Now, Where Were We? by Roy Blount Jr

Author:Roy Blount, Jr. [Blount, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82995-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

NO SENSE LENDING MY BODY AN EAR

Listen to your body.”

That’s what healthfolk tell you. Supposedly, your body knows. If you ought to stop doing something, your body will tell you. If you shouldn’t do it in the first place, your body will tell you. If you ought to start doing it, your body will tell you.

Right.

A couple of years ago, I went through a period of intense health consciousness—purism as to diet and fidelity as to exercise—and my body said things like “You don’t really want that ice cream.” Which I knew to be a lie. And “What are we just sitting here for? Let’s get up and leap and thrust and fling and strain until our heart is pounding!” Which made my work—the squeezing of quite enough but not too many words in between carefully selected marks of punctuation—impracticable.

So I subsided into temperance. A middle course between wholesomeness and degeneracy. And now my body is its old self: a Tower of Babel. Living in my body is like driving a station wagon full of three-to-twelve-year-old children. I can’t tune my body out entirely, and if I try to tune in all its voices distinctly enough to figure out what they are carrying on about, I can’t keep my eyes on the road.

Speaking of eyes, my left one at this moment is saying, “Uh, I believe there’s something, maybe not, maybe it’s jusss …”

“Just what?”

“Jussst … one of those feelings. That an eye gets sometimes. As if there’s something—maybe a speck of dust, maybe the seed of some horrible growth—just over here to the left of the tear duct, and …”

Meanwhile, my neck-and-between-the-shoulders area is going:

“Ooo. Ung. Ohhhh. Mnk. Uhhh …”

“Yes?” I reply.

“Oh, uh. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Well, then don’t. I’m just beginning to perceive the connection between the rise of fundamentalism and the proliferation of subatomic particles, and—”

“Connection. Yeah,” says the neck-and-between-the-shoulders-area. “Somewhere there’s a connection not right, because, ooo, ngk, ummng …”

“Would you at least speak English?”

“Well, it’s kinda hard to put into words … uh … twinge … uh … dull, kinda, ache.… Couldya roll your head kinda—oh—no, ow! That’s … crackle … nngg …”

How much of that can a person listen to? Not that my body does nothing but gripe. Sometimes it screams. This morning I put my right foot into this big moon-boot house slipper I have a pair of, and all of a sudden the place between my third and fourth toes—a precinct I seldom hear from—exclaimed:

“WHOA! TROUBLE! ALERT! SOMETHING AWFUL!”

“What? How could it be something awful?” my mind put in.

“Sure! Right! That’s easy for a mind to say,” cried my inter-toe gap. “A mind has no feeling! I’m telling you, THIS IS HORRIBLE! YOWTCH!”

So I pulled my foot out. There was pain. No denying that. But a person’s feet sometimes have little cramps here and there. I didn’t examine the affected spot carefully. It was too early in the morning.

“OH! MERCY! DON’T PUT ME BACK IN THERE! GET HELP!” cried the place between my toes.

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