Pemulis's Pain

Susan Sontag (Bing it) would agree with Pemulis that though it might make for interesting writing to dress up his wounds in metaphor and see his pain perhaps as Sisyphus saw a big rock, sometimes you just have to go raw. That's not to say that he wouldn't clef it up à la Sun Also Rises or even Animal Farm though.

Some Decembers ago, if you will recall, Pemulis awoke in his Grenoble bed to the early stirrings of what turned to be a vicious ailment that had strong ramifications for his enjoyment of a certain family holiday. The psychological pain at the time of writing was blurred, however, by the passage of time between the manifestations of the physical pain and its distant memory. Things are different now though because his present predicament exists not on the periphery of distant times, but at the focus of the here and now, in addition to the knowledge and experience of the road that led to here.

The new pain -- not giant boulder, career obstacle, or repressed childhood wound, but literal ouchy-ouch-ouch -- also appeared rather suddenly on a European Fall morning. This one would cause less immediate discomfort, masquerade as perhaps something else for some time, instantiate itself as something entirely more serious, lead to an explicit medical intervention, fade like so many distant memories, only to return again to seek vengeance like so many storybook villains.

Immediately following the surgery was a time of hope. Spring came early to Western Europe that year and the sun shone and the birds sang as Pemulis slowly walked the road to recovery. There were some shaky moments and the normal apprehensiveness with every small ache and pain, no matter how run of the mill they should have felt. But finally, as Spring approached Summer Gregorianally and receded to Winter aesthetically, the freedom from the pain "for good" was felt. Pemulis was out of the woods as you might say.

But then just as the weather forbade, the darkness returned. Oh sorry Susan, the pain from the god damn hole in the muscle that was supposed to have been fixed when they cut him open and inserted a foreign composite fibre object into his groinular area and sewed him back up and wished him well and hoped that the door didn't whack him in the ass on his way out.

So Pemulis is back to no longer being an endurance athlete again and he's sad about it.

The End