Sculpin

I swear, I’m not actually having a writer’s strike. It just looks that way.

For those catching up, it was about a year ago that I massively herniated a disc. Good ol’ L5S1. I can’t be accused of doing things by half measures; this thing was a centimeter in its smallest dimension. I pretty much extruded the whole contents of the disc. I basically put a bullet into my spine made out of my own meat — ewww.

The good news is, I had excellent medical care (Dr. Ren of the Polyclinic is exceptional!) and I’m making a good recovery. From what I’ve read, I’m way the heck out there on the lucky end of the bell curve. As of this writing, I’ve gotten away without surgery.

I still have some daily minor discomfort — my recovery may be miraculous, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Still, it’s rare that I need to take anything at all for it unless I’ve spent some significant part of the day doing some very particular physical motions. I can pretty much do anything I could before and now it’s more a matter of how long I can do it. (I do avoid long car trips and any kind of twisting under load.) My balance is coming back, slowly but surely, and I can walk a few miles now. Unfortunately, my post-herniation gait is something like what you’d see if you crossed Charlie Chaplin and an ambulatory pile of laundry. There’s no spring in my step at all; it’s flumph flumph flumph, dumpy and awkward, with my right foot kicking out to the side goofily. I’m working on it; it’s coming along.

The bad news is that my recovery’s slowed down and I have a lot of digging out to do. I guess I kind of expected that when I was able to walk again, however ridiculously, it’d all be gravy from then on out, but it doesn’t work that way, and ye gods is there a lot to do. The deconditioning alone… damn. I kind of fell off the face of the world last fall when I recognized just how much crap I had to do and how slowly and carefully I was going to have to do it. At that same time I was coming to grips with just how life-changingly crappy most of 2009 had been. I wasn’t prepared for how emotionally taxing having a painful injury like this would be, especially in the post-crisis stage. It overwhelmed me, and I apologize to folks who reached out to me and didn’t hear back from me. I’m back now.

One of the first orders of business is plain old housekeeping. At this point it’s more like Combat Housekeeping. When I was stuck in bed, I liked to imagine that Josh was keeping the rest of the house more or less in order. This was an obvious fantasy — Josh is one of the most clutter-prone people I’ve ever known. But since I couldn’t get out there to see it, I figured I might as well keep my hopes up. Well. It’s pretty much a warren of filth and disorganization, is what it is. But we have attic storage now, at long last, and together we’re digging out. At the rate we’re going, this could last until June.

Today I’m working on the pantry, which is full of food that expired last year. (The chickens are in heaven - so many treats!) What’s left seems mostly to be beans. This is largely my fault; whenever I see beans on sale, I think, “Oh boy, I like beans! Look how cheap!” And then I buy them, sometimes by the case. And they accrete. Looks like we’re going on the Legume Diet for the next who-knows-how-long.

Josh is taking the overthinking of beans to dizzying new heights; he’s made a project of recording the weights of the drained beans in various cans. Turns out that the bigger cans were a pretty lousy deal for us. I suspect that we got a bad case, but I’m hesitant to buy another can of beans to compare.

So that’s pretty much it: beans and cleaning up. Glamorous, huh?

ETA: I have ten jars of honey. Ten. Yes, a lot of them are different, at least one was a gift, some of them are varieties that are relatively hard to find, and yes, honey has a shelf life of centuries, but still. Cripes. I think that’s enough honey.

Mary Daly has died. It was with mixed emotions that I learned that this afternoon. When I read Gyn/Ecology and Wickedary in 1991 or so, I thought they were the biggest piles of bullshit I’d ever seen, in content and in form. Having started in on that line of thought, I could hardly help pursuing it — her work was such irresistibly loopy, maddening crap, so fractally obnoxious in ways that cast unexpected light on what I thought, felt, and knew. I didn’t give a good goddamn for her status as a grande dame of feminism; she had bats in the attic, all right, and I set out in a private fury to identify them, bat after bat.

That’s how Mary Daly wound up being important to my development as a young feminist, not to mention my development as a person who can fail to give a good goddamn. Even almost twenty years later, rereading a little of Gyn/Ecology’s preface, I find ways in which she is juicily wrong. I feel lucky to have had her work to react against. For all her flaws — and there’s a vast taxonomy of them, as I recall — she was brave as hell, and her work scratched open a small, new opposing bravery in me. Ave atque vale, old Lunatic.