The Rise and Fall of the Skittish Empire

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OK, so this is how easily I can fall apart.

I was in the grocery store last night, feeling quite good, having just gotten out of the gym. Now, not that you care, but I have been having horrible back problems lately, a spasm in my lower back that feels like someone assaulted me with a snow shovel. Maybe not so coincidentally, this happened just as soon as I started exercising in earnest at the gym. Before this, I was entirely lazy and happy, content to sit in the sauna, my much preferred European Workout. But what really got me into this spot of trouble is that I have friends, friends who insist on actually lifting weights. And when you are a guy, especially a gay one, and another guy presents you with a physical challenge, well you take it, because there are whole eons behind you of having not measured up, and now's your chance.

So, the long and the short of it is that my back was just in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

I have been dragging around with this spasming for a few weeks now. But, ironically, I finally found some relief in my "sports injury" by returning last night to my internal home-row position: the sauna. I just sat there, happily soaking up the heat, chatting occasionally with people in their altogether, reading wrinkled pages of a copy of US magazine that had completely melted away from its binding (it's so sad: enough about Heath, please). But then I suddenly had the strange idea to go stretch, which - if you knew me - well, I just never ever do. Yoga? Forget it. I am still convinced that kripalu is supposed to be pronounced, "cripple-you."

So, following my odd impulse, I went upstairs to the blue dingy mats and just s t r e t c h e d .

I breathed in and out roughly, sounding a little too porn-like for my taste, trying to channel the pain out of me. Again, quite against my nature, I paid no attention whatsoever to the people who came and went around me as I lay there, neon with pain and sweating.

Very gingerly I got up, and I just could not believe it: the stretching had worked. I bent over slowly, then back up, through the horizontal danger zone, expecting to collapse like newlywed Greeks dancing on a card table. It didn't happen.

Almost skipping - ok, well, at least walking normally - I old-person-bounded down the stairs, into the locker room, and changed. I felt so good. I started thinking right then about taking care of myself more. Eating more healthily (healthfully?), stretching more, maybe even doing yoga. God, in the span of an hour who had replaced me?

It was getting later, and I was hungry, and I started thinking about a quick satisfying dinner. So a short trek later there I am, entering the store, just ravenous about the idea of pasta... I know, not exactly health food. Baby steps.

Almost the moment I enter the store I see a friend. I am so relaxed and we start to chat about the weekend - it had been a fun one, little drama and lots of dancing, and everyone is doing well - there's even a little bit of amour in the air. Things are good. And that is when it all turns to horror.

In slow motion, like the Zapruder film, I see something out of the corner of my eye, to the right. I instantly recognize who it is. Approaching in a slow halting amble, but still a little ways off, is this developmentally-disabled girl. I have seen her there before and we have even chatted, but I realize now that I never got her name. So, anyway (and it's amazing how the human mind can cue in on this so quickly) I sense there is something greatly wrong with her, and now I am no longer listening to my friend, I am aping the conversation and nodding appropriately. But my actual attention moves to her now, completely on her. And that is when, like a glacier sliding in great raw chunks into the ocean, she just starts to fall completely apart. She collapses in a heap and just starts bawling.

Internally, I start to freak the fuck out. Now, I normally have a pretty relaxed chilled-martini personality, if perhaps a little sardonic. But I'll admit it: I am pretty cognitive in my ways and sometimes I can a bit too intellectual. You can even accuse me (if you really don't like me) of on occasion being totally emotionally frigid. But - like anyone really - I, too, have a few secret Achilles heels in my Emotional Cortex, the last 10 minutes of Extreme Home Makeover being one of them. But I am telling you, this day I found a new one. I can't believe how - in mere milliseconds - the sight of this collapsed and crying disabled girl in the middle of the grocery store just absolutely demolished me. My heart felt like a Fabergé egg being pecked apart in a cockfight.

I looked around, desperate, for someone to go over and help the girl. Thankfully, I was far enough away that there were other people, closer to her, who would have been expected to be the designated first-responders. I stood, peering over the display of salsa and lime chips, breathless, as if watching someone being rescued from a river. Once I saw that someone was coming to her aid, I actually had to turn and walk away. I felt gutted. I said goodbye to my friend and moved on, listlessly dropping cans of olives into my basket, but I couldn't concentrate. The thought of a nice dinner was obliterated. I just had to get out.

I think I have to take a pause here to explain myself. When I first wrote this essay, I got a little bit of flak from a friend. Even though he knows me, he said my rendering of events in the Stop & Shop makes me sound like a World Class A-hole. Like, why didn't I go help her? And, you know, that's almost a sort of very good question. Part of the problem is that I really hate scenes of any sort. I have spent a good deal of my life trying not only to blend into the wallpaper, but actually become the wallpaper. So, my first excuse is that when something unsavory happens, well, I run. ("Running" for me can really be it's own essay - I have lots of material there.)

I think my second item of defense (and this is really close to the first one) is that I have an impossibly strong fear of any strong emotions. (Yes, I am one of those people.) I guess I should add that - once in a while - anger is OK: that one is socially acceptable. Again, I could go on and on here for another whole essay about emotions, and my really bad relationship with all of them, and how I have been fighting them for a very long time. But let's just suffice it to say that, for me, seeing that girl there with all this raw sadness is like a black-hole, and I am just a tiny speck of a dust particle, floating dangerously close to the event-horizon, terrified I will be sucked over the edge and down into its core.

So that's why I stayed behind the salsa and the lime-chips, OK?

So - to continue the thread of the story - that's when I went home and tried somehow to make dinner anyway. And despite the evening's earlier Pureeing of the Soul, the dinner actually turned out really well, much to my amazement. But still - even a few hours and several carby bowls of pasta later - I just could not shake the feeling of that sad, sad girl, falling apart in the grocery store like the Statue of Liberty in a Michael Bay movie. I felt like when you are two weeks into a cold, when you are almost finally free of all your hacking expellations, but there is still a heavy dampness on your energy, drip-drying on the rack of your spirit.

I needed to do something.

I thought then about an article I had recently read saying the best thing to do when you are feeling emotionally Katrina-like is to interrupt the thought process, to do something - anything - so that your concentration gets so entirely sucked up that you have no more Skeeball tickets left to spend on depression, or sadness, or whatever. So I went online, ran online if that's even possible, to pogo.com. It's this free game site I discovered about two months ago when I was "helping" Greg with his paperwork. In between bouts of my indispensable assistance, I was utterly glued to this game called Luxor, a crazy-ass ancient Egypt ball-shooting puzzle arcade game, which - at the time - I just could not stop playing. So here I was now on my computer - not Greg's - having to register again and all that blah-de-blah. Fine, done. So now I am scrolling down the brightly-colored game choices and I see (to my delight, and then embarrassment, in that order) - that there is a new version of my version of crack: Luxor 2!

So I was up until nearly two in the morning... until my crappy free-trial copy ran out.

But, you know what? It worked. My sadness had melted like a box of popsicles left out in a hot parking lot. My mind felt totally better, sticky but clear. And, amazingly, my back was holding on -even my crazy stupid back still felt good. I went to sleep, at long last, and despite my mind wildly racing from a late-night hot chocolate (I know, I know...), I actually ended up sleeping better than I had in a very very long time.

Maybe, as bad as it can be, maybe, perhaps, just a little bit of trauma (of both the body and of the fragile psyche, as the case might be) is ultimately in the end somehow good for the soul.

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