As with most of the posts I’ve written in the last couple of years, I am writing this as I bike from point A to point B. I’ve briefly alluded a couple of times to the decrepitating state of my body, but in the current moment biking is about the only way I can move between point A and point B without experiencing really substantial pain.
In less than a week from now I’ll have the first of two partial knee replacements. It’s a little hard for me to know how much of my current mental state to attribute to the constant pain in both of my knees. It’s been going on for so long and it’s sufficiently bad that I honestly don’t feel like I have much insight into the difference between being me and being me in pain caused by my arthritic knees. It seems reasonably likely that a week from now I’ll begin to get some insight into that difference. How much, of course, it’s hard to know. I’ll have a recovery with rehab and then just a couple of months later I’ll do it again on my right knee. So it’s going to be six or nine months before I’m anything like a hundred percent of whatever it is that a hundred percent will be for the next few years of my life.
In the current moment, though, I do know a few things. I know that sex, generally speaking, is about the furthest thing from my mind. I know that mortality, and really more than mortality, finiteness, is very constantly on my mind. I have all sorts of manic defenses against my feelings about finiteness, but most of them have the paradoxical effect of putting me into even closer contact with it.
Featured image prompt (openai): Large-format color photograph, late afternoon, overcast winter light draining the sky to a flat silver-white. A nearly empty urban bike lane on wet asphalt — the lane markings blurred by moisture, the surface reflecting the pale sky in long, smeared streaks. The bike is parked or barely upright at the edge of the frame, one wheel visible, the rider — bald, close-cropped beard, two earrings, dark tattoo of three wolves on his upper arm visible beneath a rolled sleeve — seated heavily on the saddle, both feet planted on the ground, body slightly forward, weight transferred onto the handlebars, face turned a few degrees away and softly out of focus. The posture is not rest; it is a man briefly stopped, bearing something the frame cannot name. The wet street stretches ahead, long and straight and emptying into grey. No destination visible.
Bottom image prompt (openai): Large-format color photograph, late afternoon, overcast winter light draining the sky to a flat silver-white. A nearly empty urban bike lane on wet asphalt — the lane markings blurred by moisture, the surface reflecting the pale sky in long, smeared streaks. The bike is parked or barely upright at the edge of the frame, one wheel visible, the rider — bald, close-cropped beard, two earrings, dark tattoo of three wolves on his upper arm visible beneath a rolled sleeve — seated heavily on the saddle, both feet planted on the ground, body slightly forward, weight transferred onto the handlebars, face turned a few degrees away and softly out of focus. The posture is not rest; it is a man briefly stopped, bearing something the frame cannot name. The wet street stretches ahead, long and straight and emptying into grey. No destination visible.