Dr. Pazminski, From the Skeleton (2006)
When I moved to Chicago I could still, technically, count myself in the category of “young person.” But now, six years later, things are different. At thirty-five, I am middle aged. I don’t mean this to sound self-conscious or self-effacing—no, I am simply doing the obvious and inescapable math. Thirty-five is, if not squarely in the middle, at least the gateway into that range of numbers where, multiplied by two, you come up wih a reasonable age to die at. Push your designation of middle age much further forward, and you quickly get into the kinds of numbers that would seem an uncomfortable overstay, at least for the kind of life I’m attempting to lead.
Middle age has its advantages—you’ve settled yourself in, you’ve explored your abilities and limitations, and, having gained a sense of those parameters, you can relax a little. But, on the other hand, you have a real and distinct disadvantage in that, no matter how well things are going, and no matter how gracefully you’ve matured into artistic or social self-confidence, none of that really matters at all, because the fact of the matter is that your body is now falling apart. As a young person, I managed to buck the trends— raves, grunge, newfangled appliances—but here, at last, I’m on the bandwagon. I’m fucked! There is the dull, merciless pulse of the big wind-down all throughout my body. The bones ache, the skeleton itself is becoming rusty piping, popping and cracking, creaking and corroding.
Dr. Pazminski, whose chiropractic office I’ve been visiting with alarming frequency, does his adjustments and reconfigurations, like an accountant trying to re-work the math, up and down the abacus of the spine, coming up again and again with the same zero sum. He then gives me all the advice I don’t want to hear. “You’re too old to do heavy lifting!” he tells me point blank. “What do you eat? Are you vegetarian?” he frowns, shakes his head. “You’re not vegan, are you?”
Pazminski brings a human pelvis into the office one day, holds it up for me to examine. “Bones don’t decay outside of the body,” he tells me. “This person died years ago, and look: the pelvis is undeteriorated. When the bones are inside the body, though, they crumble and fall apart. Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know—corrosive bodily fluids?” I guess.
“I think it’s the hate, fear, and anger we hold inside,” Dr. Paz suggests. “It’s the unresolved emotions, kept bottled up in our bodies, that dissolve us.”
Hate? Fear? Anger? Who, me? Well, yes, OK: on the bus ride home from the chiropractor’s office, a man screams at a woman in a wheelchair because her foot touched his clothes (“These shoes ain’t cheap! I WORK for a living!” he berates her, as if the wheelchair is a sign of her sloth, a lifestyle accessory for laziness). Meanwhile, a busload of people, myself included, sit there silently and passively, staring straight ahead, not intervening, doing our calloused city-dweller routine, pretending this isn’t happening. It occurs to me that, hmm, yeah, maybe there is a little of all of that stuff being bottled up and pushed down into us, out here in the everyday. Maybe we do carry these unresolved interactions with us in our bodies, and maybe they really do go straight to the bones.
In any case, I really can’t complain: I got the body I deserved, and I’m not a healthy liver. I’ve been blessed, but perhaps long-term cursed, with a strong and resilient constitution (about a +9, for you gamers). This has allowed me to generally act the fool for most of my life without serious or noticeable consequences. But, as time marches on, acting like a young person gets harder and harder to pull off. I don’t bounce back as easily as I once did. It’s harder to stay up all night, and my hangovers last longer. These are the typical excuses of my age bracket for watching a sit-com and turning in at nine; in my case, though, I’ve simply plowed ahead with the youth mayhem lifestyle, having not modified my behavior significantly since 14, 24, or 34. I wonder, at times, if this is idiocy, and what exactly I have to show for it all, but then I remember: it doesn’t matter, it’s too late, the long slow ride downhill for the body has begun. Faced with that central fact, what does it matter how good your drawings are? How symmetrical your face is? What tax bracket you’re in? Pazminski is right: got to exercise more, drink less, eat enough protein. Other than that, who cares? No one path offers a better solution than any other for keeping anger, fear, jealousy and pain out of your life. It’s a good idea to focus on keeping yourself free of these things, on being a spiritual being, making yourself a vessel of hope and joy. But, like Pazminski’s exercise sheets, it’s a lot of effort, and guaranteed not to work out in the end. You enter the battle to preserve your body knowing you are going to lose.
