I finally came back to my blog and found I can’t post graphics anymore.  I suspect I have used up just about all my storage space.  I wanted to post one of the 19 terrific math poems in LeRoy Gorman’s aftermaths, a copy of which I just got in the mail from him.  Its title is “to die in one’s sleep.”  What’s below is my attempt to show it as accurately as I’m able to at this site–in other words, not too accurately:

                                                                 z

                                                             Z

Well, on the version of my entry I have here before posting it to the Internet, I have LeRoy’s poem as a big Z in the center of my screen and a little z above it to the right.  But when I’ve posted it and gone to the Internet to check what’s there, all that’s there is a little z way off to the right.  Meanwhile, I asked mIEKAL aND, whose site this blog is part of (as I feebly understand it), what he thought was going on.  He checked, and was able to post graphics here.  I’m allowed as much space as I need, he told me.  I tried a different browser with the same result. Evidentally, my computer has some kind of virus that keeps me from using html or posting graphics.  So I guess I’ll just make it a text-only blog–until I can’t do that anymore.

As I hope will be obvious, it’s supposed to be a z with an exponent of z.  Very funny at the comic-strip level . . . but deep, in my view, at the haiku-level.  The poem is best with a properly-placed exponent, but the version above has me wondering how to make a poem based on a distant exponent, as above–or a displaced exponent of any kind. . . .

A main reason I’ve been away is that my legs and a few other parts of me haven’t been right.  I guess the oest way to describe it is that I feel like I have some kind of five- or six-inch-wide band around each of my legs just above the ankle that’s a bit too tight.  My feet feel sort of swollen, but aren’t.  They feel heavy.  My heart seems not to be the cause, nor my brain, according to the cat-scan I got when I finally went in to a hospital.  The only thing not normal in the tests I got, including several blood-tests, was an abnormal reading of my urine specimen.  So I had to take Cipro, an anti-biotic with numerous side-effects, half of which I thought I suffered, for a possible urinary tract infection.

I took the Cipro for a week, and there was no real change in my symptoms, so today I saw my GP. He scheduled me for an MRI of my back (which has been feeling fine) and a sonar scan (or whatever) of my feet for next week.  My doctor felt the pulse around my ankles and said it was “not robust.” So it looks to be circulatory. I feel better about it–apparently it’s nothing I have to be rushed to the hospital about.

I still think it may be some kind of nervous breakdown.  Which wouldn’t embarrass me: you run too many miles and your knees give out; you chase ideas too long and your nerves and/or glands give out.  What’s the difference? Meanwhile, I’ve done less writing these past two weeks than I usually do even when in and out of the null zone, but I got some work done. As for this blog, what I hope to do is back-up this entire blog to an external hard drive, if I can find a way to do it that won’t take a hundred hours, then delete everything here except the last six months, say. I hope to have another entry tomorrow, but can’t guarantee it.  I feel okay right now, though.
.