She's Writing a Novel

About not renaming this site. Because the last month or so has been a parade of various maladies, and I thought it would be better to keep the running track of bitching and moaning in my head instead of committing it to written form.

I threw out my back about a month ago, and it has remained thrown. After several weeks I sought out a chiropractor because, well, I wanted putting on shoes to stop being an ordeal. You know you've done a terrible harm to yourself when you drop something on the floor and your first thought it, Oh dear. How will I ever get to that? It may as well have rocketed into space.

And it turns out a little incident I had on a boat several years ago was the crowning affliction on three decades of living, and my body had gone all kinds of off kilter, and the chiro was surprised I was still walking around like a normal person instead of laying down to die. Not that I hadn't thought of that.

So I'm going to the chiro 3 days a week, and that's only because he's not in the office more days that that. I think I'm beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel, but its a very long tunnel and I've been in it a long time. Years of aches and pains that I thought were a normal part of life...well, apparently the other twenty-somethings out there who weren't subjected to multiple traumas didn't feel like that at all. My normal was the normal of an octogenarian, and it was absurd that I accepted it as long as I did. But I didn't know. I thought I was just being a wuss.

It was only when I reached the point where I couldn't do any of the things I wanted to do, and I could only do very few of the things I needed to do, that I decided to get help. The chiro recommended to me is a cheerful older man who wears a different bow tie every day and assures me that he'll get rid of me as a patient as soon as he can; which is to say, I'm going to be just fine eventually. In the meantime there are good days and bad days, but the bad days now are better than the good days from before. Healing is always a process of two steps forward, one step back. There are no miracles, only journeys.

Today I woke up with the feeling that something was terribly wrong and I should not go to work. Since I had the sick time available, I decided to go with that feeling and call out for the day. The anxiety has abated somewhat, but only because I know I made the right decision. The alarm bells that were screeching in my head this morning are satisfied.

It wasn't a panic attack, exactly, because I've had one of those. The best way to describe that experience is to say it's a kind of existential claustrophobia, where it's not the walls boxing you in but space and time itself closing in to crush you. Your heart races and spasms and aches and you struggle to breathe and you know you are about to die, because that's the only escape you can fathom in that moment. But if you're lucky like I was, you will quietly tell a friend who knows all about these sort of things and she will lead you outside; the distraction of her voice and the rhythm of walking will push the weight back from your soul and you'll be able to breathe again.

No, today this was a Vague Unease with Aggressive Tendencies. I know these, and I try to listen even when I don't know what they're trying to say. Sometimes they don't say anything at all except that Something Is Wrong, or something is about to be wrong. I suppose I could call it intuition, but I've never had any evidence that my intuition was correct. If I feel the Vague Unease nudging me to cross this street, or not to walk down that one, or to stay home as it did today, I listen and don't try to rationalize. Sometimes the Vague Unease will grip me with such force I have to go for a walk until I feel the release and know that its OK Now.

But I never know the source or the cause of the Vague Unease, nor do I know why it departs when it does. If I've avoided some misfortune, I never know what. If someone I deeply care about has avoided some misfortune, I also don't know it. A bit of a falling tree in the forest type of a mystery; was there really ever any calamity to be avoided at all? Will I ever know, since it appears to have been avoided?

It reminds me of stories about foolish superstitious types; like a man who throws salt over his shoulder every time before he gets on a plane and claims it protects him from crashing. And when someone points out the obvious lack of correlation, he retorts that he has never crashed yet.

And on some level he knows there cannot be anything to it, but the salt still gets thrown over his shoulder. And I may be avoiding nothing at all by listening to the voice telling me to avoid. But here I am.

Two days until Christmas. FINALLY.

At this particular stage of life, there is no actual anticipation for the Day Of. Not like when I was a kid, and the holiday season was this symphony of pleasant rituals leading to the sublime crescendo, an orgy of presents. My childhood Christmas's far exceeded my first sexual experiences in terms of both arousal and payoff.

Now the eagerness is about getting to those extra days off away from the office, days I can drink wine at 11am and lay in bed watching Harry Potter, or bathing for hours and reading trashy magazines. Freedom. Time. Free time.

The Russian lover and I prefer to lay low during the holidays, not trekking to huge family gatherings if we can avoid it, and our celebration is similarly laid back. We'll put up a live tree and string it with some white lights - simple and beautiful. Ornaments aren't an option in any event because of the cats; they'll be gnawing away on the lower branches as it is.

I'm aware that Christmas trees are considered mildly toxic plant material for cats. But ours have survived at least 4 of them. More to the point, have you seen what passes for cat food these days? I'm spending 200 bucks a month to give them premium grain-free wet food; a couple of pine needles here and there once a year aren't going to ruin them as fast as a steady diet of supermarket cat chow would.

Anyway, that's really the extent of it. On Christmas day we'll make a slightly bigger deal of dinner -- maybe a whole roasted duck -- but that's about it. We don't do presents. In fact, I've more or less stopped doing presents for anyone altogether, and instead I'll invite family and friends out to dinner. It's amazing how much stress goes into selecting and buying and affording gifts, and I'm so glad to have cut it out.

In discussing a future involving little Russian-American hybrids of our own, the Russian lover has been pretty adamant about leaving the presents out of Christmas. And it's not because he's an anti-materialist; it's more so about the Russian tradition of giving gifts, in a limited (Soviet!) quantity, to celebrate the New Year. The New Year comes before Christmas on the Orthodox calendar, and since the Orthodox aren't actually religious anyway, the New Year becomes the Big Holiday of their holiday season. Here in America, it's precisely the other way around.

So it's amusing to imagine a family started by two non-religious people who nevertheless have two different ideas about which day is Christmas. December 25? January 7? Both? I think celebrating the New Year with sufficient gusto is the appropriate compromise.

We spent Christmas day the way it's meant to be spent -- in Chinatown with the Jews and Asians. The Virgin Mary had a baby boy and we had Peking duck.

We stuffed ourselves and people-watched; the rest of the city was an eerie ghost town of newspaper tumbleweeds and too-available street parking. In Chinatown there were comforting signs of life-as-usual.

Without the normal hordes of humans and traffic, center city Philadelphia looks like it's set in the post-zombie apocalypse. Which is to say this place is already such a shit hole that a violent pandemic and total breakdown of civilization could hardly scar the landscape any further but only leave it emptier. And by "violent pandemic and total breakdown of civilization" I'm referring to a zombie apocalypse, not summertime in Philadelphia...but eh, well, you see where I'm going with this. The city is so filthy and run-down and joyless already that the distracting throngs of living moving beings are the only thing keeping people from realizing how bad it is.

I'm not entirely sure what's worse -- slow-motion decay or catastrophic destruction. I guess in terms of the outcome, it's an easy answer. Nations and people seem to bounce back from wars with the same ferocity they fight them. But when the enemy is entropy, cultural erosion, diminishing prosperity...people don't seem to know what or how to fight. Government accelerates the demise in the name of staunching it, contriving enemies with the same cynical transparency of someone drawing editorial cartoons.

There's a theory that the only thing that can bring about world peace is an enemy that the entire world could get behind. In a word, Aliens. A galactic bloodbath is the only way to ensure that we're too otherwise occupied to skirmish over our differences, that we're more invested in being united than in dividing ourselves.

If you want Peace On Earth, then you've got to Take It To The Skies.