There’s an old saying: a man can get used to anything, even hanging. Truth. Live with certain conditions long enough and you forget you’ve got problems here and there; they become a part of you, the pain becomes a part of you, as much as your hair or nails or teeth. It’s why I don’t talk about pain too much in this forum. I always have pain. ALWAYS. It’s only a matter of how severe the pain is. Some days it’s much worse, and you might hear me talk about it. Some days it’s much less and you might hear me say how great I feel. But the pain is always there, in my shoulders and hips and knees and wrists.
Pain is on my mind because my rheumatoid arthritis is flaring up. I can tell now, after years decades of having this happen. My energy is nowhere, despite my current mania. I slept for 8 hours, just had my morning coffee and oatmeal, and I would love to go back and sleep for another 4-6 hours, maybe more. Don’t feel up to much of anything and it hurts everywhere. Nothing making me scream today (and I’ve been there with this). But added pain everywhere, more oomph in the ow than I’ve had for months. Sit me down for five minutes and I can barely get out of the chair. When I do get up my gait is awkward; I limp and pull my body along, I’m not walking.
Suck-ola.
The condition has even drained me of the ability to HATE it this morning, like I do so often. I can’t muster the energy to feel that burn right now. Too fucking tired. Right now, all I can feel is thankfulness that my fingers and hands aren’t too badly affected. As long as I can sit in this chair, I can type away and at least let my mind out. Even if my body is in prison again.
You may not know the worst part of this for me, so I’ll share.
What I need to do, what I MUST do, is move; the one thing I don’t WANT to do. I want to sit and take pills, take the pain away, let me sleep, please. But that (doctors tell me) will only make it worse. I gotta walk again today. Go out and move everything that’s so fucking stiff right now. And the walk will only exhaust me more. I’ll come back like I did yesterday, burnt out and feeling like I can’t – CAN’T get up out of the chair even if the fucking house is on fire.
So once again my walk is put off ’til late in the afternoon ’cause damn if I’ll waste my entire fucking day feeling like shit. Which means I play roulette with the weather. Rotterdam has entered autumn proper and rain is the soup du jour. Trust me, dodging chilly little bullets of water from the sky is no picnic when you can’t pick up the pace to reach cover. And the wind has been just fickle enough that an umbrella is only a sail out there, something to drag me along the pavement and wear down what little energy I have just fighting to keep it under control.
Like my body, neither my writing nor my music is quite right right now. I deciphered my notes from the other day; it’s good, but it’s a character sketch right now more than a story. An excellent foundation to begin from, and the lashings of the story are in there, too. I just have to take them out of the background and paint them in properly, boldly. A few well placed phrases and sentences should suffice. But I must admit to a little disappointment. It’s not the full out, complete writing in one go I’ve been experiencing and that’s just kind of a let-down. I like sitting down and getting it all at once. Proofing and corrections are easy then. Getting a solid skeleton, tho…that’s different. That takes time and thought. What I need to put in must go in with precision or not at all.
As for what I’m working on in the studio…Ugh. I made the proper decision yesterday and hooked up to again listen to what I’ve got going. It’s good to just come back and listen a few days; let your ears rest from the song before you try to tinker with it anymore. So on went the equipment BEFORE my walk. I was gonna wear my iPod and listen to music, which I knew would only set me up to expect a certain crispness from my studio stuff that of COURSE I can’t accomplish because I don’t have compression. In other words, I knew if I saturated my ears with high quality, tightly compressed music right before trying to hear my own stuff I’d be disappointed, guaranteed. So move everything for 20 minutes listening. It was a good decision. It was hard to not start moving sound levels, to JUST listen to the mix 4 times through. After the third time thru, I did up the kick and snare drums. A teensy bit. Then I shut down, because I was already fighting all sorts of issues. The mix sounds like it’s wrapped in cotton to me. It’s there, everything is there, but it’s not where I want it. I’m itching to move the EQs. But this is where “commercial” studios set their levels, and I AM trying to sell this, so I hope I can learn to live with it. Hear it for what it is, and appreciate it. So far not much progress on THAT.
I confess that I haven’t got down on the ground lately to do battle with my tummy tyre. That’s a far bigger issue nagging at me than I like to admit. My ass is my ass: I think it’s huge, but it’s on my backside and unless there’s occasion for me to remember how big it is I can forget about it. My stomach, on the other hand…That’s my pet, sitting in my lap as I watch tv. I poke it more than stroke it: we don’t like each other. We never have. It’s just this stupid stray thing that makes its way into my house once in a while. I want it gone. I know how to make it go. But it really hurts for the last week. Getting down is dangerous enough: there comes a point about 3 inches from the floor where I just DROP. Getting up is the real challenge. I have to move like a mountain climber, securing each bone, each joint before taking another step. Right now I don’t think I could get up without help, so I’m not going down.
There’s a place on all my pants that’s worn down more than the rest: the front of my thighs. I have a habit of rubbing there in an elliptical pattern. Don’t know why; a nervous thing I picked up, I guess. Been catching myself rubbing away a LOT lately. On and on it goes…
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