2.52: The Back Blog

There are moments in your life when you see all the choices you’ve made laid out for you, like the decision tree in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Each step builds on the last leading you, inexorably, towards dragging your body across the kitchen floor at 1 AM on a Sunday morning. For me the chain of events started not with a birth but with the first back drama. I cast my memories back to the day, a few years ago, when my back was out and my partner was there to help me heal. Fast forward and my partner is on her own journey along the beam awaiting the coming eclipse and I am alone and in pain on the carpet. Every step from A to B was the result of my own actions and serve as a real wake up call to remind me that choices have lasting consequences and neglect can ultimately destroy everything you are trying to become.

I’ve long been the sort of person who fails to put on bug spray because mosquitos don’t seem like a big deal out here, only to be the fool scratching up and down his legs a day later. That is to say I am the worst boy scout ever. Though it is totally within my means to be prepared, I often approach life with the thoughtlessness that leaves me both clearly prepared and unable to act on the preparedness.

I bought a backboard specifically to help me stretch out my back and get it (and me) in better shape. I used it roughly a dozen times before it became a pants rack. Prepared, but failed to execute on the preparedness.

I bought and studied over 50 books on the writing process only to use nothing from them in the actual teaching of writing.

I can name half a dozen aspects of my life in which this is true–especially in love. It all points back to an infernal laziness or lack of will to execute anything in the mid term. I do well short term. I fail at mid term. In the long term, it adds up to an ultimate fail, which is why I found myself on the floor alone at 1 AM writhing in pain. It is where I stayed until 4 AM when I managed to get up and get myself to bed. I’m up again now and basically mobile. The pain is still there, as is the understanding of why it is. That’s what this blog is about after all.