Writing with a 36 point font is a concession to my vision - a necessary adaptation that permits me to track the words i write but interferes with the pace of thought. Is that wellness - a constant tradeoff between what is easily achieved balanced against adaptation? In the past week i suffered food poisoning such that i thought i was gonna die, or more accurately i took a hard look at the fact i am gonna die. Nor were the symptoms all that gruesome aside from a radioactive liquid stool i was afraid to expose to air for fear of killing the planet and all life herein. Compared to some maladies i’ve encountered this was even benign in so far as i could not eat, nor wake up from demon haunted dreams of subducting continental plates with prehistoric plant life feeding on my dream state. And as the universe is so fond of synchronicity this weeklong state coincided with the evaporation of a sciatic tangle that has plagued me profoundly for four years, across four continents and had forced me to seriously consider the value of my existence. So pernicious and insidious was this tangle that the inflammation created pus pockets in my groin that disallowed reaching my toes in a seated position without great pain. Willingly or not the effect on my gait was so persistent that the muscles in my right leg became enervated and began to atrophy from evading the pain - consciously or un consciously. And then spontaneously one day within the past two weeks the core of the tangle found its way back to stasis. It may have been from accentuating the horse stance i do daily as part of my efforts to remain supple and cheerful in the face of overwhelming odds, but there was no anticipating the contrast between the two states. So in gratitude, i now walk three circuits of the long block where i live and found a way within my addictive personality disorder to enjoy a single cigarette daily with my “caballo” of mezcal.
Is this wellness? I haven’t written in just about a month and have become mindful of the dissonance it creates for me - not the tormented driven anxiety which accompanies fatuous oaths, but like the phone call with an old friend you know is waiting to occur though you own no phone, better yet a visit that is on the horizon though too far distant to spy the mast - flat earthers not withstanding. The process of writing often holds for me solutions to problems that elude understanding using the blunt force of thinking - really such a crude tool for perceiving the more remote characteristics of our universe. Writing often seems something like a ouija board yielding threads and relationships like forms emerging from a fog. The wellness for me in such dynamic is the informative aspect. While a robust curiosity is a gem to respect and value in one’s repertoire of senses, perception and the capacity to reason is useful for its capacity to discern sense from nonsense, or as is often the case, reason’s remarkable ability to be wrong. With writing, while certainly not a perfect lens for peering into the labyrinth of one’s darkest recesses it beats the shit out of a witching stick, or trying to read the tea leaves of social media for a clue about the digital avatar you have become, or are becoming. My sense is searching for self on a server somewhere is as silly as it is dangerous - certainly not wellness.
In the deepest void of my sciatic despair, i believed that with the logical combination of diet and exercise it would be possible to untangle what had become tangled - is that wellness? I remember walking with luggage embraced in front of me like a pregnant woman, and thinking to myself, while not a cure, for some reason walking that way was less painful. And now we are full circle back to the inevitable paradox - does one live for relief from pain by whatever measure or means, or accept the reality of suffering? I don’t know. I know it gives me great pleasure to walk unhindered by a sensory presence of pain that had become closer to me than any one of my wives at their most loving. The forced fast of my food poisoning excursion reminded me how much i prefer svelte to the denial one gains from eating for comfort and wearing its pudgy raiments so proudly just like the “Emperor’s New Clothes”. There is so much of my life that seems predicated on denial, and not. I was once given a birthday card which read “Da’ Nile” is more than a river in Egypt. Clearly it was a pointed commentary concerning a mutual understanding about me, between my wife and her requisite gay friends. The irony being i was certainly in denial, but not about whatever it was they would snicker about between themselves; it was the fiction i’d contrived for people whose behavior did not match their expressions. I wanted to believe their words, but ignored the meanness of their behavior - that is not wellness. She subsequently abandoned me 5 days after i enjoyed an appendectomy for a perforated appendix - possibly the kindest thing she ever did for me - and there was much kindness in that messy human experience.
I quit drinking and smoking for 10 years about this same time - an equally interesting act of denial that was more from fear than any particularly earnest quest of good health. I refused to accept responsibility for my poor choice of companion - i equated her absence as punishment from the universe for excesses i’d been cautioned away from since the raucous 60’s gave way to the “greed is good” ethos of our rapidly shrinking future. I suppose at some level i believed the same about being assaulted by sciatica. I had gone from running 20 some miles a week for years to searching for some way to anticipate whether my next step would buckle my leg out from under me or send shooting pain throughout my lower extremities. My decision to drink after a 10 year hiatus came at the end of a 3 month commitment to a school in the foothills of Nepal. Again i would not accept responsibility for the fact i wanted to help people that did not need my help. More bullshit - i went to expunge my guilt on their dime and couldn’t hack the fact that i was more committed to helping myself than plumbing the realities of what they needed and whether i had it in me to give. Next stop South America where i was repulsed by the mercenary corruption made chic in Ecuador. Though acclimating to the possibility that every step for the rest of my life would be fraught with pain, i’d not yet reached a point in my wellness that i could see clearly the personal projection i’d made onto an entire culture largely based on unexamined fears and ambitions entirely my own.
And not, Uruguay is more progressive, and Ecuador is more reactionary, and externalizing conflicts one experiences in the course of a lifetime as political realities is not wellness. What i accomplished in Uruguay was to take up smoking after 10 years not. The thinking, if i can reconstruct it, would have been, if i’m gonna suffer, i may as well enjoy it. For a while it worked and i had a ball - sort of. I discovered myself a changed person. The gamble of fame or even awareness by another human being of what my work reflects about me, receded in importance to the actual acceptance of what i had given myself through simple discipline - the gift of self awareness, and destruction of ego. Just as my last wife was alluring such that i’d to look past the lack of emotional nutrition at our table, i’d conveniently ignore the very real likelihood that birds of a feather flock together. My own un-wellness may have simply starved her from our home. I don’t know, but i do know the experience of trying to draw as best as i know how what i see, has taught me much about personal limitations and flaws i could barely accept much less make use of in the creative process. Yet here i sit once again flogging the indecipherable; using the inept in hopes of rendering something cogent to anyone with curiosity - go figure.
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illness - a sonnet
i came out ass first - some may have called that ill,
it’s just my dumb luck being sick when profitable.
are you not ill today due to your pill,
or well because you like to be tractable.
i like drinking more than the hangover
so i drink the way i live - quietly.
illness doesn’t know it’s not a flower
until you get a cup and told to pee.
you will remain ill until you are well,
you become well the instant you say so.
careful - you can die of wellness - a hell
known to anyone who’s known as fatso
it’s sad and lonely to have too much wealth
an illness best cured by losing one’s health
jts 10/08/2018
http://stoneartist.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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