For about a month now, the beginning of the week has meant staying at school from 7:50AM until about 8PM or so. Every Monday, I teach a 3-hour block from 7:50AM to 11:10AM (that includes two 10-minute breaks, in case you're puzzled by the math), then teach from 1PM to 2PM, then again from 4PM to 6PM. Luckily, all my classes are pleasant.
I manage to get some stuff done during my two-hour breaks, but I have a lot of work to do, and much of it gets shunted until after the last class is over. Mondays are long. Today was no different: I was in the office until 10:30PM.
Along with the burden of classes-- not a burden in the same way that hagwon classes used to be-- there's the problem of my body, which appears, at long last, to be falling apart.
Up to now I've been relatively free of back and joint pains-- chronic pain-- of any sort. Then, as of this past October, right after my folks shipped back to the States, I started getting pounding headaches.
I've still got them. They never went away. I simply stopped blogging about them until tonight.
Last week I acquired a new pain, which I'm tentatively attributing to a pinched nerve, probably due to a herniated disc. How the disc became herniated is beyond me; I don't recall having violent sex with a sheep anytime recently. I imagine I must have slept oddly one night, and then woke up with The Pain.
The Pain lies coiled in the base of my neck, on the left side. As I wrote to one friend, The Pain starts there, then radiates down two paths: one path slithers down to the inside of my left shoulder blade, the side closer to the spine; the other path roller coasters over my left deltoid, plunges into my biceps (or feels like it does), then makes annoying sensations in my elbow and, occasionally, my forearm. My left arm is painful to lift, and noticeably weaker.
The combined assault of the headache and the putative nerve pinch has convinced me to visit a clinic, which I plan to do tomorrow. I'm not looking forward to this, unless it leads to the doctorly insistence that I visit a massage parlor.
"Gimme the works!" I'll boom upon entering the parlor, fully expecting nubile young ladies in belly-dancing outfits to stream out of the back rooms to service me seventy-two different ways-- toe sucking, finger massaging, nipple gnawing, sac chewing, and of course, applying a hot iron to my schlong: every man's unspoken wish.
Alas, I'm pretty sure the reality will be nothing like the fantasy. Two hairy old women will waddle out, enormous knuckles dragging on the dirt floor. One will pull on a Gimp-style S&M mask and grab a whip; the other will pry a large axe from out of the skull of her previous customer, sharpen it absently against her granite toenails, then growl, "The poyne's by yer shyolda' bloide, roight?" as she brings the axe down on my spine, not caring whether I give answer.
It doesn't help matters that, along with the fatigue and the pain, I can't shake a certain refrain from my mind:
It takes a tough man to rape a tender chicken.
It takes a tough man to rape a tender chicken.
It takes a tough man to rape a tender chicken.
So-- how was your fuckin' day?
_
"Time oozed and bubbled like pus from the diseased vagina of a retarded goddess."
ReplyDeleteWow. If your Pain gives you enough inspiration enough to write classics like that, then writhe, Mutherfucker, WRITHE!
Um Monday... I read a book for a few hours, surfed the net, looked out the window and contemplated going for a swim in the pool, went for a drive, came back, ate a couple of hamburgers, had a nap in front of the TV, had a glass of wine and then read some more before going to bed.
ReplyDeleteYeah... Fuckin' Mondays.