Hot and cold...

...pretty well sums up my day. Cold is easiest to explain: I went to the chiro today and, among other things, I have to put an icepack on my by back -- in two places -- for 15 minutes five times daily. I'm up to Number Three right now. Ugh. Not comfortable.

Hot? It was 104 degrees where his office is located, and it's hot here. I don't like that any more than I like the cold on my spine.

The chiro was interesting, if difficult to put up with. He is a zealot for chiropractic, an evangelist who touts it as a potential cure for many disorders. Hell, almost everything I've ever complained about will be dealt with as soon as my bones are in alignment.

It was almost as if I was facing Dr John Harvey Kellogg. All that was missing was a lecture on the evils of "autointoxication" plus, perhaps, an enema to "exonerate" my bowels. I guess having a "subluxation" will have to do.

Granted, I'm not the one to approach this with an entirely open mind. My mother was in the medical field and viewed practitioners of chiropractic with something like the disdain she would have shown had I come to her with a tale of visiting an Obeah man.

Still, rather than telling me to lie down and subject myself to a series of contortions and forced cracks and pops, he took a series of x-rays and made a big production out of explaining why I was in pain. Then we got around to the cracks and pops....

PARENTHETICAL THEM'S-THE-BREAKS THOUGHT: One of the x-rays showed a broken (and fully healed) bone in my right shoulder. I had no idea! Never had a car accident serious enough to leave me in pain, no sports injuries in school school, no nothin'. Weird.

I get to go back for more Monday. Somehow, I've never been to any kind of medical person who has said, "here, this will fix you up and you won't have to come back for a half-million follow-up visits." I sense that this is going to take a while, and cost me far more than I can afford.

And damn, my back still hurts....

I'm not in the mood for this.

Meanwhile, the downward spiral continues. No checks, no offers of anything that would give me even the slightest break from the pressure I feel. Every time the phone rings or I run into anyone, my first thought is: what will they demand/take from me?

I did get an email from the editor to whom I sent a story this week:

"Uh, you NAILED this story. Put simply, it is beautiful. Few have impressed me the way this one does, and this after 11 years.

And what an easy edit..."

I still got it, Jim. Me and Tiger Woods.

Well, no, I ain't still got it. The writing took me more than twice as long as it should have, and I was wracked by angry and indecisive moments all the way. One of the bad hangovers of That Awful February 29th. That seldom happened to me before. Besides, what it all adds up to is a small check in two or three months. Doesn't even begin to help with today's crisis. Tiger? He needs surgery, but he's got a zillion dollars to pay the bills and suffer through the necessary downtime.

I suppose I should be grateful. Mark Twain didn't write a word after he died, so far as I know. Neither did Big Ernie Hemingway. Makes me unique.

You know what? This is all self-pity, and I understand that and am not proud of it, but I'm tired of rolling that damn rock up the hill over and over, only to have it roll back down again and get heavier when it does so.

I could tell you what I feel I need right now, but why? I dare not feel the slightest optimism that I'm going to get it.

No matter how many bones the chiro manages to re-align....