A Murmuration of Starlings

Wealth is created by labor and innovation. Great wealth is created by corruption.

I was purchasing a book, Lucrezia Borgia by Sarah Bradford. There was something about the cashier's voice, and I forthrightly (perhaps rudely) asked him "Are you gay?"

His expression fell flat, and he said, Yes... why do you ask?"

"It must be a lot of fun being gay," I said. Then he smiled.

The earth has a molten core. This makes it difficult for me to relax.

Salt from a salt pig, pepper from a mill.

Events unfold at different speeds, like music spun out at various tempos. Yet all minutes are the same.

The morphine comes in its own glass injectable. We never have any carpujects, so we take an empty sterile syringe out of its wrapper, put on a sterile needle, then we draw up the morphine. We take it to the patient, use a prepared normal-saline-loaded syringe to flush the intravenous line, then remove the needle from the morphine syringe to just Luer-lock the medication syringe onto the line to inject the drug. Then we get another prepared saline syringe to flush after administration. We use a few alcohol swabs to clean the Luer-lock ports before screwing on the syringes. It's a lot of trash just to give one simple dose of medicine.