Hamstring Tear [Sinew]
Deniers of the flesh, count me now among your ranks. This ramshackle meat temple I have sublet is in dire need of retrofitting, but the super's nowhere to be found. So I smash the idols of the First Church of Vitamin Shoppe, gel caps and gummies and powders desecrating the altar that doubles as a cash register.
I hereby ask for an intervention. Let some deprogrammer come forth and format the hard drive between my ears and allow me to hate my body enough to curse it like a well-behaved Gnostic. Please. I ordered a hairshirt for four monthly installments.
This body-hating started a half-dozen OG sabbaths ago, when the back of my right leg cracked like a stalk of celery. I yelped. My training partner expressed concern. I made a joke while I writhed in pain across my home jiu-jitsu mats not even primed with Grappler's Broth. We were two minutes in and all the neurons of the universe convened just under my ass cheek, raving.
I couldn't train for two weeks. I couldn't run for ten days. Hamstrings are very important, turns out. In a long career of running and mock-fighting, I had never endured a popped or torn hammy. Of course enduring such was the stuff of legend. The clean-up hitter misses the World Series and the MMA fighter bows out of his championship defense bout. What wusses, I always chirped.
Now I didn't even have the proper gait to sulk. Even the predators above me in the consumption hierarchy scoff at my compromised walk. I don't even have the grace and dignity of worthy prey.
I've become an etude of self-loathing. I used to chase down athletic ecstasy with an atlatl, looking to skin it, dress it, cook and eat some of it, stuff and mount the rest of it atop my mantle where I can glance at it for quick reference whenever the gray cloud of ennui hovered over me and siphoned all the endorphins out of my body to pump them back up into the sky in a never-ending cycle of neurotransmitter evaporation-condensation, O what's the point of any of this?
I have slung at my side about a dozen pelts of ecstasy, strange creatures of gratuitous grace that defy classification and refuse to be shoehorned into the taxonomy of the world because they were pleasures so uncommon when alive, abominations never meant to be gifted life, but drawing breath just the same, this is the point of everything, this gratuitous grace. It's like music. The thing in itself. It needs no justification. Schopenhauer drops mic.
Viral Arthritis [Skeleton]
I wrote about this a month ago, in Flirting with a Flatline. Some foreign invader hijacked my body and cramped up all my joints. Little alien bastard with a hard hat had fun at the controls, cracking junior high jokes with his hard-hatted buddies below, the ones digging trenches in my blood for the third and final panel to come of my deterioration triptych.
On the second panel, my body’s scaffolding seized up. I went down a WebMD rabbit hole. WebMD, the hypochondriac’s Old and New Testament, told me I had rheumatoid arthritis. Just like that. Overnight. Alluvasutten. Running? Done. Jiu-jitsu? Done. Skipping rope? Done. Pickleball? Pass.
I could barely stand up from bed that same night. I happened to be reading Swami Vivekananda at that time and found solace in Vedanta, letting go of all adult responsibilities by citing failing health. How many people in the world just let go, let their health decline—facilitating the fall, even—to divest themselves of the heavy cloak of accountability?
I get it. I sort of took relief in it. But no: I wanted to snatch more guillotine strangles on training partners’ necks, having become obsessed of late with the arm-in, pretzel-grip variation. I needed Murder Yoga in my life. My Japanese necktie-per-week quota was woefully behind.
More than anything, I wanted to practice spinning wheel kicks in the living room, defending my wife and daughter in an update of wu xiapian.
“Mommy, how come Daddy don't do tornado kicks no more?”
“Daddy's sick, Sweetie. That's why he now carries pepper spray.”
"But heroes don't use pepper spray.”
[Silence]
How to become a teleporting black belt when I can't even twerk?
Ringworm [Skin]
Son of a bitch. The very mats of justice I yearned to return to doled out my third and final S, which now crawls along my largest organ serpentine-like, slithering its way into my hope, sinking its fangs into that shrinking commodity, and poisoning my chances to return once more to the mats until it has cleared, which seems never, two weeks pretty much equating to never along the time-span of self-pitying solipsism.
Contrary to many misconceptions, ringworm is not actually a worm. There’s some disappointment, I have to admit, looking forward as I was to a crawling parasitic terror that took enough interest in me, something I could gross out girls with. No, it's a mere fungus, the banal B-actor of the disease set that's responsible for athlete's foot and jock itch.
I wish I had a nifty analogy to Ouroboros but that would only bring me back to the first S, the hamstring, which hurts after overcompensating the lack of grappling with daily running with no off-days, thereby enslaving me in a pike-riddled chamber whose walls close in while cargo cult cannibal music drawn from instruments fashioned from human bones and skin clanks as an unholy leitmotif to my physical deterioration.
Ha ha ha.
Who am I to talk about prying open third eyes when the headlights of adversity make my two OEM orbs blink? Suck it up, Buttercup! some atavistic father figure from the distant past snarls, a club in one hand, his other hand in the jaws of a sabertooth somewhere far off. Wait until the eighteen-wheeler of true tragedy behind the headlights gets to you, bub. What a wuss.
I tend to eschew self-loathing, but I saw an opportunity to vent. So here it all is. Even pigs win competitions. Where's my blue ribbon?
Three lemons of woe do not a full pitcher of lemonade make—but I had enough wedges to pass around while the fam and I had al pastor tacos. I did what you're supposed to do when you're hamstrung from chasing your usual dragon. I pivoted. There's always something else to do. So what the Hell; I finished up a novel.
Above: The novel, coming soon!
And just like that, the ringworm started to clear up. What shoestring tragedy will strike next? What's to come next and add woe to my cotton-candy-coated cavalry? Pain and suffering are in our futures. And so is mirth.
Yay.
Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK. Want more self-deprecating attempts at achieving Eternal Cosmic Oneness or inane observations of reality? There's more below. I love you.
Goddamn you have been cranking these out lately. Reading with envy and awe as always.
YESSSSS! From the neurotransmitter cycle, to the falling-into-illness-to-avoid-responsibilities, to the Schopenhauer mic drop--I loved all of it!