What's the use?

Jetlag is pervasive, vague and mysterious, highly individual in its effects, impossible to predict, even difficult to communicate.  More surprisingly, this bout of post-travel fatigue has struck me deep in the soul.  For I can feel it.  I am not bouncing back.  I am returning, gradually, to whatever baseline functionality existed before.  But that's not saying much.  And there's something lingering.  A generalized achiness and, let's be plain, enfeeblement.  Standing up, never the easiest maneuver for me, now takes supreme effort.  And underneath it all, there is a simple realization.  I will emerge from jetlag, but not age.  Time is taking its toll.  I am wearing down, loosening, sinking.  My life's possibilities are waning.

I have a book to finish.  Which means I have some time to put in at a desk.  And the truth, sad and simple, is that this is becoming difficult.  Something about sitting.  Holding up my torso.  I don't know.  What I do know is that it hurts.  And there's a subtle drain on energy that goes with low-level pain that I simply have to face.  There is a way of handling this.  I can sit in a recliner chair with my feet up, laptop on my knees.  Not a perfect solution, and somewhat restrictive, but this should work.  It's that other thing.  The will.  How much more of this do I want to put up with?  Such are my thoughts.

I'm used to battling with my disability.  I'm not used to giving up.  But now I'm tired of battling, that's the scary reality.  I sense a general slowing down, even of cognition.  My eyes are gradually failing.  Balance, never my forte, seems to have evaporated.  Better be careful when reaching for the TV control, leaning across the kitchen sink, even venturing slightly beyond my center of gravity.  I can't feel where I am, and it's often an unpleasant surprise to see where my body is heading.  Toppling, listing, before I catch myself.

It's what I catch myself thinking that frightens me.  What's the use?

I am angry, fed up and, it seems, ready to give up.  It's 11 a.m., and I have a train to catch.  What's the use?  I have a meeting, sort of, in the City.  All I need is a newspaper, a notebook...and the one under my desk is too frayed and tacky to take.  So I glance around.  Never mind.  Got to go.  Grab the newspaper, flop down on the bed to put on the fanny pack.  A simple matter of grabbing one buckle with the working hand and wedging the other buckle against the paralyzed one.  Now lifting the back of the paralyzed hand to maneuver the buckles into place.  Something slips.  One misses the other.  I'm going to miss the train.  This is taking too long.  Everything is taking too long.  I can't even get to a train in time.  Even with all morning, damned if I don't find myself flailing about at the last minute looking for notebooks, then spastically messing about with my bum bag.  Time draining on and on.  

Finally clipped, I am up, no not quite, I am actually fighting my way up from the bed, staggering into the wheelchair, getting the footrests snapped into position, then getting the feet on them.  Now, the newspapers and magazines and salon.com downloads to read on the train...and damned if I didn't forget the Netflix video for the mail.  Out the door, backwards, of course to enable me to close the door behind me.  Down the ramp, then out to the street with a quick glance at the watch.  I am going to miss this fucking train.  I've missed everything in life.  Missed the mark.  Missed the point.

I roll straight down the middle of Fair Oaks Drive.  Not on one side or the other, but the absolute center.  The issue of facing or following traffic does not apply, because I am traffic.  I am the rural tractor leading a traffic jam through the hinterlands.  I am the forklift blocking the truckers at the docks.  Worse, I am the hard-to-see man in the small battery-powered chair, a black dot on the black asphalt, moving at 8 miles an hour and worried about the train.  A car swerves to avoid me, and I veer toward the right.  I make a nominal effort to look over my left shoulder, neck turning being rather difficult at the best of times.  Fuck it.  I swerve across the street, now facing the oncoming cars.  Bouncing, joystick all the way forward, trainwards.  At the main intersection, the traffic light is subtly anti-Semitic, deliberately discharging left turns and boulevard crossers before me.  Finally, I slip into the crosswalk, zoom past the bookstore, nearing and nearing and wondering what to do about the level railway crossing.  Such as, if the signal clangs five seconds before my approach, would I stop?  Considering that I am supposedly an exemplar of rail safety, would I halt ?  No fucking way.  I bounce over one set of tracks, then another, and that's it.  I am on the right platform, close enough to catch the train...and thinking "Paul, can you be nice to yourself now?"

Italy is the good mother.  Italy is far away, and the good mother is too.  But I need her.  She is somewhere inside me, and we have to find some way to keep in touch.  We do, in a sense, at lunch.  One of my nonprofit efforts has paid off, as someone explains, and I have much to be proud of.  I am at an outdoor café, faux Italian and staffed by a pleasant band of Hondurans.  I order the gazpacho.  And a little something else?  Oh, how about the grilled chicken panini.  The one with the mozzarella.  My lunch mate tries the Thai potato crisps.  Won't I have a few?  Damn straight.  Plus a latte.  And, yes, a chocolate biscotti.  Why?  Because the good mother is a bad dieter.  Because as someone wise observed, when you have a master-slave relationship with yourself, the slave always rebels.  And, it must be said, that in the midst of any serious rebellion there is little time for "what's the use?"