walking

Back to the Sunday Seven format tonight, s’il vous plaît.

I haven’t updated on my neck in a while. The news is good: I’d say my right hand and arm are back to 100% of baseline, which I’d define as about 15 months ago, before I started feeling any symptoms at all. My left hand is improving more slowly, but it had farther to go. Let’s call that somewhere between about 50-75% of baseline. It’s still getting better and I’m optimistic it’ll get back to 100% at some point down the road. I’ve started playing again, and I think my limitations at this point are as much due to rust as the injury to my nerve roots. Onward.

I am still restricted from any physical exertion beyond walking. I see the doctor again at the end of the month, at which point I expect to be cleared to return to running, lifting, cycling, and golf.¹ But as I’ve been telling people: whether he clears me or not, I’m getting back to some of that, against medical advice if need be. I’ll ask him what the risks are, of course, and then make my own decision. At this point I believe the damage to my mental and cardiovascular health caused by sitting on my ever-expanding ass is a much bigger problem than whatever might happen in my cervical spine if I dare to exercise again.

I will say this for walking: it allows for taking in one’s surroundings in ways that running and cycling simply cannot. Those two activities require constant vigilance and alertness for danger. Cars, pedestrians, other runners/cyclers, dogs, and faults in the sidewalk or road that could lead to calamity—it all takes up a huge percentage of my available CPU. Walking gives me a chance to notice stuff, like gardens, wildlife, interesting (or terrible) architecture, just a general sense of who’s doing what around the neighborhood. It’s…not terrible.²

I’m in the market for a new shrink. I worked with a guy recently in the run-up to my surgery who was very good at helping me through my anxiety about that, but on the occasions where we branched into All My Other Bullshit, we didn’t really connect. Now that the surgery’s behind me, I haven’t been back. I did text him to let him know it went well, but I never made another appointment. Maybe tellingly, he didn’t ask about one, either. I think he knew. Sometimes that relationship, like any other, just doesn’t work out.

Lately I’ve rediscovered the first two Cracker records, their self-titled debut, and Kerosene Hat. It occurs to me that these records planted a seed in me that would eventually grow into my love of what people are calling “Americana” these days. Somehow, these guys released what are essentially country rock albums into the “Alternative” wave of the early 90’s and got away with it. Maybe David Lowery’s sardonic lyrics gave them cover to run with that crowd. The reality is that he and Johnny Hickman were a couple of boys from the Inland Empire whose roots are more about the Bakersfield boys than the sludgy stuff Cobain and the rest of their peers were weaned on up north. You can draw a straight line from those Cracker records to what Jason Isbell is doing now. They made me a sleeper agent, or something.

I’ve been thinking about getting a drone. A real one, with a good camera on a gimbal, several miles of range, a proper controller with live first-person video, etc. I don’t know why, exactly. Just seems like it’d be fun to be able to make high quality aerial movies around town, or down by the lakefront. It sits at the intersection of the Venn diagram of a lot of my interests. On the other hand, it’s a lot of money to do right, and a lot of time that I don’t really have. There’s a line in a Dawes song about “buy[ing] more shit you don’t have time to use” which I should probably heed. Maybe I could spend that money on another guitar instead, though that may not pass the Dawes test, either.

Speaking of guitars and my healing hands, my band The Good is gearing up³ for our annual Halloween show, the Exquisite Corpse Ball, at Beat Kitchen on October 24th. The bit here is that six local bands each commit to doing a mini-set of covers. Everyone chooses a band to inhabit for an evening. In the past, we’ve done Bowie, Queen, Ozzy, Bruce, AC/DC, and others. This year we’re taking on U2. I was truly moved that the guys checked with me early on in the process to make sure we were choosing a band whose guitarist I could handle technically even if I’m not at 100%. I have nothing but love for The Edge as a musical force, but what he does isn’t exactly virtuosic in the same way that Randy Rhoads or Brian May are. It’s going to be an incredible show, and if you’re local, I hope you can join us for a great night of music, costumes, and celebrating Chicago’s music scene.⁴