They shot this at a beach I used to visit. Never considered playing speed metal there.
Sometimes
3 years ago
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Sunday, February 24, 2008
My Checkered Youth as a Metalhead
My very first music purchase was a cassette tape of AC/DC’s classic, Back in Black. I played it, on a newly-gifted Panasonic tape recorder, till the magnetic tape snapped from wear. Sitting on my bed, a fifth-grader, fists-clenched, as Angus Young’s demonic guitar licks pumped out the likes of “Shoot to Thrill” and “Have a Drink on Me”, I experienced the first thrills of what would become a lifelong addiction. That was an excellent beginning, but after that, my past as a metalhead has been a checkered affair.
Metal, an early version of it, was the music of choice for the miscreants who used to beat me up in shop class. Junior high school was, quite certainly, the most miserable period of my life. Shop class was the worst time of the day. I was a nerd, and the shop bullies lived very troubled lives. I sat in the back of the room, averting my eyes to avoid any action that might remind them that I existed. This was exceedingly difficult, because their shirts danced with lurid images of angels and devils, pentagrams, and blood. Molly Hatchet, Metallica (yes, at least I think I remember a very early Metal Up Your Ass tour shirt, it would be worth a fortune now if it existed), Iron Maiden, Led Zepplein, Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, and so on. These angry preteen sociopaths dominated shop class, PE, the school yard, every other place it did not take a B average to enter. They wore their concert shirts with pride. I was to later learn that many of them came from abusive backgrounds. Terror of these bullies made their music all the more fascinating. I kept wondering how it was that rock bands could advocate the worship of Satan so openly. In hindsight, I realize, they had incredible taste in music.
They did not sell metal shirts at K-Mart. To get one, a lad had either to garner the freedom, and social skills, required for actually attending a metal show, or have a very cool older sibling, one with the worldliness to have grown tired of a band and moved on to something else. Eventually, I had such a sibling. My first rock T shirt was a Pink Floyd T, emblazoned with the image of a spectrum refracting a beam of white light into colored rays. It was a hand-me-down from my sister, who was eschewing her early days of rock and roll, drinking, and older boys to pursue the clean-cut life of a good girl who would later grow up to shoe horses and drink chai lattes. I cut the arms off, to make it appear less feminine, and wore it proudly. This must have been the ninth grade, and by then, I had been telling my classmates I listened to nothing but classical music. A lie. In truth, I did not listen to music at all, except for what I experienced from watching Friday Night Videos or as the guest on Saturday Night Live. It was on TV somehow, that I discovered the Plasmatics. I knew that somehow, I should not be permitted to see images of Wendy O Williams, clad in a leather bra, cutting televisions in class with a chainsaw. My parents were oddly strict and very religious. Not because of any prohibition, but simply due to general somberness, they never played music. By strange extension of their desire for quiet, our house was a very nonmusical place.
This was the early 1980’s Metallica had just played their first few shows, Punk Rock was reaching an early apex in California, and hair metal was becoming truly big, My sister’s ex-boyfriend, a charming young mysogynist devoted to cars and drinking, fell from a scaffold at a Van Halen concert and suffered a serious brain injury. People in NYC were piercing their cheeks with safety pins. I wrote the logos of various bands on my Pee Chee folder, like any other white kid, to affirm my status as a nonhomosexual who did not openly wish to join ranks with the Mexican contingent. In truth, however, I sat that whole era of music out.
This, highly political, element of music listenership, seemed to be a serious issue. In South San Francisco, a working-class suburb of the bohemian metropolis, the white denizens of the place felt besieged and outnumbered, marginalized and usurped by encroaching hoards of Asian immigrants, a large and well-established Mexican community, and the presence of an enormous homosexual counterculture flourishing in the city proper. Whites were a minority in South City, then as now. It was not so much racism as otherness. These other cultures were vastly different, and their members more numerous. Organized along family lines, they were tightly knit, and extremely competitive for jobs, grades, benches at the mall. As for the gays, the objection to them was religion, plain and simple. Perhaps, also, there was a fear that they would somehow recruit our members, assimilate some of us into their gayness. It could spread, somehow. Middle class men, with families, would abandon their families and go to the city to be gay. All of this, of course, is what filtered down to me from above, distorted by my own perceptions. My parents were uprooted Midwesterners, staunchly Catholic and utterly perplexed by the clash of cultures. The major blowback of all of this was the need to pick a side. There were two, rock, and soul. I chose to rock.
To choose rock meant to reject disco, and everything associated with it. Disco was meant to be hated, despite its infectious beats and alluring clothes. It was, quite literally, gay. To choose rock meant to align myself with Judas Priest, Queen, and a number of other bands to which I never actually listened. KSJO was San Francisco’s only real rock station, and to emblazon a binder with its yellow diamond logo was a strong statement of allegiance. Rock was working class. Rock was white. "Soul", what we called soul, was neither. It was an artificial aggregation of everything else. It included Disco, but also, paradoxically, oldies. It included Latin American Music and R & B. I watched Dionne Warwick sing on Solid Gold, but I knew it was somehow bad to like her. Except for the AC DC tape, I listened to very little music. Most of the rock I heard, I overheard from the car radios of my sister’s creepy, fascinating friends. They would play Jefferson Starship, Foreigner, Van Halen, the J Geils Band, whatever could loosely be classed as hard rock.
By high school, my smart but much cooler, friend, Dwight, had introduced me to Rush. Here was a band I could stand for. No songs about hedonism and girls from them. They sang songs about reason, freewill, science fiction, and how leadership and clear thinking could triumph over adversity. At one time or another, I owned every Rush album up to Hold Your Fire. As an adult, I realize that, if I had immersed myself in the nascent punk scene, or snuck to the city to see the first shots in what would become the thrash movement, I would be a very different person today-a serial killer or a convict, a dead rock star, a carpet layer, or perhaps an office worker with six kids. It was Rush, and to a lesser extent Pink Floyd and Yes, that kept me from listening to anything that was cool and less than ten years old. I have Rush to thank me for my status as a biology lecturer and part-time evolutionary biologist.
I don’t know whether to love them or hate them for this. There are too many possibilities. Instead of listening to the Sex Pistols, dying my hair blue, and chasing girls, I drew elaborate dungeons, read Astronomy magazine, and played Hemispheres over and over till I decided Circumstances, on the B side, was a real work of genius.
There are too many possibilities. As an adult, I despise just about the entire Rush catalog. It comes off as didactic and grandiose-technically perfect and completely missing the point of rock and roll. I have Bertrand Russel to read when I want to hear a voice of reason criticize Jesus, not Geddy Lee. There are some incredible moments here and there, such as 2112, and the more Sabbath-inspired pieces from Caress of Steel (pretty much Bastille Day, that's it).
Like all Dark Ages, this era is darker in hindsight than in actuality. My close friend in high school, Rolf, an all-around evil nerd, introduced me to the real thing-metal. He was clean-cut, accepted by the kids in shop class as a low-ranking hanger-on. Dorky, and evil. We stayed up together watching videotapes of Faces of Death and the Evil Dead. He liked scary shit. Together, we logged hours playing Dungeons and Dragons, listening to Venom, Accept, Merciful Fate, and Ozzy Osbourne, nursing our darkest fantasies of rape and pillage. It is only now, as I write this, that I notice the connection between the music I listened to at the time, and the fact that in years of playing D & D, I never once played a character that was not evil incarnate. No druids. No paladins. A string of evil clerics, antipaladins, necromancers, and the like. Strange to think of it now. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I never brought any of the music home. I was in the process of rejecting Christianity at the time, quietly and secretly, and the soundtrack to evil would have raised a million satanic, red pentagram flags with my parents. I wore a lot of black clothing, even then, and played Dungeons and Dragons. Even lacking a Venom album on the turntable, I was interrogated about possible ties to satanism more than once. In fact, I owe my rejection of Christianity not to Ozzy Osbourne, or to King Diamond, but to Issac Asimov.
As an example of how uncool I was, I shared an art class, two years in a row, with members of the early thrash band, Death Angel, and barely noticed. I was a junior in high school at the time, and had come to the conclusion that, unless I did something radical to reinvent myself, I would never, ever, have sex. I bought a West guitar from the want adds and attempted to learn to play. I got nowhere.
Dennis Pepa, co-founder of Death Angel, and a fixture in the early thrash movement was a student at El Camino High school. A senior, so unmistakably cool it was impossible not to notice him on the five or six days a year he chose to attend classes. He was a genuinely decent guy, as were his cousins, various relations, and hangers-on, all of which made it into the band. He was also great with pen drawings. One afternoon, probably on an errand looking for his metalhead friends that sat in the back of the room drawing pictures of corpses, he looked over my shoulder and inspected the iguanodon I had drawn in charcoal pencil.
Dennis:
“That’s good. I like it. Hey, do you play?
My response:
“Yeah, a little guitar. I’m not very good.”
Dennis:
“What do you play?”
Me:
“Blues.” (True, actually, I had decided that, since all rock comes from blues, blues I should play.)
Dennis:
“Cool. Sure you don’t wanna come play with us some time?”
Me:
“Nah. I really suck.”
That same year, Kirk Hammet, of Metallica fame, produced Death Angel’s first demo tape.
Death Angel was a Phillippino thrash band. In one stroke, he dissolved any illusions I might have harbored about metal being music for whites only. Here were Asians doing it better, and looking much cooler doing it. He was also the first real metalhead who was ever nice to me.
I don’t think I spoke a word to him, before or since. I never played with them, obviously, never met Metallica. Cest la vie.
I bought a copy of Metallica’s “And Justice For All” two years later, living in a noisy dorm, my first week at UCLA, but that is another story.
Metal, an early version of it, was the music of choice for the miscreants who used to beat me up in shop class. Junior high school was, quite certainly, the most miserable period of my life. Shop class was the worst time of the day. I was a nerd, and the shop bullies lived very troubled lives. I sat in the back of the room, averting my eyes to avoid any action that might remind them that I existed. This was exceedingly difficult, because their shirts danced with lurid images of angels and devils, pentagrams, and blood. Molly Hatchet, Metallica (yes, at least I think I remember a very early Metal Up Your Ass tour shirt, it would be worth a fortune now if it existed), Iron Maiden, Led Zepplein, Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, and so on. These angry preteen sociopaths dominated shop class, PE, the school yard, every other place it did not take a B average to enter. They wore their concert shirts with pride. I was to later learn that many of them came from abusive backgrounds. Terror of these bullies made their music all the more fascinating. I kept wondering how it was that rock bands could advocate the worship of Satan so openly. In hindsight, I realize, they had incredible taste in music.
They did not sell metal shirts at K-Mart. To get one, a lad had either to garner the freedom, and social skills, required for actually attending a metal show, or have a very cool older sibling, one with the worldliness to have grown tired of a band and moved on to something else. Eventually, I had such a sibling. My first rock T shirt was a Pink Floyd T, emblazoned with the image of a spectrum refracting a beam of white light into colored rays. It was a hand-me-down from my sister, who was eschewing her early days of rock and roll, drinking, and older boys to pursue the clean-cut life of a good girl who would later grow up to shoe horses and drink chai lattes. I cut the arms off, to make it appear less feminine, and wore it proudly. This must have been the ninth grade, and by then, I had been telling my classmates I listened to nothing but classical music. A lie. In truth, I did not listen to music at all, except for what I experienced from watching Friday Night Videos or as the guest on Saturday Night Live. It was on TV somehow, that I discovered the Plasmatics. I knew that somehow, I should not be permitted to see images of Wendy O Williams, clad in a leather bra, cutting televisions in class with a chainsaw. My parents were oddly strict and very religious. Not because of any prohibition, but simply due to general somberness, they never played music. By strange extension of their desire for quiet, our house was a very nonmusical place.
This was the early 1980’s Metallica had just played their first few shows, Punk Rock was reaching an early apex in California, and hair metal was becoming truly big, My sister’s ex-boyfriend, a charming young mysogynist devoted to cars and drinking, fell from a scaffold at a Van Halen concert and suffered a serious brain injury. People in NYC were piercing their cheeks with safety pins. I wrote the logos of various bands on my Pee Chee folder, like any other white kid, to affirm my status as a nonhomosexual who did not openly wish to join ranks with the Mexican contingent. In truth, however, I sat that whole era of music out.
This, highly political, element of music listenership, seemed to be a serious issue. In South San Francisco, a working-class suburb of the bohemian metropolis, the white denizens of the place felt besieged and outnumbered, marginalized and usurped by encroaching hoards of Asian immigrants, a large and well-established Mexican community, and the presence of an enormous homosexual counterculture flourishing in the city proper. Whites were a minority in South City, then as now. It was not so much racism as otherness. These other cultures were vastly different, and their members more numerous. Organized along family lines, they were tightly knit, and extremely competitive for jobs, grades, benches at the mall. As for the gays, the objection to them was religion, plain and simple. Perhaps, also, there was a fear that they would somehow recruit our members, assimilate some of us into their gayness. It could spread, somehow. Middle class men, with families, would abandon their families and go to the city to be gay. All of this, of course, is what filtered down to me from above, distorted by my own perceptions. My parents were uprooted Midwesterners, staunchly Catholic and utterly perplexed by the clash of cultures. The major blowback of all of this was the need to pick a side. There were two, rock, and soul. I chose to rock.
To choose rock meant to reject disco, and everything associated with it. Disco was meant to be hated, despite its infectious beats and alluring clothes. It was, quite literally, gay. To choose rock meant to align myself with Judas Priest, Queen, and a number of other bands to which I never actually listened. KSJO was San Francisco’s only real rock station, and to emblazon a binder with its yellow diamond logo was a strong statement of allegiance. Rock was working class. Rock was white. "Soul", what we called soul, was neither. It was an artificial aggregation of everything else. It included Disco, but also, paradoxically, oldies. It included Latin American Music and R & B. I watched Dionne Warwick sing on Solid Gold, but I knew it was somehow bad to like her. Except for the AC DC tape, I listened to very little music. Most of the rock I heard, I overheard from the car radios of my sister’s creepy, fascinating friends. They would play Jefferson Starship, Foreigner, Van Halen, the J Geils Band, whatever could loosely be classed as hard rock.
By high school, my smart but much cooler, friend, Dwight, had introduced me to Rush. Here was a band I could stand for. No songs about hedonism and girls from them. They sang songs about reason, freewill, science fiction, and how leadership and clear thinking could triumph over adversity. At one time or another, I owned every Rush album up to Hold Your Fire. As an adult, I realize that, if I had immersed myself in the nascent punk scene, or snuck to the city to see the first shots in what would become the thrash movement, I would be a very different person today-a serial killer or a convict, a dead rock star, a carpet layer, or perhaps an office worker with six kids. It was Rush, and to a lesser extent Pink Floyd and Yes, that kept me from listening to anything that was cool and less than ten years old. I have Rush to thank me for my status as a biology lecturer and part-time evolutionary biologist.
I don’t know whether to love them or hate them for this. There are too many possibilities. Instead of listening to the Sex Pistols, dying my hair blue, and chasing girls, I drew elaborate dungeons, read Astronomy magazine, and played Hemispheres over and over till I decided Circumstances, on the B side, was a real work of genius.
There are too many possibilities. As an adult, I despise just about the entire Rush catalog. It comes off as didactic and grandiose-technically perfect and completely missing the point of rock and roll. I have Bertrand Russel to read when I want to hear a voice of reason criticize Jesus, not Geddy Lee. There are some incredible moments here and there, such as 2112, and the more Sabbath-inspired pieces from Caress of Steel (pretty much Bastille Day, that's it).
Like all Dark Ages, this era is darker in hindsight than in actuality. My close friend in high school, Rolf, an all-around evil nerd, introduced me to the real thing-metal. He was clean-cut, accepted by the kids in shop class as a low-ranking hanger-on. Dorky, and evil. We stayed up together watching videotapes of Faces of Death and the Evil Dead. He liked scary shit. Together, we logged hours playing Dungeons and Dragons, listening to Venom, Accept, Merciful Fate, and Ozzy Osbourne, nursing our darkest fantasies of rape and pillage. It is only now, as I write this, that I notice the connection between the music I listened to at the time, and the fact that in years of playing D & D, I never once played a character that was not evil incarnate. No druids. No paladins. A string of evil clerics, antipaladins, necromancers, and the like. Strange to think of it now. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I never brought any of the music home. I was in the process of rejecting Christianity at the time, quietly and secretly, and the soundtrack to evil would have raised a million satanic, red pentagram flags with my parents. I wore a lot of black clothing, even then, and played Dungeons and Dragons. Even lacking a Venom album on the turntable, I was interrogated about possible ties to satanism more than once. In fact, I owe my rejection of Christianity not to Ozzy Osbourne, or to King Diamond, but to Issac Asimov.
As an example of how uncool I was, I shared an art class, two years in a row, with members of the early thrash band, Death Angel, and barely noticed. I was a junior in high school at the time, and had come to the conclusion that, unless I did something radical to reinvent myself, I would never, ever, have sex. I bought a West guitar from the want adds and attempted to learn to play. I got nowhere.
Dennis Pepa, co-founder of Death Angel, and a fixture in the early thrash movement was a student at El Camino High school. A senior, so unmistakably cool it was impossible not to notice him on the five or six days a year he chose to attend classes. He was a genuinely decent guy, as were his cousins, various relations, and hangers-on, all of which made it into the band. He was also great with pen drawings. One afternoon, probably on an errand looking for his metalhead friends that sat in the back of the room drawing pictures of corpses, he looked over my shoulder and inspected the iguanodon I had drawn in charcoal pencil.
Dennis:
“That’s good. I like it. Hey, do you play?
My response:
“Yeah, a little guitar. I’m not very good.”
Dennis:
“What do you play?”
Me:
“Blues.” (True, actually, I had decided that, since all rock comes from blues, blues I should play.)
Dennis:
“Cool. Sure you don’t wanna come play with us some time?”
Me:
“Nah. I really suck.”
That same year, Kirk Hammet, of Metallica fame, produced Death Angel’s first demo tape.
Death Angel was a Phillippino thrash band. In one stroke, he dissolved any illusions I might have harbored about metal being music for whites only. Here were Asians doing it better, and looking much cooler doing it. He was also the first real metalhead who was ever nice to me.
I don’t think I spoke a word to him, before or since. I never played with them, obviously, never met Metallica. Cest la vie.
I bought a copy of Metallica’s “And Justice For All” two years later, living in a noisy dorm, my first week at UCLA, but that is another story.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
I Miss Filter
These artifacts, flawed and weird, are products of mocha, music, old couches, and Filter, which sits, four-dimensionally, behind a Bank of America at North and Damen. They are some of the only surviving visual art from that period of my life. As you can clearly see, I was, and am obsessed with sex, and heterosexual.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Imagining the Tenth Dimension
I just wrapped my brain around this. My Clone forced me to watch it, on drugs, between bouts of playing kick-ass metal bass riffs. It my head open. In one way or another, I had been aware of every aspect of reality presented in the video, but the video united them into a common, geometric view of the universe.
There are implications beyond the video, for instance, the curvature of spacetime induced by gravity can occur in a variety of alternate dimensions, possibly. I have seen astronomical photographs of gravitationally-lensed galaxies and they really exist.
I spend most of my life in a six dimensional universe, it turns out, but occasionally try to project myself in the eighth.
Just because we cannot conceive of dimensions beyond the 10th does not mean they do not exist. As a matter of fact, at the line drawn from one point in the seventh to the next, between two possible universes, I see either a contradiction, or an excuse to add more dimensions. That third universe, the one that makes the three universes a noncolinear series that defines a plane, must differ in an aspect of its starting conditions that did not apply to the first two, otherwise it would be on the same line. This implies that, for every aspect of starting conditions to the big bang, there is a new dimension of reality. It makes a big difference whether or not the existence of a single, time-like, dimension is an aspect of the universe's origins, or a consequence of it.
No wonder electrons make more sense in 26 dimensions. I suddenly wonder why 26 is the limit.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
my own strange peace with the disease
I should tell the story of my own degenerative, autoimmune disorder. It seems relevant right now.
Ankylosing spondylitis is a form of degenerative arthritis. The immune system attacks a very specific target-the synovial membranes. These are structures that form little plastic baggies, holding a lens of fluid, in the disk of cartilage between two vertebrae. Nobody knows why the immune system does this. There are a few hints as to its origins though. Rheumatoid fever, a relatively rare condition nowadays, but formerly common, resulted when a particularly virulent strain of bacteria, Streptococcus sp., most often (the more I know about prokaryote taxonomy, the less I trust doctors to identify them, thanks Marianna), attacks the host and causes a severe fever. Later, after the bacterium is defeated, immunocytes press the attack and cause serious damage to the heart valves. The victim survives, but damage to heart valves makes it likely that, later in life, there will be heart attack issues.
Spirochetes, the cleverest and most beautiful of all bacteria, are masters at tricking vertebrate immune systems. Syphilis and Lyme disease are both, largely, autoimmune disorders. The later stages of both conditions, are similar in that the host continues to attack target tissue long after the parasite is gone. Both pathogens use proteins from the host to masquerade as host tissue, evading the immune system for years. The host finally recognizes the parasite, fights it to a standstill over the course of a multi-year progression, but an autoimmune catastrophe is imminent. The parasites have rendered it inevitable, they always find something in the host to use as a disguise, and the disguise works for a long time.
Lyme disease, for instance, can induce MS like symptoms in an adult, by provoking the host to attack the mylein sheaths that surround the long axxons in the central nervous system. The resulting inflammation can produce astoundingly MS like symptoms, including the optic neuralgia, a difficulty in moving the eyeball, resulting from an inflamed optic nerve.
With MS, rheumatoid arthritis, and Crohns disease, the pathogen is a mystery. It is possible that the body does not even need an excuse to attack its own tissue. With MS, it is mylein, with Crohn's, it is the intestinal lining, with rheumatoid arthritis, it is the joints. Certain genotypes are, most likely, more susceptible to these disorders. For instance, people who bought Crohn's are also likely to put AS in their shopping cart. This is why I call my guitar teacher, "my clone", he looks like a miniature version of me because he has a conspicuous posture indicative of AS, but Crohn's is the big deal with him right now.
Like most people with AS, or MS for that matter, I had the illness for years before I realized what it was. As a senior in high school, I remember having such severe hip problems that, sitting up from a desk, the hip would slide right out of its socket and need re-adjusting. This was painful, but I accepted it as an inevitable fact of nerd life. Of course I had a weird hip. It suited my bookish, non-athletic personality. The symptoms persisted in college, and, by the time I hit grad school, my wife was shopping for just the right cane for me. She liked the idea of me with a suitable cane. I went to an orthopedist at UCLA once, but they found nothing. They were looking at my hips. The problem was that the disks in my lower back were under attack by my immune system, sending shooting pains down my leg and causing secondary issues there.
This thing with my hip came and went, and the major upshot from it is that I rarely jaywalk. For many years, I was simply unable to run, under any circumstances. This can be a major liability crossing a street against the light. I developed ideas about how it is wrong to disrupt the public order by crossing illegally, and how it is selfish to endanger ones self in such a way. In fact, my autoimmune disorder was already affecting my relationship with society. I began to feel increased empathy with the infirm, the elderly, and anyone else who, in a hunter-gatherer society, would be doomed.
The hip thing used to come and go, finally, it went. In its wake, it left a weird posture. I accepted this. I was happy to be free of the pain. Other back pain ensued, however, higher in my back. Funny, this whole time, I never went to the doctor. I had no health insurance, and I figured there was nothing they could do for me. This was, in fact, true. I was actually in much better shape, because when the hip infirmity left, I was able to run, work out, and go for ten mile walks regularly. Walking and pushups had always been my exercise regime, and I was in much better shape at 30 than I had ever been in high school. By 30, however, everyone was telling me something was wrong with my back and I needed to get it checked out. As the disease worked its way up my spine, I developed a serious potato-chip curvature. Kyphosis. It used to come and go diurnally. I would wake up relatively tall, and as the inflammation progressed, I would shrink and double over. I discovered Aleve for the first time near my 30th birthday, got drunk that night, and nearly poisoned myself. Drinking and Aleve do not mix.
It was my mother in law that finally insisted I go to the doctor. I remember walking into the clinic, in a vintage building at UIC, and sitting there, telling my symptoms to a medical student. He was an orthopedics student, and a weird sort of light lit up in his eyes. He had me do that teapot stretch, and, for the first time, I realized that I could not do it. I overcompensated by bending my knees to simulate the same result. For years, I had been overcompensating for a lack of mobility in my spine, and I had truly not realized what had happened to me. Student one asks me a whole lot of questions, and then I wait. In walks Dr. Dickhead, and students two through five. Dr. R is in his late fifties or early sixties, is obviously important, and has summoned all these students because it was a rare moment of diagnosis. Cases of AS do not come up every day, it had obviously been talked up as a horrible disease, and he was seizing upon this exact moment to show his underlings how to deliver the crushing prognosis.
He tells me, rhetorically, to a television audience that did not exist, to stop whatever sports or athletic activities I was doing. Whatever they are, they are all too dangerous. When I mention that I have absolutely none, he asks me what, exactly, I DID DO. I told him I sat around in coffee shops, reading, and writing bad poetry. He asked how this affected my back. I told him that I hate straight-backed chairs. These, he told me to avoid.
He went back to his TV audience, dismissing the notion that there was any "magic pill" or surgery he could do to make my back better. I do not recall asking for such a pill. Nor surgery. In fact, I had avoided going to the doctor for years out of virtual certainty that this would be the outcome. There was nothing they could do, they would charge me for telling me that, and they would schedule many extra appointments in the wake of my diagnosis, mostly for the purpose of monitoring my condition as a case study.
He told me, that, by 40, 45 at the latest, I would have no motion whatsoever in my back, and literally would not be able to look to the left or the right. A fixed stare, forward. Most likely, my spine would be contorted into a grotesque shape, possibly facing the floor or permanently to the side. I would be grossly disfigured, soon, and I should get used to this.
Oddly enough, I kind of liked the notion of being disfigured. I wanted to be disfigured in an interesting way though, not a goofy and stupid way. All of this, I kept to myself. Dr. Dickhead kept up his condescending, tough talk, for the sake of his students. I remember gasps, and statements like "I don't know what it would be like to be diagnosed with AS, I don't know how I would deal with it." I dealt with it by walking out of the exam room and throwing all the paperwork for the follow-up appointments in the trash. I kept the card for the physical therapist, though. He was awesome. I saw him once. He gave me some exercises. I realized that as long as my spine moved, it did not matter what exercises I did.
I spent a lot of time on Google and realized something. The Dr. Dickhead gave me a very dated prognosis, as did my physical therapist. Most cases of AS do not proceed to head-to-toe "bamboo spine", though some do. The trick is to keep the spine active. In Victorian times, they used to treat MS by corseting. If you stick a person in the right corset, you can keep their spine straight, and as the disease progresses, at least they will not be contorted into a pretzel. It is very sad that I missed my opportunity to wear a corset under my clothes. In the earlier stages of my illness, I used to crave one. A black one, velvet, ribbed. I would lace myself into it, somehow, and be sexy AND tall at the end of the day.
Corsets on men do nothing for my wife, however, but she likes freaks.
It turns out that corseting is the exact opposite of what to do for the illness, and I started stretching every day. This proved to be most unsatisfying. I got nowhere. Stretching cold, without working out, does nothing for me. I started working out, THEN stretching, and developed a routine. I still have it.
I can list about a hundred psychological effects the illness has provoked in me. The majority are positive, some are negative. It made insecure about my attractiveness to women. Being deformed does that. To this day, I don't think my wife has put the two together. The ensuing search for masculine charisma has led me to find the best friends I will ever have, one after the other, in the women from whom I have sought a validation of my sexual charisma. They have all, every one of them, figured out my motivation and accepted it. We all have our pecadillos. It certainly taught me to endure discomfort. This is typical of AS cases. They are generally diagnosed late in their illness, and have grown so used to discomfort, that they can tolerate anything. Most become masters at overcompensating.
Yoga was the most humiliating experience I can recall. It taught me humility, and empathy for every student in my classes who simply cannot learn what I try to teach them.
I smoke a lot and drink rarely. For years, I took so much Aleve, Tylenol, aspirin, that adding booze to the mix was a recipe for organ failure. I do not like the feeling of a good alcohol buzz anymore, even though the illness is waning and I have not taken a painkiller for days.
I think of my old age as in my sixties, not my eighties or nineties. The illness has probably shortened my lifespan and I have gotten used to that. No problem. This has provoked a massive, existential reworking of my everyday life, and a much greater appreciation for each passing moment. I live so much more deeply, richly, and dangerously now than I did when I was 21.
The pain, and the routine, have taught me discipline. I can discipline myself to do almost anything. The limited resource now is time.
On the other hand, I will never go rock climbing. I will never scuba. I should avoid carnival rides. I should never box or do martial arts. I really should not ride a bike in the city, though I do all the time. I should be terrified of traffic accidents. I am. I have a friend, an old friend I never see anymore, who does not know how much he damaged his friendship with me by continuing to drive the way he does, despite my entreaties not to take our well-being into our hands. We all have our pecadillos.
Fuck scuba. A decent walk in the woods is just as profound, and it is convenient that most of my research involves organisms that work at eye level, above water.
The pain, the constant soreness and discomfort, that became a baseline for me, has waned to the point that I do not remember it. It used to be so severe that its absence, which would only occur in those brief moments after renewing my prescription to Celebrex after a long hiatus, would make me feel high like an opium addict.
About the time I was diagnosed, they developed incredible meds, with equally incredible side-effects, to treat my illness. Ten years later, the side effects are less acute, and the meds can be used to treat other autoimmune diseases. My Clone finally has a handle on his Crohn's. The meds will, most likely, stop it in his tracks before the terrible prognoses set in, the weird fistulas through the abdominal wall, etc.
I hear there are good meds for MS now too, if taken early, they stop the disease in its tracks...before it progresses to the point that the nerve damage sticks a little every time the disease recedes.
I am not exactly regretful that I never took the meds. They arrived too late to help me. I needed them in 1992, not 2002. I have made my own strange peace with the disease.
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