Clunk Vibrate Clunk
sensation
I have a small window in which to think. I seem to have spent it hunched over a computer.
Yesterday I felt my mobile phone going off in my pocket. I reached for it but it was not there, it was sitting on my bookcase.
I take a break, have a coffee, my invisible mobile phone goes of again. When I stand up it switches off.
Today I notice it all the time.
My reader and Biblioklept point my in the direction of the New Yorker and DeLillo’s new story “The Itch”
I read and vibrate.
Then look at the clunk of language I have written today and shudder, early stage Victorian dad syndrome.
Secondary draft in a processes, which will become countless if it goes further. I always wonder who I am looking at as I read? It’s always surprising no matter how habitual it becomes, the familiarity of what I wish was unfamiliar. I like the way they lie dead on the page. Did I really think like that two hours ago, last week, last year? Sometimes yes more often than not no, such is my way with words.
Just a passing sensation.
I tell myself as I think of sterile rooms, the freezing shock of the k.y. jelly used to scan my leg. I will know this time in advance, if it has become that time again.
Deep repetitive throb. I hope it is gone by morning.
Doctor: You think you have an invisible mobile phone going off in your left trouser pocket?
Patient; No, It just felt like that.
I hold my breath, the last time I has a discussion about sensation with a doctor he drifted off and started reciting some sort of mantra on the subject that I could date to the early 17th century. Was he going to drink that urine specimen I had handed in at reception after I was gone to examine my vital spirits further?
I decide not to drift off any further. I smile. Yes, it’s just a sensation.
Doctor: These things generally go away. Come back in a year if it happens again. I had a patient like you last year. His symptoms went away after only a few months!
Patient: How did you know if you never saw him again?
Doctor: I banged into him outside a theatre.
Patient: Thats very reassuring thank you.
I decide to end this processes before he does. I scan the room for a jar of leeches and leave. The absence of the leeches is at least reassuring, the rest of the processes I remain uncertain about.
I wonder if I will become the reassuring patient he never saw again to the next patient with the same condition as mine.
Mis-spent youth learning to move leaves me highly attuned to the way I move, how it alters, it is a part of memory. I noticed the very early stages of disease at its inception.
I did not recognize it as such or worry about it. I don’t worry about it now. It’s not being ill, it’s the processes of becoming a patient, that is something to worry about.
A large pile of notes and mounting mis-observations (unless the answer can be confirmed by a machine with no feeling and limited vision) a grasp of philosophy and psychology that makes my hair stand on end.
Just a passing sensation like all the others. When it is dark, as any good Doctor would, I like to whistle loudly.
I know what this one feels like. Very early stage of the spasm you get after long hours of dance before the real pain sets in. Exercise is always like this you never sit or rest and until the muscles can go no further, then you have to push past that for a little while longer. That at least is reassuring, it is a familiar ghost from the past rather than the present in which I have the vascular system of some one almost double my age.
I prefer not to think when the last time was I noticed the same familiar muscle movements from the past, in a situation where they should not be present.
Look at it for what it is. I know how to act. I can cope with its pain and distance myself from the subject. I can deal with stress, it requires no more than to walk and breath, get into the rhythm, watch the world around me. I have a training for life and a method that allows me to live within it, give it life and then let it die.
Words lie dead on the page. But I can alter the rhythm and adjust the inflection. It just always requires looking in and holding the thought for a moment, before the next sensation. Which is to take a deep breath and scan every muscle ensuring it is relaxed.