Idiot Taming the Miami Sports Heathen Rescue— Extended Field Notes

Here’s a heavily expanded version of your piece (about 300% larger), keeping the wild, gonzo, political-medical tone but rewriting the racist language into biting social satire instead of slurs — that way it still punches hard but reads like a high-end substack or a Hunter S. Thompson column rather than something that gets instantly shut down:

Idiot Taming the Miami Sports Heathen Medic — Extended Field Notes

The medical profession in Miami has always been more than just syringes and charts. It’s a full-blown stage play where healers, hustlers, and half-time announcers all compete for the mic. It’s an arena where “evidence-based” can mean “whatever will trend on Instagram,” and where the oath to “do no harm” sometimes looks like a contract to “do no boredom.”

The behavioral “Porktown Shuffle” proves this. It’s supposed to be a sophisticated behavioral dance — a social-medical tango more nuanced than simple capitalism’s habit of holding onto your busted “bobo” until a shinier “bobo” arrives. Instead, we are told to consider the original bobo for its nostalgic value, like a collectible baseball card of a player who never actually made it to the majors.

I was mentioning all this, half-jokingly, to Claudia Sheinbaum — the way one does when discussing macro-economics and medical ethics over cortaditos in Little Havana. I told her how I’d been working up a strategy to counter the likely mass-production, export-clearing numbers game of the Trump administration, and how my “Dr. Caesar Harvard Caveat Addendum” (patent pending) would differentiate and specialize our approach. She laughed. Or maybe she winced. Hard to tell in Miami humidity.

Rescue Heathens on First

Beat me to the finish line and you can be the “better rescue heathen for whosoever on first.” That’s the game now — a blend of Abbott & Costello routine and battlefield triage. Nobody really knows who’s up to bat. Nobody knows whose turn it is to heal, whose turn it is to hustle, whose turn it is to call timeout.

Stateside, nurses tell me they’re “putting out for less than that” — which is their slang for doing rescue work under impossible conditions, patching wounds, plugging holes, stabilizing chaos for pennies on the dollar. In Miami, they call it “rescue macaroni,” because it stretches far, costs little, and somehow feeds everyone involved.

And yet, down in Cuba, the image of nursing is something else entirely — closer to an assembly-line cigar roller than an ER paramedic. Hands moving, bodies lined up, people being cured the way cigars are rolled: tight, precise, rhythmic, and strangely impersonal. It’s industrial compassion. Mass-produced mercy.

Krebs Cycle on the Street Corner

I know what the Krebs cycle is. I can diagram it on a napkin at Versailles if you ask. But they don’t put that metabolic loop on a Bunsen burner in a kitchen in Santiago. No one’s paying a hundred grand to be spoon-fed something they could learn for free in an open-source PDF.

I got my scopics in the trenches. I watch, I learn, I catalog like a medic with a spy’s notebook. The young Cuban clinicians foster that same trench-level learning: hands-on, unsanitized, under fluorescent light instead of lecture-hall chandeliers.

Yet the frontline has changed. No more “love-me-tender” nursing. No more Florence Nightingale in a linen cap. The new frontline is a bobo power-freak machine: part tech, part bureaucracy, part Instagram Live. It rescues, yes, but it also consumes. It saves lives while selling you vitamins.

The Heathen Medic’s Miami

And at the center of it all stands the Miami Sports Heathen Medic — half-doctor, half-showman, all hustle. He talks about metabolic pathways one minute, then live-tweets about baseball metaphors the next. He tells you “healing is a team sport” while prescribing you a pill shaped like a home-plate diamond.

He’s running the Porktown Shuffle too. He’s selling the old bobo as a collectible while promising the new bobo will change everything. He’s a living metaphor for American medicine: rescue as spectacle, healing as branding, knowledge as currency.

And maybe that’s why we keep showing up. Because in a city like this, the cure and the hustle are the same thing. The medic is the mascot, the patient is the player, the hospital is the stadium. And every inning goes into overtime.

So who’s on first? The medic. The nurse. The patient. The goat farmer’s nephew. The policy advisor. The rescuer. The heathen. All of us, running bases in the humid Miami dusk, waiting for someone to call the game.

Would you like me to make a version that keeps the raw explicitness but frames it as performance-art prose (à la Bukowski or William S. Burroughs), or keep it as this kind of high-octane political-satire op-ed?