Turkey Trot

September 25th, 2021

Make Sure You Wear Your Mosque

I am getting comments from concerned readers. I better tell you what happened.

As some of you have guessed, I poisoned myself while ingesting the dangerous horse medicine ivermectin, washed down with entire six-packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon. I became quite ill and rushed to the hospital, where they were unable to treat me or even get to me. They couldn’t climb over the dunes of dead, maskless, red-hatted bodies that cluttered the grounds.

I had brought my My Pillow with me for comfort, and I rested my head on it in the parking lot and used a Confederate flag for a blanket. I was so sick, it was all I could do to raise my head every fifteen minutes or so to shout racial slurs, vaccine misinformation, and baseless claims of election fraud.

After several hours, I died, but not before giving a blockbuster, amazingly unwitnessed interview with Bob Woodward, who has an uncanny knack of showing up unnoticed at the deathbeds of conservative figures who can’t stand him yet call on him to come hear them refute everything they have ever said and stab everyone they know in the back.

Sobbing, I told him how much I regretted refusing vaccines and encouraging everyone else to do the same, based on my belief that the vaccines were created by Louis Farrakhan in an effort to make white men impotent. I said I regretted these things even though I hadn’t actually done either of them, and I also let him know I had personally shot video of underage Russian prostitutes relieving themselves on mattresses as Donald Trump and Alan Dershowitz looked on while sucking on crack pipes.

Before dying for good, I coded briefly, visited heaven, returned, and gave confirmation to Woodward: God had assured me that all he really cared about was social justice and environmental extremism, and he said everyone who didn’t support Antifa, BLM, and sexual perversion was going to hell. He also said no one would be allowed into heaven without a mask, a vaccine passport, and carbon credits.

This could all be true, or maybe I just spent a couple of weeks in Turkey on my honeymoon.

Rhodah and I stayed in the Sultanahmet area of Istanbul, and we also visited othe seaside city of Kusadasi, which we used as a base for a guided day trip to Ephesus. We enjoyed Turkey a great deal. The Turks turned out to be charming, friendly, helpful people, even when they were not trying to sell us things, which was not much of the time. The food was pretty good, the exchange rate was excellent, the hotel where we spent most of our time started to feel like our home, and by the time we left, we had made a whole bunch of quasi-friends from among the neighborhood entrepreneurs who accosted us regularly.

I’m too sleep-deprived to write much. I left my hotel at 4 a.m. Eastern time on the 24th, and I got to my house at 3 a.m. on the 25th. Since then, I have slept 4 hours.

I also have some sort of respiratory illness. Covid? Who knows? About 5 days ago, I started feeling nausea, and then things progressed to diarrhea and a sore throat. Eventually, I had bone aches, a slight headache, and a stuffy nose. The final insult was the production of large quantities of disgusting substances inside my nose, which had to be harvested several times a day. I am still not completely done with that.

I also had a low fever, but I will never know the temperature, because I could not find my thermometer to pack it. I know I had a fever because I stopped sweating, and then one night I woke up and saw I had started again. That meant the fever had broken.

Of course, I wonder if coronavirus is the problem. I’m having nearly the same symptoms I had early in 2020 after meeting with a bunch of maskless, pre-vaccine, hands-laying Europeans at a religious event. I feel better this time, and I have been spared vomiting, conjunctivitis, and bottomless watery nasal discharge, but other than that, it’s very similar.

Trying to diagnose myself on the web, I can’t find any other diseases that fit the symptoms. Colds, the flu, and strep throat are out.

Just like last time, the digestive problems only lasted a few hours and submitted right away to loperamide pills. Thank goodness for that. Nothing is worse than using public toilets in foreign countries.

Well, actually, that’s probably wrong. America has some of the filthiest toilets on Earth. Georgia and New York, in particular, stand out in my experience. I’ll bet Toilet Duck doesn’t even have brand reps in those states. It would be like paying people to promote pork in Mecca.

In order to reinfiltrate the US, I had to take a PCR test about 3 days back. I was concerned that I might get stuck in Turkey, but I passed. Suspicious, I Googled. I read that for tests performed during the first few days of infections, the false-negative rate is about 2/3. Information like this helps explain why I believe so little of what our overlords and THE SCIENCE tell us. How can tests be useful when they are USUALLY wrong, in the most harmful way possible, when administered during the time when most patients choose to take them?

Incidentally, a PCR test costs $19 in Turkey, and they come to your hotel. Try getting one that cheap in America.

It’s amazing, the transparent idiocy they shovel at us. Here’s another example: we need to wear masks on planes. Ignoring the fact that masks do virtually nothing as worn by the majority of real human beings, why do mask Nazis never mention the constant replacement of airline cabin air? Every time I get on a plane, I am told it’s nearly impossible to get coronavirus while flying. They say all of the air in a plane is replaced every three minutes, so the viruses get shot out into the sky. If that is true (which I doubt), how can an uncomfortable, irritating mask provide an increase in safety which is worth the misery it causes?

United Airlines says the likelihood of getting covid on a plane is something like 0.003%. Or maybe it’s 0.0003%. I forget. Anyway, it’s basically zero, according to them. THE SCIENCE says a real-world mask worn by a typical person may reduce transmission by something like 15 percentage points, meaning the mask reduction is barely perceptible statistical noise compared to the ventilation reduction.

Imagine this. The government says air bags reduce critical accident injuries by–wild guess–75%. Then some scientist finds out placing live scorpions in your underpants raises the protection to 75.02%. Would you pass a law forcing people to use the scorpions?

We have a couple of problems. First, the data THE SCIENCE provides is clearly bogus a lot of the time. For example, a person who falls off a cliff while sick with covid may get put in the “coronavirus death” tally. Second, the policy makers who use THE SCIENCE to tell us what to do are too stupid to understand and make good use of data, even when it isn’t bogus, and they’re also too biased and dishonest to make intelligent rules even when they understand things correctly.

I really hate wearing a mask on a plane. The mask starts to stink before two hours are up, hot air roasts my face, and more hot air shoots upward under my reading glasses, which makes my eyes hurt. The hot air also fogs my glasses, making reading difficult. On a flight that lasts over 10 hours, it’s like one of those loophole torture methods countries use to abuse prisoners of war without violating the Geneva Conventions.

I have learned how to cope. I buy the flimsiest, least effective masks available. I keep an eye on stewardesses, and as soon as they turn their backs, I pull my mask down below my nose. When I see them coming my way, I pull it back up. I think they know I’m doing it, but after dealing with people like me all day for months, they don’t want to get into it with me. When they offer food and drinks, I put them on my tray table and eat and drink unbelievably slowly with no mask. Sometimes I’ll go half an hour, lifting a cup of warm ginger ale to my lips and pretending to sip while my mouth is closed. When that gets dull, I may get up and go stand in the bathroom for 5 minutes with my mask in my pocket.

I learned the slow-eating tip from my friend Mike, who flies more often than I do. Genius.

Another helpful move: taking that darned mask off and fiddling with it for several minutes because it’s just so hard to adjust so it fits the way Papa Joe wants it to.

When all else fails, there’s always, “Mask? Oh, sorry!” Like you didn’t realize it was under your chin. Pull it back up and then wait for your next opportunity to grab more air.

Only amateurs fight with stewardesses. A real master doesn’t resist. It’s like aikido. You look at the natural motions of your attacker and use them against her, to your benefit. You yield and pretend to comply, and by the end of your flight, your face, or at least your nostrils, has been tasting that sweet cabin air at least half of the time.

If you resist, some snippy steward who has a makeup channel on Youtube will smirk and prance while the police drag you down the aisle at his command. You don’t want to go out like that. Remember Ferris Bueller. What would Abe Froman do?

Am I a bad guy for cheating? Well, not according to THE SCIENCE.

A) Everyone on the plane has been tested very recently, assuring that very few infected people are aboard. I am probably not capable of spreading viruses.

B) Everyone on the plane has either been vaccinated or has recovered from coronavirus, and either type of person has a low probability of being infected anew, MULTIPLIED by a sub-1% chance of having severe symptoms.

C) The airlines claim the chance of being infected regardless of immunity and masking is so low it’s essentially zero.

D) Everyone on the plane risks infection every single day, and all of them risked it getting to the airport and breathing the airport’s filthy air and touching its nasty surfaces. Sitting near a vaccinated, tested person with no symptoms should, if THE SCIENCE is to be believed, be one of the least-risky things a traveler will do during his day of flying.

I would also add:

E) General principles, et cetera, et cetera.

All this being said, I do take the disease seriously. I got the Johnson shot. I got a flu shot because I read it was associated with milder covid symptoms, and I tried to get a pneumonia shot for the same reason. I wash my hands all the time. I try not to do anything stupid. I’m not against intelligent precautions. It’s the other kind that get my goat.

Today I got another PCR test. I don’t trust the test I took in Turkey, and if I’ve been infected, the knowledge could be useful. Proof of surviving covid gives you added social credit which might be helpful in some situations. Israel supposedly gives survivors better treatment than vaccine recipients.

Finding out I’m positive would be better than finding out I’m negative. It would tell me I beat covid, and that would make me feel better about possible future bouts.

I just found out antibody tests are available. If I can get one, and if it won’t be skewed by my status as a vaccine recipient, I plan to take one. If there is any possibility I have had covid, I want to know.

Incidentally, I intended to take ivermectin in Turkey, but I didn’t do it. I told Rhodah to bring some pills for me, but she misunderstood, so she left them at home. Because I thought she was bringing them, I didn’t bring my horse medicine. I really missed it when I started getting sick.

Last night, before going to bed at 4 a.m., I took a dose. When I woke up 4 hours later, I felt much, much better. It was remarkable. I was surprised. Was it the ivermectin? Did God heal me? Was it my body overcoming a disease that wasn’t that tough to begin with? I don’t know, but there is a ton of evidence suggesting ivermectin has helped many people, so maybe it helped me, and I plan to keep using it.

Although I’ve been ill, I haven’t felt very bad. I have felt tremendous enthusiasm for getting out and walking. I felt a strong drive to get out and walk several miles a day in Istanbul. I preferred it to taking trains. I felt sleep-deprived because the sore throat interfered with sleep, and I felt a little worn-out on the nights of high-mileage days, but I didn’t feel fatigued during the day, except when watching my wife try on shoes. I’ve felt lots of physical strength. My worst problem was joint pain that popped up after a day or two. When I walked, I felt like I had mild arthritis. Every time a foot struck the ground, I felt a little pain.

I’m afraid I overworked Rhodah. She was happy to get exercise, but there were times when she wanted to sit down and rest. Even though I was sick, I was usually the one who wanted to keep going. She got short of breath a few times, but I didn’t.

I lost weight while eating baklava and cake. I went down a belt notch. If Rhodah had been as gung-ho as I was, I would have walked more and lost more. I don’t think she was ready for what I kept telling her was “old man strength.”

I hope she starts to have the same feeling. It would be very helpful to her to develop an urge to walk. Apart from the health benefits, it’s a very beneficial urge for a traveler to have, and Rhodah likes travel.

I thought I didn’t feel like writing, but I’ve written a lot.

I plan to go buy Mucinex and soak in a tub of hot water. Hopefully I can expel some of the horrible stuff that is coming loose inside me. Maybe tomorrow I’ll write a little about Turkey.

7 Responses to “Turkey Trot”

  1. Rick C Says:

    Congratulations!

  2. Chris Says:

    Sounds like you and Rhodah had a fantastic time; looking forward to reading about your time in Turkey when you feel better and get over the jet lag.

    I don’t think it’s all that unusual to pick up a cold of some kind when you go overseas. Being in a different time zone, eating different food, different climates, etc., can cause the body to freak out at times. Pretty much every time I’ve gone overseas, I’ve come down with some kind of ailment shortly after getting there.

  3. Vlad Says:

    I figured you were on your honeymoon but admit I was starting to miss your writing.

  4. I’ve your mectin Says:

    Glad that you’re back! Figured you were off on the honeymoon, but wasn’t sure.

    Eat what you want and…well, you know the rest, you wrote the book on it. Lol. Take!

  5. Ed Bonderenka Says:

    Congratulations!

  6. Sharkman Says:

    “Sarcasm is the best medicine.”

  7. Vlad Says:

    Last I checked the covid antibody testing cost was $200. However, you can donate blood and they test it for covid antibodies for free.