The schmucky non-macaroni-cooking me...

I've spent the past two days immobilized on the couch, cracking an eye now and then to take in Law and Order episodes, which I find as soothing as a cold soaking compress on the brow. Beginning with the thumping musical intro, the first glimpse of the corpse by a startled jogger, all the way through the wise-cracking cops, until the cold-as-ice DA makes her starchy appearance, then to the righteous end where the malfeasant is led away, angry yet-chastened (unless he's a psycho, in which case he's usually creepily smiling). What I'm saying is that Law and Order is a nursery tale: utterly and happily predictable. This seems to be what I require in my undone state, like a restless toddler listening to Dr. Seuss for the 400th time or Goodnight Moon. (Goodnight corpses, Goodnight Logan, Goodnight Benson, Goodnight DA, Goodnight wits, Goodnight skells, Goodnight perps...)

I have a couple of chronic conditions although it's hard to know what sets them off. Both my maladies are painful and one involves lots of non-lethal bleeding. There's not much in the way of painkillers or any modern miracle that helps. But when one or the other disorder topples onto me, there's no bargaining. I'm just there, squashed under the rubble like a half-dead survivor, having no thoughts about anything, except a glimpse of eventual light and the dim sound of human rescuers.

So I read to take my mind off various unhappy sensations, and, I've discovered afterwards, that I always form a black resentment towards whatever book I seized on. Like a savage, I see my paperback as a repository of pain, pain that was sucked off my hours of desperate reading and might still live inside the pages like a malevolent little demon. This time I chose The Purple Decade by Tom Wolfe, and I still feel like going grrrr every time I walk past it.

This time, flopped in a suitably darkened room, I considered how unlike myself I was at that moment. Getting up to feed the cats struck me as equivalent to climbing K-2, and I broke out in a sweat at the very thought. It also occurred to me to make some packaged macaroni, but the effort of putting water in the pot made me tearful as a whipped child. And then it occurred to me, This blubbering incompetent is me.
How innaresting.

A humbling thought. As myself, I write, and as myself, I blubber and can't make Extra-Cheesy Macaroni. And when I think about it, there's no difference between us. I'm me when I'm a wreck and I'm me when I'm not.

I could say the cure is attitude--just pull yourself up with yoga and a handful of wide-spectrum vitamins, but I think that's crap. Anyway, there's a real joy when I come blinking through the cannon smoke, my infinitesimal battle over, at least for a while. Personally, I like what George Herbert said, after a hard 15th c. bout of plague, syphilis, leprosy or whatever the poor bastard had:

And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my only light.

Me too, Georgie-boy.

After the crud, I live and write.

And what a white-hot blessing it is.