Feel 2much

Marriage, death, broken bones, home improvement

Technically the Problemz’ Estate is a Mischling household.

The thing about pain is at least you get to go through it alone. No matter how empathetic anyone is, only you can feel it and, if you’re monastic or antisocial, living in pain gives you a little depth and privacy from the burdens of shared experience. Not even your spouse can feel what you feel which is not their fault and for the best, as two people in pain is worse than one.

Like having sex on camera, I can give you an impression of what it’s like but you can never quite feel what I feel and talking about it is, or should be, taboo.

Yet, like any savvy svengali, I deploy the very tactics I advocate against, showing what I say not to show. Because it’s private, I have an in through which I can titillate you a little, showing you what isn’t supposed to be shown, acknowledging that making the private public is the provenance of writers, women, pornographers, and conmen of which I am only a few.

This is the story of how I got on Substack, totaled my car, shattered my foot, and found out my dad died. I touch on the practicalities of physical pain but not the victimology. I don’t seek out sympathy or offer advice. I’m like Tony Robins without the lessons.

In my defense, I don’t talk about this IRL so I’ll bury it here amidst talk of home improvement and marriage, daddy issues and drugs, turning 40 and oversharing without oversharing. For those who are old enough to remember, it will be like the late 90’s all over again, like American Beauty with crypto instead of bisexuality. Shit for brains and concussions for breakfast. I learn nothing. I bring no solutions.

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Welcome to hard times

Like many couples who purchase fixer-uppers, this last May my wife and I got our very old, very beaten up tiles replaced with new ones that needed to sit and cure. I was sitting on a section of our giant couch which was crammed into our two-car garage along with almost everything else from our living room, dining room, and kitchen. Pots, pans, a 600-pound wooden table, and assorted detritus like pens, coins, keys, cuticle nippers, and pictures of people from way-back-when caringly stuffed into cardboard boxes where no one can see them. Our house is about 1,600 square feet but our garage is only a few hundred and so, as many men before me have done, I exiled myself to the least hospitable place in the house so that I could smoke a doobie and read.

Whether studying sacred texts or crafting new ones, whether you’re in a cave or on the couch, posture matters. Unfortunately, I tend to sit on one foot while draping my other leg over the top, almost always my left foot under my right buttcheek. My body, like anyone else’s, registers a little asymmetrical for all the normal human reasons but also from years of playing upright bass, guitar and pretty much every other iteration of extended range and baritone stringed instrument in between. 40 years of sitting, reading, smoking, playing, watching TV, and thinking, my body and iPhone keeping the score the whole time.

A good narrator would tell you I should have been on a plane to New Mexico for a friend’s 40th birthday but I was home, sick, losing my voice, sweating, reading, and smoking.

I, like many Jews, have a pretty bad stomach that does gnarly things for which doctors have been little use and whatever pathogen I had, was not helping.

Having set the stage, it’s here where my trajectory into Substack begins. Half Steve Jobs, half Eminem. I sit. In the garage, sweating, sick, a little stoned, researching the femininity of certain Polynesian prostitutes, when I suddenly need to divine how close I am to the cusp of diarrhea, when I should be getting it from mushrooms, a divine vision in the desert and a beatific enlightenment through the help of friends, fungus and the visions that accompany us.

There, in the garage, I found myself needing to hightail it to the kitchen, around the corner to the living room, and around another corner to the bathroom with my left foot 100% completely asleep. What I have neglected to mention is that my wife was out running errands, neither of us realizing tornadoes were heading straight for us.

Texas Flood

I live in Texas now but grew up in the subtropics of South Florida, which are no stranger to inclement weather nor act of G-d. I can remember waking up in the hallway, shaking my sister, and showing her a sky so purple and orange you thought you were already dead, eating whatever defrosted first with canned potatoes cooked on propane, and school in the dark, without air, not because we were poor but, as Covid proved as it stretched across calendars yet to come, private schools have to give you something for your money.

I grew up with little shot at seeing what you’re supposed to be or do before you’re shuffling around, taking naps, watching the market, eating statins, and tracking your cholesterol in between knocking off work early and taking dips in the pool. Such was the dynamic between me and my father, 56 years my senior, making our house half childhood home, half nursing home. I bring it up not to vent, but because when I get up and move, when I lift and box, and when I go to get somewhere, I put my whole body into it to get away from that weakness. The problem is the the thing I hate is the thing that moves me but stays inside me wherever I go.

Weakness is a choice but it’s also a sin. Taking human talent and leaving it undeveloped is too and that’s exactly what happens when you’re too tired to get off the couch. You take those sweet Ashkenazi IQ points and you let them shine a four-color rainbow of atheism, libertarianism, contrarianism, and deontology across a spectrum so bright you become fluent in first-principles and reasoning things out based on the data presented so that you can parse what people mean from what they say. In later years, these skills will help you figure out how to pick up girls and not get fired from work when your tongue comes in contact with taboos long ago set by people hostile to reality. With only a little guidance, you could have become popular the easy way, learned how to throw a ball or ride a bike before 10. It might not have been your mother who got stuck wheeling you in a stroller until you were 5, telling you you could be anything you wanted, and eventually teaching you how to pee standing up when no man was available for the job.

Speaking of

You get a little intolerant of weakness and learn to fight dysfunction if you hate it. Talk to anyone who has a chronic disease or terminal prognosis, anyone who used to be an athlete and let themselves go. They’ll tell you the less you exercise, the more you need exorcism. Volunteering at nursing homes, going in and out of hospitals, bussing loved ones’ bedpans, and pulling people off the floor will teach you this. And so, as part of my blanket policy of self-mastery and discipline, I work out 5-7 times per week and never shit on myself, even if home alone, because The Antichrist loves when you are weak and incontinent and, even though I am Jewish and have a terrible stomach, I cannot stand The Antichrist. The enemy of my enemy is sometimes my friend, and the enemy of my friends is often my enemy.

Back to the couch. Back in May while I was sitting and smoking and sweating, I leapt up and began trying to make it out of the garage, feeling the indelible sensation of G-d’s fingertip on my vagus nerve. As I navigated the three rooms whose floors were curing, I aimed to make it down the hall and into the bathroom. About halfway there, I tried to pick up the pace, hopped, hoping to cover a greater stretch of tile than my stride allotted, and ran out of plan, putting 200 pounds of lean white meat squarely on the outside of my left foot before my right foot could even touch the ground. The impact rattled through my bones but my foot was numb so I could only feel it as a spatial, kinetic, proprioceptive reality but not a particularly direct or tactile one.

If we could take a CGI journey through a microscope, using a school bus, a Tesla, a scooter or Sea-doo for an off-road adventure told from the lips of Bill Nye to the ears of Neil deGrasse Tyson and into the search history of Adam Conover, we would discover a monologue telling you this:

I shattered a piece of the outside of my foot so hard it couldn’t be located, and would learn upon a secondary medical visit that I chipped the top of my foot near the ankle, in addition to earning a third degree sprain just because I didn’t want to shit on myself. I had no school bus, no microscope, no multi-ethnic coalition of smarmy rhetoricians. I didn’t even have health insurance or know the extent of my injuries, but I still made it to the bathroom a champion. Sick, on the toilet, in my empty house, I sat listening to the echoes of the wet, smacking sound of my foot kicking fresh Saltillo tile hard enough to turn bone into dust.

Where was my wife and why was she letting this happen to me?

My wife, who is a nurse, was not very useful. She was out for groceries which always seems to take an hour longer than I can imagine but maybe it’s because she’s short and has tiny legs and I am impatient and treat public commerce like an exfiltration mission deep in the mountains of Kandahar: Go in, get out, burn rubber, no talking. While I am a sensitive guy, I also lack the patience, politeness, and social intelligence to take my time on such excursions and so everyone else just seems slow or selfish to me while I sit smoking, waiting for food, and studying up on trans, Hawaiian prostitutes.

Did I mention that on this particular day, in addition to being sick, and stoned, and now having a broken, sprained foot with which to navigate my soon to be new floors, it was hot? I live in southern Texas. I live where it is hot and dirty and violent and we like it. Like Israel and my birthplace, South Florida, this is G-d’s country and you better not forget it, which is why He lights us up with tornadoes and hurricanes, showing who’s boss and who’s not. Like Sodom and Gomorrah, we have our own prostitutes and sex-trafficking practices and have since added many fast food purveyors and vape shops to the landscape of strip malls and overpasses. But you will be saddened to know that the anti-trafficking signs in massage parlors are there because the cops probably won’t be. So we get a thunderbolt up our ass from time to time and it catches up with you whether you’ve been hoing or not, so it pays to be able to predict when a storm is coming.

The problem is you can’t really

Watching for heat and contrasting weather patterns can help but it’s almost always hot here and things turn fast like when an ex of mine from Paris, TX told me about a girl she knew who got struck inside her house through a window. There’s no one cause that can predict a tornado or any other spontaneous storm but basically the air gets soaked with humidity until the clouds have loaded up as much ammo as possible and then it all comes down fast and messy like a firehose with a bump stock. A few times a year you get something special: hail, a flattened fence, a tree through your window, a pole through your car. In Paris, the bulb in your brain burns like never before.

What happens is the air thins out. As if its molecules are leavening, the pressure drops, and the sky turns black. A siren blares from your text message/shopping/porn machine, telling you to take cover. Whether texting, purchasing, or pleasuring yourself in some other way, it’s time to finish up, duck for cover, and say your prayers.

In one sense, the alarm should put you on alert and make you hop to, but it turns out that when everything is an emergency broadcast system, everything is also an emergency. And people zone out. A friend’s breakup, Betty White’s death, shrimp farming, HIV, Juneteenth, and nuclear holocaust are all on the same level. Through the magic of modern technology, a bomb shelter on the other side of the world can feel realer than a tornado over your head, the grip of your hand on your dick more intense than the hand that brushes your back, the necessity of malaria nets more pressing than the misery of the people under the highway you take to work.

But, in this case, the storm also happened to be what would normally have constituted an emergency in the time before cell phones so I called my wife and told her to pull over and run into a business. She said there were none by her and that she was already halfway home.

I hobbled into the garage on my broken foot and opened the door. The rain came down in sheets and walls. Cubic blocks of blackened sky dumping liquid chaos on you and everything you own. And down to the wire in timebomb time, my wife pulled up and ran inside, leaving everything to defrost into the fabric upholstery of her hatchback.

Only smiles

People have a tendency to bitch. I’m no different and I’m not seeking credit for my travails or secrecy but what I’m about to tell you, almost no one knows. Not because it’s that salacious or embarrassing, although there’s some of that, but because it’s lame and weak to complain. People won’t respect you and because I need to respect myself more than I need you to respect me, I try not to do it.

So I’ll take a different stance here, keeping this section a little cold so that everyone knows I’m not seeking sympathy or bragging. Hopefully, my word that I haven’t even told ten people helps my credibility.

In the month before the break, my father died in South Florida one day shy of his 95th birthday. My brother buried him the day after, telling everyone in the family but me, my sister, and my uncle so that he wouldn’t have to see us out of fear of confronting the kinds of Old Testament, family-feud items you read about in ancient scripture and contemporary homicide reportage. After two weeks of figuring out what I wanted to do (my dad wasn’t going to be any less dead in the future), I called my brother whom I hadn’t spoken to in four years. While it’s hard to fathom, after four years of radio silence and a generally poor relationship, he thought I was calling to check in on how he was doing, having heard mum about the coincidentally preceding events of the month. He started to catch me up on his life for a few minutes leading with the fact that he now has very serious cancer. When he finished, I told him I was sorry to hear it, then I told him I’d been receiving condolences for weeks and asked how our father was doing.

Understanding in a car crash

A week or two afterwards I’m sitting in line for a stalled exit ramp on the highway when my airbag punches me in the face. A former marine driving the car he just fixed for his wife, switches lanes to get around slowing traffic, too close to the car in front of him to see me waiting. He doesn’t know it but there I am waiting to get knocked into a Mexican girl in a Jeep who will take my tissues and compliment my tattoos before hiring lawyers to begin trying to extort me. Before the letters and lawyers, my car totals into a crumpled ball of steel never to be driven again.

What happens next is a lot of mishandled exchange of information, a tow, a lift back to my job, an urgent care that wants to charge me $2,100 cash because I don’t have a claim number yet and my phone is dead, and another walk back from the urgent care. Two days later my wife takes me to another where I tell them about the headaches I’m getting but they just take pictures of my AC joint and send me packing.

I can’t work out that week. My muscles seize when I try to lift my arm. I keep crying and I don’t know if it’s because I have a concussion or my dad is dead.

It follows

That was April and May. Now It’s December and the year is coming to an end. While they’re usually 365 days, it feels like we just did four tours of 2020. If we isolate the last 200 or so days, here’s an abbreviated list, a shit-sandwich in bullet-points:

• Start making house rad

• Dad dies

• Car totaled

• Foot breaks

• Post first piece 4 days later

• Work on walking

• Turn 40

• Front of house is almost finished

Like I said, I didn’t learn anything. If you’ve been thinking I shouldn’t smoke or have diarrhea, I feel you and honor your opinion. I won’t even fight you on this but so far this year, in addition to the drama, the diarrhea, my dad’s death, and family feuds, I’ve made our house much nicer, working in the beginnings of a side garden and a little stained glass. While it sounds materialistic, I didn’t buy infinite cars, or trips, or tchotchkes. I replaced my car with a 15 year-old police interceptor and began introducing privacy, structural upgrades, and select flourishes most will never know, into our old, brick house. While you can’t buy memories, it takes effort to make an environment where memories can be made, a quality of life you force out of vision and willpower for you and whoever you love.

When I got stuck and couldn’t move much, I started putting my ideas out there for people to weigh and argue with. I started a book club and have met some incredible, fun, smart people I would never meet in real life alone.

And when it isn’t raining, I walk. I stretch. I still limp. I have a coach, and use a cane so I can make it home when I go too far. A little pain to remind me to outpace this thing I take with me.