Nerve endings had the nerve to never end. It brought forth a tsunami of pain. I prided myself on surfing the tides of turmoil, of rollerblading across asphalts of agony.
But not this time. Nope, not this time.
A symphony of screams struck up, with none but the Devil himself as conductor. Hell's in-house orchestra had been tuning its instruments for this piece since I was born. And now they were in virtuosic form.
My life all the way up to this point, since my first memory as a two-year-old in Germany, picking at a stereo with a drinking straw, had been a long etude for these demon musicians to hone their craft. And now they played with impeccable form.
My joints cried out for all the glucosamine in the world, for it all to be pooled back together as a single motherlode of mercury. Bones crashed against bones, all of them protesting over their spheres of influence. “This joint ain't big enough for the both of us.” Tendons and ligaments stayed safely back, wanting none of the smoke.
My body locked up. I couldn't do a thing. It started with my palms aching during jiu-jitsu class. We drilled leg entries, which involved next to nothing of the palms. But there they were, hurting like hell.
Twelve hours later, my neck joined the conspiracy and I couldn't tilt it to the left, right, or above. All I could do was cast glances straight ahead or down toward my feet, where lay my fate.
By the following night, I was convinced I would live a life condemned with rheumatoid arthritis. I couldn't stand up to go piss. I had to make backdoor deals with gravity to make my way to the toilet. Sleep was impossible. Who ever thought you needed well-lubricated joints to plant your flag on the land of Murpheus? Sawing logs proved as physically demanding as sawing logs.
Pulling on socks became multi-episode productions. My fingers, illiterate in the language of making fists, protested at the touch of cotton. They read me the riot act for wanting to recruit them into the sordid act of dressing.
My working days were over. My running days were over. So too, my jiu-jitsu days. Shoulder rolls over car hoods and parkouring down the Tower of Babel right as the Holy Fist hit were parts of a long-gone highlight reel. I was transmogrifying into a vegetable. The vastest terrain my body would now traverse was the universal remote.
I had gotten way more high-octane man-hours out of this aging body of mine than seemed reasonable, and now, finally, the Grim Reaper sent his wingman, Father Time, to serve me papers. I was the same age as my mother-in-law when she passed fourteen years earlier. Who was I to demand more than my allotted grains of sand? What hubris, wanting to live with vitality.
“What's your secret?” they tend to ask when they credit me with ten years I don't deserve.
“Romaine lettuce and heroin,” I say. “Go easy on the Romaine.”
So could it be e-coli? Covid? HIV? Hepatitis C? “Is it lupus?!” George Constanza cries at a fortune-teller as she gives birth. “Is it lupus?!” Well, is it?
Is it too much blasphemy? Yeah, it was probably the blasphemy. Twenty-thousand wheelbarrows full of turmeric wouldn't keep back the wrath of God as he shook his second commandment.
Reader, I was prepared to die. No fooling. I accepted my fate. I'd be lying if I said I accepted it with aplomb. I did not. I grudgingly accepted it. I cited all the examples of those who led dissolute lives and treated their temples like dumping grounds, only to be fated to outlive me and watch all the newest gadgetry come to fruition.
But I found some solace. I found solace in a Vedanta text I had got the Kindle version of for $2.49. That's some dirt-cheap perspective, now. You can barely get a pound of gala apples for that price. Swami Vivekananda should be the fifth food group.
“Life's a study in dying,” Josh Homme sings in Song for the Dead, “how to do it right.”
But for all my card-carrying Stoicism, I am blown away by those who brush cancer off, like swiping flakes of dandruff from the shoulder as nothing but a nuisance.
But I know they have ontological crises. I know they string along whole suites of woe, with intermezzi of Postmates chow mein.
And maybe they pluck their hands into the pillowy next world and feel around for something, as confirmation that it's okay to slip away from the present realm that has just been unplugged and is running off circuit-board capacitors.
And then the pall of death breaks. It is likely a virus, one I can flush out with zinc, water, and David Goggins. I am relieved, but not completely. I had a magnum opus going, titled Woe Is Me, and now the world's tiniest Stradivarius has been snapped over the knee of mediocrity.
But yes, I am relieved. I will live. I will shoulder roll over car hoods and hopscotch through fields of fire. I will dance, cloven-hooved with maidens with fetishes for forked tongues, and pitchfork fate in the ass.
At least for now.
Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK! To read more half-assed attempts at achieving Eternal Cosmic Oneness and/or whimsical observations, see below! I love you.
i really enjoyed this
Try Vivekananda AND an apple. That’s nourishment.