Good morning, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Dave Laird <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in part: > >>With my head bound up in constriction bands to help >>fight off sinusitis inflammation, > > They make those? I always thought such a thing would be a good idea. [laughing] I *knew* I should have stuck with the original story if I was going to be facetious, because there once was a time when poultices were applied using constriction bands to fight sinus infections. Even within my lifetime I remember my Grandma using that method on one of my distant cousins. My original story about being sick? The reality was more complicated than any story I could possibly create, for you see friends of my family, fearing the worst for my health, summoned a pair of native healers from up in Stevens County off the Yukapatooie Indian Reservation. When Saggeeba the Healer came down to Spokane from the Nations, she brought with her Ottumwadiddley, a Moojoo Witch well-known throughout the Greater Inland Northwest for strange but highly effective cures. Since at the time, I was feverish, my sinuses infected and my lungs filling with fluid, my wife had laid me down in the center of the Great Room with my entire clan gathered around me, no doubt preparing for my last hours on earth. Once she arrived, Ottumwadiddley proceeded to dance the Dance of the Irreverent old Fart followed by a quaint little native dance called "Make the Wounded Dog Rise Again" that damned near brought the entire house down when, during the heat of the dance, I groaned in agony right on cue after one of the native dancers inadvertently trod on my ankle. The healing procedure was actually a quite complicated affair, really. After taking one of my wife's prized 4 quart stainless steel pots out of the kitchen, and filling it with boiling water, the Moojoo Witchcraft Woman opened a jar of some strange dirty-brown ointment, and peeling off a few handfuls of the stuff into the boiling water, she erecting a tiny tent made out of a pair of skivvies she purloined from the laundry basket. After muttering a few choice words in her dialect, she immediately jammed my head in the only tent flap available in the skivvies, and held my head there against my will. Being downwind of the once-infamous feed lots in Moses Lake, Washington in the heat of August had NOTHING on whatever ointment she dumped into the boiling water! Were it not for the sixteen coats of Krylon paint on my oldest Ford sitting on blocks in the back yard, the sheer powerful smell of her potion would have eaten the bondo right off the Ford makeshift front end forty-five feet outside. At the time my Uncle Cedric plowed into the cop car in Terrebonne, Oregon last winter, bondo was all we had left to patch the right front fender of my old car. Since the cops were looking for a badly-damaged Ford Torino, we put a makeshift Ford Fairmont nose on the poor thing and loads of bondo to make it look better. So, after nearly two hours spent screaming my lungs out beneath the makeshift teepee she'd erected over the steaming cauldron in the middle of the Great Hall floor (which she thoughtfully kept refurbished with more scalding hot water from time to time), and all the ancestors, relatives and even the family Dawg sitting on my feet to keep me from exiting this strange theatrical performance, I finally was allowed to emerge six hours later. Whereupon Ottumwadiddley threw a noose over my ankle and, tossing the rope up over the rafter in the Great Hall, hoisted me into the air upside down by my one undamaged ankle. Muttering something in her language, she waved a ham fist in my general direction, and sitting down on her massive hams in the middle of the floor, proceeded to light up a clay pipe filled with some unmentionable grass or weed, and simply sat ignoring my screaming pleas to cut me down. Somewhere much later, although I can scarcely remember when, because I must have passed out at some point, everyone simply abandoned me, hanging upside down, and Ottumwadiddley had simply put a big brass bowl right beneath my head. At first I didn't understand the brass bowl, but after a few times of waking up upside down and then passing out again, I began to realize the bowl beneath my head was filling up with snot and various forms of corruption so vile it defies the imagination, all of which obliquely had dripped from my poor nose while I hung upside down. Sometime around midnight, the contingent from the Yukapatooie Band of Indians simply picked up and left, leaving me hanging, so to speak. This morning, after threatening dire consequences of the first order if I wasn't cut down immediately, several family members finally removed the ugly bowl from beneath my head and gently set me down on the floor. Suffice it to say, my sinuses are clear, but my intentions are that I will NEVER entrust my health to another member of the Yukapatooie Band of Indians ever again in my life. That's my story, and I'm sticking to this one. 8-) Dave -- Dave Laird ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) The Used Kharma Lot Web Page: http://www.kharma.net updated 11/24/2004 Usenet news server : news://news.kharma.net Fortune Random Thought For the Minute Beggars should be no choosers. -- John Heywood _______________________________________________ Libnw mailing list Libnw@immosys.com List info and subscriber options: http://immosys.com/mailman/listinfo/libnw Archives: http://immosys.com/mailman//pipermail/libnw
