I had just picked up something in my left hand when the urge to put my right hand on the keyboard next to me found my hand already moving over to the keys. After a half minute, something told me to hit the red button and I started recording. As always, what was captured was not as sublime as the memory of what was not, but after a few moments of doubt, I decided to push on, anyhow, and recorded the music for the video below. It took 8 minutes to make the music. It took about a half hour to craft the montage. And another couple of hours of tinkering video settings and uploading to YouTube. Is that what they call backloading?
When I was writing this and when I originally recorded it, it was called “Poland” because I was so impressed with the crushing situation faced by Polish democrats in the face of the Russian-backed Polish Communist government’s repressive tactics and inability to provide food and basic necessities to the Polish people.
But that was more a distancing metaphor for my own darker feelings. The giddy euphoria I had felt getting out of the hospital after 2 months after my motorcycle wreck quickly evaporated when I hit the bricks in my walker. While I soon exchanged the walker for a pair of crutches, and six months later a single cane — I was, without my knowledge, walking on a broken leg. And from that point on, for several years, my leg didn’t improve, but rather got worse.
(Second opinion, people. Get a real one — not from the other docs in the group, no matter how “top flight” they supposedly are. I didn’t sue but, for the sake of the community, I probably should have. Several years later, my doctor, a very nice man who I suspect had serious problems reintegrating into civilian life after training as a battlefield orthopedist in Vietnam, paralyzed a young man in a “routine” vertebrae fusion. The story was that he’d wanted to make sure the young man would be able to go back to his warehouse job. Very similar to my own story with the good doc — he asked me if I wanted him to fuse my broken hip rather than reconstruct it as a functioning hip — since the fused hip would be better for carrying heavy loads — I, too, was a warehouseman at the time — of course, with a fused hip, one would never be able to walk with anything even approaching a normal gait. Psycho. But a nice guy. He let me drink in the hospital — even when I was on injections of morphine and demerol. Talk about yer warm and fuzzies. Then again, it wasn’t any fun at all when I went straight from warm and fuzzy pain meds in the hospital to beer and whatever I could find around my girlfriend’s place when I first got sprung. I kept reaching for that nurse call button…)
Anyhow, where was I… ah yeah, my leg was broken and aching all the time, almost a year and a half after the wreck. Throw that together with a stretch of destructive storms that seemed to go on all winter, compounding my physical misery, a disintegrating relationship with the girl I’d been seeing, and world political malaise — and ya get this cheery little ditty…
Turn down this street
back down that alley
there is no escape and there is no stalling
The future is here
and it’s more of the past
All I remember
is falling and falling
Leave me alone
just let me be
with wounds this deep
they just have to bleed
Desperation is short supply
I used up my panic in the crises last year
It’s hard to worry, it’s hard to care
when you’re so tired of anger
and you’re so tired of fear
No point in crying, laughing or dreaming
no point in love, no % in fear
desperation is in short supply
so tired of anger
2 dazed 2 care
