Broke back, no mountain

“What are your hobbies?” He’d like to know.

Is that all you have for me? By way of topics to discuss?

I’m on a first date. The worst offenders are men on a first date. We’ve all accidentally agreed to a lout one, a shaped like a peanut one. It’s unbecoming really. And no secret it is under pretense of sucking all of the oxygen out of the room and telling one about his own. Thank Gd I’ve left that in the past. The men, not my hobbies. But if ever the bone-dry question were to threaten asphyxiation again, tragically requiring the Heimlich (Gd forbid), I have a glass of water prepared to wash it down.

My glass of water is selfcare. My hobby is apparati. Used as a conduit for loving thyself. An instinct that goes beyond wisdom. While the sun gives way to the moon, and the sun is always giving way to the moon, I ask of these modalities, these potions of the holy, to bring me closer to myself, closer to Gd, closer to Mother. I am my own Mother. (I also enjoy researching all the ways in which the peanutmen and his brethren wrong me. The entirety of women too. But no need to discuss that here.)

There’s a rebounder, outside, to the right of the trash. A vibration plate, not only a red light mask but a four-foot panel of red and blue and I think green lights. Face masks, exfoliating when my pores are clogged or moisturizing when my skin thirsts. Hair masks, compression leggings, legs all the way up the wall with a castor oil rub down, a heating pad, a decolletage silicone patch, a decolletage silicone patch with a phallic pillow atop while I slumber. Preventing many a macabre wrinkle of said decolletage, threatening distraction from my huge and undulating breasts.

Right, and then a question of the rudimentary; “How does she have all this time?” Well, I’m mentally ill, introverted and depressed. Two sides of the same coin, a kitchen with a fork, the devil found in hell. Does this make me a criminal? Being a mental convalescence? There’s no laws or rules about it. So that’s who has the time. She who makes the time. She who is mentally diseased has the time. She who watches a broken clock, not sure if time is passing at all, or if the tik passing toks are so slow that time is unrecognizable. The sun setting is my favorite part of the day. Climbing into bed knees first, then a turn of a 270 degrees towards respite, landing under freshly washed sheets. And this is when I mix the potions. If only the sheets were steamed.

The bevy of apparati sitting in our office doubling as a gym, also, have nothing but time. They stand idle, waiting for the press of a power button by the barely extant (me). If you must know, reader, I do get a decent ROI on the bevy; however, some returns unexpected, unbidden, unwanted.

Most mornings, I vibrate. On a plate. The cheeks of my ass convulse side to side, like a seizure. If there were a witness, and my asshole were a mouth, it’s tongue would be too erratic to be popsickle-sticked down, preventing the swallowing of it up, by a passerby. The vibration plate is designed to rid stagnant lymph fluid, by shaking up the turgid and sallow with probable microplastics, from my rotting carcass. And then one excretes the toxins by way of pissing it out.

I’m on level 30, supersonic speed. On one single vibration, lasting a millimeter of a second, each hip bone, the tippy top, what’s called the ischium, reaches high in earnest. In an incredible feeling, a river of flesh blood flows, washing up sediment of red cells and oxygen unto the skin on my legs leaving them with an itch. A virtuous itch that calls and coaxes and begs and screams for a scratch. I abide. I scratch. I scratch like I am the first and only to ever have felt an itch. Vigorously, excitedly. Like the dog showing his belly, aching for fast fingers, or the big toe’s beg after a new mosquito bite. Plus, in the reflection of the window, I look JUST like Shakira. But my sensible Shakiran mind lags behind my (once) able body.

Seemingly, subtly, somewhere on the way to 30, maybe 10 or 20, my vertebrae turn crooked and rub against each other. A small piece breaks off from friction. It catches air. Then it lands softly, too softly, so softly the landing’s in question.

And that’s what did it. The straw and the camel. I assume the camel couldn’t feel the last straw and I couldn’t feel the crooked or the crack.

It was too fast vibrations I guess, and too many vibrations maybe, and too much pressure to shake. And it broke. Broke right off, like your ex-boyfriend’s bumper. Well, technically, it cracked. Which makes me wonder why isn’t it “cracked my back out”? It’s more of a sound epithet, “cracked my back out”. I’ve never felt a spine throw but I have felt a back crack.

I wake up with a cinderblock leaden on my crown, in which volume of my hair is crushed, and/or hopes of a bend and snap and/or simply a snap. My whole body turns to dust, like the bunnies that hide in the corners of one’s apartment, the ones that one looks at every day and chooses to ignore, from a line of dainty vertebrae coming crashing down, like that one fateful day of brethren towers. I am chewed up and spat out stiff and erect. If only I were a boner.

So now I’m in the community. A society of bad backs. A bad backer is easy to identify. Because they identify themselves first, with loudness by proudness. By all measures they cannot resist the telling of anyone in proximity that they are in fact in the community, and in fact have a bad back, and in fact has had surgery two years ago and it took the greater part of the two years to trust the nuts and bolts enough to reach to into the future, or into past.

Sure this is a great annoyance to the non-bad backers, but hear me when I say, this is not just a trite and colloquial miss-work excuse. It is debilitating in its affliction and indignant in its movement. And mind you, reader, it is an extremely acceptable reason to call out of work. And what’s it to you if I skip work? You should try it sometime. Worry about yourself sometime. Instead of ratting her out to the unit, “it’s her back again,” with an eye roll, then passing the message along to the manager, like you said you would upon hanging up. All the while your PTO remains so unused (what to be a good employee?) that 40 percent of what you earned, in its monetary value, is sure to go to taxes after retirement. And if you want to pay the man sure, but I damn that man until the day the man damns me.

I’m off track. About the back. There is greater collateral damage. It’s the strangest feeling the tickling nerve. It’s ineffable. If I had to pick one word to describe this tickle of this nerve, it’s tormenting. No. Maybe tantalizing. No, titillating. Yes, titillating! (What a good word).

Medical personnel call it a paresthesia. The nickname of a nerve in its current state I suppose. She’s a light tickle. Barely there, like the inception of a thought, like she’s still deciding to be or not to be. A feather grazing the bone, or maybe the muscle, or maybe a layer of flesh that has yet to be named, yet to be found. She is insatiable, paresthesia, she’s cloying and selfish. She won’t let me free, won’t let me be.

And I am oh so desperate for a scratch! Of this different itch, an unvirtuous itch. I long for long French manicured nails puncturing through the flesh, reaching unseeable places; pulling back with proof of relief, of dirt and muscle meat, underneath the acrylic. Please let me scratch, please let the itch scratch, I cannot go on, I cannot think if the scratch remains unitched.

It’s a feeling of increasing tension, growing towards climax. Like the inexorable climb towards an orgasm. It needs to be rubbed just right, just so, until it cums. And reader, I hate to be crass, but, it is the only apt descriptor of the torment, I swear it. It wants to explode. A visceral need to erupt.

This is the greatest sense of condemnation; of persecution, I’ll ever feel. And I do wish it on my worst enemy. If only they hadn’t wished it on me first.

I try to quiet the nerve. I reach for an emollient, another category of apparati in the plethora, waiting in a bathroom cabinet, should anything arise able to be allayed topically. Capsaicin 0.1 percent pain relief cream, I choose. Capsaicin is the spawn of a chili pepper, pilfered from her pungent placenta.

This is a high concentration this 0.1 percent of the chili pepper’s womb. (Only discovered recently in order to maintain this essay’s accuracy.) This potency can only be found on Amazon. Jeff Bezos, once again, intruding on my existentialism. For at my local pharmacy, Walgreens, only 0.25 percent of the bell pepper lineage is available. But this meager 0.25 percent offends my ethos; the stronger the better, the more the more. So I lather. I lather with the strength of four times. No skin is spared, south of the button to my navel. Nye my asshole, nye my pussy, nye my bridge from asshole to pussy, widely known as the taint, so nye my taint, is spared.

There is a fire cauterizing my legs, and all of the anatomy previously named, from the inside out. I can smell the singing flesh. Undeniable is the sensation. However, this chemical reaction is denied to the naked eye. There is no redness, no proof of the infernal inferno, the pepper’s spawn cannot be seen. The phantom burning is only felt. This phenomenon is known to send some to a hospital of the mental.

I make rounds through a homemade spa circuit. First a lukecold shower (it’s only as cold as the shower goes), next, an ice bath with blue icepacks, the kind one’s dutiful mother packs in one’s lunchbox (it is unclear how these icepacks came into my possession, for I don’t have, and am not a dutiful mother), and last, still nude, a blow by an industrial fan. But come to find out, the only antidote to this devil’s milk is its distant relative, dairy milk, unbeknownst to me. The previous hour has proved all in vain, just an excuse to wade in dirty (I didn’t have time to clean the bathtub due to urgency) cold water. However, with distracting worry of an XY hospital worker possibly assessing my genitalia should I need to be hospitalized, and time, heals all.

But it doesn’t end there. I am nothing if not a devout problem solver. I love the solve so much that I create the problems, look for the problems. When will I quit myself? When will I be patient. When will I abstain from the cycle of problem and solution and pain and supplication.

Upon further examination. Of the problems needing to be solved above, one may believe, the original spore from which this particular back injury spread, is the beauty standard. Not the levels of a vibrating plate, or a cracked back, or the titillating nerve. One may believe.

Is it the beauty standard? Or is it self-love and care? The boundaries blur. Do we just convince ourselves that all this apparati is used out of self-love and care? Like we do when we have sex with that guy clad in Lululemon, who is a littlebit crosseyed, a little bit stout, and looks as if his breath has gone bad. Reader, is it like when you have sex with him under the pretext of your own volition. But really you just think you want to want the sex, the Lululemon, because it’s the only way to earn acceptance into this society, by being with this man. Halitosis be damned. Is this like the beauty standard? I don’t want to know.

It’s a little of both, I suppose, I assume. Because it’s always a “little of both”, a little of each, but which came first? The chicken or her egg. And so what if I’ve fallen in love with oppression? I’ve fallen in love by way of these cooling facemasks, and the self-flagellating Capsaicin, but they also have fallen in love with me, and so I’ve fallen in love with myself.

Now that I think about it, I could do without the tit pillow and the five step skincare routine and the twenty minutes in front of the red-light panel with my thumb up my ass. Oh, and if it’s supposed to be so good for you, the red-light, then why is my cholesterol high on the labs I just got back. How do you explain that? Do I simply revel in the pleasure of taking care of myself? One might say cooking for oneself is caring for oneself too but my financial advisor said DoorDashing is fine.

And then of course the anorexics are back in. So now it’s really important to be skinny. So one must vibrate until one’s vertebrae chops off. And so on. And so on a woman’s period, supersonic speed is necessary due to extra fluid, due to extra inflammation in her uterus, which is ipso facto a result of being a woman, and she endures its shedding, a whole layer of tissue, pouring out of her vagina in dark red chunks.

Can we get a day off? I think we’ve earned it. What?? Just to be ugly? No! One cannot do that to herself. Doom looms with the thought of seeing a resemblance to John C Reilly looking back in the mirror after I skip a step, a single apparati. The oppressed side, one might say, I might say, enjoys the lathering and the routine and the silk nightgowns and satin wet hair and baby soft skin and a fresh face.

And since there’s no men around me, no society around me, it can’t be for them, so it must be for me? It’s not for my wife but I’m glad that she has it. She is careful with it as to not make me feel like just a piece of ass but a beautiful, smart, seen woman with a piece of ass.

I’m sick of talking about it. Such shrewdness in the phrase – ad nauseum. And why do I abide? Because I’m scared. Just like everyone else. I can talk myself in circles and question my morality, or what women mean to the world, or our power needing reclamation, or simply clamation, since we never had it in the first place. I do not have to bear every subject that is cross (ed). I am not a savior. This is not mine to carry and shall be given to another warrior, if a woman so chooses, to dissect the chicken and her egg.