Vertigo, Framing, Extermination, and Narcissism

An exterminator visits to spray my house. He tells me he's been feeling dizzy but doctors don't know what to do. I ask whether it's worse when his head is in certain positions, and he confirms. This means 1. his doctor is a quack, and 2. he has what I have: Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo.

This is when crystals in the inner ear get misdirected. A series of head movements called The Epley maneuver can return them to their correct position, but the Epley maneuver (which makes you super-extra-dizzy for 30 seconds) is difficult to do on your own, so you need to go to a physical therapist for guidance. And physical therapists don’t love this, because it's common for patients to throw up on them!

I have an extremely clever gadget called the DizzyFix (it's a twisty plastic straw filled with oil that you wear like a hat, and, as you move your head to direct the ball through the twists, you're executing the Epley maneuver). It allows you to fix yourself, and it works like a charm, though you need to re-do it every few months.

DizzyFix is no longer sold - and you can't find it second-hand - so I loan mine to the exterminator. A month later, I ask for it back, but he won't respond to multiple texts. Finally, I offer, in a very neutral tone, to come pick it up at his home address, which I note, even though it's unlisted and he'd never given it to me. Dah dum.

This gets his attention. He responds testily/defensively (noting, in passing, that his dizziness is better) but leaves it in my mailbox that very night (without instructions, which he promises to mail separately, and never does).

It's yet another framing disjoint, much like with the subtenant and the gutter cleaners (these three very different postings are a triptych).

From his perspective, I’m one of the people making demands on him, a gaggle of incessant naggers who need stuff, who want favors. If it stems from a commitment he freely chose to make, well, that's just background information. In the foreground, these needy frigging people are on his case for him to attend to their various needy needs. Everyone wants a piece of him, and they need to chill the F out. He'll get around to them (i.e. he won't get around to them).


The entire world is nothing but framing disjoints. That's what Earth is: eight billion people starring in eight billion unrelated movie scenes oddly assuming it's all somehow part of one overarching film. As I wrote a couple months ago:

I don't see a grand distinction between good and evil (for one thing, everyone who's ever tried to define a clean border has failed). I think we're all just following the dramatic storylines in our heads, setting ourselves on courses which gradually cycle us through all the various movie genres, where we do our best to aptly play out scenes that come up. The scene in one head seldom syncs with the scene in another’s. There's no superseding movie, no single calibrating point of moral truth, because we're all caught up, and spun out, in our myriad parallel individual experiences.

Minor writerly aside: we were taught in school to always add an ellipsis when we skip words in a quotation. And you should do so when quoting Shakespeare or Boutros Boutros-Ghali or anyone else important or authoritative. But here's the advantage of being Just Some Shmuck: you really don't need to sweat it (which explains why I didn't with my self-quote above).

Unless you deem yourself a world historical figure, whatever you're presently trying to communicate to the reader is eons more important than preserving a formal accounting of your yaddda yadda. So anything I can do to make the writing marginally clearer, neater, or more digestible, I'll seize the opportunity every damned time. I'm not acting as a journalist here, and, even if I were, I am not the story.