Sunday, 22 May 2005 at 22:26 by perilous
Posted in
the nothing It’s so exciting to have this goddamn blog back that I’m looking for reasons to post any kind of blithering thing that I want to write about. I should settle down in a few days. I think. There’s been a lot of stuff lately in the news especially that I’ve wanted to comment on.
My body has been giving me distinct signals lately that the time for recuperation is well over and it’s time to be moving my ass now. I’ve become a sort of computer-themed Jabba the Hutt, doing little each day that varies from my routine of moving as little as possible from my desk, unless it is to sleep, to use the bathroom, or, of course, to potter around the all-important kitchen, from whence 50 pounds have managed to pack itself back onto my carcass in the past three or four months.
It’s bad. Everyone expects to gain wait after surgery, especially a very serious series of surgeries…but I have now gained back 20 pounds beyond what I lost being hospitalized in the first place.
Anyway, about six weeks ago now I started getting this fucked up tingling sort of pins and needles feeling in my right leg. That has since spread its way all the way up my right side to the armpit, including just the right side of my right arm, and my whole right hand. It’s very odd…I can literally feel the demarcation line when running my finger across my skin from right to left. It’s like someone electrified only half of my body. And it’s especially weird in my right arm, where the outer side of my arm…the right half…is tingly, but the left half of that same arm is totally normal until my hand joins my arm at the wrist.
Anyway, I’m eventually going to make a doctor’s appointment to find out what kind of neurological bullshit is happening here; but I am extremely reluctant to go back to that fucking hospital only to be told again and again some bullshit answer or have to go through batteries of tests only to be told “we dont know,” which is quite often the case tracking down any neurological issue, even in the best of facilities, which Olive View Medical Center most assuredly is not.
So over the past week or so I’ve been making a concerted effort to be far more active (and by that I mean merely leaving my chair) than I have been for over a year now. It started with the election last Tuesday, since I knew I was going to have to be very active for many hours. I figured since that has to happen anyway, I’d try to use that for momentum to start getting myself moving. Just the past couple of days, I’ve started walking around the block in the early morning. This evening I did my first evening promenade.
It’s funny how the nighttime is my favourite time of all, yet for a few weeks now I’ve been hesitant to venture out into it. It’s a combination of that whole not wanting to move thing combined with something very interesting: the mindset I hear an overwhelming number of people in this country who are past the age of, say, 25, who are convinced that venturing out of their door past nightfall is like taping a “please rape and murder me” sign to one’s back, preferrably printed on a hundred dollar note.
Not that there’s zero danger of such a thing, of course, but the night time has always been my favourite time to wander. It’s so quiet, cool, and peaceful; fragrant night flowers perfume the air. Yes, there are night flowers here in North Hollywood, and yes, they do perfume the air. It’s just that nobody knows it because most of you are too fucking scared to go for a walk!
Anyway, that whole thing that I was getting…the “the bad guys will get me” thing…has been irritating me for many reasons, not least of which is my long history of night walks, as well as the fact that I think it’s safe to say that nobody who really knows me would describe me as having a walk like I expect to be a victim. Perhaps more that I will victimize someone else…but never that I in any way put across any type of image that I am someone you’d decide would make a nice, soft target. Even if I did have a victim mentality, I grew up in a city that teaches you fast how to walk in public properly, if you want to actually reach your destination with any success on most occasions.
So I ventured out this evening and was amused to discover that far from being the only one, I actually saw three other solitary women walking around, as well as a couple. One woman was an elderly lady in a nightdress quite obviously out for a regular stroll, and the other two women were around my age, one a bit younger. It was pretty funny to me. Perhaps just to me.
So yeah, that was pretty cool, and I am left to wonder why in hell this mindset would come to me in the first place, since I regularly scoff at others who feel that way. Perhaps it’s just because I have been shut in the house for so long, doing nothing but reading the news and being beset with personal health and financial woes, as well as being totally relucant to perform any activity that requires me to get up and move around.
I dunno, but it’s fucking annoying, because I miss walking at night. I miss that lovely fragrance, which seems to be the same no matter where one is…it was the same in New Orleans, in the Garden District, which is heavy with wisteria and honeysuckle.
It was there, but a little different, in Minnesota: it wasn’t so much scented flowers as pine trees. Since it was winter and there was snow on the ground about eight months out of the year, that night fragrance was the scent of fresh pine needles and crystal cold air that cut through your face like a knife and went straight to your brain. I would spend 10 whole minutes at a time, quite often, just standing still and breathing outside in the wee hours of the morning. It was awesome.
And in LA, possibly more surprising to me than the other places I’ve been, there is the scent of fresh grass and night blossoms. It is a less enveloping smell than it was in New Orleans, with that city’s unrelenting, constant humidity: but the smell of the manicured lawns and that wetness which doesnt last long enough to do more than fragrance the dry air that wafts them, combined with honeysuckle vines, magnolia trees, and roses is nonetheless intoxicating.
You can still smell it in the early morning, as well, but with a different magic: I have never been as fond of dawn as I am of the night, but the dawn is definitely a close runner up, especially the moments before and during the actual sunrise.
The night air is cooler, less cluttered, thinner: it allows the sounds of the night creatures that are going about their normal business to be heard (if one has ears to listen) in a way that the dawn, with its busy day ahead of it, does not carry. I like the dawn, but I love the night, and the way the pitch black palms and pines and deciduous trees, flowering or otherwise, are lined in silver against the sky.
The palm trees in particular seem to take especial delight in dressing in silver or gold, as though the moon and sun were their special wardrobe managers. The palms shine so here! They never did that in Louisiana. Perhaps they were too depressed.
I am not particularly fond of palm trees; the royal palms are definitely gorgeous, but theyre not my favourite trees. However, the way they gleam is an endless source of visual delight for me, and I wish like hell my stalwart little camera was good enough for really dark night photography. There was a picture tonight, of the full moon set perfectly between two tall, gleaming, silver-lined palm trees, that I dearly would have loved to capture.
As I was setting out on my walk, I stumbled on the edge of where the grass verge starts and the sidewalk ends and re-twisted the knee that I hurt falling off the stage last Tuesday while helping set up for the election. I had jumped down from the stage, which was elevated about three feet, firmly ignoring the huge red warning flare that was telling me to take the goddamn stairs and not be a jackass, and went down like a frathouse hooker at an end of term house party. My knees gave zero support to what must have been a totally unexpected impact to them, and my left knee hyperextended. I heard the tendons creak and immediately knew that I was one lucky son of a bitch not to have really fucked up that knee badly. I’ve been wobbly on it all week.
So I hadn’t taken 10 steps before I twisted my ankle on that grass verge and nearly went down again; I managed somehow to keep my balance (through sheer force of will, I think, since balance itself seemed to have momentarily fucked off and was occupied elsewhere), and I think that at that moment I really would have proven Douglas Adams’ theory of learning to fly if someone had jumped out at me from behind a hedge with some kind of remarkable theory or shocking statement. The only way I could have possibly avoided falling down at all was some kind of levitational force. I should have been on my face. I felt and saw myself actually falling down. Now I ask you…where is Ford Prefect or a bottle of exotic liqueur when you really need them?
After the miraculous self-correcting, non-impact stumble, my knee was hurting and I was limping quite badly but I was going to be damned if I hobbled back into the house without going for my walk. Within just a dozen or so steps, my knee stopped throbbing and I completed this fantastic journey around the block with little complication, swaying or staggering a bit because my balance is in the crapper, but otherwise, enjoying the evening. My right leg…the buzzy one…started to get a cramp in the calf about halfway round and I was considering doing two more times around the block because it’s such a lovely night tonight, but I decided that I should probably give it at least a full week of walking two or three times a day around the block before I try any marathon, multiple-pass sessions and really hurt myself.
It’s kind of ridiculous and even embarassing that I’m in such pathetic condition, but to be fair to myself, I am quite lazy and blodgy and Huttish and all that, but I really did have a lot of medical problems and I really did spend a great lot of time either hospitalized or recuperating from some pretty serious issues. I only last month finally got my doctor-enforced, medically necessary limitations on physical activity lifted.
They’d always encouraged me to walk as much as possible, and I didnt do that, so much of this now is my fault, to be sure. But for a lot of that time, honestly, I really couldnt sustain a lot of activity and walking around the block was an effort that required frequent resting and so forth. For the past three or four months, physical restriction or no, though, I have been able to walk and just didnt. Now I’ve got to, if I want to have any hope of mobility anymore. I have nearly gotten to the point that I have always dreaded getting to: being like my grandmother, who was unable to walk even half a block because she was so unbelievably sedentary.
I am not yet that far gone, and I can definitely walk and move around much better than she ever could in my memory, but I’m only 40 years old. This sucks. I used to hike 10 or 15 miles a weekend at least twice a month not so long ago. Now I get leg cramps walking halfway around the block. No. This has to change, especially with this weird ass neurological buggery going on now.
The good bit? I am moving around more already, and it seems to be having a beneficial effect on this tingling thingie, which I believe is a pinched nerve caused by the constant pressure of my ass in this chair. It’s too soon to tell, but after each walk the tingling does subside, and so maybe this is the thing that I should be doing to correct it. We’ll see. The best outcome would be to totally get rid of this tingling thing, bring my legs back into condition, and get some of this fucking lard off my ass so I dont have to start buying my clothes in the tent section at REI. The hard part is going to be sticking with it. I’m hoping like hell that I’m not stupid enough to stop when my body is sending me a clear signal that enough is enough, already, and consequences are occurring that could be easily avoided.
We shall see. Wish me luck.
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