Sunday, December 09, 2018

Jukebox Zero

Decided to kill some time a few days ago by playing some guitar.  I have very vague memories of a time when I used to enjoy playing guitar; never was any good, although I have clocked in over 1,000 hours playing “Rocksmith” on my computer.  I suppose that must translate to me enjoying the process somewhat.  Now I’m sitting here with my upper left arm and shoulder in constant pain.  That, you see, is just the way life works for me these days.  Nothing ever has any positive results – nothing.  Everything I do just adds more to the pile of shit that my life has become.

The thing is, I don’t get it.  This is not the first time I’ve had debilitating pain that I’ve been able to trace back to playing guitar; however, the specifics of the sessions that caused the pain are anything but identical.  Hell, the pain wasn’t even in the same arm.  It’s kind of like life’s telling me that even if I somehow discover something that I might enjoy it’s not going to let that happen.  Nope … if it somehow doesn’t end in soul-crushing disappointment, it’s not something that I’ll be allowed to do…

The first time that playing guitar fucked me over was about 3½ years ago when I was living in Nevada.  On that occasion, it was triggered by playing my acoustic guitar on my sofa.  The result of this – for some reason – was that my right arm became sore early the next day with the pain slowly increasing for a couple days until I was unable to use the arm for anything.  I ended up going to a local doctor.  Got X-rayed, diagnosed with severe bursitis and prescribed a couple of drugs – one for the swelling (that I don’t remember having) and one for the pain.  My parents even flew down to help me although they didn’t arrive for a few days and the issue had pretty much resolved itself by then.  I still don’t know what the true issue was as I’ve played my acoustic many times since without incident; all I know was that it was very painful and ended up causing grief to my poor parents as well as me.  What I didn’t know was that, although the circumstances vary, this was going to become somewhat of a recurring issue.

According to what I’ve been able to decipher by searching my past postings on Facebook, the next time something similar happened was about a year later.  I was neither sitting on my sofa nor playing my acoustic guitar; however, the results were hauntingly familiar.  This time I was standing and playing the bass I recently acquired.  Upon waking the next morning, the pain began and consistently increased until my arm was useless.  Interestingly enough, it was my left arm this time – different arm, same bullshit.  Didn’t bother jumping through the hurdles required to see a doctor this time, though … just decided to wait out the pain.  For you see, being that this was after making my bone-head decision to become a professional poker player, I no longer had good medical insurance; that’s just the way it is in this capitalistic country – if you’re not either rich or in a current process of trying to become rich, you’re not worth keeping alive.  I was relying on the bronze-level, bullshit health insurance I had obtained through healthcare.gov.  This makes actually seeing doctors for any non-emergency, life-threatening purposes as difficult and expensive as they can legally get away with.  No sense making things worse by actually attempting to obtain any medical help.  When I did bother with this the last time, they pretty much proved to be quite useless when all was said and done…

As mentioned above, I have once again started this deja vu … three days ago.  This latest run-in began with me playing my Les Paul whilst standing for somewhere between an hour and a half to two hours.  The exact amount of time is unknown, although I do know I completed a 90-minute non-stop, random selection of songs as a single set followed by playing a couple songs that I selected afterwards.  The pain – my left arm/shoulder this time, same as the last one – started to arrive a couple days ago and has been, as before, consistently increasing in severity since.  So, as I stated at the start of this article, I am now sitting with constant pain.

What all this means now is that I apparently can no longer play my guitars unless I’m willing to risk losing the functionality of an arm (or even worse, possibly both arms) for a number of days afterwards … not to mention having to deal with the pain that is also associated with this.  So, it now looks like I won’t be playing my guitars to kill time.  One more joy gone…

It’s getting to where everything seems to be pointless.  I’m trying to land a job (pathetic as that process seems to be going…) so that I can once again be a contributing member of society; however, I’m having a harder and harder time explaining why I’m even bothering.  It’s gotten to the point where I actually don’t want to do anything.  That can’t be healthy…

bis später,

Coriolis

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