King of Pain, King of Life

Been on a Police kick lately. In my world, that stuff is all still fresh and new. What's forty years across the human musical timescape? Blink of an eye. Maybe you have to be olden to take this perspective, but maybe being olden brings a lot of rich reward. Copeland sure has some interesting interviews up on the interwebs as well.



As I've mentioned before there were aspects of my 2019 summer existence which really sucked. One of the major ones was physical pain. To recap that, I managed to grow a benign tumor deep in my pelvis. It had been growing for some while and eventually began pushing my lumbar spine out of line and smooshing some of the lumbar nerve roots, causing lots of pain.

Sting was writing about a different kind of pain, but his words can be useful for anyone facing pain. Well, in my opinion anyway. This summer I had the pain of loss and the pain of pain. Today, as I write this on September 25, 2019, I find the composition, melody, and lyric quite uplifting. There is no life without pain. But life isn't only pain, and pain has a wonderful way of framing the rest of experiential living. What quality of pleasure and enjoyment can one experience with nothing to scale it against, with nothing to provide scale, context, perspective? How can such visceral, beautiful music arise except from the ashes of suffering?



Don't get me wrong (if I'm looking kind of dazzled -- old people rock, even if like me they're mostly a bunch of dickheads!), pain sucks and isn't enjoyable. But it can be formative and forging, and since none of us can avoid it, my thought is that we're all well advised to make the best use of it. The only other choice is to let it destroy us.

Yesterday a bunch of super people wielded the magical power of modern medicine in my behalf. They injected steroids into the tissue surrounding my smooshed lumbar nerve roots. My pain departed immediately, and as of this morning it's still gone. There's no way to tell the future so I have no idea if this is a one-shot, long term fix. Maybe yes, maybe no. There's some reason for optimism given the way my body's efforts to heal itself were trending, but only time will tell.

At the moment I'm pain free. I can walk without pain, and I've discovered that I've been altering my gait to compensate for the hurting, so now I've got to get my gait back to normal. A mere trifle.

So that's my deal for the day. Here's hoping that all of you kind readers are well and finding ways to revel in and enjoy your mortal existence.