Hip and Now

my dad was often times misconceived as someone cool. i think this was mostly on account of his teaching history classes while reclining in a lawn chair and wearing sunglasses. the sunglasses may have been an actual staple of cool, and they had a great dramatic effect-- when he'd take them down to stare at you with his sunken grey eyeballs, you knew he was serious. but the lawn chair was less cool than it seemed. it was just his bad back-- the majority of the time i knew him, he was in that lawn chair.

he would play catch with us while sitting in the lawn chair sometimes. and he would yell things like "use you arms!" while we ran miles and he sat in his lawn chair. i always hated that.

point is, the chair was more of a necessity than the choice of a cool person. he may very well have been cool, but the chair had little to do with it.

and i'm sitting here, typing away, quietly remembering the day they took molds of my feet to have me fitted for orthodics. from the start, i knew i'd adopted the same sloppy spinal genes that my dad had, and one day i'd be in a lawn chair being mistaken for a cool person.

the idea was the orthodics would help realign my hip, which would then help to keep my spine straight-- but it wouldn't solve anything, the orthodics were meant to only slow down the speed in which i became a full gimp. and i suppose that's better than nothing.

they started me with plastic orthodics, but this was before i smoked cigarettes and i spent a lot of time running track and field, playing volleyball, and generally jumping off roofs. i went through about four of five pairs of plastic orthodics before they switched me to the unbreakable graphite-carbon-fibre-superhero version.

i broke those within the year, too.

i still wear that pair-- i just duct tape them back together every week or so.

but on certain days i'm reminded that i will definitely be a handicapped old man no matter what i'd rather. sometimes i can hardly get out of bed without shooting pains starting at my hip and ending in a glorious unwanted spasm in my kneecap. it's embarrassing, but good comedy i suppose. i'll try to stand and literally fall down.

usually i can string up my converse and my spine/hip/knees will automatically feel better. but on especially horrible days that won't solve the problem and i'll just be that guy who can't walk right and takes twenty minutes on one flight of stairs.

and it's not even the kind of pain that i can just man up and deal with. it's the sort of pain that's like electricity and if i choose to ignore it, all that will happen is my leg will randomly fail to operate and i'll fall on the ground wincing. it even makes wiping my butt painful because of the way i have to twist my hip to get the toilet paper back there.

on those days i feel like i'll wind up like will ferrell in that one snl sketch that he'd always end with "IS IT MY BACK? YES IT'S MY BACK, GET OFF ME YOU STUPID BITCH!"

those particularly pathetic days remind me what a creaky old man i will be.

today is one of those days.