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I have had a full weekend, with a lot of the best and a handful of the worst.

Tommy and Morgan stayed in the studio over the weekend for John’s service and wake. It is never a good cause for a get-together, but I was happy to see them again. John’s pseudo-niece and her husband were here, too, as were a good handful of John’s friends that I have only ever read about in his entries. The continent was represented from coast to coast… John made that sort of impact on people.

Jesus and (I believe) his partner, as well as John’s good friends from upper state New York/Ft Lauderdale were all in attendance. I apologize for the lack of name-recall. I was not on my game, but I will get to that later in the post.

This morning started early, ferrying Tommy and Morgan off to the airport.

Midday through early evening was spent at the Slap-n-Tickle, borrowing some power-tools to move forward on the work I need to do for my solo show in August.

Oh, yeah! I have a solo show in August at the Tickle. Did I forget to mention that…?

My afternoon work was productive; I got sheeting board cut and a chunk of it framed for the understructure of the new work. I also managed quality time with various wandering members of my village on breaks, which is always a nice surprise on unexpected days…

So, having reached the twenty minute mark of typing this post, (I had some distractions) I am returned to the previously mentioned worst part of the weekend. Sometime Thursday evening, something foul hit my stomach. Somewhere around 1:30 Friday morning, I started my dashes every twenty minutes. They were truly non-stop; I called off from work and took naps in roughly fifteen minute intervals. I didn’t see my doctor since 1) he only holds a half day of office hours on Friday and 2) he is more than twenty minutes away. I had run through the prescribed daily allowance of anti-diarrhea pills by 3 am that morning to no effect. Really the only thing that helped was to sip fluids in tiny amounts and to not eat. Period. Besides, what little I managed to eat tasted horrible anyway.

Saturday morning, I awoke without that sick taste in my mouth and hungry as all hell. It seemed a good day. In retrospect, I should have been more careful to stay with simpler, blander foods. By the time the evening came around and I took my meds, everything built back up to a head and kept me up through the night a second time. I am happy that is gave me a break to stay a while through John’s wake…

Today is only marginally better.

To be said, whatever it was has passed, but my body is simply not yet ready for food. It behaves quite normally until I eat something substantial. I have moved from what I call “pissing out my ass” to what I would consider a fairly normal range inflicted by HIV meds.

The only food to mention today is pasta noodles with butter. I have been sipping a green tea ginger ale and have purchased some probiotic smoothie drinks (since the idea of having to chew yogurt is currently unappealing to me)….

The most frustrating thing in all of this: I hate… that should not just be hate, but hate! not having food sit and taste right to me. It is very confusing and unbalancing. I spent most of Friday rummaging through the cupboard and refrigerator to pick out the best options only to be repulsed by everything that come in front of my eyes.

The most confusing thing is that I feel fine, in the sense of energy level… For all intents and purposes, I have eaten and been able to nutritionally take advantage of anything since midday Thursday. I do not feel that I should be able to spend the afternoon working with power-tools and building frames and such.

And of course, I am dodging the mirror a bit at the moment. I have no scale in the studio, but it is clear that I have dropped weight. To me, I look skinny instead of trim… I understand that I have baggage about unplanned weight loss, but there is no way that any loss of the past weekend could have been in any healthy means…

*sigh*

I will be going to work tomorrow; I cannot afford to lose more time. I am apprehensive about my bowels current schedule as compared to the demands of my work shift, but I do have the entire night to time it out with the added yogurt cultures…

Here’s hoping…!