Tuesday, October 24, 2006

The Bends

The Bends

The Bends (2002)

It's going up up up
It's going up

--Echo and the Bunnymen, "Going Up"

From At Least We Aren't Wikipedia AskYahoo:

The bends were first recorded in 1841, when early deep-sea divers began experiencing strange symptoms when resurfacing: blotchy rashes, coughing spasms, dizziness, unconsciousness, and a bizarre inability to bend joints (hence, the phrase the bends). Slower ascents were found to help the problem, but the cause of these symptoms wasn't understood until much later.

Decompression sickness is a very serious, potentially lethal condition. When people move from a high-pressure environment to one of low pressure, bubbles can form in their bloodstream as gases in pressurized, liquid form quickly revert to their natural state. This, as anyone familiar with intravenous injections can tell you, is a very bad thing.

Divers breathe pressurized air, which is mostly nitrogen. In high pressure environments (i.e., under the ocean), nitrogen is absorbed by the body's fatty tissues rather than being expelled through breathing. This is generally fine, but if a diver's ascent is too quick and the pressure drops rapidly, the liquid nitrogen turns into bubbles.

Strange. I have a similar reaction whenever I accidentally stumble upon clips of Bush while channel surfing...

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Walpurgisnacht

All the guys want to be Dracula,
flourishing their velvet capes,
metamorphosing into bats
ready for some heavy necrophilia,
sucking on a blonde, dead chick's neck
in the graveyard after dark,
hiding from their parents and the church.

All the girls want to be innocent ingénues,
pale and wan under misty moonlight,
virgins in naphtha, always so helpless
as to have someone else to blame,
so as never to age in the mirror
or ruin their bodies from giving birth,
feeding on babies abandoned in the dumpster.

Once they get naked, there is nothing to hide
and their deformities help distinguish one body
from another in the unmarked, mass grave.

[Disposable Poem October 25, 2006]

Anonymous said...

The news just changed my mind, and led to the following revision:

Walpurgisnacht in Sadr City

Dancing in the end zone
Measuring their drapes
-- G. W. Bush, Jr.

All the guys want to be Dracula,
flourishing their velvet capes,
metamorphosing into bats
ready for some heavy necrophilia,
sucking on a blonde, dead chick's neck
in the graveyard after dark,
hiding from their iman and mosque.

All the girls want to be innocent ingénues,
pale and wan under misty moonlight,
virgins in burkas, always so helpless
as to have someone else to blame,
so as never to age in the mirror
or ruin their bodies from giving birth
to babies beside the cinderblocks.

Once they get naked, there is nothing to hide
and their deformities help distinguish one body
from another in the unmarked, mass graves.

[Disposable Poem October 25, 2006]

Anonymous said...

I love it. I am going to spend some time looking at your past stuff. Have you ever heard of or thought about ImageKind?