TUESDAY, 4 APRIL, 2000, PHILADELPHIA

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I gushed sycophantically about my new-found saviour masseuse friend? No? You didn’t mark it on your calendar? I can’t imagine what your problem is. Anyway, your poor, aging, crispy, brittle Marquis has had a relapse to the nth degree. Woke up yesterday with a screaming howling back that would not bend, and a thigh that was about to pop out of its socket like a Barbie leg. Damn pathetic. I was awash in pain and, moreover, anger. I had to give the stairs a test run before I walked down with my $10,000 PowerBook which I was loathe to drop. Had to first see what I could and could not do with my body so my legs didn’t collapse from under me as my computer went tumbling down the stairs. You see my (possibly) skewed priorities here. I don’t care if I take a spill and crack my skull open, but good lord take not my computer! I haven’t backed up in months! Test run down the stairs, each step, I shouted to the empty house, “DUMB! DUMB! STUPID! LAME!” The problem was at its worst when I sat. Roiling waves of spasms and contractions that I imagine were similar to childbirth, but on the other end. So I stood most of the day. Paced, really. Which made everyone in my department a little nervous. When my legs got tired, I would sit, but sort of prop myself up like one of those toys where the monkey holds onto the bar and you squeeze in the bottom of the toy and he goes spinning about and … oh c’mon, you know what I’m talking about. Propped up my the arm rests, torso hanging pendulously. “Dumb dumb stupid dumb,” was my mantra. I was labouring under the assumption that things would diminish with the day, which they did not. Don’t you love labour lost? So I found myself a chiropractor in town who could see me in an hour, scootled thither, and got popped. Besides my whiney, baby reasons for wanting to get this over with right-then-that-very-second, the thought of being crammed into a tiny airplane seat on Wednesday (tall boy here, hello!) for 4 hours when I couldn’t even manage to sit in a chair like a normal person was so perverse and wrong! No way, uh-uh. So I got crrracked. Which was hella freakin’ freaky, actually! I’ve never been cracked, twisted n’ popped befo’. “Take a deep breath. Relax. This is going to feel a little weird.” Didn’t I just hear that line yesterday in “The Matrix”, said before Keanu Reeves gets a huge plug jammed into his cranium? Relax? Cha-roit, muthafuckah. And so the room flashed white for a moment and the cracking echoed about the room like flubber and I thought, I’m paraplegic. I just know I’m now a paraplegic. I’ll never play the oboe again. Or do my patented solo-synchronized swimming routines. I’m going to sponsor a telethon and be wheeled out at functions like Christopher Reeves and the public will sigh en masse: “Oh, so sad. So young. So much potential. Whatta movie-of-the-week.” Hélas, my self-indulgent fantasies will not come true. Not this week anyway. What happened instead was an abrupt cessation of pain from my back, throughout my Gluteus Ubiquitous and down the leg. Pain gone. Bing. Blammo. And of course the best thing about pain is that when it abates, the lack of pain is almost orgasmic. Sorry for the ill-health deluge. Nothing short of home movies could be so boring. But this is a diary, dammit, and lately, this is what has been consuming me. Tomorrow, off to New Orleans. Certainly better stories are imminent.