And he are us.
I was never a huge Pogo fan, but I do kinda miss him. Walt Kelly's weird wisdom was a bit more universal than Dilbert.
I suspect it is a natural risk of blogging (maybe of being human) but I worry a little about repeating myself. I'm pretty sure I have mentioned the "we all get in our own way" aspect of this idea at least once. If I didn't cite Jerry Harvey's "How Come When I Get Stabbed in the Back My Fingerprints are Always on the Knife?" I should have. Jerry is a mensch, a Texas mensch, but a mensch.
I've also had the bit about the "organ recital" and that's about where I am going today, but different.
The alternative title for this could have been "Not for Sissies."
Over the last few weeks I have had a series of minor but annoying and somewhat painful battles with my body. I won't bore your with the details. It would be TMI anyway. But here's the thing. Pretty much like most people, I spent a lot of my life taking my body for granted. I wasn't an athlete so I didn't attend to its fitness or development. If it did what I needed it to do, fine. If it couldn't (as in bench press x hundred pounds or run a marathon), so be it.
I've never been really well coordinated. I was the kid who got relegated to right field. But I was not without my physical skills. I was a pretty decent instinctive wing shot, which I discovered duck hunting and in that weird 80s aberration, paintball. I've become a reasonably competent caster when fly fishing. I could do a hard day of physical work when I needed to.
But it is true that I pretty much ignored my body. Even when arthritis struck in my late twenties and impacted my fingers, for the most part I simply compensated and moved on. Now I suppose you could argue that if I had paid more attention then, that I'd have less to complain about now. Possible.
I've been pretty lucky. My teeth needed a lot of help in my late teens and twenties because they had been sorely neglected earlier due the family circumstances. There's the arthritis. I had a go around with diverticulitis in my early forties that only bothers me every half dozen years or so. A couple of hernia repairs, the prostate cancer, and some skin things that needed handling. It doesn't feel like all that much and more in the realm of normal wear and tear than anything else. The most recent medical thing was getting cataract surgery and in the process having my vision restored to what it was twenty-five years ago with no more astigmatism. That feels like a miracle.
What's got my attention now are the small annoyances. The pains that pop up with no obvious cause that persist enough to see the doc or make a visit to the chiropractor. The colds that seem to take forever to go away. [I've ducked this last for a while since I no longer commute to the office Petri dish where one gets exposed to the germ pool that includes young children via their parents.] The getting up three and four times a night. The profusion of slightly alarming but, it turns out, benign skin things that show up in new and different places all the time. The feeling that things don't really want to bend the way they used to when I get up in the morning. The inability to shed that extra fifteen pounds that I seem to have acquired in the last ten years not matter how hard I try--we were working out a nominal three days a week, missing once in a while, now we are planning every morning that we don't have a conflict.
It's all a reminder that the systems are slowly failing, not badly yet, but inevitably like the juice draining out of a battery.
I had a dream recently which involved losing my mobility to the point where I needed a walker. Now a cane I think I could handle, but in the dream I seem to have given serious thought to suicide as an alternative to the walker.
I wish the systems would all run reasonably well for however long I have got and then just fail all at once. This micrometer by micrometer decline has little appeal.
So maybe my body seems like my enemy now because I wasn't its friend back in the time I could have made a difference, and maybe not. I suppose it is what it is.
None of this is meant to take anything away from those of you who have had a major physical crisis and are doing what you need to do to fight your way back. I know there are a couple reading this and I have nothing but the highest regard for the way you are taking on the challenges.
I'm just bitching. Put it to the tune of "It's Not Easy Being Green."
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