With Continual Reference to Justin Kahn.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

I am Become Tireseus

Sunday night I went to bed with a very sore eye. Monday morning, I woke up with my right eye swollen shut. Rather than write, I applied hot compresses. I willed my eye to heal.

I cried involuntarily.

I cried not out of the kind of eye-swollen-shut-reflex referred to in the previous sentence, but because of the conflict in my psyche between the part of me that knows that I dislike pain and the part of me which feels that I am in fact undergoing a kind of low grade, but constant pain.

I cried beacuse of all the suffering in the world.

(Somewhere around that second sentence, I think I was maybe trying to hard to sell you, the highly credulous reader, my sensitive side? )

While I am usually lax about my health, I could see this was a problem. Like any mature adult, I took charge of the situation. First, I got together a blog entry (see yesterday's entry). Then I read a few more pages of David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster*

Soon, I resumed the business of hurting.

To wit(?), I include an excerpt from my private diary, which usually stays private:

DECEMBER 12, 2005
6:13 My eye hurts.
7:34 Cannot believe that the nurse will not give me an appointment.
8:45 Wow, does my eye hurt.
8:46 Hurt from the eyes.
9:03 Snake eyes of pain.
10:05 Eye Hurt.
11:04 Spreading to the Bridge of My Nose.
12:05 Listened to Johnny Cash's 'Hurt.' Lyrics such as, ‘I Hurt myself today, to see if I still feel/I Focus on the Pain/ What have I become?/My sweetest friend’ make me think of my eye.
12:17 Ate a scoop of Nutella.

By early afternoon, I finally got in to see a doctor.

Did I live? Or was I overtaken by the terrible disease I suspected I had (a disease so pathologicaly horrific that the only comfort I could find is knowing that the rareness of the disease would certainly catapault me into the media, where my story would provide a rare moment of humane tenderness amongst the audience) and died within hours of my last journal entry?

Tune in tomorrow and find out.

*I have been pushing DFW on everybody. To date the dialouge which has given me the most pleasure is:
ME: Is there a reason you haven't read DFW's Consider the Lobster.
RESPONDENT**:Because I just read Consider the Crab, and wasn't that impressed.

**Jessi of A***.

***DFW's trademark footnotes, are these days often replaced by asterisks. How lame.

2 comments:

Justin said...

Maybe I should just get the ball rolling on this comments section and say that Jessi' Consider the Crab remark, really made no sense, but usually we talk about things like 18th century lit, and how proto-feminims affected the writing of Frankenstein. So such an obviously inappropriate response was simply shocking, and in this case humourous.

Anonymous said...

Does Tireseus mean "pinkeye"?