It Isn't Ass Time

Eighteenth months ago I did a few flips off a diving board in Long Beach at our friends’ pool. On the last flip (for life) I landed square on my lower back and I have not been the same since.

Of course, it’s not cystic fibrosis. I mean, one must not get dramatic.

But, having tightness traveling up and down my leg, numbness, pain, etc, for months: Oh, welcome to middle age! I made an appointment, maybe looking for something I could do, alternative like, man.

At the doctor’s office today, no one wanted to do their work. Seems like with this downfall, many intrinsically lazy people are just saying, “Fuck it,” at a time when they need to ramp it up a bit. And maybe mean spirited people who usually have to keep a clamp on it are letting it rip. The doctor was furious and nastily cranky, stating that the cause of my lower back problem is my weight. “For every ten pounds you are overweight, that’s fifty extra pounds on your lumbar spine. You know it’s curved right? How tall are you? How much did you weigh in high school? You should head toward that weight. Probably all your problems will go away.” The lanky, cranky man.

I was aghast. I told him I wasn’t even full grown in high school, so let’s deal with freshman year of college. Okay, I was ten or fifteen pounds lighter then. But I mean, that was a long time ago and I’ve had a lot of pork chops since then. I told the doctor, “Well, I was about 165 or 168 pounds,” I told him, with an expression on my face like, “Are you really serious about full grown adults trying to recapture the weight of their youth?”

He talked about his running miles every day. He clearly hates himself. Sure, he’s thin. I mentioned something about being middle aged, not really including him, and he quickly responded, “I’m not middle aged.”

Then the phone rang. A nurse asked something about drops. The doctor yelled into the phone, “You called me for this? Why are you calling me? Put in the drops. Just put in the drops.” He slammed down the phone, completely peeved that he was being bothered for something so routine and looked right at me, searching for an ally, and said derisively, “Guacamole,” like he was saying, “Fucking Mexican idiot.”

I just looked at him, stunned.

Later in the hall, he was putting someone down, a co-worker, for not covering his mouth when he coughed and the put down man, sounding exhausted from daily lambasting said, “There was no one around, so I didn’t cover my mouth. There was no one around. Should I have covered my mouth if there was no one around?”

When I was leaving, I tried to get some paperwork from the front desk. The front desk person looked at me blankly, like I was destroying her special slow-time-at-the-lunch hour with my Danielle Steele book. Eventually, I got what I needed.

Let’s not let these bad times make us bad people. Get off your ass if you are sitting on your ass. If you are sitting on other peoples’ asses because you’re a jerk, get off their ass.