Stiff

 

Jesus. I just realised I didn't write a post today. Typically I'm able to set aside time in the morning, before (or just after) any work meetings begin, but today there's been a series of them, with a few even running over. Before lunch I had to quickly steal away to the store to get some gnocchi (and various other groceries) to throw in the pan and scarf down just in time for a 1:00 meeting. I haven't even had time to enjoy the fact that it's sunny today.

Last night (or early this morning, you decide) I got up to take a leak. As I made my way back to the bedroom I noticed something odd about the living room, so I ventured in. I saw a window-shaped shaft of light stretched across the floor and didn't understand what I was looking at. It took me a second to realise that a setting full moon was casting its eerie light onto my rug. It peered at me through the trees as it sank slowly down. When I got back into bed I checked my phone to see what time it was. 6:45. Oh well, I thought, I'm not likely to fall asleep now. And I didn't.

I still managed to squeeze in a bit of yoga, some mindfulness practice, and even a brief workout. Since I don't have any weights in my apartment, what I do is wrestle with my demons. I take a backpack and fill it up with as many 1L bottles of water, wine, whiskey and mezcal that it can hold, and then use it to do bicep curls, overhead presses and squats. I need to get ready for bum fights somehow. At the moment I'm just a scrawny bald guy with a scraggly beard. Bulking up is the only way that I'll stand a chance against the riff-raff here.

Right now I'm aware of some tension in my spine. It's calling out to me. Today's yoga session incorporated a lot of twists. Look back through my previous posts to find the one about when I broke my back. I remember the doctor recommending that I avoid twists. Surely she didn't mean for life, did she? Given the way my back is feeling, perhaps she did. Imagine sustaining an injury and never being able to do a thing like twisting again. 

This daily yoga practice has increased my awareness of my inflexibility. Certain parts of my body feel so stiff and rigid that I can't believe it. At times my bones feel like brittle pieces of wood that are liable to snap if I leaned too deeply into a stretch. What a draaag it is getting old. It makes me wonder if part of the mental hardening which occurs as we age is due to the physical structures of the brain experiencing the same elasticity challenges.

I don't think there's much left in me today. I'm suffering from resource depletion. Sustained cognitive load due to work sapping all of my creative juices. Work should be considered a crime. I'm hopeful that in the future, whatever nightmarish dystopian future humanity finds itself in in the year 2123, that people will look back and say "people used to work?" I hope they marvel in astonished stupidity at their ancestors who twiddled away their youth and the prime years of their lives just to make scraps - struggling to pinch pennies and stressing to make ends meet so they could pay off their mortgages and retire with their wrinkled, ruined bodies - while the rich exploited their labor and meticulously accumulated all the world's wealth. For me it's either universal basic income or the complete collapse of society, whatever it takes to topple the concept of a career.

What an ugly word.