1.  I’m no good at this.

I was quite euphoric the day after the spine surgery. I even told you all about it. Ideally, that post would have been just an intro to some future videos of me deciding to take up some new physical activity like ballet, or something.

In more retrospective awareness, the wonder of this sort of modern medicine—where they literally cut a 3″ incision into your spine, literally down to the bone, and you’re literally home eating mom’s home cookin’ a few hours later—is a bit double-edged-scalpel. I now think that perhaps the value of all of that is more in being in familiar places, surroundings, and circumstances—because you can be—than it’s any particular magic. Or: in the brutal dice roll that was surgery—a remarkable cost-benefit deal that would never get FDA approval if it were to be conceived of today—they just figured out a few things that have less to do with the actual incisions, scraping, general mechanical aspects…and more to do with microbes, like infections. Whereas, perhaps in the mind of patients, it was always ‘gotta spend a lot of time in hospital, I have incision(s),’ it was more always really: they can get infected and that’s what’ll kill me.