that movie i got the other day? Simple Men? SUCKED. i haven’t even watched the last half yet. fuck it. that movie just plain sucks ass big time. awful acting, in fact it’s more like pretending coupled with line recital. even at just $2, i feel very, very ripped off. what a horrible, pitiful movie. i mean it is just terrible. everything about it just reeks of suckness. or suckosity, i forget which.
also:
i’m going to get an exacto knife for my finger. i’m not sure what i’m going to do, but i’ve got to do it. i don’t think i’m going to do anything drastic, like amputate it (after all, i AM a musician, and a guitar player at that – and with my luck, i’d just have phantom pain anyhow). but i want to dig.
stay away from green beans, kids. you don’t want that uric acid building up and giving you gout. trust me, there is nothing more painful than gout. there have been many, many occasions when the pain was so great that my heart palpitated, and i would have done anything –anything!, i tell you!- to stop it. on a pain scale of 1 to 10, i’d say i’ve hit 23 on at least 55 occasions.
when the weather changes
when the seasons change
when it gets colder, or hotter
when the humidity changes
when it’s wet, and the water is not perfectly room temperature
when my pulse rate goes up
when i sneeze
when i run or exert myself
when something touches it just a tad too hard
these are the occasions when i have to sit down in silence, because even thinking or talking or listening or moving or standing hurts like hell. sometimes it goes all the way up my arm and even into my chest.
the pain ranges from dull achey throbs to constant aching, to sharp spikes, to constant dullishly sharp knifing hell. the worst parts range in frequency from one or two times a month to several times a day, depending on the above factors. it lasts for several minutes during peaks, or hours and even days during periods of aching and/or throbbing.
i’ve described one version of the pain before as this:
it’s like having a new and awful compound fracture in the bone of the last segment of the finger, and then slamming it in a metal door jamb.
sometimes, it just feels like i’ve been stabbed straight through the flesh and the bone with a butter knife.
DEBILITATING is much too gentle a word.
what’s hilarious is that inevitably there are probably many people who think that it’s either “all in my head” or that i’m just lying or something; that it’s somehow not real because they’ve never really seen me during a serious attack. and most of the time, depending on the weather mainly, i’m pretty much fine. i mean, i can interact and stuff, i just can’t exert myself much. so you’d never even know it unless you saw me at a particularly bad time.
just one of many reasons why i want to give up. i live for making music, absolutely NEED to make music; and since i can’t do that at just any old time that i feel like it, i just have to swallow the sheer horror of having my life’s very purpose taken away.
do you know that i have trained myself to play pretty good guitar with just my first two fingers, and sometimes even my pinky? sometimes i even use gouty-finger, but not very often at all. i should be immediately declared a guitar god, or at least the next Django Reinhardt.
i have performed minor surgery on myself before. nothing like digging into the core of a digit or anything. but this lump of hell must go or else.
i went to a doctor once, over ten years ago now. he took a battery of tests, including MRIs and X-rays, and when nothing came up (nothing showed, even though there is a visible lump in the side of the end segment of my #3 finger and i no longer have a fucking fingerprint and you can see the veins through very translucent skin), he declared that i must have tendonitis. i was supposed to have EGS – electro-galvanic stimulation – which consists of sticking your arm into a water-filled stainless steel bathtub and then plugging the whole fucking mess into a wall outlet and sitting there like that for a half an hour. i never went back for a second visit. i could hardly even drive myself home that day.
