Dear ones,
I am writing these pieces, one by one, that will be bloggy and at the same time amounting to something all together. That’s what I’m up to lately. I’ll call them “Pain,” and they may make a book or something. This is my life, I could call it.
Pain
# 8 Tuesday
Tomorrow the doctor will stick a needle down my spine to see if we can stop the pain. Really? There is no limit to what can be done in the service of human ease. All sorts of drugs. I am sleepy a lot. I usually want to sleep all morning. This is what happens. I am already sleepy. Sleepy, Dopey, Doc, all the dwarfs. Jerry was Doc for the Halloween party. The one I stayed home from, a half-asleep dreamer in my orange chair.
# 9 Thursday
Cortisone shots, at least of this magnitude, make me feel buzzy. I woke up at 5:30. I may be a little better, and that’s all I have to report. What is an epidural like? You lie on one gurney, they wheel you to another room, get you to roll onto your back onto another gurney, with your head through a hole like a massage table. It’s pretty simple—they push your gown out of the way and stick needles in several spots. They do a preliminary shot to prepare you for the deeper ones. The doctor said I had so much hardware he had to work around it. Well, okay, whatever it takes. Hardware, cortisone, ceremonial dances.
I sit here trying to think of the word surgery, which obviously I finally thought of. Surgery would be next, but not now. I am so tired of having my body used this way. I can’t remember words because they’ve all been sucked into the black hole I call my brain. They are in there, having their ceremonies without me. Dr. Faulkner had the most wonderful book I had to study and pass an exam on. It was about—damn, I can’t hold onto anything—It was about diagramming sentences. I know sentences, I mean I KNOW sentences. The man knew what he was doing. I know the hierarchy of language, which words dangle off the main stem, which minor ones dangle off those. Dr. Faulker, the quintessential southerner, is dead. I am very old, still the language in all its mutations is clicking along. Only those of us who remember the old words find joy in the old configurations. It’s a secret club.
Names are important to me at the moment, since I can’t remember diddly-squat. I am looking up the eight classical forms of Indian dance: Sattriya, Mohiniyattam, Manipuri, Odissi, and so on, depending on the movements of the body, depending on the drum-sounds. My first meditation teacher tried everything. He hung by hooks from a pole, hooks that dug into his chest, part of an Indian ceremony. He showed us the scars. He’s still teaching on line. I have enormous respect for him, not because he could hang by a hook, but because of his utter devotion to going deep into human experience. There’s some connection between the epidural and his voluntary suffering.
# 10 Friday
I’ve been beaten up. My sister reminded me that it’s typical to hurt worse for the first 36-72 hours. This gives me hope.
The P.S. . .
You’re invited to the first thing I’ve done in a while . Please join me with the brilliant Darien Gee as we talk on Substack on her series called “Writer-ish.” 3 Things: Short Prose Talk.
Event Details:
Topic: Short prose, the diary as ballast, and the writer you become over a lifetime
Date: Wednesday, November 18, 2026
Time: 12:00 pm PT (notice! this is Pacific Time)
Cost: Free for all subscribers via the Writer-ish Substack. (Look it up)