Mont Blanc

I would not describe it as a cloud lifting, but more like a gallstone blasting.  Or a clot dissolving.  A vessel widening.  I'm referring to the improvement of mood, opening up of emotional range and the general sense that life is moving again.  It's been about a week of blockage, the certainty that some painful knot was draining me.  Physical and downright tangible it was.  Always there, muting everything into a low-level depressed wheeze.  But I could feel it this morning, the slight change, much like the weather which has returned to the cooling breezes of a normal Bay Area summer.

It started with the bad news.  Because there has been so much bad news, that is to say, my recent souring has turned every occurrence negative, I could sense the contrast.  Lorna, morning helper and reliever of the day-starting burdens of getting dressed, particularly in the sock department, not to mention tea-preparer, breakfast-maker, exercise machine assistant and all around maternal soother, was pissing off to her mountain cabin.  For a fucking week.  How any human being would have the gall to do this in my quadriplegic hour of need boggles the mind.  However, there she was on the phone boggling away with this very unwelcome information.  See you next week, I told her.

The thing that is inexplicable, particularly to outsiders, and unfortunately even to me, is that, say just the last week, I could find a way of blaming myself for Lorna's departure.  Oh, things would get twisted around to...why am I so dependent on her...why don't I have a backup person...some form of self-recrimination and self-loathing.  But not this time.  This time I simply got pissed.  Angered at her, the situation, but not myself.  Well, not too much anyway.  This redirection of the guns of psychic war makes all the difference.  It is what counts as progress these days.

Even better, I interrupted Perry on the playing fields of Stanford, and sought his assistance.  Would he come over and wedge my foot on the exercycle?  Sure, he said, about 10 AM.  And by 10:15, damned if I wasn't going at the thing like a hamster in heat.  Heat being pleasantly absent this morning, the cool night breeze stored in the carport's concrete floor.  So, I was cycling up a cardiovascular storm, listening to the BBC Radio 4 podcast of 'Analysis' on the rapid disintegration of Pakistan...and damned if the whole Pakistan thing, the parts I could hear between the thuds and creaking of the exercycle, didn't just send me into an aggressive state.  Pakistan pissed me off.  Having to exercise pissed me off.  Having spent a morning hour of my life span paying bills and opening a week of ignored mail, that pissed me off.  The fact that it was 10:45 pissed me off.  And Lorna's preposterous absence pissed me off all over again.

Which is to say that my lower extremities were now in neuromuscular hyperdrive.  The digital readout was clocking me at a virtual 30 mph, which is not bad for a guy with 1.2 legs.  And the energy kept coming.  Angrier and faster and faster and angrier.  The legs were pounding and I was pounding my opponents into dust.  Fuck them all.  Yes, there was the usual bladder race against time.  I could feel the water pressure building.  But, what the hell, I was only wearing shorts, easy to change, easy to rinse out if necessary.  And this workout was going to go as long as possible...just short of the point of sphincter exhaustion.

Getting off the exercycle is not such an easy matter.  But a deft blow from the right paralyzed hand knocked the right paralyzed foot off its clip.  The latter fell to the exercycle's plastic base with a satisfying metal crash, as the steel clip smashed down.  Easy to twist off the good leg, stand and lift the foot onto the central exercycle bar...working it back and forth in the mysterious way that somehow gets the cleats up over and down...always a mildly terrifying moment, relying on the spasticity of the paralyzed right leg to hold me up while the working leg gets over the bar and down to the concrete.  But there was less terror this time, more eyeballing of the situation, straining to lift the foot when a little strain might help.  And it did.  I collapsed back into the wheelchair with nothing to worry about except peeing.

Unthinkable to try to maneuver my legs onto the wheelchair footrests and head indoors, with only seconds before bladder meltdown.  So, the good foot holding up its bad counterpart, I did what any sensible man would do and headed for the back garden.  That's way back, in back of the vegetables, to my landlord's patio.  My landlord being gone, his Mustang having thundered out of the driveway half an hour earlier.  Problem was, by the time I got in position, a wet trail was visible on the red concrete.  And yet, due to a miracle, something on a par with Manon of the Spring, albeit less contrived, my shorts were not soaked.  This was due to the miraculous, inadvertent positioning of personal equipment in a forward pointing direction, right under the edge of my shorts.  Okay, a splatter here and there on the legs.  But otherwise dry.  And not shamed.

Who knows what changes a mood?  I wish I could say, but one thing seems clear.  You can't avoid the dark journey.  It's like the Mont Blanc tunnel.  The thing goes on and on, and there are too many fucking diesel trucks, and the air gets worse and worse, and all that raw jagged granite is starting to make you believe in Wotan and this is all the more credible, considering that if you back out of this tunnel, you'll have to spend days driving in Austria, so there's no alternative but forward...and there it is, daylight and France.  Both good.