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DANCING NEBULA
When the gods dance...
Friday, May 31, 2013
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Team picks apart structure of HIV’s shell
"The
capsid is critically important for HIV replication, so knowing its
structure in detail could lead us to new drugs that can treat or prevent
the infection," says senior author Peijun Zhang. (Credit: Wellcome Images/Flickr)
U. PITTSBURGH (US) — The
first description of the 4-million-atom structure of the HIV’s capsid,
or protein shell, could lead to new ways to fight the virus.
The findings are highlighted on the cover of the May 30 issue of Nature.
“The capsid is critically important for HIV replication, so knowing its structure in detail could lead us to new drugs that can treat or prevent the infection,” says senior author Peijun Zhang, associate professor of structural biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “This approach has the potential to be a powerful alternative to our current HIV therapies, which work by targeting certain enzymes, but drug resistance is an enormous challenge due to the virus’ high mutation rate.”
Three neighboring hexameric assembly units in the HIV capsid. (Credit: University of Pittsburgh)
Previous research has shown that the cone-shaped shell is composed of
identical capsid proteins linked together in a complex lattice of about
200 hexamers and 12 pentamers, Zhang says.
But the shell is non-uniform and asymmetrical; uncertainty remained about the exact number of proteins involved and how the hexagons of six protein subunits and pentagons of five subunits are joined.
Standard structural biology methods to decipher the molecular architecture were insufficient because they rely on averaged data, collected on samples of pieces of the highly variable capsid to identify how these pieces tend to go together.
Instead, the team used a hybrid approach. They took data from cryo-electron microscopy at an 8-angstrom resolution (a hydrogen atom measures 0.25 angstrom) to uncover how the hexamers are connected, and cryo-electron tomography of native HIV-1 cores, isolated from virions, to join the pieces of the puzzle.
Collaborators at the University of Illinois then used their new Blue Waters supercomputer to run simulations at the petascale, involving 1 quadrillion operations per second, that positioned 1,300 proteins into a whole that reflected the capsid’s known physical and structural characteristics.
Three-helix bundle
The process revealed a three-helix bundle with critical molecular interactions at the seams of the capsid, areas that are necessary for the shell’s assembly and stability, which represent vulnerabilities in the protective coat of the viral genome.
“The capsid is very sensitive to mutation, so if we can disrupt those interfaces, we could interfere with capsid function,” Zhang says. “The capsid has to remain intact to protect the HIV genome and get it into the human cell, but once inside it has to come apart to release its content so that the virus can replicate.
“Developing drugs that cause capsid dysfunction by preventing its assembly or disassembly might stop the virus from reproducing.”
The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation funded the work. Researchers from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and the University of Central Florida, in Orlando, collaborated on the project.
Source: University of Pittsburgh
“The capsid is critically important for HIV replication, so knowing its structure in detail could lead us to new drugs that can treat or prevent the infection,” says senior author Peijun Zhang, associate professor of structural biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “This approach has the potential to be a powerful alternative to our current HIV therapies, which work by targeting certain enzymes, but drug resistance is an enormous challenge due to the virus’ high mutation rate.”
Three neighboring hexameric assembly units in the HIV capsid. (Credit: University of Pittsburgh)
But the shell is non-uniform and asymmetrical; uncertainty remained about the exact number of proteins involved and how the hexagons of six protein subunits and pentagons of five subunits are joined.
Standard structural biology methods to decipher the molecular architecture were insufficient because they rely on averaged data, collected on samples of pieces of the highly variable capsid to identify how these pieces tend to go together.
Instead, the team used a hybrid approach. They took data from cryo-electron microscopy at an 8-angstrom resolution (a hydrogen atom measures 0.25 angstrom) to uncover how the hexamers are connected, and cryo-electron tomography of native HIV-1 cores, isolated from virions, to join the pieces of the puzzle.
Collaborators at the University of Illinois then used their new Blue Waters supercomputer to run simulations at the petascale, involving 1 quadrillion operations per second, that positioned 1,300 proteins into a whole that reflected the capsid’s known physical and structural characteristics.
Three-helix bundle
The process revealed a three-helix bundle with critical molecular interactions at the seams of the capsid, areas that are necessary for the shell’s assembly and stability, which represent vulnerabilities in the protective coat of the viral genome.
“The capsid is very sensitive to mutation, so if we can disrupt those interfaces, we could interfere with capsid function,” Zhang says. “The capsid has to remain intact to protect the HIV genome and get it into the human cell, but once inside it has to come apart to release its content so that the virus can replicate.
“Developing drugs that cause capsid dysfunction by preventing its assembly or disassembly might stop the virus from reproducing.”
The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation funded the work. Researchers from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and the University of Central Florida, in Orlando, collaborated on the project.
Source: University of Pittsburgh
Straight from the Source
DOI: 10.1038/nature12162
Half of Americans below or near poverty line
The Census Bureau says 15 percent of the country is living in poverty, but the reality is much worse
(Credit: AP/Robert F. Bukaty)
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
The Census Bureau has
reported that 15% of Americans live in poverty. A shocking figure. But
it’s actually much worse. Inequality is spreading like a shadowy disease
through our country, infecting more and more households, and leaving a
shrinking number of financially secure families to maintain the charade
of prosperity.1. Almost half of Americans had NO assets in 2009
Analysis of Economic Policy Institute data shows that Mitt Romney’s famous 47 percent, the alleged ‘takers,’ have taken nothing. Their debt exceeded their assets in 2009.
2. It’s Even Worse 3 Years Later
Since the recession, the disparities have continued to grow. An OECD report states that “inequality has increased by more over the past three years to the end of 2010 than in the previous twelve,” with the U.S. experiencing one of the widest gaps among OECD countries. The 30-year decline in wages has worsened since the recession, as low-wage jobs have replaced formerly secure middle-income positions.
3. Based on wage figures, half of Americans are in or near poverty.
The IRS reports that the highest wage in the bottom half of earners is about $34,000. To be eligible for food assistance, a family can earn up to 130% of the federal poverty line, or about $30,000 for a family of four.
Is Success Killing the Porn Industry?
By David Rosen
According to one estimate, there are nearly 25 million porn sites worldwide and they make up 12 percent of all websites. Sebastian Anthony, writing for ExtremeTech,
reports that Xvideos is the biggest porn site on the web, receiving 4.4
billion page views and 350 million unique visits per month. He claims
porn accounts for 30 percent of all web traffic. Based on Google data,
the other four of the top five porn sites, and their monthly page views
(pvs) are: PornHub, 2.5 billion pvs; YouPorn, 2.1 billion pvs; Tube8,
970 million pvs; and LiveJasmin, 710 million pvs. In comparison,
Wikipedia gets about 8 billion pvs.
Sometimes the porn industry recalls Mark Twain’s famous line, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” In June 2012, Guardian columist
Louis Theroux analyzed “the declining economics of the pornography
industry.” Reporting on the January 2013 Adult Entertainment Expo, David
Moye, writing at the Huffington Post,
picked up the chant and warned, “porn industry in decline.” But is the
porn industry in decline or yet again restructuring due to technological
innovation and marketplace changes?
Walter Benjamin recognized that the
photography engendered the aesthetic sensibility of the modern age. A
photo extended image reproduction from the natural to the “manmade” or
manufactured substances, specifically chemical-based processes.
Photography introduced a new way of capturing and rendering an image as
well as a new way of seeing, and thus a new category of art ... and
artist, the photographer. It fashioned the modern Western aesthetic
sensibility of the last two centuries. (The early porn postcard has
essentially the same dimensions or aspect ratio, 4.5" by 2.3”, as
today’s smartphone.)
The technologies of modern pornography have followed two twin paths. One path involves “obscene” content created to feed the technologies of centralized creativity, the one-to-many media of radio, television/cable and movies. Much of it is regulated by the government, whether by the FCC or the courts when distribution involves “public” or over-the-air broadcast media, media sent through the U.S. mail or retail operations barred by local ordinances. Broadly speaking, this is commercial porn.
The other path involves decentralized creativity, from the earliest photography to today’s DIY or user-generated-content (UGC) digital online porn. This second path is expressed in the adoption of a number of groundbreaking analog techologies that empowered the user’s ability to produce and distribute porn. The Polaroid camera, introduced in 1948, enabled the first-generation DIY still-image pornogapher; the Xerox copier of the ‘60s enabled the unlimited reproduction of black-and-white pornographic images; and by 1986, some 30 percent of the homevideo market consisted of DIY porn content.
In her telling 1967 article, “The Pornographic Imagination,”
Susan Sontag identified the underlying force of sexual desire. She
observed, “tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic
forces in human consciousness.” Its force is truly superhuman, “pushing
us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from
the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to
the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one’s consciousness, for
death itself.” Sontag grasped the negative dialectic of erotic desire.
The commercial porn industry is
restructuring, adapting to new technologies of distribution. Porn –
along with illegal “recreational” drugs and commercial sex -- is a “sin”
industry. For the 13 years of Prohibition, alcohol consumption was not
only illegal but a “sin”; it is the only Amendment to the Constitution
to have been replealed. A dozen or so states have adopted one form of
another of medical marijuana and two states have decriminalized
recreational drugs.
May 27, 2013
|
When was the last time you watched a porn flick? It
doesn’t matter whether you are a man or woman, straight or gay, or
whether it was a "romantic" or a “gonzo” video. Chances are you watched
it on a digital TV, computer or mobile device like a smartphone or
tablet, and that you accessed it via an Internet connection.
Anthony also
reports that men make up more than four-fifths (82%) of porn viewers
while women consist of less the one-fifth (18%). He estimates the
average length of time spent on Xvideo at 15 minutes. From an aesthetic
perspective, he notes that most people receive their digital video feeds
using low-resolution streaming.
The porn business
is like an old Sally Rand fan dance performance, with performers
suggesting a lot while showing very little. It is nearly impossible to
get real numbers from porn companies, as few are publicly traded.
Estimates as to the size of the business range across the board. The
website TopTenReviews claims that, in 2006,
the worldwide porn market topped $97 billion, with the U.S. making up
$13.3 billion. It argues, “the internet is not the most popular form of
pornography in the United States. Video sales and rentals accounted for
$3.62 billion in revenue in 2006 while internet pornography raked in
$2.84 billion. Magazines were the least popular.” The world has changed
since ’06.
The Guardian’s Theroux does not
offer an estimate as to the size of the porn industry, but warns, "some
time around 2007, the ‘business of X’ started going into a commercial
tailspin.” Huffington’s Moye cites estimates from Theo Sapoutzis, the
head of the Adult Video News (AVN), who claims that the porn business
made $10 billion in 2012. Last year, CNBC claimed that porn businesses,
led by Vivid Entertainment, Digital Playground and Manwin, “generate roughly $14 billion in revenue per year that in 2012.”
The
porn industry is facing a period of significant restructuring. Porn
theatres and XXX shops catering to the “raincoat crowd” and the risqué
have all but vanished; the DVD, the old cash-cow release platform, is in
rapid decline for both porn and conventional movies. Digital video
streaming is the 21st-century medium of porn distribution.
Most
commentators identify five factors contributing to the predicament now
facing the commerical porn industry: (i) the widescale pirating of
copyrighted porn and its illegal resale and posting by opportunistic
websites; (ii) the ease of producing do-it-yourself (DIY) amateur porn
videos; (iii) the enormous increase of “free” porn sites; (iv) the
resulting change in business economics; and (v) the ongoing recession
with cuts discretionary spending, especially among a certain sector of
the male audience.
This restructuring has led to the
closing of many commerical porn companies and cuts in jobs and fees to
porn workers. Not unlike other once-analog media industries – e.g.,
newpaper, magazine and book publishing – porn is struggling to make the
transition to digital online publishing.
“The current economic crisis besetting the porn industry began to emerge around 2005,” says Chauntelle Tibbals,
a sociologist at the University of Southern California who has spent
over 10 years studying the industry. “2005 was one of the last years
that things looked good for the industry, at least from the outside,”
she adds.“Things started to visibly change after that.”
She
identifies piracy as the key factor fueling the crisis. She points out
that the proliferation of “free” stolen content cut into cash flow, but
the industry’s inability – or unwillingness – to effectively deal with
the problem turned a serious cold into a cancer. Only a handful of
companies took early action. “Digital Playground is an example of a
company less impacted by piracy,” Tibbals reflects. “They engaged a
variety of strategies early on to protect their content.”
The
2008-2009 recession, the sluggish recovery and the rise of the Internet
compounded the problem of piracy. This was mirrored in the decline in
DVD sales and the drop in DVD price points. Tibbals notes that in the
good old days, a high end three-disc box set could go for upwards of
$69.95, while more “ordinary” titles would sell for $29.95. “Today, only
an elaborately produced title with great source material and huge star
power will go for $30 or $40 – something like the Avengers XXX or The Dark Knight XXX,” she points out. “Price points drop off steadily after that. Today, you’re lucky to get $14.95.”
Piracy
and the economic crisis led to dozens of porn companies in the Los
Angeles area, the nation’s porn production capital, either closing or
being absorbed by bigger players. (California and New Hampshire are
currently the only two states in which commercial porn production is
legal; it is technically illegal to shoot content in Arizona, Florida
and other states.)
Since the first porn photographs were
introduced in the 1840s, each new technology destablized – and
revolutionized – what is considered “pornography.” This is evident in
the great analog revolution of the late 19th and 20th centuries. The
sexual imagery conjured by newpapers, magazines, books, radio, records,
movies, television, self-printing cameras, photocopyers and homevideo
fashioned the modern erotic sensibility. Now, yet again, with the
digital revolutions of the late 20th- and early 21st-century,
pornography is being recast.
The analog and digital
revolutions share two attributes. First, each makes availability to an
unprecedently-wider audience what was once considered “obscene” works,
originally reserved for the few, often grandees. Second, each technology
expanded porn “aesthetics,” the depiction of a greater range of
previously unacceptable sex practices.
A century-plus
ago, in 1896, the first “porn” film was shown in New York City at the
Koster & Bials Music Hall. It was William Heise’s classic, The Kiss,
which runs 16 to 51 seconds (depending on version). It depicts a
closeup of John Rice and May Irwin passionately kissing. Exploiting the
latest moving-image technology of the day, “vitascope,” this truly new
pornographic imagery was projected onto a large screen in a dark, dank
movie theater.
The display of larger-than-life sex
must have been thrilling, even overwhelming. Early movies must have felt
like a cascade of images reinforcing the complexity, confusion and
rawness of daily life. A newspaper critic of the day exclaimed,
"Magnified to gargantuan proportions, it is absolutely disgusting. ...
Such things call for police intervention.”
A
half-century later, in post-Depression and post-WWII America, the iconic
images of female sexual fantasy were represented by Marilyn Monroe’s
provocative innocence in a swimsuit and Bettie Page threatening in a
S&M outfit; they were decried by sexual puritans as immoral.
Measured against today’s erotic standards, they seem so tame, so
innocent, so all-American.
The technologies of modern pornography have followed two twin paths. One path involves “obscene” content created to feed the technologies of centralized creativity, the one-to-many media of radio, television/cable and movies. Much of it is regulated by the government, whether by the FCC or the courts when distribution involves “public” or over-the-air broadcast media, media sent through the U.S. mail or retail operations barred by local ordinances. Broadly speaking, this is commercial porn.
The other path involves decentralized creativity, from the earliest photography to today’s DIY or user-generated-content (UGC) digital online porn. This second path is expressed in the adoption of a number of groundbreaking analog techologies that empowered the user’s ability to produce and distribute porn. The Polaroid camera, introduced in 1948, enabled the first-generation DIY still-image pornogapher; the Xerox copier of the ‘60s enabled the unlimited reproduction of black-and-white pornographic images; and by 1986, some 30 percent of the homevideo market consisted of DIY porn content.
These second path techologies
seek to empower the autonomous media maker. These makers have grown in
number and production capability with the introduction of low-cost
digital production tools, most notably (relatively) inexpensive cameras
and Apple’s Final Cut Pro editing program. This second path was further
empowered with the widescale adoption of an easily and cheaply accessed
Internet. The Internet has turned out to be the next-generation
“public” media, an open -- mostly unpoliced -- distribution medium. Porn
is produced and accessable at an historically unprecdented scale.
Since
its Puritan founding, the U.S. has never known how to deal with sexual
passion, especially expressed in the changing forms of media
representation. Today, many embrace Supreme Court Justice Potter
Stewart’s quaint phrase defining pornography, “I know it when I see it."
Stewart was seeking to distinguish between soft-core and hard-core porn
and refused, apparently for moral reasons, to specify the differences.
Ruling on an allegedly obscene movie, Stewart concluded the sentence, “…
and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” The 1964
case, Jacobellis v. Ohio (378 U.S. 184), involved a French import, The Lovers (Les Amants).
Sontag
published her article three years after Stewart’s opinion. Reading them
with a half-century’s hindsight, they seem like voices coming from
different planets. They had very different understandings of
pornography, let alone sexuality. In the intervening half-century,
Stewart’s pre-consumer revolution Protestant innocence was superceded.
(We even have a Supreme Court justice made famous for his porn viewing
practices.) Today’s sexual culture, what Sontag would have called its
pornographic imagination, has lost its innocence.
The
film historian Linda Williams observes, "pornography is not one thing,
but sexual fantasy, genre, culture, and erotic visibility all operating
together.” Modern visual culture is in the latest stage in the
transition from analog to digital media. Porn produced during the 19th
and 20th centuries took a variety of analog forms, including
photography, magazines, records, film, televison and homevideo. An
expanding market cultivated a widening erotic appetite. This created
businesses, even industries, as well as new ways of seeing, the modern
erotic imagination. Each format expresses its own form of sexual
representation, a particular pornographic vocabulary. Often
unappreciated, each medium created a vital community of amateur makers
who helped remake America’s erotic sensibility. Over the last
half-century, porn pros and DIY amateurs have refashioned the
pornographic imagination.
The issue of obscene content over
the public airways may come up in the soon-to-be-held Senate
confirmation hearing (chaired by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W. VA) of Tom
Wheeler as the new head of the FCC. Wheeler will be grilled over net
neutrality, industry consolidation and other issues. More illuminating
will be his answers to questions about the “f” word, “fleeting
expletives” and limited nudity on ever-shrinking broadcast television.
If he’s asked.
Journey into a Magical World
House at source
Low cost airlines
Little House on the Prairie
Polish bonsai
Tide
Chess on island
Dragon’s pleasure
Erosion
Hesia 2
Homestead
The road
The spring labyrinth
The winter wave
Painter’s Kitchen
Wegener’s theory
S.A.D.
Four seasons
The summer
Brontosaurus civitas
Carnival fights fasten
Tectonic
The city is landing
Aquarium
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Why the Shareholder Rescue Never Comes
Note: The Trade is not subject to our Creative Commons license.
Shareholders can't be counted on.
That's the message from the dispiriting shareholder vote on whether to leave Jamie Dimon as both the chief executive and the chairman of JPMorgan Chase, or to split the roles. Even more shareholders backed him in his dual role this year than did last year.
About The Trade
In this column, co-published with New York Times' DealBook, I monitor the financial markets to hold companies, executives and government officials accountable for their actions. Tips? Praise? Contact me atjesse@propublica.org
For some time, reformers have hoped that shareholders might ride to the rescue to solve the problem of Bank Gigantism, otherwise known as Too Big to Fail.
Big-bank critics, like the freethinking analyst Mike Mayo, analysts at Wells Fargo, and Sheila Bair, the former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — and others, including me — have raised the possibility that shareholders might revolt over banks' depressed stock valuations and seek breakups. Broken-up banks would be smaller and safer.
No, it's not going to happen. Shareholders are part of the problem, not the solution.
No group has skated free of severe (and deserved) criticism in the wake of the financial crisis: financial firms, regulators, credit rating agencies, borrowers and the news media. That is, except one, which happens to be among the most culpable: institutional investors. Yet today, the structure of institutional investing is the same. And so is shareholders' view of their responsibilities.
When applied to banks, corporate governance campaigns are wasted efforts.
"We need to recognize that corporate governance is not going to fix the financial sector," said Lynn A. Stout, a Cornell law professor, who is a critic of the notion that companies should be run primarily to maximize shareholder value. "We have to have effective government regulation."
By keeping Dimon in his two roles, shareholders indicated their belief that only a supposed superhuman executive could run such a banking monstrosity.
But he either failed to rein in his bank's reckless trading, or he failed to understand it. And he has failed in the most basic responsibility of any steward, to plan for his succession.
These transgressions may not have been worth ousting Dimon. But hardly anyone called for that. Instead, shareholders had an opportunity to reorganize the company to diffuse a little power and increase oversight.
They punted. So what explains this shareholder fecklessness?
In some sense this was an act of reflexive class fealty. In rejecting a split of the chief executive and chairman roles, institutional shareholders seemed to prefer spiting pension funds (for their perceived union bias) to rebuking a CEO whose actions last year actually put them at risk.
That's not the only reason shareholders are immobilized. Giant bank financial disclosures are too incomprehensible for even the most sophisticated and dedicated professional investors.
Shareholders suspect that management wouldn't break up the banks in a risk-reducing way. They would be separating whole businesses, not shrinking the size of any one division. Therefore spinoffs would mean that the unknowable supernova risks, like that of derivatives businesses, would be concentrated in smaller entities.
But the most important reason is that shareholders benefit from the big banks' structures. Stout points out that shareholders want companies to take high-risk, high-return bets. They capture the unlimited upside and their losses are capped.
This is true across sectors, which is what helps drive so much short-term corporate thinking. But with banks, things are even worse. Big banks benefit from government subsidies, both implicit and explicit. As the Federal Reserve moves interest rates down and engages in huge asset purchases, the holdings on bank balance sheets rise in value. Shareholders are the chief beneficiaries.
The economy? Not so much. Not when unemployment is at 7.5 percent and so many Americans have "jobs" that can't support anything close to a middle-class life.
Shareholders, a group that includes executives who were larded up with options, helped push banks into the financial crisis. And then, in one of the most damaging and least remembered episodes of the debacle, learned some valuable lessons about what a protected class they were.
When JPMorgan saved Bear Stearns in early 2008, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. initially pushed for a symbolically low price for the stock — $2 a share. Such a low price would have sent a punitive message. Bear Stearns was going down; shareholders would have gotten absolutely nothing if JPMorgan hadn't saved them.
Yet instead of being grateful, they revolted. They threw tantrums and bluffed. And it worked. JPMorgan raised its offer to $10 a share.
Of course, shareholders did get wiped out in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.
But what was the lesson the government drew from that? To rush in to save every institution it can.
Today, the government says that it has ended Too Big to Fail. By the provisions in Dodd-Frank, the government plans to seize holding companies of failing financial companies, wiping out shareholders and even some debtholders. The government might be able to carry this through if just one giant bank fails on its own for an isolated reason, like the storied British bank Barings did in 1995.
But most of the time, if one giant bank is going down, they will all go down together. Inevitably, the Federal Reserve spigot will open and the Treasury and Congress will find a way to intervene, as the economist Simon Johnson recently pointed out.
If shareholders really believed that bailouts were a thing of the past, they would be acting responsibly. From the JPMorgan vote, we can see that they aren't.
Sex in a hospital bed
After my husband's traumatic brain injury, we were forced to find an intimacy we'd never known
(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon)
Sex was the furthest thing from my mind when a tree branch struck my husband’s face, and he was hooked into life support immediately.
When it was clear he would live, he underwent surgery for his fractured skull, eye sockets and nose, after which he was weaned from a medical coma. For months, all I did was hope and pray. It wasn’t until he was in rehabilitation that I allowed myself to think about how intimacy would work. But now, I felt like a virgin at 33.
Once, when his eyes were still glued shut and he had yet to speak, I slid into the hospital bed with him. He shared a room with a man flown in from Alaska who had hit his head on a cast iron wood-burning stove. The guy was doing surprisingly well, which made me feel depressed. Miles moaned and thrashed underneath wrist restraints; meanwhile Alaska flipped through channels and barked at the nurse for Oxycotin.
There was a vinyl green curtain separating their beds. When Miles had been in intensive care, I had laid my chest across his, pleading for him to come back to me whole. But here I could lie horizontally along him. On an afternoon when he was calm, I asked him to “scoot over.” He didn’t respond. I knew he wasn’t sleeping, but he wasn’t awake.
Feeling stubborn, I warned him, “I’m crawling in,” and balanced myself along the edge, attempting to spoon him. He is not a small man, so when he rolled over, unaware of my presence, I nearly suffocated. I had wanted to arouse him, to see if his parts worked, but had to accept he wasn’t ready yet.
It’s strange what you notice when you’re surviving trauma. You’d think it would be 100 percent bad, a full-on nightmare, but really there’s some funny stuff. Like when the night nurse came in for rounds, saw me in bed with Miles, and clucked that I “wasn’t supposed to disturb the patient.” How Miles’ roomie, Alaska, had piped up after sucking down a cigarette outside, and said, “Aw, let ‘em be. She’s trying to get it on with her man.”
I warmed to Alaska after that. I brought him cupcakes and watched football with him, while Miles moaned, thrashed and slept. You find your pals where you can, when you can. Everybody needs a comrade in times of duress.
A week later, Miles felt a little better, so I tested his vitality again. Alaska had moved on, so for an hour we were roommate-free. His swollen eyes were healing, and with the crack of light from their tiny slit opening, he’d peer sidelong around the room. The way he cocked his head and let his chin guide his sight reminded me of a child playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey, peeking beneath a blindfold.
S.E. Cannon is the pen name of a writer and mother living in the Seattle area.MORE S. E. CANNON.
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