I felt like writing this as a way to cope I suppose. Like a lot of these blogs, it’s more for myself. Helps me keep my stories straight. So anyway, my back has been giving me a lot of chronic pain in recent years, especially in the past month or month and a half. Then I have my tailbone issues, aka coccydynia. I finally got an MRI done on my spine, and now, I’m left with trying to piece together how this all happened.
Doctors want to hear that your pain was caused by some dramatic injury, like a car accident or something. But mine kind of happened over time. Like lots of little micro-injuries just added up over the years. They dismiss you if you say it like that though. And because I still (fortunately) look youthful, and I’m short, that just makes it even easier to assume I’m faking my pain because I don’t want to work or something. Damned able-bodied neurotypicals. I feel like I understand ableism a lot more now. It took me a few tries to find a doctor who took me seriously.
To take things back to the start, I’ve always had bad posture. I remember being chewed out by my evil band teacher in Middle School almost daily over it. Believe me, I feel bitter over the fact that she was right that I would have back pains when I was older. It always took a lot of extra effort to sit up straight, and doing it for too long hurts. And you know what, it wasn’t my fault. I was diagnosed with autism over the summer. And having underdeveloped back muscles is common with autistic people. Have a look at this Facebook post by NeuroClastic. It sounds like my struggle.
So, I dealt with bad posture my whole life, got crap about it from people from time to time. Lugging around heavy backpacks all through school didn’t help. My attempts to alleviate that by getting a rolling backpack was met with bullying and chastising, of course. And here’s another thing that I think screwed up both my spine and tailbone; when I listened to music, I used to sit in a little chair with my legs and arms crossed, and rock back and forth. For hours on end, day after day. I didn’t go out much. I stayed locked in my dark room, rocking. I didn’t know I was slowly screwing up my body. To date no doctor seems to believe this caused my chronic pain but it’s true, I know it. And it’s another autism thing. It’s called stimming. But like I said, doctors don’t want to hear about little micro-injuries over time, they want to hear that you had some kind of traumatic moment that scarred you for life. Well, I do have something like that.
May 2015, I was in Armenia doing my internship. One of our weekend trips with Birthright Armenia was a bicycle ride from Yerevan to Etchmiadzin, about ten miles. The roads in Armenia aren’t the best. Very bumpy. And after this ride, my tailbone was never the same. I believe I fractured it. And it never healed properly. Over the next few years, I further strained my spine trying not to put too much weight on my tailbone while sitting. And that made things worse. I don’t know how long I’ve had scoliosis, maybe since my teens as far as I know, but I sure have it now.
For the past couple of years I’ve been through physical therapy. Didn’t do anything. Been through several pain killers. Didn’t do anything. Got a steroid injection to my tailbone. First several excruciating tries it didn’t do anything, it finally worked when they went really deep with it. But it’s a temporary fix. And then I went to a chiropractor. It didn’t do anything until around mid-September last month, when the chiropractor decided to go extra rough on me and screwed my back up even worse. And since then it’s just been awful. I can’t do much anymore. Hurts to get out of bed. Last week I got an MRI. To my horror, it was the type where you sit up straight. Sitting up straight and not moving was incredibly painful, and I was in agony for the next two days. It was horrible. I could have tolerated laying down, but not sitting. It’s even worse than standing, which hurts too after too long. Here’s what they found in my MRI:
So I have a bulging disc. Sounds about right. I have a lot of upper back pain too between the shoulder blades. The MRI didn’t find anything there, but the doctor says it may be muscle pain, which I’m willing to believe. Sounds like the plan is more injections, and more physical therapy. I am skeptical this is going to do anything. The injections are going to really suck.
I’m falling apart.
I really have to reevaluate my entire self image now that I can’t do the same things I used to. I’m not the same person I used to be now. A part of me still feels like a kid who’s body happens to be deteriorating. I’m never going to feel like I’m old mentally. Time laughs at all things, including me.
I write this at 3 am at night. Insomnia seems to happen every other night now to me. I’m listening to one of my mixtapes of acoustic rock in order to soothe me. I don’t know when it will succeed in getting me to sleep. My back pain became severe last month, after a chiropractor screwed it up. I have scoliosis, I was supposed to have an MRI last Friday but the insurance decided to fuck around as usual. Maybe it will happen this Thursday now, but I’m not holding my breath. I’m 36 years old, halfway to 72, but I feel like I’m already experiencing physical deterioration. This is my life now. Pain. From the moment I wake up to whenever I’m lucky enough to sleep. I can’t even get on the ground to play with my son. Simple outings have become excruciating because the longer I’m standing upright the worse the pain gets. I can’t get through the day without being medicated. And I can hardly get a full night of sleep. You know, I realize how fortunate I am in a lot of respects. A wife, a kid, a house, food at least most of the time. But I can’t help but be depressed, I feel like my body is falling apart. I feel the bony hand of Death on my shoulder, whispering in my ear that he is coming. Is this a midlife crisis? I never got over my quarter life crisis, back when I realized my entire education was a scam. I could have started writing this blog entry a lot sooner. I usually like to give myself at least a few days to do these. But it was supposed to go up today. I barely have the motivation for my webcomic let alone anything else. I’m back to being right up against the deadline on those pages.
What music has been getting me through these rather dark times? Here are a few songs. I don’t know how much I will write about each song. Probably going to try to get some sleep and write a little bit during the day, got to work on my comic page though, top priority besides parenting and such.
((Update: I fell asleep finally around 4ish, woke up just before 8, with another groggy, painful day ahead of me. Gonna have to compensate with a lot of coffee, and some jazz cabbage for the pain if you catch my drift.))
Another thing keeping me in a black place mentally is Armenian news. As Azerbaijan continues to attack Armenia and commit heinous war atrocities while the rest of the world largely doesn’t care in the slightest, I see the writing on the wall for my little country. 4,500 years was a good run at least. Every country gets wiped off the map and forgotten by history eventually. Humanity is headed for extinction anyway. The abyss consumes all. It’s like how no one is going to remember me 200 years from now. So yeah, it’s like I’m reliving the 2020 Artsakh war while being in excruciating pain. Fun times huh? I mean it’s not like I can do anything to change it personally, especially being flat broke. Maybe I should use my “fame” to raise awareness about it, eh? Hah. Not even Serj Tankian or Kim Kardashian can do anything of substance about it. Best I can do is try to avoid looking at the news. I’ve unjoined the Armenia subreddit again.
So, here we go.
Desmond Doom ~ The Dissociation Song
Desmond Doom’s music still speaks to me. Especially this song. It really embodies where I’m at right now, just kind of checking out from the rest of the world. “So dead, zombie through the day. Too fast, in the Milky Way. So numb, pins and needles, man. I’m not really here.” Sounds like me stumbling through my days.
Slow Danse with the Dead’s new EP is awesome, no lie. No happy lie. “Strangers in the Dark” topped my charts last month and it’s still a favorite of mine right now. But lets have a look at this one. It’s saying that happy people only stay happy by lying to themselves. “Happy lives tell happy lies.” I would add that it’s a combination of that and ignorance being bliss. The more you learn about the world the worse it is. I was happiest right before Middle School, age 10 to 11 or so, right before I started to figure out what an awful place this planet is. I was at the perfect balance of intelligence and ignorance at that age. I would binge on books about dinosaurs and ancient Egyptian mythology, the world seemed like a fascinating place, not a terrible place. I didn’t know what the hell a genocide was, back then. I was being told happy lies as a child, and I believed them whole-heartedly until life proved them false. Anyway I’m not good at happy lies. I embrace uncomfortable truths. That’s why I’m not very religious anymore either. You can’t look around this world and believe in the good of a God who rules it. War, famine, pestilence, disease and death, they rule this world. That’s a quote, from Vincent Price in Masque of the Red Death. I don’t see any way to refute it.
Another part of the song I like is where the singer asks why anyone seeks fame if they’re just going to die someday anyway. That’s a thought I like to chew on too sometimes. There will come a day where no one even remembers William Shakespeare. We’re all doomed to be forgotten eventually. Even entire countries.
On my blog entry about my acoustic mixtapes (I need to update that by the way, I made a third tape since then) I mentioned how I could hardly find any acoustic goth music besides maybe The Cure and William Control, it’s mainly 90s alternative rock with the occasional 80s pop song or something. But then I found this guy, Ovmorth, he does acoustic covers of Russian post-punk. And it sounds great, really. When is MTV going to give us Molchat Doma Unplugged? Never, but this is the next best thing. I really like the different feel you get from this version. Brooding and emotional.
Ssshhhiiittt! ~ Восемь
“Mom, tell me, why did I become an adult?”
Hilarious band name. It was fun putting that in the blog title too. I bet they get past the censors on the streaming platforms spelling it like that. Anyway, heard this song on one of those Russian Doomer Music compilations, liked the sound of it so looked it up and found this with an English translation. And damn, it sounds like something I could have written. “I’m growing older faster and faster, and fitting in with people less and less.”
The band is from Rostov, Russia, and the song came out in 2016.
This version specifically is the one I’ve been feeling lately. “Pennyroyal Tea” is a song about being in chronic pain on a bunch of different medications, and having bad posture, among other things. Yes there’s the heroin withdrawal element to the song too, but since I am in chronic pain I’ve felt like gravitating toward the song anyway (trust me, I’m not self-medicating on anything that hardcore). Another song kind of like that is “Falling Apart” by Insane Clown Posse, where it’s a song about drug withdrawals but I relate to it through physically feeling like shit for all different reasons. Anyway I dug this particular demo version of the song up when I was working on my acoustic rock mixtapes. It’s more raw than the album version, and Kurt Cobain sings in this uncharacteristically low voice that he almost never sings in. He sounds like he’s suffering. “I’m so tired, I can’t sleep.” Love that line. Kurt Cobain should have made post-punk music. He would have made a great goth. Anyway, this song sounds like a mess, I feel like a mess.
