Current Jam:
Fam.
I don’t have any tattoos. I know people I love that do and it’s not like I’ve never or don’t consider them myself. Such a conscious decision to alter the body you got from the factory is one that I respect as much as I respect abortion and birth control and the number of piercings you got wherever because that Seemed Right ✊.
That’s cool. I’m pro psychologically positive modifications to the meatsack. We have to live in it our whole lives after all, and what that’s like mutates over time.
For me, hip replacement surgery is my first tattoo (I could have lived without it but that would have sucked and so the thought pulled and cozened…) and it was a great decision. Not least it means a bottle of Percocet and apologies to folks for whom that is problematic (I’m in earnest, I hold concern for you, and I hope you are in a good place) but for me that means a good night’s sleep and a 15:00 nap (on the dot) the next day.
Obviously, I’m back and work and I’m not taking those just because they are nice, anymore.
But let’s talk about meat. Oh my goodness, it’s so much better with some changes, from what it had become. The newly mechanical is factory smooth, swifter than conscious intention and free of the grinding (literally, I could feel it in most every motion (and if you’re like “did that harsh your groove?” the answer is “Fuck yeah it did, frend.”)).
Meat, like you can slap down on the grill, is just stuff made of protein and makes up a good bit of what you are. When you have surgery, surgeons (I have this on good authority, thank you organdoctor ) will do their level best to not fuck you up worse than you are while they are trying to fix you. They are pretty good at it. That said, I’m waiting for the mid-surgery imaging that will show what looks a lot like tire irons sunk into my flesh, pulling my meat apart to expose the stuff that holds the meat up. So it can be sawed out.
That shifting of the vital flesh leaves a mark. I will be months sorting that out.
But that’s not all! In addition, compounding this injury (and it is; intentional; medicinal; recoverable) there are the years the meat spent moving in Wrong Ways. Now it may move in Newly Strange ways that are a rerun of the past and yet still wholly different from anything that has gone before (You are Older, accept this (no), you do not comport in rest nor in motion (no) like you did before (unthinkable, irrevocable, maddening, enraging)).
So you do the little sets of exercises that the 40 year old you would scoff at. You do them and sweat and afterward, after sitting a spell, try not to limp when you stand again. You know that you’ve struggled through soreness and limitations of motion before. You know you can now. You “know” the “vast gulf” between the causes then and the causes now and you know the lies you are telling yourself about how easy this “should be”.
Relax, dude. You’ll need a longer runway. You’re heavier. Your thrust is less. You will have to balance your unchanged thirst against these.
You’ve always got daydreams.