10/20/02

Right now, I'm... not an encyclopedia, by any means, but one of those sidebar-of-magazine-article glossaries of types of extremely minor pain.

*Columbia-at-Columbia insists that if we ache for a few days after yoga it's a good thing, because it means our bodies are readjusting. She'd better be right; my neck and (especially) right shoulder have been requiring frequent attention from Lisa all weekend.

*Then there's the momentary-only sort of pain, like the spatter of hot peanut oil that splashed onto my hand when I dumped onions into it too quickly for the mung bean/brown rice/kale thing I made for dinner tonight; the pain went away so quickly I couldn't tell where I'd been spattered a second later.

*The canker sores that plagued me for years and went away once I started using Rembrandt's anti-canker-sore formula (pity I can rarely use Tom's of Maine toothpaste now--I liked that stuff) are putting in a rare appearance right now, in a way that makes me shlur my shpeech a little.

*My fingertips have that pleasant mild soreness that tells me I recently played guitar or bass a bunch after not having played it for a while. Which is true: Lisa and Jess and I played for a couple of hours today (we learned a short but fab new song of Jess's, New Bad Things' "The Dirge," and Ivor Cutler's "Go and Sit Upon the Grass," and messed around a little with the Homosexuals' "Soft South Africans" and a song I'm still working on about Kantian aesthetics and the screwed-up love life of a friend of mine).

*There's also the category of pain so abstract it's not even the real thing, just a reference to it--Parker Paul has a song called "Pain Pain Pain Pain Pain," which has been doing nice things with the use/mention distinction in my head all day.

*The significant one, though, is one I can't even feel as much: one of the revelations of my big revelatory experience in the desert this year was the sudden and striking absence of pain I hadn't actually noticed in my torso and limbs, which suggests that my baseline level is actually somewhat higher than I'd figured. Lisa insists that I should go see a doctor sometime soon, and I've promised her I will.

The parashah is currently in the middle of Can, specifically on "Connection" from Unlimited Edition, recorded in the early Malcolm Mooney period, i.e. when they were the weirdest garage-rock band in Europe. Hooray. Bought a couple of records this weekend including Stereolab's BBC-sessions comp ABC Music(it's currently sitting on top of Crosby & Nash's The ABC Years, by happenstance), but the one I keep hitting "play" on is Fennesz's Field Recordings, wonderful digitally processed solo guitar & occasional beats.

Douglas

 

previously ask for advice