Man, did you ever get into one of those spirals, where everything needs to be replaced at once? I need a car, a driver's license, a new computer, furniture, spiffy clothes, a watch, some swanky shoes. In fact, I'm in need of pretty much everything that differentiates a human from a cave bear. It's sad, really, that I've lived as long as I have in Germany without actually building a beachhead. It's a good thing I wasn't in charge of Operation Overlord, or they'd all be speaking German here*.
Sadly, I've got no money to speak of, as I'm apparently born to be po'. I can't save money, for some reason. I'm not a big spender, so it must be the North Georgia white trash in my blood that acts as a bling repellent. It's not like I'm tossing out Franklins and snorting heroin off the well-manicured mons venera of lanky Czech supermodels or anything. I lead a simple life. I get up in the morning; well, technically it's still morning. I work hard...-ish. Until recently, I didn't waste my money on luxuries like meat. So where does it go?
In a Socialist system, there's an amazing amount of built-in drag. It's like there's an enormous, good-intentioned man-child riding shotgun who keeps lifting the hand brake while you're trying to drive. A large amount of the money that you earn is siphoned off by the Gubmint for safekeeping. Which is great, don't get me wrong; otherwise, you'd do something stupid with it, like buy corn dogs. The problem with this is, it makes saving money for things you think you need difficult; luckily, the government is using that money to finance your retirement, health care, and quality public television to let us know where canned soup comes from.
I guess it's all for the better. I don't really need a new computer right now: I managed to coax the current one back to life by removing the firewire card. And a car isn't necessary, as isn't the $1000 driving license to go with it, seeing as there's a magical Streetcar Named Thriftiness that stops right outside my door. I just wish I didn't have to stand next to all those smelly, aggressive winos while I wait on it. I wonder where they get the money to buy all that booze, anyway?
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* -- sorry, bad joke.
Art is the residue of passion. That's what I read, anyway, in an old National Lampoon cartoon, the punch-line of which was, "OK, so you get to sleep on the 'art' spot." Low-brow, to be sure; but in every ham-handed, proletarian joke there's a nugget of truth. And a Jew.
There's a lot of things that keep my brain occupied, and I don't understand the half of them. Sometimes, it's like there's some brilliant novelist from the 1930s sitting next to me, spouting clever saws about brandy or the unwashed masses and urging me to use that line in my next blog post. Other times, it's like an old college buddy asking me what I've been doing with myself the last 15 years. I keep explaining, and although it makes sense to me, he just doesn't get it.
The tops of my feet are numb. I can't feel a thing on them. I usually notice it when I'm laying in bed; I can feel the covers on my toes, but the tops of my feet tingle, and don't feel the sheets sliding over them. I'm not sure what you do with an anomaly like that. It's not like you need to feel the tops of your feet or anything. But I take it as a symptom of a larger problem. Two weeks ago, I tore the ligaments in my ankle at baseball practice, and had to go to the doctor. When I was there, decided I'd ask the doctor about the numbness, and see if it rang any alarm bells. He told me that it would be 'highly irregular' for someone my age to have connection problems between the spine and foot, and we left it at that.
When I was 18, I dislocated my hips from my spine. I think it happened during ice hockey practice, with a bad hip check. I didn't realize it until the free-floating spinal column moved a half-inch to the left and cut off communications to everything below my waist. I was in my dorm room at Georgia Tech, at eight o'clock in the morning, getting ready for class. Having just gotten out of bed, I was walking around in my boxers, which coincidentally were covered in red hearts, and gathering my books for my calculus class. I leaned over my desk, and lost all feeling in my legs. I fell backward onto the floor, and couldn't move. A minute or two later, my friend from across the hall walked in to see if I was ready for the long walk to class. I was laying on the floor in my underwear with a sheaf of notes in my hand, my legs pinned backward under me, and I just kind of looked at him. "Close the door, and don't tell anybody," I remember saying. He walked in, and closed the door behind him. Taking my hand, he pulled me off my legs and onto my stomach. Suddenly, I could feel my legs again, and I stood up. I skipped calculus class that morning. I climbed back into bed and covered my face for the rest of the day.
So now, maybe I should get a second opinion. The novelist in my brain is also, unfortunately, a hypochondriac. He tells me the doctors in these days don't know what they're talking about. Of course, he comes from an age when doctors prescribed cocaine as a 'pick-me-up' and actually had an official cause of death named 'Old Age'.
