When I was young, I used to play checkers with my grandfather on an old, cheap plastic set. The sort of thing you’d pay a dollar for at a garage sale. He always beat me, but he did it kindly and slowly as tried to teach me the subtleties of the game. I never learned to play well, and I haven’t played that game–his game–in twenty years.
Author: Marc Teale
Old and broken
I’ve been feeling old and badly damaged for quite a while now. I have plantar fasciitis in my left foot. When I wake up in the morning, my first steps feel like someone took a hammer to the sole while I was sleeping. Running, walking, and standing all make it worse. My foot is, for all practical purposes, permanently and badly bruised.
My right knee is only slightly better. Some days are worse than others, but I can never cross my legs, sit Indian-style, or use a footstool without feeling it burn and hyperextend. My hip feels like there’s broken glass between the head of my femur and the socket of my pelvis. My right shoulder feels to be partially dislocated again.
Needless to say, I haven’t been going to the gym or running much recently.
I don’t list all of these problems simply to complain, but because I finally watched The Dark Knight Rises today. In it, Bruce Wayne starts as a decrepit, battered old man, hobbling around with a cane. I’ve actually considered getting a cane several times, when the pain has been at its worst. A close friend of mine has one. We’d look good limping down the street together. I’ve never done it mostly out of pride, but also because I think people would think I’m intentionally being dramatic.
Not too long after, Bruce, with the help of some technology, gets back on his feet. And not just because he’s the goddamn Batman–it’s because he worked at it. He stopped accepting that pain was normal, and that he wasn’t going to get better. I saw myself in him, and realized that I, too, had accepted I wasn’t going to get better. I’d given up on ever running a marathon, or getting my black belt, or learning parkour, because without being consciously aware of it I had quietly accepted my body was too old and frail to take it.
I walked out of that movie angry with myself and my body. I’m thirty-one years old. That’s far too young to be damaged beyond repair. Tomorrow, I’m calling my doctor, a sports doctor, and my podiatrist, and I’m going to make myself get better even if it requires surgery.
I’m done being broken.
B-Movie
I saw an awesome B-movie last night. An old man invites his two sons up to a remote cabin in the mountains for a relaxing weekend, and each brings his wife.
After dinner, the father sits everyone down and spins a yarn about their so-called ancient familial curse, and how they must fulfill a ritual pact that their ancestors made to protect their tiny village centuries ago. The village no longer exists, but the curse laid on the family remains. A shadowy, half-seen beast that flits in and out of the corners of their vision, and it slowly makes itself known with increasing twisting and vanishing shadows in the corners of the cabin.
As the movie progresses, we learn that the story is true, and that the beast is real. Black, angular shadows bolt through the cabin, upsetting the table as the father talks louder and more aggressively. The women freak out, and beg him to stop. He refuses, and tells them the real reason they’re there: the beast feeds on blood, powerful emotion, and life. And it’s time for the last sons of the village to sacrifice their beloveds in order to slate the beast’s thirst and send it back to wherever it came from. The same way the old man and his brother sacrificed their own wives twenty-five years ago.
Both sons go slack, blank, and stare numbly. Their wives scream for them as they fight an extended battle for their lives with the old man and the beast, and lose. The women are pulled, bloody and screaming into a hole torn in the world by the beast.
The next morning, the sun rises on the idyllic scene of the old man cooking breakfast for his two bachelor sons. They have no memory of the last night’s events or their wives. One glances down at the fork in his hand as he eats, and notices a tan line around his left ring finger. He frowns at it vaguely for a second, then crams another forkful of eggs in his mouth, unconcerned. The old man thanks them for coming up to see him, and they leave.
After he stands out on the porch waving as they drive away, he goes back into the house and reaches deep into the back of a dusty cabinet. He pulls out two tin cans, each one labeled with a son’s name. He carefully lifts up the jagged metal lids, pulls two wedding bands out of his pocket, and tosses one ring into each can. As the camera fades to black, it pushes in until we see that both cans are half full of battered, scarred wedding rings.
Sounds like a great B-movie, right? It’s classic. The cabin in the woods, the ancient evil, the half-seen monster, the hint that something darker is happening and will happen again. There’s just one problem: this movie played in my head last night. It was a dream.
What in the fuck is wrong with my subconscious?