Compromise That Now Punctuates

Came down the stairs early this morning.  Was determined to finish off “Sapiens”, which I’d gotten into the previous day.  Mid way through I’d read a review in the Guardian that described it as “swashbuckling” which seemed about right if by that one can swing from epoch to another flipping tables, disrupting assumptions.  The Agricultural Revolution was a bad bargain, the love of money is the world’s most successful faith, capitalism is a ride we can’t get off. 

My office has a big, green comfy chair.  It is rather absorptive.  I like to sit in it.  And as I read, I drifted off to sleep again and again.  I’m not sure why.  My body kept calling me back to rest and sitting in the chair I must have fallen to sleep in an asinine position.  An hour later, when I finally arose I had a pain in my lumbar.  It was the sort of pain one imagines might disappear if one just leaned back far enough.  But I was wrong.  This pain wasn’t going anywhere. 

My reading wound followed me around as I made my younger daughter and her friend some huevos rancheros and even though I sat on a completely different hard backed chair as I devoured the final hundred pages of the book the pain throbbed on. I biked over to the gym and it remained.  Today was an upper body day for weights.  This did not help.  I considered the skeletal and muscular charts at the gym and pondered the part of me that hurt.  Back home I lay on the ground, pressing my lower back deep down into the floor.  I ate more Advil, stretched, tried to walk it off, but the ache remained.

Now I’m on the east fourth ring road, staring up at the Zun Tower, which is nearly complete.  It’s lovely, in my opinion.  It’s a whole lot more thoughtful than that tired compromise that now punctuates lower Manhattan: “The Liberty Tower.”  In fact it looks a bit like a more gracefully shaped version of the old Twin Towers.  My back's been good but then I haven’t been moving.  Typing.  And this can add pressure.  But the illusion, sitting here, in the back of this Volkswagen, is that, like this morning, the pain has finally made its retreat. 

Sunday 8/19/18