After 9 months in the hospital and 9 months at home with my mom, I am finally on my own again. Here’s to everyone that sent love, prayers and affection, everyone who lassoed, harangued, and cried, and to everyone else that leant an ear. WE did this. YOU are the ones who brought me back. I love you and I’m excited to see what’s in store. More chronicles of adventure to come as adventure arrives. Brooklyn in time, but for now the Beard’s name is Baltimore!
when i was young man i was a great artist in my own mind and assumed i would die young, as true artists tend to do, or go mad, and thereby become immortal like Buddy or James Dean or Janis, but somehow I kept on living due to the fact that I was too poor to afford herion or a fast sports car or a chartered airplane, and so I got too old to die young and eventually I turned 70, and here I am. No longer the artist I thought I was, but if you ask me immortality is not all it’s cracked up to be. I prefer life itself… That is how a writer is born. You go, you see, and then you tell the others.
This video is like the minimalist techno of rehabilitation and achievement or what microbiotic cells are in science, complex beyond understanding yet so small one could pretty easily miss a million.
You see the trick is, my dead ankle just moved a millimeter. Maybe two? 18 months ago today I sat in a hospital bed in an induced coma, pre-scheduled for months of surgeries I couldn’t immediately complete because I was still in the process of being saved. So, it’s a big deal that I have been walking a lot more and further on my own.
But the biggest deal of the day is that little twitch in my ankle. You see, for 18 months nerve damage has ensured that the only feeling I have in my right foot is electric chaos. I’ve been told that my ankle may never move again.
So, yeah, maybe these just look like sweaty socks, but I’d argue they are the beginning of a miracle in motion.
A bad case of math. A failure to adequately read instructions.
5 pills x 30 days = 150 pills
4 pills x 30 days = 120 pills
120 pills / 5 per day = 24 days of pain relief.
The government and pharmaceutical industry regulate controlled substances, limiting their disbursement to 30 day intervals. Thus if a completely legal prescription was to be wrongly consumed at the rate I have outlined, a well-meaning person in pain would find himself sweating out a completely secret, yet absolutely ingrained opiate addiction.
I spent the majority of my 30th Birthday in bed. I was by no means alone (the smiling, balloon-carting crowd around me was working lovingly, even against my objections). But there was a peeking darkness, a shade uncovered. I wasn’t just turning thirty (OLD, OLD, OLD!), I was doing it on my back in a nursing home. The big win of the day wasn’t my birthday at all, but instead the 40 minutes I spent up IN A REAL WHEELCHAIR.
A year later, I spent my birthday weekend in Washington DC, carousing museums and cowering side stage beneath the fury of the PA in my favorite concert hall of all time. And today, my actual day of birth, I made a point of going into physical therapy early, before further festivitives, so I couldshow all of you the greatest gift I’ve been given. Endurance needs work and the right leg and arm could use improvement, but here it is: I CAN ACTUALLY WALK AGAIN!
Love, always, friends, and to those that pushed me kicking and screaming (often literally) to stand on my own again. Here’s to a year that brings even greater joy to all of us.
Do not allow yourself to be mastered by irony, especially in uncreative moments. In creative moments try to make use of it, but only as one more means to grasp hold of life. If its use is pure, it is itself pure also, and one must not be ashamed of it. If you feel that you are too familiar with it, if you are afraid of your growing familiarity with it, then turn to great and solemn objects, before which it becomes small and helpless. Seek the depth of things, for irony never penetrates there—and when you go thus to the edge of what is great, find out at the same time whether this form of comprehension arises from a necessity of your being. Under the influence of solemn events, it will either fall away from you, if it is a thing of chance, or, if it really belongs to you and is innate in you, it will grow stronger and become a serious tool and take its place among the means by which you will have to build up your art.
I’ve been graced by moments of love both severe and delcate, epic and serene. I’ve known passions so pure and unadulterated, felt hands so small and soft, that even the heart’s most extreme hyporbele offers only injustice. In theory, returning undying adoration has been the most steadfast flag of my existence, but, when you think about it, isn’t every Romeo, by definition, a little self-obsessed?
In honor of Valentine’s Day, I’d like to reflect again on the idea of “love at another level” as learned from those who stood with me after the accident. I’ve found that the mark of true companions isn’t infailability, but an ability and willingness to rebuild in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. It may not be infinite or unquestioning, but it is steadfast and secure.
And so, I bring you, not a love letter, but instead a rather stern admonishment from a friend. You see, even at our best, as we strive to love with an adult’s intensity, we are completely capable of being an asshole (or at least completely forgetting what we should actually be after). As those who love me will tell you, I am no exception:
Jacques Brel -> Quand On N’A Que L’Amour -> LOUD
There are 50 lines in Radiohead’s “Fitter, Happier,”OK Computer’s somewhat creepy aside and each is a backhanded affirmation of existence within recovery. When you parse it out, it’s almost like a true or false test. Take a look below to see how I scored a 78%. Care to compare?
It’s been awhile and while my public self-reflections often paints an uninspiring outlook, the fact remains that things are improving immensely. It’s startling to think, but a year ago, simply holding my head up straight was an achievement. Things have progressed so far beyond that that it’s almost inconscionable. Here’s a list of 25 things I’m genuinely pumped about…
I thought about shaving my head today. I almost did it. I thumbed through the attachments, clicked the one-inch guide into place, and ran the razor slowly through my hair, pinching the strands at the end to approximate. I toyed with the idea of plugging it in, then prudence began to attach itself. I Googled pictures of mohawks, thinking perhaps a half measure would be enough, pictures of Rihanna with shorn sides, the top of her head unaffected (would a woman’s haircut work?). I think I look too much like me and it’s throwing everyone off.
When I was swimming in the deepest murk of eternity, in the swallows of pharmaceutical intoxication, I was convinced I had cut my penis off. The sexual implications are murky, I admit, but this wasn’t so much about being a woman as hiding myself completely, unrecognizably in an irredeemable act of escape. For awhile, I donned the mask of a young asian girl, and my waking dreams were aalmost anime. I didn’t become this girl, I hid inside of her. It was a guise so foreign that no one, not God or the Devil, would ever find me out.
I no longer believe in death as we fear and imagine it – it’s an abstract as unknowable as anything eternal. What I believe is that we dissolve and reemerge in equal order, and that if we shed all attachments, we might even be ageless. Even shorn, I possessed my essence, and I knew I would emerge safely, if unrecognizable, when I gave everything up.
But love gives soul to doubt and conviction dissolves as easily as anything else. I submitted to the backwards pull of emotion, and, as reality became manageable I allowed others to make me something resembling myself again. It’s hubris entrenched in cruelty to try to erase ourselves when so much still lives in others. That’s the inherent flaw in “irredeemable” acts. When they turn in on themselves, they reveal a desire, without a will to carry it out.
I’ve decided I’m not over being me after all…
They say that times of crisis are the true test of one’s character. I wouldn’t know because since my character took a powder that year, leaving in its stead a jewel-bright hardness…
What remains of your past if you didn’t allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don’t have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories, procedural and depopulated. It’s as if a neutron bomb went off and all you’re left with are hospital corridors.
I’ve been in New York for over five days and I didn’t look up to see how high it really was once. That says something about the people here and how well they take care of me.
As a kid, I used to shimmy off to Terrace Lanes with some regularity (my high school was right across the street so we even went as a class from time to time). My driving school was right next door, my first deep inhale of cigarette smoke was by the snack bar, one of my scariest experiences was in the parking lot, and I even “borrowed” a pair of shoes (what a young nogoodnik!).
Weird returning at a much the same height I remember, but this time around was a completely new experience. Sure, I didn’t bowl my best game, but still, it wasn’t bad considering I did it with no legs and my left hand (I am NOT a switch hitter). Keys to throwing rocks from a wheelchair:
1. Smaller ball is better.
2. Slow roll, less arc = infinitely more control.
3. ALWAYS lock your brakes (or way more than your toe will end up over the line).
4. Your brother will absolutely lie to you about how good he is (lucky strikes, my ass!) to try to make you feel better about it.
