Talk To The Hand

What at first appeared to be a minor, if painful, injury to my left hand is having lasting effects. The effects are subtle but unmistakable, and limited almost exclusively to my guitar playing.

The injury resulted from an embarrassingly stupid mishap. It’s almost irrelevant that I was traveling at the time, except that the back seat of the rental car was occupied by a suitcase. A remaining five- or six-inch swath of seat cushion seemed to be just enough room for the six pack of beer I’d purchased at a Trader Joe’s minutes earlier. But no sooner had I placed it there than it rolled sideways, caught the tip of my left hand middle finger, and hyperextended the hell out of it.

If it had been an ordinary six pack, the cans would probably have tumbled out. But it was sealed, so I caught the full weight of those six cans. Bitter irony: it’s one of my favorite beers, a regional IPA (Upper Hand, oddly enough) brewed in northern Michigan and unavailable in my western state.

The top of the hand swelled up, and that night I noticed that making certain guitar chord shapes  was difficult. The middle and ring fingers wouldn’t properly align; they seemed to bump into each other. (Yes, I know that sounds strange.) There was also a dexterity issue.

After I got home I saw my regular doctor, who felt my hand and detected no breaks. Give it a month, she advised.

But the problem persisted so I went to an orthopedic surgeon, who took x-rays and ordered an MRI. It seemed like a good omen, during the MRI, when the music that played through ill-fitting headphones included several in my repertoire: “What A Wonderful World,” and “Fly Me To the Moon.” But I should know better than to believe in omens. I do know better.

The issue revealed by the MRI, the ortho said, is with your flexor tendon. It isn’t torn, but it is strained. Yet ultimately she said to me: “I’m stumped.”

Soon after, I had a friendly chat with a woman I knew to be a Doctor of Osteopathy, though that had nothing to do with our chat. The discipline impresses me. I stuck out my hand and she did a thirty-second assessment, then referred me to a hand specialist.

This resulted in a few months of physical therapy, as well as the insight that damage to soft tissue, tendons in particular, can take longer to heal than bone breaks.

Now, nearly six months after that six pack mishap, the damage lingers. I think it’s a bit better – some of those chord shapes are a little easier to make, though still troublesome. Is it healing, oh so slowly? Is the PT paying off? Or is it that humans are endlessly adaptable, and I am unconsciously making necessary guitar playing adjustments? Or, all of the above?

Smell a Rat?

Note: This post was written a few days after the November 2024 election, but not posted until the following February. It just seems so futile. Now, I figure, what the hell! Plus, someone – Greg Palast – has finally shot up a flare.

Does no one smell a rat?

There’s been plenty of anguish since the second elevation of The Dump to the presidency. I share it. This development is a catastrophe, politically and otherwise, for more reasons I’ll enumerate here.

The pundits I’ve heard since November 5th have uniformly accepted the results and are busy playing the blame game. I’m not remotely interested in this. No one, so far as I know, is suggesting what seems entirely plausible to me: that maybe, just maybe, the results of the 2024 Presidential election are illegitimate.

Instead, there’s been blame heaped on Kamala Harris: a poor candidate, some say. Yet she ran a virtually flawless campaign and absolutely wiped the floor with Dump in their one and only debate.

There’s been blame heaped on Biden for not stepping aside sooner; for not holding to his 2020 pledge to be a one-term, “bridge” candidate. An open campaign with multiple candidates and all the primary trimmings, some argue, would have produced a stronger candidate who could have won.

There’s been blame on voters themselves: a substandard election day turnout by Democrats.

I’m highly skeptical. I cannot accept that The Dump legitimately won. He betrayed the constitution and his oath of office by fomenting an insurrection. He was convicted on thirty-four felony counts. He is a known sexual predator. He bragged about ending abortion rights. He is transparently incompetent, unqualified, and corrupt, and has never done a selfless, public-spirited act in his life. He ran the shabbiest campaign imaginable, with no real policies beyond a baldly stated plan for retribution against his political opponents. He is a known cheat. None of it adds up.

By now this wretched soul has done everything but shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. He belongs in a penal colony.

And yet this traitor “won” because of the price of eggs?

And no one smells a rat?

Rabbit is Racist

Rabbit is Rich is the third of John Updike’s “Rabbit” series of novels. It is preceded by Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux, and followed by Rabbit at Rest and Rabbit Remembered.

I’ve read the first two, am nearly finished with the third, and intend to continue through the series. The titular “Rabbit” is Harry Angstrom, so nicknamed in high school as a star basketball player. Those years turn out to have been the high point of his life, and the novels, published at about ten year intervals, chronicle the rest of his ordinary, everyman existence.

The books are quite good. A couple of them, in fact, won Pulitzers. Each is written in the present tense, which is a little odd at first, but you get used to it. Some of the overall story is quite moving, as in a meeting between Rabbit and a former lover some twenty years after their fling.

But this isn’t really a review. I want to comment on what I see as the casual racism in the series, which is most noticeable in Rabbit is Rich, when Harry is in his complacent, financially secure middle years. While no characters (most of them white) are klan members or anything that extreme, there is an unmistakable bigotry, a sort of benign intolerance, that is quite bothersome. A character will invoke a slur or stereotype, but no one stops to interject, “That is so racist!”

True, the N-bombs, anti-Semitic bombs, and homophobic bombs are not in abundance. But they are frequent enough. Since they are so casually part of the narrative, they’re like a slap to the face.

It’s that casualness that is so galling. Presumably Updike is just painting a portrait as he sees it, but he never condemns the sewage that spills from some of his characters’ lips.

There is, of course, much more to Rabbit is Rich and the others than what I’m here calling casual racism. I love a good sentence, and they are plentiful. There are also parts – in Rabbit is Rich, especially – that made me laugh out loud. I must admit that it’s tempting to ignore the stereotypes and slurs as outdated reflections of their times, which they are. But it’s difficult to overlook them, not without comment.

(In spite of what I have written here, I do recommend these novels. If you decide to read them, I strongly recommend looking at the entire series as a whole, and reading them all).