I am in pain, people. Ouch. The pain has at least a little to do with being out of shape, lack of exercise, abuse of the body in one way or another. Well, perhaps it could be traced more to an unwitting abuse of the body.. that abuse which time and lack of knowledge inflicts. The direct, hands on abuser was in fact, myself. I was young, I felt good, I was healthy so I took no precautions. I used my physical self to make money. I sold myself. Oh, Lord.. I do wish I had been a different kind of prostitute. That might have been fun for a while. No, I was the usual kind of wage-slave prostitute. I spent long hours humping away in a hard environment, with chemical mist in the air, physical challenges, loud machinery, no sunlight. At one point, in the long ago past, I even machined beryllium without any sort of breathing protection. The kind of machining I was doing allowed tiny particles of metal to rise up in a thin cloud, ready for the breathing in. Turns out that the metal is vigorous in it’s ability to cause lung cancer. Yikes. That was then and this is now. Now, there are regulations that attempt to keep folks away from the thin clouds of harmful stuff, away from the loud noises, away from chemical mists. It is too late for me.
I am almost elderly, at 75 and I am in pain. Ouch. What now?
Currently, I have a shoulder that is complaining. This makes my day more difficult than I want it to be. The shoulder is loud. He cries out, periodically and louder when I want to move my arm or sleep. I try to play piano, I try to play guitar and both things aggravate the shoulder. Doing laundry is a misery. What did I do to deserve this? The answer is: I lived. Repeated stress from using the shoulder, over 75 years, has brought me to this point. There are other things that have accumulated over time. Repeated consumption of more calories than I needed made me fat. Being fat made me less eager to go walking, less eager to keep doing. It kinda looks a little downhill from here. I don’t want to believe that, to let go and surrender. Nope. My tendency is to blame myself for the road I travelled to get here. I won’t accept that I just did what was there to do, the best I could, with the knowledge and maturity I had at the time. Nope. My bad. My naughty. My better start making reparations!
So. Sympathy? No and I won’t be going to the doctor yet. Maybe, after six months of constant pain, I will consider it. The challenge I face is to ignore the pain and/or sit it out for now. I still have desire enough to play music, to sing – so I guess I will have to put my nerve-endings on over-ride and push through a bit. One thing I need to do, though, is to not blame myself so much when I just want to sit in the rocking chair. Staring out the window, with my shoulder raised just right relieves… I shall allow me to do that for a while. No, there isn’t a lot of time left to learn guitar or piano or to sing and sing the way I wish to do but… I gotta sit down for a minute. The book (and typing) the guitar, the piano, the possibility of romance all will have to wait. I am on pause, trying to remain ready to re-start.
I have to realize both that I am wearing out and that I still have a bit of material left on the calipers, a little gas left in the tank, a little bit of smile to give. After all, I did make the church folk laugh at my naughty joke about King Charles being a queen (until we get the books reprinted). I have some miles to go before I sleep. Oh, by the by – I am excited about some new music I found. Two little hotties (Gen Z or X or something) who cobble together really nice, inane pop tunes that satisfy, thoroughly. They go by the band name of Ray Bull, check them out. Also, the fellow next door is handsome and mighty bed-worthy. There is that, still.
Ouch, damn.
Robert On The Air 