Laidupedness

IN THE MONTH OF MAY the sharpshooters began to stand down. That electric nerve pain, worst kind, transmogrified to arthritic inflammation, pulsing along the nerve corridor like I was a bioluminescent sea creature. Lately I have lots of painless moments, or so they seem upon casual observation. If I inquire too solicitously my body usually reports that Pain is in fact still there, perhaps sleeping.

The controversially-called 'painless' moments are strictly conditional. I get to have them if...and you don't want to hear the ellipses contents. In brief, absurd limitation paired with ibupanacea.

I've had to cultivate some weird other kind of discipline. The kind where you don't do stuff--not even the sensible, responsible things your brain says to do. See the chickenshit on the patio, but don't hose it off. Hear the coffee beans crunch underfoot, but don't sweep up the resultant grounds. Faced with a heap of dishes, wash only one dish.

The little feline Buddhist nun understands such things. If her water bowl is empty, she says, Do not attempt to reach it! Merely open the door, that I may go and drink from the water garden. She is conducting clinical trials on the efficacy of feline saliva, applied topically, on spinal disc regeneration in humans. With a sample size of one.

I READ BOOKS about The Back and about Pain, trying to learn from them without being steamrolled by their high church pronouncements. Bed rest should not exceed 1-2 days. I agree: it should not. Not least because it FUCKING SUCKS. But what would general medical wisdom have had me do instead? Keep moving about until my screams summoned the neighbors?

I hold as my bottom line the oath I felt like a lot of doctors failed to make me: First, do no harm.

The research I do and the interactions I have about my back problem are often painful themselves, though I do learn from them. In such case I must unbandage the wound, saying, This hurts and I wish it would get better. That invites clucking opinions and facile judgments as readily as sympathy or genuine help. Princess SHao brought what I really wanted: chocozucchini bread.

AND NOW FOR a quick lesson in making a person's hardship their own choice and fault. It's a neat trick: 1. Think up something the person should be doing. 2. Suggest it to the person. 3. Sit back and relax! If the person fails to be better, it's on them! You tried.

Nothing I hate more than people's little self-solacing notions of What I Should Be Doing. The suggestey shit pricks me til I bleed with self-doubt. The philosopher JBird said what I really wanted to hear: that my ass retains its splendor.

But what would I have people do in lieu of solacing themselves? Doesn't provision of empathy require suffering along with me? How can I ask that?

AFTER THREE MONTHS of laidupedness and discouragement, I gave myself the following advice:

This will last...some amount of time. Some awful, unbearably long period of time, way beyond reason. The progress will be invisible slow; setbacks many. You won't have the support you need. Won't have options that could make it easier. Instead eight million things will conspire to make it harder. You'll often be mired in depression. Your self-confidence will wear down. Your life will get all off-track. You'll get farther and farther from being as you were. You'll lose your fitness and your beauty to some extent or other. You may not even feel like yourself; you'll feel like you are the Pain. Fully parasitized. All this will happen. Continue happening. Even so it will end. You'll get well.

That has proven useful. Eventual wellness is a damn fine promise, one beyond the reach of many who are unwell.

FINALLY, for Lolo, a word on bullshit-skimming. You see, ordinarily I care about a lot of dumb shit, like what people think about the things I do, and why I don't make more money, and whether quoting rappers makes me ridiculous. But with Pain at my back, how can I possibly care? Jay-Z said it best:

I used to give a fuck

Now I give a fuck less

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Fun Times With Chronic Pain, Part MCCXLII

STILL DOING my bid. Pain Prison, cell block 1722. Pain is not my constant experience. I get free from it sometimes and quiet it often. Rather, Pain is the bars and the guard. The walls seem penetrable, and I start telling myself that if I dared to walk through they'd give way. But what happens instead is I walk into a wall. Then Pain gets mad and I spend a day or two on lockdown.

Today I'm on lockdown, in bed, in a painstorm. The storms come less frequently now, and I had gone a record six days without one. Of course I was not without pain on those good days, but I could manage and be comfortable--so long as I didn't do anything wrong. In the concept of wrong Pain shows its capricious tyranny. Yesterday a walk and a stint in a reclined position turned out to be wrong.

This is where rope-a-dope pain management gets tricky. The initial strategy is clear: you feign surrender, let Pain think it's winning. So far so good. But like...you don't actually mean to give Pain the victory. And at some point along the fake surrender, perhaps when your muscles atrophy and your joints forget their parts and the nerve down your leg is so battered it goes haywire, making pain signals out of thin air, Pain does win. Can't have that. So the question is when and how to start punching back.

I try this or that: an exercise, a stretch, an activity. Maybe just moving about the house for twenty minutes. Sometimes I do these things and Pain is powerless to protest. Then I get a bit stronger, a bit more able. Other times I do these things and they open me up to a big fat punch. Then, like today, I stagger, curse myself and Pain both, hate being here, watch the painstorm pass, re-group, prepare for the next round.

Pain justifies the mixing of metaphors.

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Dispatch from the Floor

TERRIBLY OFTEN when I tell people I have back problems, they’re like, Yeah me too. And then I can't say, No but mine are like super bad. I will tell you, though, dear reader: they are quite bad. Bad enough that I’ve landed on the floor, two months and counting, though I didn’t do anything much out of the ordinary.

In fact the strain upon my spine over the last decade has been far less than ordinary, since I make innumerable concessions to the tyrant Pain. I work part time and stretch at ballerina frequency. I am mindful of lifting and sitting and sneezing and carrying too much in my purse.

But nor am I Pain’s little bitch; I defy its rules when I think I can get away with it. And really, it was a pile-up of such sneaky infractions that landed me here, spine trained to the floor, with my mercifully tiny laptop atop a pillow on my stomach and my feet on the couch and an ice pack beneath me.

For the last few years Pain was the weaker contender, and I spit in its face, daring to do things I thought I might never get to do, like have a normal job, live by myself, take dance class, walk for miles. At the height of my triumph I wore some obscene heels.

I was a blithe, jubilant rat fattening myself on a windfall of spilled grain night after night, and Pain was a cat with a grin, crouching and watching. I’m being melodramatic, but nothing inspires it quite like Pain.

THERE IS A NERVE corridor originating at my sloppy L5-S1 spinal disc, the disc aptly if uncharmingly named for its location between the fifth lumbar and first sacral vertebrae. This corridor travels the length of my leg. Errant L5-S1 protrudes and the nerve gets agitated. Back in the day the S1 nerve path used to be the thing; now my main pain corridor is L5. (Both are pictured below.) The S1 path ends in the tendon and heel, which made me feel like an aching Achilles. L5 ends in the toes, which are often a-tingle.

The corridor is constantly abuzz. Be it with electric sharpshooters, splayed inflammation, dull ache. The sensations, and locations thereof, are ever changing, and sometimes I lie here and watch them, as malignant internal fireworks. The corridor may grow dark and quiet, but it always exists. Even at times when I have negligible pain, the corridor is active, alert, ready. My unaffected leg feels to have no corridor; such is the difference.

You may get frustrated, dear reader, when I tell you there is little more I can do for this than rest and let it get better. This smacks of medical slackerdom. But having done much time down the rabbithole of pills, treatments, hospitals, I can tell you with confidence that this is the truth. I had surgery ten years ago, to the day. So do me this one favor and don’t suggest anything for me to *try.* If you wish to offer something, I like food.

I just have to do the time. It is not fun, but it is a test of a sort, a strength challenge, and I dig those. It's like a marathon, only instead of training from normal human to superhuman capability, you train from jacked-up to normal. You battle the daily discouragements and the limits of your body and develop focus and stamina. And sometimes you give up and fall backwards, and watch streaming episodes of Basketball Wives. (I assume marathoners get discouraged and turn to Basketball Wives.)

Sometimes it is hard to believe that my spine is so dysfunctional. But I think of how other people have diabetes or lupus or herpes or dire allergies and it seems common for the body to have some failed function or other. It is the human body, after all, and quite remarkable. It is much more shocking to think of what it can do.

I EMPLOY a rope-a-dope pain management strategy. I lie here in apparent defeat and let Pain punch itself out until I am the stronger one.

I've had to adapt to long-term battle. Reading and writing are all I can accomplish, and sometimes I can accomplish nothing. I'm drinking pint smoothies and eating mini yogurts and frozen dinners, with a resultant abomination of plastic refuse that is hardly less objectionable than begging friends to do my dishes. Bowls are heavy to carry to bed and glasses are easily spilled down the chin when drinking lying down, so the plastics do win for now.

My personality adapts too, as you might have noticed if you know me as a pleasant person and are reading this thinking you would rather not visit such a grumpbitch after all. I don't laugh much, but I usually feel alright. It's just I have to be serious. I can't listen to music that gets me worked up or makes me want to bust even the smallest moves. No Nicki, no Weezy. I've been on Joan Baez and Iron & Wine. My earffirmative action campaign got a leg up.

And I'm in the hard situation of needing lots of Help. A friend remarked to me that it's too bad how in our society it is frowned upon to need Help. And that may be so, but I think needing Help sucks inherently, not just because of some social norms. There are as many kinds of Help as there are kinds of love or water. Help can be given loudly or quietly, generously or stingily, for free or for an implicit price; you can be made to feel it or allowed to accept it with ease. Given gracefully, it is a tremendous gift. But the position of need is a shit position, even so.

Pain is not all curses and grumbles. I grow by its trials and appreciate how it skims the bullshit off life's surface. Maybe I'll tell you about that some other time.

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Fun Times With Chronic Pain, Part MCCXVIII

PAIN, old nemesis, I never should have thought I had you licked. You humble me, exhaust me, shred my plans, shatter my independence. I respect you, even so. You've changed me before, and taught me things I would have otherwise gladly avoided learning. You beat me up and make me strong. When you leave I remember so vividly how nice life is without you. That last while you were gone I enjoyed every way I could. I wore the badbitch heels and tore up the clubs and walked miles home from downtown in summer sunshine. I dashed about, met people, planted, milked a goat, tanned my abs in delicious somatic vanity. So you, the terrorist, have not won. It has been a hard March. You suck today. Maybe better tomorrow.

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A Brief Treatise on Why "Real G's Move in Silence Like Lasagna" Is Indeed the Perfect Lyric

WEEZY SCHOLARS are abuzz about the sneak-attack simile from the hot new single "6 Foot 7 Foot."

First Weezy Scholar: You heard that shit? Real g's move in silence like lasagna.Second Weezy Scholar: Yeah man shit's hot...Real talk though... Fuck does that mean?WS1: Think about it. Real g's move in silence like lasagna.WS2: I'm seeing a lasagna doing slug walk cross a plate.WS1: Like lasagna. Spell it.WS2: L-A-S-A-- Oh shit the g is silent.
WS1: Yuup.
WS2: Damn.
WS1: Yuup.
WS2, following a moment's reflection: You know what, though? That's kinda whack actually.
WS1: You just mad you ain figure it out.
WS2: Nah nah for real, because the g in lasagna ain really silent.
WS1: Fuck you talkin about. Yeah it is.
WS2: Nah, it's not. Cause think about it though. If the g wasn't there you would pronounce it "la-zann-a." That nya sound is from the g. On some Italian shit.
WS1: Oh damn. You got me there.
WS2: He shoulda said real g's is like gnats.
WS1: Flyin all in a ball with other gnats is not gangster.
WS2: Says you.
WS1: You know what is gangster though?
WS2: Huh?
WS1: A letter acting all innocuous where it falls in a word, then moving silently, only to show up later making a y sound, on some Italian shit.

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Hey Nicki! Hey Nicki! Asthmatic Ode to Nicki Minaj

WHEN FIRST I heard "Your Love" on KMEL, I thought I had met it in the sky. Nicki's arrival had the same effect; I didn't know she was somebody I'd been waiting for, and I already can't fathom a hip hop world without her.

Nicki Minaj exists on so many planes she might fool you. First come the pink wig and flaunted ass, daring you to underestimate her. Then there are the many faces, many voices, Nicki as self-created cultural artifact. But rip off all the shiny packaging and you find an artist with talent and heart. (Also be advised you'll want to re-use such nice wrapping paper.)

An obtuse observer could mistake her sexiness for a cheap appeal to men, but in fact her brew of brazen sexuality and conquering power is bound to baffle and terrify many males. (Hence, When I throw this p**** you better not start duckin.) It's not easy to find straight male Nicki fans. Men seem to want to watch her, but from a safe distance.

She appeals, instead, to women. Nicki is power, and transmits power. On some advanced like fifth wave feminism shit. In this she differs vastly from beefmate Lil Kim, whose kittenish sexuality, while powerful in its day in its way, is less threatening, and voluntarily subordinate. Nicki would never list herself after Wayne the way Kim deferentially self-seconded once upon a time: Brooklyn home of the greatest rappers/Big comes first then the Queen comes after.



Nicki shrewdly combines her Barbie wigs with aggressive rapping, one of many replications of her perfectly calibrated hard-soft dichotomy. See also her person, with its sharp points and soft pillows, and her voice personas, which range from babyish to thug murderous. And unlike Lil Kim and Foxy Brown, who specialized in a delicious ghetto brand of sexual aggression (yeah I said it: specialized) , Nicki's aggression is general. Thus does Barbie also get accused of being too masculine.


AND SHE DOES channel masculinity when she feels like it, calling upon male alter ego Roman Zolanski. Suffice it to say that Roman can go head to head with that paean to male aggression known as Slim Shady. (It is understood that regular Eminem is a marshmallow Peep compared to this alter ego; Shady is the one still stuffing ladies in the trunk after all these years.) Over a scary railroad track of a beat, courtesy of Swizz Beatz, Roman and Shady defile and destroy anything and anyone in the vicinity. My favorite bit is in her second verse:

I hear the mumblin
I hear the cacklin
I got em scared, shook, panickin
Overseas, church, Vatican
You at a stand-still: mannequin

Next she breaks out the emotional matter, ranging from the glorious romantic phantasm of "Your Love" to the relationshipal nitty gritty of "Right Thru Me." The most powerful lyric in the latter goes simply, Okay you're right/Just let it go.

"Dear Old Nicki," in which Minaj openly grapples with her past self, is the most honest work of self-reflection I've heard from a rapper. Stars so often have unglamorous former versions hiding in a closet, those easily embarrassing rough drafts along the editing process of self-creation. It's quite a feat to embrace an old self while deciding to move beyond it. But Nicki can.

After all the serious work is over, it's end-of-album party time. The bangingly superficial "Super Bass," waiting to be discovered by club turntables everywhere, celebrates her own femme version of fun pimpery:

I am Nicki Minaj
I mack them dudes up
Back coupes up
And chuck the deuce up

NICKI IS PART of a cadre of Millennial rappers who realized in the nick of time that rap had staled into its own conventions in need of flouting. She is joined by Young Money labelmates Lil Wayne, the eyelid tattoo alien, and Drake, the matinee idol psychoanalyst. Peers include the dapper-suited philosopher of hard-partying Kid Cudi, and political nerd Lupe Fiasco. These Millennial rappers aren't nervously checking their street cred every five minutes, and so are free to explore uncharted terrain, like singing their own hooks, wearing eyeglasses, collaborating with rockboys, riding skateboards, experiencing ambivalence. And at long last, Andre 3000 has challengers for the weirdness throne.



Nicki, with her many guises and cartoon curves*, is trailed by an inevitable misapprehension that she is phony. (To which she responds: If I'm fake I ain notice cause MY MONEY AIN'T.) But her rapid rotation of wigs and voices is rooted in theatricality--she studied drama at LaGuardia High, the "Fame" school--and her embodiment of so many Nickis is a way of claiming every possible iteration of self, as well as an acknowledgment that to rap, after all, is to wear a persona.

*Her improbable ass to waist ratio does have this perfectly logical explanation: she's on a diet, but her pockets are eating cheesecake.

Were she sexplosion only: dayenu. But she can do sex, she can do glam, she can do swag, she can do love. She can be scary, zany, savvy, vulnerable, introspective--often under the same wig on the same song. She can murder a Swizzy beat then hopscotch across a will.i.am confection. Her strength is her stubborn unwillingness to be any one thing, least of all whatever you might want her to be. And I'm not just saying that as an X-pon-tittie Barb stan. Though to be one is a privilege.

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Hibernating (Like a Dungeon Dragon)

WHAT HAVE I been up to lately? Oh, hibernating. You know, winter torpor.

I have this theory of radical sloth. I invoke it as needed. Sometimes, the theory goes, the best thing to do is nothing. Said theory is staggeringly difficult to convert to policy. But you know: I try.




I am a staunch opponent of the culture of busy. I do my best to resist societal pressure to scurry about antlike, and operate instead at my own strange pace. Doing nothing I consider an art. I like to suppose that if you do nothing enough the things you then do will be better and count more.

Of course even in mid-hibernate you end up doing something, but it'll be exploratory and non-required. I took up Nicki Minaj whilst Carmela took up Pema Chodron. We have conversations like:

Ca[rm]: Bodhichitta is essentially a quality of warmth, an experience of our connection with all beings and with all things.
Cl[eb]: Shoulda sent a thank-you note you little ho. Now I'ma wrap ya coffin with a bow.
Ca: Don't have expectations for others. Just be kind.
Cl: I don't sympathize. Cause you a simple bitch.

Carm meditates for days in her kitty bed cave. I leave Wild Cravings treats at her feet and she bows ever so slightly but doesn't touch them until her sit is finished. I'll be in badbitch heels giving myself a dominatrix lapdance with gold-teeth-and-fangs derangement sneers for the mirror and the little feline Buddhist nun remains perfectly still.

Start at 3:35. And emphatically not before.


But mostly I've been filing my nails and thinking my thoughts and taking decadent naps and twiddling my thumbs. I had a nice long sleep. Now I'm rubbing my eyes and stretching my limbs. Emergence is nigh.



Good looks to the illustrator.

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