Toast

There are a bunch of old jokes that have something to do with being on your back. I think most of them relate to prostitutes. I, having spent all but a few of the past 96 hours on my back, can relate, and find these jokes very funny, although I cannot remember any of them at the moment.

 Dawg, let me tell you, watch out. Past the age of 35, a back injury is just waiting to happen. It’s like you get roughly half your life to enjoy the physical freedoms that you will spend the other half ruminating upon. I don’t believe this is actually a better:worse situation as much as an apple:orange conundrum or, perhaps, a Spike Lee Joint. Like Bruce Hornsby sang, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til you lose it all again, Listen to the mandolin rain, listen to the music aahhh-luh, listen to the tears roll down my face as she turns to go.

 I took up the mandolin when I was 12 or 13, I think. I got into it because of Johnny Marr’s exquisite usage on The Smith’s “Please, Please, Please Let Me, Let Me, Let Me Get What I Want.” It was a real slog at first; the pairs of strings were very close together, pulled to a very high degree of tension. I found the picking style to be next to impossible; in spite of having spent a fair amount of time in my room with a weathered Victoria’s Secret catalogue, I seemed to lack the dexterity in my wrist required to flutter a plectrum across a pair of strings at high speed. Inevitably, REM released their break-through… you know, the one with “Losing My Religion”… which was full of Peter Buck’s rather pedestrian, although highly-effective, mandolineering. Suddenly everybody had a mandolin and was playing it badly, almost as bad as me. What was the point? I went to the pawn shop and traded mine in for a flanger pedal and a weed eater.

 The good thing about back trauma is that it makes you very thankful for the good times: retrieving a magazine from the floor, turning on the water faucet to wet your toothbrush, sitting down on a toilet seat all by yourself. A big part of living life is appreciating life. Sometimes in the morning I remember to do a quick meditation on ten things I am grateful for. This sets my day off in a good direction. Then I go downstairs and make toast.