The body intervenes
Notes on pain, the 65-game rule, and parsing unending NBA playoff seeding.
How will I know if I should take them off? I ask Dylan, my lower back lighting up like coils in an oven, brightening to broil.
If it burns, he says.
It is burning, I say, craning around best I can to look at my lower back in the mirror and see whether the skin around the adhesive bandages is flushing red.
If it hurts, he says. Want me to take them off? He offers.
They do hurt, I say, pausing. But maybe… it’s good?
The package warned, I read, that a small percentage of people experienced severe burns from the bandages. I start to swing my arms in slow, ragdoll rotations, half wondering whether this will accelerate the heat.
Floppy, ungraceful arm swings are the only movement that’s brought me any relief over the last few days. First, just in the relative dark of the kitchen after wincing my way out of bed, self-conscious, but quickly uncaring, in the aisles of the grocery store, or standing on camera between the host’s ad reads doing a podcast; in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, and carving out a bubble of space for myself on the shared city trail we walk the dogs on, making cyclists and joggers veer away.
I stood to do them every 10 minutes working through rounds of edits on a giant story I wrote for The Ringer, joking with my editor both the pain and the swings were a good analogy for the editing process. I’ll do them during commercial breaks later tonight, on the last regular season segment of NBA TV I’m scheduled for.
I did them watching Artemis II drop like a stone down through Earth’s atmosphere, nervously speeding the swings the longer it seemed like it was taking for the capsule’s parachutes to deploy.
I should back up a bit.
I hurt my back, the jury Dylan was on got sequestered, Donald Trump threatened to annihilate Iran — 93 million people — ostensibly with nuclear war, and I wondered, not for the first time, how to care about the convolutions of NBA playoff seeding in a time of existential threats as proxy and posturing. Not morally, though there is that too, but just how, in the brain, to line those two up.
