May Sweeps - Day 474

I probably won't be getting any push-ups or sit-ups today.  Normally, that would feel like some kind of monumental failure to me, but my mom ordered a new gas grill yesterday, and my brother-in-law and I carried it from the front yard around the house to the back deck, and the damned thing must have weighed two hundred-plus pounds.  I don't understand how I, who exercise every single day, would have a harder time lifting it than he did, but that's how it goes (he works for UPS, though, lifting boxes of various sizes every single shift, so maybe that makes a difference).

For me, though, I have spent the day being surprised and re-surprised by just how excruciating back pain can be.  One day, about twenty years ago, I threw out my back, and it was both extremely painful, and extraordinarily scary, because it hurt so much that I laid down on the floor, and then was completely unable to get up again for several minutes.  

Luckily, I've not experienced that sort of thing again in the years since then, though I have injured myself a time or two.  Today, however, every time I drop my keys, or have to walk up or down stairs, or worst of all, sneeze.*

Push-ups Today: 40
Push-ups In May: 2222

I've been sitting here typing for the last half hour, and the pain goes away, but then I'll change my position, or reach for something, and the pain starts again, like George Lucas making yet another change to the Star Wars Trilogy.

"Who the eff are you, I wonder."

I made the dumb decision to come to the park today instead of the library, thinking I needed a change and the cool, sunless afternoon might feel nice (and it does).  Unfortunately, a family arrived to eat their Chik-Fil-A meal, with their half-dozen children running around, and oddly, it's not the children making all the noise, but the parents, talking to each other so loudly, you'd think they were at a Megadeth concert rather than the gazebo at a city park.

Okay, they've gone off to play with their kids on the swings, and now I'm alone again, and can concentrate on my writing . . . except I don't want to.  It's Church Muse once more, because when that family was jabbering on so distractingly, all I wanted to do was write Layla finding out the truth about her sister, but now that they've gone, I'd rather blog, or go for a drive.  Dang.

Sit-ups Today: 30
Sit-ups In May: 1979

So, at the very end of the night, having not dared do any sit-ups, I considered just going to bed with zero.  But, oddly enough, I got angry instead.  If I failed now, then they win, I thought to myself.  Specifically, they are all the people who I feel inferior to, who never had to sit home on Saturday nights, listening to the radio and watching Lorne Michaels's show, whose parents were proud of them for excelling, holding down a good job, nailing a cheerleader, getting straight A's, or making a touchdown or a goal or a free-throw, who never drove to Idaho alone to see a once-in-a-lifetime celestial event because nobody would go with him.

And that anger fueled me to go into the living room and do the hardest sit-ups I've ever done, wincing when I didn't keep my back completely straight, and holding my arms out in front of me like I was Bela Lugosi playing Frankenstein's Monster.**  I only managed thirty, but I'll do better tomorrow, and not every day can be a home run . . . sometimes I walk to First is gonna have to do.

As far as the twins story goes, I reached that point of no return I've been talking about.  I should have made a list of possibilities, and then picked the one with the most potential, but instead, I just went ahead and chose what I wanted the answer to be, and then started in on that scene.  I've little doubt that I've made the wrong decision (wouldn't it have been brave to just have Layla have lost her mind?  That she couldn't bear to be away from her twin for a weekend, so she invented this idea that something was wrong in order to cope?  Hell, the big revelation could've been that Layla was a single child, and the twin was only in her head, though I'd have had to go through the story when I was done and rephrased every conversation, so I didn't end up with a contradictory pile of garbage like an Ehren Krueger screenplay).

The fact that literally no other people will ever care how I resolve this question should be a bit of a load off, not having to deal with fan backlash, but if anything, it makes it all seem all the more pointless.  Kind of like life, Tommy.  Kind of like life.

Words Today: 1062
Words In May: 13,176

*I have never counted how many times I've sneezed in a day, but it's more than I thought, since each one is like getting an electric shock to my spine.

**Yeah, Bela Lugosi.  That arms outstretched version you see in cartoons and such is based on his blind version of the Monster, from 1943.