Reviews of My Life #3
There’s been a leak coming down from the living room ceiling for a month or so. It was landing in a pot in the center of the room. But then the drip got faster so I went up in the closet and took down the big-ass-summer cooler and I put that under the drip. Zero stars.
I’ve been looking after my health lately. I’d seen this YouTube clip of this strength guru from Texas, and he said that if he was put in charge of a nursing home instead of a gym, he’d be able to get more than half the senior citizens out of the nursing home and away from the nurses and the drugs and imminent death and all that and he’d cure all these seniors citizens of their maladies by using just four simple barbell movements: he was talking about the deadlift, the overhead press, the squat, and the bench press. And he didn’t want them phoning it in either, these seniors were going to lift heavy—heavier than they ever dreamed—each week adding five pounds to each barbell movement. They, or their nurses, would keep detailed training logs. And each week, five more pounds added to the bar. What would follow, within six months (of lifting like this, and eating like a person who cared about strength training), would be slabs of muscle, and newfound power, and lots of empty beds in the nursing home. I don’t know how many stars to give that.
I went and saw my friends the other day for something we were calling “The Long Lost Lunch.” We started drinking at one in the afternoon and we stopped drinking around nine o clock at night. A very successful use of eight hours. Ten stars.
One of the big things that happened during the Long Lost Lunch was that we all committed to reading Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, which I’m not sure any of us will actually do. Ten stars.
Another thing that happened during the Long Lost Lunch was that I decided to give up protein powder because my friend called it “baby formula for adults”. Ten stars.
I’ve been trying to take better care of myself because I had what could have been a cancerous tumor. One star.
The internet said it probably wasn’t a cancerous tumor, it was probably not even a tumor at all, being that it was on the underside of my pinky, where the Internet said people often get a non-life threatening (or even finger threatening) cyst. But I probably wouldn’t have done anything about the strange bump on my finger at all if I hadn’t been causing me pain when I tried to lift weights in the power cage I’ve recently installed in my writing room. My theory was that the bump on the underside of my finger was from working with my hands all my life, and I’d caused a bone spur to develop and what I really needed to do was get a razor blade and slice my finger open and jam a file in the slit and file that calcium deposit down till it was smooth and I had a normal digit again and then I’d simply super glue the wound closed. But Rae wanted me to go see a doctor. Three stars.
He was an orthopedic surgeon.
And is an orthopedic surgeon.
His office was by the mall. Two stars.
His waiting room was full of ordinary freaks with melting bodies and curly cue bones and Jesus Christ, I thought I should just lop the finger off myself by closing it in the elevator door and then throwing it in the waste basket, fleeing these waiting-room mutants who had revealed the true terror(s) the human body had up its sleeve for any of us if we so much as sneezed wrong in our sleep or aged. One star.
But he turned out to be really a helpful doctor, after an X-ray, he said, “I think we just have to stab it real hard with a sterile needle” and I said, “If you want” and he said “If I want? If you want.” And I said, “Well I don’t like to make anyone do anything they don’t want to” and his reply was “I want to.” Eight and a quarter stars.
He sprayed some strange stuff on my finger and the sensation of the finger went away and then out came the syringe and he stuck it in my pinky and I heard a pop and all of this took three minutes and I was cured. He said it (the cyst) might come back and if it came back I could just stick a needle in it myself. “I can?” He nodded. Did I want the rest of the numbing spray to take home with me? I took the rest of the bottle with me. But later that night I put it in the wash machine of the building by accident which probably would have been okay but then I also accidentally put it in that ridiculous industrial (Satan’s) dryer we have and the stuff exploded on our stuff. The doctor came out as I was paying and said, “Oh wait, be careful driving home.” He meant because of the numb pinky. I have no idea how many accidents a year are caused by people who have numb pinkies and shouldn’t be behind the wheel. Seven stars.
Can I tell you something? I just went upstairs and talked to Ann who lives in the apartment above us and I mentioned that it’s been a month since the leak started and she said yeah, they hadn’t said yet when the repair was going to happen. She wasn’t excited, I could tell, about the repair having to happen, because it’d involve them having to tear up the floor in what was their office and also the room they slept in. Zero stars.
The drip is happening in the room where Rae would try to work-from-home on the days she works from home. But the repetitive sound of the drip slapping the bottom of the cooler drives her insane so she has been coming down the hallway and fielding her teleconferences and doing all her photoshop and InDesign in the room where I have the power cage and the typewriter. And she is so sweet about it and says I shouldn’t stop what I would do with my free time, in that room, and I should just pretend that she is not on this ZOOM call with the CEO, and so I’ve been bench pressing off camera and the sound of metal slamming on metal on metal makes her flinch and let out a nervous laugh and the CEO says, “What was that?” But between sets I am doing two minutes of retyping my manuscript and when the typewriter goes clangclangclangclangclangclang clangclang clangclangclangclangclang clangclangclang. clangclangclang. clangclangclangclangclangclang. clangclangclang all my problems go away. Ding! It’s time to reset the carriage. Nine stars.
This building doesn’t have skin it has bricks and limestone. This building doesn't have hair it has tar. This building doesn’t have eyes it’s got windows, like my living room window, that look like it’s painted over with milky glaucoma, because of the leak coming from the radiator in the apartment above ours. This building doesn’t have bones it has steal beams. This building doesn’t have muscle it has cement and marble. This building has a gym in the basement. A twenty four hour gym. Ten dollars a month, site unseen. I signed up, figuring there was no way in hell it could be a rip off—went down there and opened the door, fucking room was empty.
amazing
I love these so damned much. Of course the doctor wanted to jab him. And YES to the weight lifter freeing all of the people from the nursing home. And yes to Rae making zoom calls from his office/gym. And no one is going to fix the leak. He’ll have to move the bathtub in there. All the stars.