A month back, a dog bit me. The wound has healed, just a shadow bruise of that quick violence remains on my left calf. But the resulting course of antibiotics has messed with my chemistry. Stomach cramps were the immediate side effect, then rashes that are slowly waning. A few days ago, my left ear refused to pop. This morning, the right ear feels cotton packed. Things moving from left-to-right… might that mean I’m on the mend? From what, though?
Connected symptoms? Possibly. It seems that any assault to the delicate balance within my body starts a chain reaction manifesting in small miseries. I can’t recall the last time I felt no minor irritation, a day without a puffy eyelid or sore leg or indigestion.
Conventional wisdom and a slew of comedians state that all men of a certain vintage will endure physical abnormalities rather than visit a doctor. Stoic suffering. It’s our brand. Women, on the other hand, go to doctors and have their pain dismissed.
I have been seeing doctors for various irregularities. Credit my wife’s powers of persuasion. Were I a single man, I would suck it up, live with itchy skin and plugged ears and other discomforts I dare not name. I’d likely have more issues. I’d probably still smoke cigarettes. My drinking would be out of control.
My wife is going to add years to my life. I love her for this. But I also think of what a man once said: life is a terrible thing to do to a person.
Who said that? I think it was me.
I used to find my birthday depressing. How utterly stupid.
I am not depressed, but I can’t say I care much about my birthday. Because I’m not a child. It’s just another day. Yes, convention would have us celebrate another year around the sun, which I do—I’m not that stoic—but my idea of a celebration is a nice meal with my wife and a glass of single malt after a day of book shopping and maybe a museum visit. No parties, no fanfare. But, as I have done before on this blog (I think—I don’t have it within me to find or link to similar ramblings), I am not above a bit of reflection. The easy slide is into dour thoughts of my declining body (see above) and lack of achievements after what both seems like a tremendous amount of time and no time at all. It’s so fucking quick, it really is.
UNORIGINIAL THOUGHT ALERT:
Childhood seemed to last forever. Meaning K-12 was a slog. My god, would I ever get through this education and ascend to the ranks of real people? Somewhere around thirty-something, days quickened, years evaporated. And here I am, a decade shy of theoretical retirement.
My forties were the best. Everything else was practice for that decade. My fifties have been fine. No real complaints, save for the difficulty bouncing back from a bender or the aching back that demands my version of Pilates.
Two days ago, I had a cyst removed. A speck. I thought it a mole, but it was merely dead skin accumulating in a tiny gulf between shoulder and neck. Hardly worth the bother, but the first dermatologist recommended excising the thing. The second dermatologist, the one with the sharp instruments who did the excising, breezed into the room and cut the thing from me with a nonchalance I found off-putting. It was so rushed—even my follow up questions she answered with a quickness that made me feel guilty for wasting the doc’s valuable time. This woman has real shit to deal with, skin cancer and so forth, and yet there I was asking what to do after this less than minor procedure.
I can’t help but feel that the cyst, and its removal, is a representation of what’s to come: small annoyances that I would sooner ignore because getting them addressed means bothering some healthcare worker with bigger fish to fry. Until my guppies, the rashes and bad back and plugged ears, become malignant marlins. Then I might get a doctor to listen to me attentively. For now, I am merely the middle-aged asshole in their way.
Last weekend, I went for drinks with some friends. Lovely night out, even if I did as I too often do: talked so much I woke the next day full of regret. A few beers and whiskies and I can’t shut the fuck up. You’d think by now I’d practice restraint.
I woke the next day with a physical toll punctuating the regret. Not quite a hangover, certainly not the epic agony of my wilder days, but a fog that made reading difficult. I could hardly get through a page, the clouds in my head obscuring meaning. Usually, a glass of water, a cup of tea, some eggs, and an Advil set me right as rain. Not so anymore.
I’ve laid off the booze since then, partly because the dermatologist advised against drinking before the procedure. Don’t want to thin the blood and cause excessive flow. I’ve springboarded this reprieve into a full week off, which has brought predictable results: clear head, un-bloated belly, better sleep. There was less need for drink when I was younger. I enjoyed nights out, but more for the company than the intoxication. As I’ve aged, I find a glass of something strong more opportunity for contemplative luxury and less to do with callow rituals and rebellion. Which is precisely when the body has decided to make processing a few before bed more difficult. If there is a god, he is either daft or cruel.
God is male. Let’s get that settled. No woman would fuck things up to this degree.
In an essay about his prostate that I am too squeamish to finish, William Styron wrote about the unintelligent design of the human body. One can easily surmise the premise of his argument. Jim Holt made a similar point in a New York Times article: the human body is a botch job. The pain mechanism would make sense if it always warned of danger. Human places a hand on a hot stove, the body feels pain, human knows to remove hand lest they cause irreparable damage. But in the case of cancer, what function does pain serve when the pain often comes far into the disease’s tenure? Holt uses other examples of odd physiology to make his case that any designer of the human body is not very intelligent. No electrician would wire a home so shoddily.
Not believing in God helps. Or believing in a god who is, at best, indifferent. I used to say that I believed in God when things went badly, not because, as they say, there are no atheists in the foxholes. No, I just needed someone to blame other than myself.
I’m an agnostic because that’s my only defensible position. Really, I don’t care if there is a god or not. I can’t prove it one way or the other, so fuck the debate. I’ve heard that people find their way to God, or at least religion, the older they get. Stands to reason: we’re in need of something, especially when our time is closer to the end than the start.
My something has always been art. Literature and film and painting and definitely music. A world without Ulysses and “you shall above all things…” and The Third Man and Undercurrent and Hotel World and Disco Volante and That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do and Repo Man would be intolerable.
We run to God or art or heroin or Star Wars fandom or meaningless sex or Labubus (or their predecessors, Beanie Babies) because we’re here. We need something.
Yesterday, I read another writer’s ramblings, tighter than my own but imbued with a sort of hipper-than-thou contrarianism that presents as insight. The ramblings were not lacking insight per se, but the writer’s tone made me want to find this person and shake them and ask why. Which I suspect might be the reaction of anyone who’s made it this far. If you have, and you’re feeling as I did when I waded through this other writer’s precious bullshit, feel free to leave a comment below. You may simply write “shrimp taco” if you have no other words, and I’ll know that you mean: I finished your jabber, ya prick ya.
My dog is asleep next to me. He worries very little and sleeps easily. Every walk is a treat. Food is joy. Company is all he craves. The wisdom of dogs.
In the time I have left, I plan to read as much as I can. And write more. Even if it is rambling and solipsistic. Because who cares? It’s my time to do as I please.
I read recently that “literary fiction” will go extinct in the next few years. The article making this prediction meant that big five publishing houses are putting literary writing out to pasture and throwing their weight behind things that sell. Vampires fucking and young people with crushes on other young people and Colleen Hoover and the robots that can easily mimic her work. This may seem a depressing possibility, at least to anyone who writes whatever “literary fiction” is, but as someone who might boldly place their work under such a big umbrella term, I am only slightly bothered. At fifty-five, I am not likely to crack the code that will secure me literary renown. Unless I follow Frank McCourt’s example and pen a best seller in my sixties. Presented with this reality, I can either revise my wayward manuscripts into something the market values or just write whatever I want and find a way to share it with the few people who give a damn. It doesn’t take Kreskin-like clairvoyance to guess what I’ll do.
So that’s what I’m doing with whatever remains: practicing the art of writing, reading for pleasure when not reading for pay, watching what I eat so I can still indulge once in a while, visiting the sawbones with regularity so my irregularities remain manageable. And matching inevitable decline with caustic humor. And long walks with my wife. And long talks. Big books, brazen ambition, beautiful failure.
Life is shit as much as it is joy. Or so it can feel. True accounting would show that the level of shit is far greater than the joy. But the joy is what keeps us going. I sustain myself with mornings in bed and the comfort of my wife and my dog and a second cup of tea and writing nearly 1,800 words that few if any people will ever read because there is nothing else. And it is enough.
