Wednesday, November 18, 2009
The GooBUgly
I have a record album, Ennio Morricone’s Colonia Sonopa Originale del Film “Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo (which you would know if you were reading carefully), which is just the fancy euro way of saying “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” It’s an album, a soundtrack, a movie, and a way of life. You know what I mean. Let’s be honest, we all have our Clint Eastwood (early phase) days, our Lee Van Cleef days, and even our Eli Wallach days, god save us. Well, I’m having them all at once. I’ve had some good things happen, some bad ones, and some ugly ones. This is my golden opportunity to foist a sample of each of these on you, and I bet you don’t even have your anti-foisting aprons on so now it’s gonna be your problem too.
The Good: For several years now I’ve been sleeping on a bed that’s had a memory-foam mattress topper. At first it was a wonderful supplement to our pillowtop mattress, all warm and pliant and memoriously foamy. Unfortunately, I sleep so heavily that, in the years it’s been in use, we wound up putting permanent divots in the damn thing. It’s become, if you will, repressed memory foam - it knows where we were even when we wish it would forget already. As a result, we’d wind up crawling into a big king-sized bed just to find ourselves hemmed into a little body-sized rut that kept us in place if we tried to roll about over-freely. I’ve been whining about it for so long that Kel finally got us a new one, and we installed it last weekend. Can I tell you? It’s AWESOME. It’s done off-gassing (anyway that’s the story I told Kel) and it’s all puffed up and responsive, and we sleep with the freedom of gazelles, were gazelles to lie stationary on a foam pad for several hours at a time. It feels good on my back and in my brain, since I’m no longer dreaming of trenches, ravines, and flumes from which my insensate self cannot escape. Yay foam! Bonus: When Zach comes into our room to sleep with us, which means, really, to sleep between us while keeping us both awake on either side of him, we can put him in a comfy bedroll at the foot of our bed, comprised of a warm comforter atop the old mattress topper, now folded in two. He seems fine with it and so am I. What the old mattress topper has to say about this arrangement is of no concern to me. It had its chance.
The Bad: I’ve been writing a short story for a few months now - the idea actually occurred to me about a year ago but I put off the actual writing for a long time because it sounded like a lot more work than most of the spindrift I usually propound here. But the damn thing got stuck in my head and would not go away, so I figured I’d try to write it up and see how long it turned out to be. Once I’d written about ten pages or so, I transcribed them to a text file but kept working along in my notebook, really starting to revel in the experience of delving into character and exposition and pacing and arc and all that writerly stuff I hear them writerly-types talk about. The story was coming along surprisingly well and I was growing increasingly happy with it and fulfilled by the process of writing it. I’d ground out another ten or so pages of handwritten text as of last week. That’s when I lost the damn notebook and half the story I’d written, just as it was reaching a climactic point. It took me several days even to confront this reality, believing that it would still turn up someday, that someone would call the number I’d written clearly on the cover, that hope had been kept alive, that the terrorists had not already won. Now I know better. The notebook - which also included numerous ideas for other posts, notes on cute things my kids do that I needed to put in their memory books, photos, receipts, recipes, medical records, and possibly a supermodel - is irretrievably gone. It’s been a week without word one about the words. I finally bought a new notebook yesterday but have yet to write in it. I have a few ideas, but I think I want to finish that blasted story first. It’s bad, but it’d be worse if the damn thing started haunting me.
The Ugly: Enchondroma. It’s a benign cartilagenous cyst, not actually that uncommon, that forms in bones - typically bones of the arms, hands, legs and feet. I learned about it as the result of a series of events going back five months, when I was chasing down Jesse (aka “the rocket-powered bowling ball") and I slipped on the carpet and I fell down hard on my own foot. The pain was unexpectedly sharp and intense; I figured I’d broken something internally but after a few minutes of labored breathing and directed visualization it actually started feeling sort of normal again. Within a few weeks it really only hurt if I messed with my toe, bending it backwards. No problem. Except over time, that symptom did not get better and actually started getting worse. I wasn’t even able to do some basic yoga anymore. Still, it was such a little thing to complain about - I felt like a drama queen, but of course a manly one. Finally I resorted to seeking professional assistance. “No problem,” the podiatrist said, “probably a bone chip in the joint capsule. We can just pluck it out with crochet needles and a dirt devil.” To allay my concerns further he had me take an exrai, which produced a clear image of a 9x13mm cyst growing inside the bone of the lower part of my big toe. “Oh!” said my DPM. “You need a second opinion.” That took another month, by which time the toe was pretty damn sensitive to any back-bending or downward pressure. I learned at the new DPM’s office that my cyst was the sort that grew inside the bone, slowly swelling it up as if a balloon were being inflated, stretching the outer bone wall till it was so weak that it could fracture if I just looked directly at it too forcefully. However, he seemed to have a firm grip on how to fix me up: he’s got me on the board for surgery sometime in December, probably, when he’ll just open up the toe, cut a window in the bone, scoop out the cystic matter, drill a hole into the lump of tibia that forms the inner part of my ankle, dig out a bunch of little “morselized croutons” (his words) of bone, cram them into the vacancy left by the cyst, close my bonewindow, sew me all back up again, and leave me on my ass for three weeks and on crutches for two months. Then I’ll be ALL BETTER. I am emphatically not looking forward to any of this but it is better than letting the situation deteriorate till my toe falls off and then attacks me in my sleep. And all that time I was thinking it wasn’t worth bothering medical professionals about an ache in my metatarsals, when it turns out I was just being a (very manly) enchondroma queen. SEE? UGLY!
But no, I really need the surgery and my toe is all achy. And my notebook is gone but I’ll rewrite the story. Plus at least I have a nice new mattress topper that barely even smells weird anymore. Ugly, Bad, and Good. I’m ending with Eastwood. It makes me feel tougher.
