Rhinocrisy

A missive from the hedgehog woke me from my torpor, and I realize that I should give this blog its due diligence.

I wish I had a good story to explain the long silence. I was visiting a community of Arab exiles in Paraguay, whom I became acquainted with through a friend who trades in refurbished stereos with Arab expatriates all over the world. I found an old boot containing half a kilo of cocaine and an ancient illuminated copy of “The Lives of the Saints”, and had a devil of a time getting rid of both. I contracted a multiply-resistant strain of Staphylococcus and spent the month groaning in a hospital bed, my skin covered in sores that made it look like dried dates, while my doctors attempted to defeat the bug with various combinations of antibiotics. I unfortunately laughed at a man who stepped in a puddle of murky ice-water, who it turned out was a not-so-forgiving Jewish gangster, and spent the month hiding out with my old roommate in Ithaca until the whole thing blew over. I attended a conference in China and lost my passport, and so had to sneak back into the country with the assistance of a parade of smuggler groups, one of which made me work as a driver along the southern border of Panama for two weeks before allowing me to travel north again. I was trapped in a glass bottle by a djinn, and was only discovered a few days ago when my roommate mistook my prison for a bottle of Trader Joe’s olive oil. I went scuba diving and got my foot trapped in the maw of a giant clam, and had to take my air through a long tube until the clam (apparently popular as a local tourist attraction and therefore more valuable than my foot) released me. Meanwhile the skin on my hands partially rotted and they nearly had to be amputated. A fit of mania seized me and I took it upon myself to dig a well in the backyard; the frozen ground made it impossible to identify the water table, and I dug thirty feet down before I realized this. My yoga instructor spent a weekend in samadhi and conceived some brilliant insights about the nature of being, and enlisted my help to translate his fevered and fragmentary memory of his brief wisdom into a vernacular text. We argued almost constantly and in the end wrote almost nothing down. I experimented with a low-sodium diet that resulted in me dropping into a coma. In my comatose state I dreamt I was a salmon, desperately struggling upriver against the current, with the vague desire to spawn glimmering in my mind like a flickering beacon to guide me. Along with some friends I built a stone tower thirty feet high in a local park, working under cover of darkness and sleeping during the day. It collapsed after the first snowstorm and now resembles a ruined battlement. While drunk at a party I received a brief instruction in Tibetan throat singing. But poor coaching led to me developing two completely separate voices, which warred constantly whenever I attempted to speak and often expressed contradictory viewpoints. Recovery required learning to swallow my own tongue without choking. I received an envelope in the mail addressed to a former resident of my house, which I opened; the contents included a letter from the real Santa Claus and one of Baba Jaga’s iron teeth. My subsequent attempts to interest a society of cryptozoologists (some of the most frustrating, and, ironically, close-minded individuals I have ever encountered) in either of these items proved fruitless. A botanist I know isolated a phytoestrogen from a Colombian vine that he claimed suppressed homosexual urges and promoted heterosexual ones. A society of gay ninjas determined to destroy his research solicited my help as a mole. A new brand of long underwear I recently began wearing resulted in an unusual level of static accumulation, which caused me to destroy any keyboard as soon as I touched it; I proved unable to isolate the source of this problem for several weeks. My roommates discovered flatworms in a bunch of tripe they had purchased with the intent of making rennet for use in a homemade Havarti cheese, and got the rest of us tied up in their bullshit legal dramatics with the provider of the infected meat. Fuckers. I stumbled across some bones while jogging, which turned out to be those of a dromedary camel, a mystery which eventually led me to discover a defunct bestiality society which used to run around these parts in the 1920s.

But the truth is it’s winter, and I’m depressed, and tied up with work, and my own guts are strangling me. Which seems an ill excuse not to write. I’ll try to pick it up.

I’ve never believed in the expression “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” John Audubon was in his middle age before he became a naturalist and started work on Birds of North America. And it doesn’t even hold true for actual dogs. So I’m confident that it doesn’t apply to me, either. Even if I’m talking about adjusting something I learned at the age of eight months.

I was walking early. I’ve always been annoyingly precocious, and I started toddling around before my body was ready for it. My bones weren’t strong enough to support my weight yet, and the result was that I developed severe bow-leggedness. My mum used to call me “the McDonald’s Arch”, because I would wander around in a pair of yellow pajamas (which I presumably held up with one hand because I had no ass to do the job for me). I had to be fitted with a set of corrective orthopedic braces.^*

All of this is to say, I still have a slight bow-leg, and all my limbs have always hyperextended slightly at their full extension.

Lately I’ve been obsessing about my posture^†. I’ve slouched my whole life.^‡ As a habitual sloucher, I’ve gotten used to bending a certain way, too. I bend at the lower three lumbar vertebrae to do everything, including touching my toes, etc. Observation of other people indicates that this is definitely not the norm - most people bend at the hips. So I’m usually not in the habit of supporting my weight with my lower back, meaning those muscles are weaker.

This in turn affects the way I stand. Because I bow my back out all the time in order to slouch, I usually stand with my knees locked, flexed backwards. I can do this without using any muscles at all, exploiting my deformity and the strength of leg tendon to support me. I think this has left my knees weaker, as well.

I’m working on correcting these things, which mostly involves paying attention to how I walk, making sure I bend my knees instead of keeping them locked, and not standing with my legs flexed or my lower back bowed. This is really bizarre. It seems strange to be almost at the end of my third decade of life and still be working on fundamentals. Makes you pine for the opportunity to converse with your younger self and correct all these things. “Self,” I would say, “you really ought to stop slouching now. Otherwise, when you go insane in your mid-twenties, you’ll have a much harder time of it. It’s better to go insane about worthwhile things, self, like developing a crushing need to paint schizophrenic landscapes on the asphalt in traffic intersections, rather than boring things like walking. It’s unfortunate that you don’t realize how much there is to learn and grow, so you waste your life playing. Believe me, you’ll find it much more fulfilling to be able to play, with all you’ve learned, in your adulthood than it ever could be at your age.”

“Also, don’t spend so much time posting crap on Usenet in your teens,” I would add. “There’s this thing you’ve never heard of called Google Cache that will haunt you for the rest of your life.”

“(Scream of terror),” I would reply, trying to punch myself ineffectually.

“Cut that out, self,” I would say, deflecting my strikes off-handedly. “I’ve learned kung-fu in the interim.”

I suppose this is why people have kids.

^* Which were apparently very painful as they readjusted my bones; I would wake up nights screaming and crying.

^‡ Being tall is inconvenient in many ways. For example, eating is much more difficult for tall people. The journey from the plate to your mouth can begin to feel like a transatlantic shipping route if you don’t lean over. And greater height means more splatter if you accidentally drop a bit of food. These sorts of pressures add up and subtly encourage you to correct your height towards the median, usually by slouching or self-mutilation.