Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus (6 page)

R
ecently I got a very nice computer-generated letter from an outfit called the National Library of Poetry.

“Dear Dave,” the letter begins. “Over the past year or so we have been reviewing the thousands of poems submitted to us, as well as examining the poetic accomplishments of people whose poetry has been featured in various anthologies released by other poetry publishers. After an exhaustive examination of this poetic artistry, The National Library of Poetry has decided to publish a collection of new poems written by THE BEST POETS we have encountered.

“I am pleased to tell you, Dave, that you have been selected to appear in this special edition:
Best Poems of 1995 …
The poem which you will submit for this edition has been accepted for publication sight unseen on the basis of your previous poetic accomplishments.”

You talk about feeling honored. It’s not every day that a person who does not, technically, write poetry is selected as
one of the top poets for a year that has not, technically, occurred yet.

Oh, I know what some of you are thinking. You’re thinking, “Dave, you wienerhead, they don’t really think you’re a leading poet. They got your name from some mailing list, and they’ll publish any drivel you send in, because what they REALLY want to do is throw a book together and then sell it to a bunch of pathetic loser wannabe ‘poets’ for some absurdly inflated price like $50.”

Well that just shows how much YOU know. Because it turns out that
Best Poems of 1995
is now available at a special pre-publication discount price of just $49.95. But listen to what you get: You get “a superb collection of over 3,000 poems on every topic,” as well as “an heirloom quality publication” with “imported French marbleized covers.”

I called the number listed on the National Library of Poetry letterhead; a pleasant-sounding woman answered, and I asked her which specific poetic accomplishments of mine the judges had reviewed before selecting me as one of the Best Poets.

“Um,” she said, “we don’t have that available right now. All that information is closed in a backup file system.”

I frankly have had very few poetic accomplishments. I once thought about writing poems for a line of thoughtful greeting cards, but I finished only one, which went:

Of course I have to produce an entirely new poem for
Best Poems of 1995. I
asked the woman at the National Library of Poetry if there were any special literary criteria involved; she said the only one was that the poem had to be, quote, “Twenty lines or less.”

I was happy to hear that. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a long poem. And if there’s another thing I hate, it’s a poem wherein the poet refuses to tell you what the hell he’s talking about. For example, when I was an English major in college, we spent
weeks
trying to get a handle on an extremely dense poem called
The Waste Land
by T.S. Eliot, only to conclude, after endless droning hours of classroom discussion, that the poem was expressing angst about the modern era. I felt like calling Eliot up and saying, “Listen, T.S., the next time you want to express angst, just EXPRESS it, okay? Just say ‘Yo! I’m feeling some angst over here!’”

I believe that if some of your former big-name poets such as Homer and Milton (neither of whom, to my knowledge, was invited to be in
Best Poems of 1995)
had observed the National Library of Poetry’s twenty-line limit, their careers would be in a lot better shape today.

Anyway, I wrote a poem for
Best Poems of 1995
. I call it, simply, “Love.” Here it is:

I sent this poem in to the folks at the National Library of Poetry. If you think that you, too, have what it takes to be one of the Best Poets of 1995, you might want to send them a poem of your own; their address is Box 704, Owings Mills, MD 21117. Tell them Dave sent you.

And T.S., if you send something in, for God’s sake keep it simple.

I
will frankly admit that I am afraid of medical care. I trace this fear to my childhood, when as far as I could tell, the medical profession’s reaction to every physical problem I developed, including nearsightedness, was to give me a tetanus shot. Not only that, but the medical professionals would always lie about it.

“You’ll hardly feel it!” they’d say, coming at me with a needle the size of a harpoon.

As a child, I was more afraid of tetanus shots than, for example, Dracula. Granted, Dracula would come into your room at night and bite into your neck and suck out all your blood, but there was a positive side to this; namely, you could turn into a bat and stay out all night. Whereas I could see no pluses with the tetanus shot.

Of course today I no longer have this childish phobia, because, as a mature adult, I can lie.

“I just had a tetanus shot this morning!” I can say, if the issue ever arises. “Eight of them, in fact!”

But I’m still afraid of medical care. And I’m not encouraged by TV medical dramas such as
ER
. If you watch these
shows, you’ve probably noticed that whenever some pathetic civilian gets wheeled into the hospital emergency room on a stretcher, he or she is immediately pounced upon by enough medical personnel to form a hospital softball league, all competing to see who can do the scariest thing to the victim. Apparently there’s a clause in the standard Television Performers’ Contract stating that every character in a medical drama gets to take a crack at emergency patients:

Now you’re probably saying: “Dave, you big baby, those are just
TV shows
. In real life, bad things do not happen to people who fall into the hands of medical care.”

Excuse me for one second while I laugh so hard that my keyboard is short-circuited by drool. Because I happen to be holding in my hand a bulletin-board notice that was sent to me by a Vermont orthopedic surgeon named either “David H. Bahnson, M.D.,” or “Oee Bali,” depending on whether you’re reading his letterhead or his signature.

Dr. Bahnson told me, in a phone interview, that he found this notice over the “scrub sink,” which is the place where doctors wash their hands after they operate so that they won’t get flecks of your vital organs on their Lexus upholstery.

No, seriously, the scrub sink is where they wash their hands
before
operating, and Dr. Bahnson said that this notice
had been prominently displayed there for several months. It is titled—I am not making this up—”EMERGENCY PROCEDURE: FIGHTING FIRE ON THE SURGICAL PATIENT.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Dr. Bahnson told me that, although it has not happened to him, fires sometimes break out on patients during surgery, particularly when hot medical implements accidentally come into contact with surgical drapes.

The bulletin-board notice discusses two types of situations: “small fire on the patient” and “large fire on the patient.” There are step-by-step instructions for dealing with both of these; Step 3 under “large fire on the patient,” for example is: “Care for the patient.”

I was surprised that the procedure was so definite. You’d think that, what with all these medical lawsuits, the instructions would call for more caution on the part of the doctors. (“Mrs. Dweemer, we think you might be on fire, but we won’t know for sure until we have a specialist fly in from Switzerland to take a look.”)

Now before I get a lot of irate mail from the medical community, let me stress that not all surgical patients catch on fire. Some of them also explode. I am referring here to a November article from
The Medical Post
, sent in by alert reader Lauren Leighton, headlined: “BEWARE EXPLODING PATIENTS.” This article states that nitrous oxide—which is sometimes used as an anesthetic in stomach surgery—can get mixed up with intestinal gases, which have been proven to be highly combustible in countless scientific experiments conducted in fraternity houses. If this mixture is ignited by a spark from a surgical implement such as an electric cautery, the result can be what the article refers to as “intraabdominal fires.”

In what could be the single most remarkable statement that I have ever read in a medical article, one expert is quoted as saying—I swear this is a real quote—”Patients aren’t exploding all over, but there is potential for it.”

Ha ha! I certainly am feeling reassured!

No, really, I’m sure we’re talking about a very small number of patients exploding or catching on fire. So if you, personally, are scheduled to undergo surgery, you needn’t give this matter another thought, assuming that you have taken the basic precaution of having a personal sprinkler system installed on your body.

No, seriously, I’m sure your operation will go just fine. And even in the unlikely event that you do explode, you may rest assured that, no matter how many pieces you wind up in, every one of those pieces will, in accordance with modern medical standards, receive a tetanus shot.

W
e are approaching the Thanksgiving holiday, when we pause to reflect on our blessings by eating pretty much nonstop for an entire day, then staggering off to bed, still chewing, with wads of stuffing clinging to our hair.

It’s a spiritual time, yes, but it can also be a tragic time if an inadequately cooked turkey gives us salmonella poisoning, which occurs when tiny turkey-dwelling salmon get into our blood, swim upstream, and spawn in our brains (this is probably what happened to Ross Perot). That’s why the American Turkey and Giblet Council recommends that, to insure proper preparation, you cook your turkey in a heated oven for at least two full quarters of the Vikings-Lions game, then give a piece to your dog and observe it closely for symptoms such as vomiting, running for president, etc.

Someday, perhaps, we won’t have to take these precautions, not if the U.S. government approves a radical new concept in poultry safety being proposed by a company in Rancho Cucamonga, California. I am not making up Rancho Cucamonga: It’s a real place whose odd-sounding name, if
you look it up in your Spanish-English dictionary, turns out to mean “Cucamonga Ranch.” I am also not making up the poultry-safety advance, which was discussed in a lengthy news story by Randyl Drummer in the May 16 issue of the
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
, sent in by many alert readers. Before I quote from this story, I need to issue a: