Where to start? Where to open this thing? Well, I can start at the ridge, the spine, those buttons of bone holding Richard Wilson together. This spine of mine has been hurting more in the last week than in my entire lifetime. I cannot sleep. I feel busted apart, broken and less than, subtracted from, added to and upon, the pain is alive, like a king, a czar, no, a mad psychopath riding my neuro-pathways. It is constant. It is a constant.For years Ive accepted it, dealt with it or ignored it by not dealing with it. Somehow I coped. That is the word: Coped. This week my ability to cope is gone.Vaporized. Now I weep. Not in a poetic sense. Definately, not in that way...no, I really cried; it felt as if I realized that I cannot trust to be free of pain. I cannot trust my own body. I make plans to go places , only to cancel because of pain. I make plans to do physical therapy and cancel. To stretch and cancel. After cancelling every beneficial action,every escape, every entertainment, however minute and innocuous, one begins to sink, to become suffocated in despair. It is a suffocation. A real , physical stanching of breath. Of elan. Of joi de vivre. The insouciance, the swagger and burn and blaze that was my trademark, is gone. My cacophony of the past is acarpous. Im left holding nothing but faux coinage that I made myself from the vertebrae of sacrificial marsupials, so to speak. As if anyone says such malarkey! Oh, I do. My folly, my fault, my pas de deaux with pain. Not a dance really, but it is omnipotent, it is an immersion, a script imposed on me, from eye open to...to what, it is always here, even in my sleep. I feel hijacked.Pirated.One doesnt want to bother others, calls are ignored or cut short. Just me and the pain, occassionally we're accompanied by pain meds. I don't know if theyre my friends or not, they seem to not function as friends. The pain is more of a best friend who lets me know exactly where I stand, dont stand, how to stand, when to stand, when to lie down, when to scream, when not to sleep, when to think hopeless thoughts, when to cry, when to bark, to bite, to cry, to lie down, to stand like a crooked cricket, to the side, wincing as I walk like a geisha in no hurry , a cricket geisha, a were-hyena, a half something, human and pain. Human and pain. And, to alleviate the friendship of pain, I read about genocide and gulags, concentration camps, horror upon horror, if I were a school Id give myself a PhD in the History of Atrocities, Genocide Studies. Why? Why the fuck read this? Its all so simple: to place my pain in context, to compartmentalize . Next to suffering at the hands of a Beria or Mengele or Khmer Rouge torturer, how does my pain rank? Very Low. It helps, or rather it has helped. Not now. Not this week. Frankly, to be insanely blunt I don't care about the Holocaust, the democide of millions , billions. Or the Great Devouring of the Rom, the creeping death of millions of my own ancestors, whether in Eire or in North America. I cannot care, rather. Not now. My attention is here. My ability to empathize has been shaved off like a superfluos protrusion, like too much antennae, a feeler too long, dancing too much, wasting energy. Energy. In pain, energy is sloughed off, gone, ghostly. It comes in gusts that are few and far between. And, when it does come---what next? One simpy cannot run around lke a Jack Russel terrier...so, the energy is caged, shackled, is dictated ruled by pain. One cannot move.
For three years, I was optimistic, changed my mind, looked at the "bright side", wrote, read a book, lay down, with legs up, on percocet, ibuprofen, ice, heat, hope. Not now. All things revolve around "It". It is my warder, my weather, my confidante, my raper, my enemy, my life. Since the pain has increased, for the last three years my belief in the Christian god has died. It has not been resurrected. My belief in any personal god is kaput. There is an emptiness inside me regarding dogma, philosophy, morality, belief in any kind, justice. In my life I have been everything from an anarchist to a Republican, to a Communist, to a liberal, an agnostic, an atheist, a nihilist. Im a curmudgeon now. A misanthrope. A skeptic. In public , I smile. Over the phone I laugh. In an email Ill be humorous. Inside, its barren. My sons, my wife, the baby she carries, a few friends, some authors---these are my religion. I live, to be very honest, for them. I know that to kill myself is cowardly. And, selfish. I cant do that to my sons and wife---or my friends. I respect them enough NOT to do that. But, it(lowercase is needed, it doesnt deserve caps) doesnt take part in my love for my sons, wife or friends. I snap at my wife, when she doesnt deserve it. I email people with a real hatred. I talk to secretaries as if they were scum, dolts, morons and child molesters both. I douse them in scorn and epithets. I have become a lonely human. A man trapped inside himself.
With my ex wife, I took my first steps towards becoming human, a man, and twas the first time I ever began working on the pain of the first part of my life, which was mental, emotional, spiritual--- and this pain was worse than what I feel now, it molded me, carved me into a violent, wrathful maniac. Ive no clue as to how I made it out alive, or worse, did not murder someone. I almost went to San Quentin , for assault and battery and weapons and drugs. Id hit strangers with bottles or glasses or fists or clubs, especially if they resembled my father. 18 times i was arrested in one year. Mostly petty shit, but enough to be put in jail for 6 moons and on probation, with a 3 year suspended prison sentence.This woman, she helped, as did the woman after her, Hana. That pain was with me when Lauren and I got together. She couldnt deal with it, I would have left me too. I never hit her, but my erratic behaviour, my ups and downs were too much for her. My constant underemployment was too much. The back trouble worsened then. It began at 18, when a ton of cultured marble slabs crushed me in a factory in Sacramento.Of course, if I had to do it over, I would change 99% of my actions. At the outset of my adult years, I envisioned a certain way of things happening, an outcome where I was changed, heroic, a loved figure, by progeny, family, ex's, strangers, animals, ghosts, everything and everyone. Especially those I had relationships with. Especially my ex wife, Hana, Leah, Kaia, Chandra, Emily 1 and 2, and the early loves, Joanne, Jennifer, April,Heathers 1 and 2, Coppelia, ---I feel like Jose Feliciano. I did, I did cause pain. And, Im sorry. Trust me: my sins are laid out every day by me, for me. I feel for my exwife, for Hana, for Natasha, for these three women the most. Why? Because in my own pain, I was fettered...am fettered. I blame noone but me. As Isaac Singer says: I believe in free will, I have no choice. I could have done better. For this I'am ashamed and assault myself every day.
I dont cut myself slack: I was incompetant. ( I can't even spell the word correctly). To this day, Ive no clue how to take care of me. My boys?Yes. My wife? I can cook, clean,comfort, rub her back, feet, console, I am a master at making women feel comfy, in all ways, except financially----in three years Ive been gainfully unemployed because of the back pain. Natasha doesnt complain, but I do. I see men with jobs, with money and I want to be them. I see men with no knowledge of Dostoyevsky or Modoc cosmology , or could care less who started the Pelopenessian War....they seem niched, comfy in their clique, in their dutys, their jobs, theyre ok with their job defining them and being their life. Or, they have hobbies, something outside of them---Im an extreme narcissist crippled by low self esteem, Im the antithesis to "cool". Im not, never have been "part of any crowd". I was Jack London Part Two, Rimbaud mixed with Artaud, in the body of a lumpenproletarian, a petty thief, a drughead, an alcoholic, a veteran of many psychic wars. The learned laborer. The fisherman, logger, concrete worker, mover of dirt. Tons of earth. Enjoying my own image, my own myth, my own unwritten book, me. Painful, pained, me. The bearer of "it". Navel gazing at its worst.
My earliest memories are of pain, gnashing teeth, weeping, blood . We did not endure the gulag or the destruction that war, famine, etc bring. But, our daily life was a sense of loss. Of not being able to actually know if we'd be alive tomorrow. I know this feeling more than my sisters. I comforted them , told them stories as Dad beat Mom, as we raced to escape our own personal Stalin, Manson, Himmler. Every day was horror. Abject shock. My psychiatrist says I have PTSD. Fuck her. In her Argentine ears.
To write about it, takes away from its power, those days were a war between the forces of death and the forces of death-in-life. We were alive---yet, we were dead inside, and not in a monastic sense. In a coping sense. I cannot explain the nightly practice of crying internally, so that HE didnt hear . Hearing my father at night made me shiver, tremble, panoptic, on the edge, every pregnant second I was asthmatic and crawling out of my skin. The tears filled my bones, my organs with saline and water, I felt heavy and bitter. Painful. I did not know it then, but life was terror.Extreme.Everyone I know from my childhood died violently or from alcohol related illness, the lucky got cancer or jailed in nutwards.
Many other things occurred later in life, not as bad as dear old Pappy. But bad. Feels like life was one necklace of bad-worse-worst-bad-better-worse moments, ad nauseum, ad infinitum. From pain to less pain. Always. This must be boring to read. It is the "in" thing today to reveal all about oneself; of course, I did the sensible thing when I was 15: I bandaged my brain. Alcohol, gasoline,sex, coke, anything and everything. When I met my sons mother, these bandages had lost their ability to stick. When she met me, I was suicidal. "It" had returned.
Now, 15 years later, it has transmogrified. Metamorphosed into a gerontological" it", an elderly "it". A cerebral, existential, philisophical nothing, nothing and everything , in dream and in wakefulness. With meds and without. Only near daily talks with my sons calm me, only my wife soothes me. I dont have the resources right now.Ive victoried myself away, sayeth Bohumil Hrabal.
At the beginning of this little writing exercise I had pain shooting into both legs, I had just woken up after falling asleep at 6am. I slept for 6 and a half hours. I wanted , badly, to go outside. Then "it" came. I wept as I havent wept in many years. And, in accordace with my daily ritual, I took a percocet to muffle the pain. It has subsided. I want to walk outside now. I need birdsong . I need air. I want to see the squirrels I love to watch, so agile, graceful, little furry gymnasts. I make squirrel noises at them, they come to me in that humping manner, undulating quickly and small, all muscle and instinct and hunger, soft black eyes looking at me. We talk ---I think. Eventually, they realize I have no food to give them and they seek crumbs elsewhere, running up the trunks of the London plane trees, onto branches and jumping into the void, little squirrel arms and legs akimbo, yawned, seeking purchace, finding it and scurrying according to their purpose.
Perhaps, today , I will bring bread. I need to write this down, percocet messes with my memory. Maybe , once Im outside Ill forget where exactly it is that Im walking to. Where am I going?
Where?All I know is that Im a moirologist, a cloud in trousers, one long, goddamned jeremiad. If I don't put this out , I will go mad, or Ill become more loopy. There. "It" has left the room. Psssssssst....let me tell you something, he's not so bad after all. I must take a shower. I feel dirty.
I arch my back, stand, stretch and walk to the bathroom, where I turn on the hot water and smile, remembering a passage from Nabokov...but I forget where it came from. I remember the shower, disrobe, enter and vertigo spills me into the stream of hot water. Of course this is fictional, this ending.Reality is not always probable, or likely, said Jorge Borges. But, what did he know, eh?A blind Peronist, full of mate and Argentine steak and Icelandic sagas galloping thru his Scottish/Spanish blood. I always picture him as a twin of Nabokov. In looks and dress. Not style of writing. I sometimes pray to them, spontaneous prayers, and to Milan Kundera, too. My Holy trinity. But, like all else, my gods change, only "it" remains.
