, granddad seems to win out and the boy reluctantly takes off the mask and hands it to him.

On the train there are two girls: a very dark African with braided hair who's maybe 20 or 21 and sitting opposite her an older Polynesian girl. They both have very strong Australian accents and the African's posture is typical suburban Sydney - chewing gum, one leg stretched out on the seat in front of her. The conversation is all girls stuff - he asked me out and I didn't know what to say, such and such is a bitch, that kind of thing. After a pause in the talk the islander takes out a bible and starts to read it aloud, the African girl slumps back in her seat and shuts her eyes like she's listening to music.

 
Written on the back of a teabag packet:

Fragrant aroma mellow taste
Homely refresher valuable gift

--
I dreamt I was supposed to be studying at a university in another country. I arrived at night and groups of students were standing around burning piles of garbage and the buildings were very old, and close to together and arranged in a square. I wandered around and eventually walked into one of the buildings and a woman said a name, it was a surname like Savill or Sullivan, which was the name of the building. She said it like she was expecting me.

She had a manner like a nurse. She asked if I'd just arrived and I realised that I had actually been in the university for sometime but I couldn't remember where I'd been. In a mirror I caught my reflection and my clothes were dirty, my skin was grey and there were bruises and scabs on my face. I looked like a homeless person.

A man appeared in a uniform like a security guard and he and the woman looked at each other without saying a word and I knew that they had been waiting for me for a long time, maybe weeks.

The woman led me down corridors, up endless sets of stairs, through common rooms where students watched TV - we walked for hours until she stopped at a wide, closed veranda that had a bed against one wall. This was my room, I was disappointed that it was so bear but slowly walls appeared and eventually I found myself in a standard sort of college bedroom: bed, desk, one window. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do, but just being there seemed important.

 
J and I hosted three couples on Sunday each with a one-year-old child. It was interesting how the young mothers glided through each room putting everything breakable out of the reach of their toddlers. It reminded me of the automatic tidying machine in the Cat in the Hat.

The kids didn't really get along. each one was the centre of their own little universe. They'd stare at each other for a while, lose interest and occasionally shove each other out of the way like they were moving an inanimate object.

 
Unveiling a New Nose

I went to the gym yesterday for the first time in 2003. The place was full of guys mostly, all talking about working off the Christmas bulge. One big Lebanese guy was slapping his stomach and saying 'I'll work it off.' After two weeks off I felt like I'd never seen a gym before and had to drop the weights to about a third of what I used to do.

There was a girl running on one of the treadmills who seemed to be constantly toweling down, and holding the towel to her face for long periods. When she took it away I realised who she was. She's one of the crowd at the gym that I know well enough to nod to. A Greek girl with olive skin, dark brown ringlets and this great Mediterranean nose. I always thought she was kind of striking, like something you'd see on a Grecian urn, or an actress playing Helen of Troy. But, the reason she was spending an unusual amount of time covering her face is that she'd had a nose-job and seemed self-conscious about everyone looking. Minus her original nose she was still good looking but had really lost something. Now you wouldn't look at her twice in the street - which is probably what she's always wanted.

 
Remember when people used to say 'Never discuss politics or religion at the dinner table'? Maybe they should add popular culture to the list, some people take it so seriously these days.

J and I had dinner with friends on Friday night. Things seemed OK until I tried to fill a gap in the conversation by mentioning that I thought South Park isn't as good as it used to be. I tried to explain and said that I thought that the new episodes are not that funny and rely more and more on predictable gross-out scenes. When there was no comment I laboured the point that it was just my opinion and I didn't expect anyone to agree. The response was tense silence pretty much for the rest of the night. Towards the end the guy started talking, but only to his girlfriend as though we weren't there.

I suppose it's an identity thing for these aging TV babies - criticise my favourite TV show and you criticise me.

On the weekend I cleaned out an old shoebox full of letters from my college days. It was a residential so most of the letters were written during the holidays: 'What have you been doing?' 'Nothing' That sort of thing, so I didn't have any problem chucking them. At the bottom of the box I found a small piece of paper with a phone number below the name Julia Stern. The name is a total blank to me, but last night I dreamt I was walking through a thick crowd and a small blonde woman was just a head of me - white linen suit, ponytail bouncing with every step - I couldn't see her face but in my dream I thought 'Oh, so that's Julia Stern.'

 
Last week nothing wanted to publish. I must have tried a dozen times and nothing worked. Here's what I wanted to post:

[1/2/2003 10:45:06 PM | David Browne]
Last night I dreamt that I was in court being represented by some motor-mouth lawyer with a grey mustache. All the guy talked about was a set of restraints that I had worn when I was arrested - a leather belt with a set of handcuffs on a long chain attached at the waist. The lawyer kept demonstrating how my movements had been restricted as though it was very important for everyone to understand. He'd raise one hand close to his body at the same time as lowering the other saying: 'See, one goes up and the other comes down.'

This morning on Redfern Station, waiting for my connection, I noticed a short African guy wearing bell-bottomed jeans with orange and red patches all over them. He was a stocky, muscular little guy with a very serious expression. As he was getting on the train this gangly guy who looked like an emaciated version of Lemmy from Motorhead – long lank black hair and a handlebar mustache – ran up beside him shouting in this whinny, almost camp voice. Inside the scarecrow guy sat down and talked constantly to the tough little African who slouched against a handrail like he was waiting on a street corner and didn’t say a word. Most of the talk was junky wisdom, stuff about ‘they can’t get you if you do this,’ or ‘stash it in your newspaper, they never check your paper.’ The black guy remained silent and I couldn’t tell if he was nodding occasionally or if the motion of the train was making his head rock. After about ten minutes they got off at the same stop.

[edit]
[1/2/2003 3:53:10 AM | David Browne]
First day back at work, walking through the Sydney Olympic Park grounds was even more deserted than usual. It feels like a science fiction film where the entire population has been abducted and you're the last person on earth. To increase the effect the whole place is activated as though they're expecting huge crowds: repetitive announcements on the railway station telling you where the exits are and advising you to 'mind your step,' music and friendly suggestions on the outdoor intercom and giant video screens broadcasting musical performances and community announcements.

Everyone in the office looks tired, although every single person described Christmas as 'relaxing.'

Yesterday my neighbor told me a strange story about her son. She said that when he was young - 2 or 3 maybe- she couldn't sleep because she knew that if she did he would stop breathing during the night. The problem, according to her, was that he needed his appendix out but she couldn’t find a doctor who understood (she said this as though demonstrating the sad state of the medical profession these days). Eventually, a doctor 'took something out of his nose' - the kid's adenoids, I suppose - but she said after that he started taking antibiotics and then 'couldn't get off them,' and that's why he's so weak these days.