Neanderpundit

When I was a kid, it seems that my mother was gaslighting my father, at times. She cleaned so incessaantly that everytime he put something down, she picked it up and put it away.

Now, dad was a simple man. He had a week’s worth of work clothes, two decent suits, maybe ten pairs of dress socks, and about thirty thousand pair of white BVD’s. Come to think of it, Dad did have more hunting clothes than regular clothes, too. Anyway, dad was obsessive about clean underdrawers, and there were always packages of them in the car, under the seat of the truck, in his locker at work, in his damned toolbox. We found fresh 3-packs of dad’s underdrawers as far as three years out after his death, stashed all overe the place.

Socks, as I said, he had few. White ones for work, seven pair, black ones for church. he’d take ’em off, put them down the hamper, and they seemed to disapear.

Anyway. I must have been about ten, gramma was still alive and living with us. Mom was at work, and dad was attending a funeral for a co-worker in the middle of the week. I had been my usual ten year old self, whcih meant that Gramma was about a hairsbreadth from slicing my head of with a bread knife; she was not in a mood to be trifled with- and as I was hiding from her in the window seat under the living room window, she was fit to be tied.
Dad wanders into the room, fully dressed but for his missing socks, and says “Mom?” (my mother’s mother, actually, but we were a close family) ‘Do you hjave any idea where bernie has put my socks?”

My gramma, right on the razors edge of snapping, turs to him and says “If they were up your ASS you’d KNOW!”.

There was dead silence in the room, and I peeked out from under the cushion of the window seat. Dad was standing there looking at grandma, a thin grin starting to show on his face, and Gramma, who had just seen me peeking out from under the seat, was beginning to turn beet red. Dad left before he laughed out loud, Gramma grabbed me by the ear and lifted me bodily from my hiding place, and from that point on, anytime anyone says “Have you seen my ____” I am prompted to say ‘If it were up your ASS you’d KNOW!”
Thanks, Gramma.

So on or about the first of July, I fuck up my back. Not a big fuckup, mind you, just lifted something I shouldn’t have.

THe downside of this has been a couple of weeks of pain. The further downside has been that at, for instance, the Ogmeet, I wasn’t able to enjoy myself as much as I could have, as i was in constant pain. I also spent some evenings this week overdoing it, so that as of last night, percocet was the only thing that would let me sleep.

So today I break away from a conference call at work to visit my chiropracter, and she turned me inside out, hit my spleen with a hammer a couple times, played the xylophone on my ribcage for a while, and then zapped me with electromassage and ultrasound. And as I was walking out of her office, I found I had to hit the can. Hard.

I used the john at the office complex. I used the john at the corner gas station, I used the john at the Dunkin Donuts. I used the john at the Home Depot. I used the john at the Menards. I used the john at the Walgreens. I shat more in that trip home than I’ve shit in a week. It’s as if the back pain was shutting off the urge to shit, and the spinal adjustment turned it back on. Whatever the case, I cannot now stand outside in a stiff wind, because I’m so empty I reverberate lie a bell. If I had anything else to let go of, I would, but I shit things I hadn’t ever eaten. (Circus peanuts? I’ve never even HAD circus peanuts!) I don’t know if this is normal, but I know I’m not, so I’m not concerned.