Me and My Body

It works. Except when it doesn't.

Note: I wrote this in bits and pieces over the course of the week, so the time sequence is sort of nonexistent. Oh, well. Don’t worry about it.

I woke up this morning in the Bed That’s Just The Way I Like It, and have been thinking about my body. Like a lot of people, when I was young, I was basically indestructible. I no longer am, and that’s provided a lot of food for a lot of thought.

In my twenties. I’m the guy on the right, and I was indestructible, pretty much. Amusingly, I also had a lot of hair.

I moved East about a month ago. The very first thing I did when I arrived, before even seeing the place I now live, was buy a mattress. Which, I’ll have you know, set me back around $3,500. The actual bed upon which that mattress sits was already in my new home, in boxes. It was not inexpensive either. In the U-Haul that would shortly arrive with the rest of my stuff was a down comforter from The Company Store, which was around a thousand bucks. Under that is a Pendleton wool blanket, and under that is a set of flannel sheets from L.L. Bean. In the winter, I love sleeping under flannel. All told, the whole arrangement set me back between $6,000 and $7,000. Every detail of this bed reflects decades of experience, in knowing how I like to sleep.

I have often thought there’s a coffee-table book idea in a book called Celebrity Beds. Or maybe just Beds — a one-word title would be cooler. The concept would be that famous people — Taylor Swift, for example, or Steph Curry — would simply get up in the morning from their own beds, and leave the room. A photographer would then enter and shoot a picture. It would be intimate and revealing and voyeuristic and fun. No art direction allowed. I would LOVE, for example, to see what Barack Obama’s bed is like. Or Tim Cook’s. However, I don’t really feel a desire to see what Donald Trump’s bed is like.

I digress.

What is worth every dime, why I spent all that money, is the way I felt when I woke up this morning. I had a session with my cruel, cruel trainer, Matt Blank, yesterday. Because of that, and because I’m sixty-plus years old, I can feel what that bastard did to me. It was leg day, so my thighs, my calves feel worked. But thanks to the BTJTWILI, I slept very deeply, all night. I woke up with that wonderful, relaxed, snuggy feeling you have from a warm, comfy bed in a cold room.

Despite dealing with an ongoing, deep cough from a cold I’m getting over, I slept like a dead rock last night, and sitting here typing this, I feel fantastic. Rested, full of energy, happy. As soon as I run out of writing momentum, which will be in 45 minutes or so, I’m going to put on boots and a jacket, and take the Handsome Boy out for a long walk. It’s 26 degrees out.

By the way, as far as I can tell, despite doing some ridiculously punishing things, Koda always feels fantastic. Always.

Koda, coming out of the water after a refreshing dip. Onto the ICE.

That feeling is why spending several thousand dollars on a bed is worth every dime. It has an immense impact on how well I sleep, and thus, how I feel in general. If I’m going to spend 1/3 of my life in that thing, and if I want to spend the awake part of my life doing things — hiking, working out, and so on — then plunking down money for a first-class bed and a first-class sleep is a bargain.

Our bodies and our minds and our emotions are all woven together. The idea that the part that does the thinking isn’t profoundly affected by the physical part is wrong, and as one ages, this idea becomes more and more absurd. When I was a blithe young thing, of course, I was able to do absolutely horrible things to my body, and pay for it not at all. Like, say, stay up until 3 AM drinking tequila. I’d wake up at 7 and be just a little tired for an hour or so. My daughters can do that now. I had my fun, so I only resent them a little.

When I’m tired or distracted, I cannot write well. I get depressed. I start thinking in circles. My emotions start hunting me: You have no talent. You’ve let everyone down — again. My body is the container for everything else I do, or think, or feel. Everyone’s is. Often, I think we forget this simple fact, which doesn’t change the fact that it is a fact.

I am immensely fortunate that my container is a really good one. I come from a very long line of Scandanavian reindeer herders on my mother’s side, and New England farmers and workers on my father’s. I’m 6’2”, very strong, love being outdoors (which makes owning Koda, who loves it even more, a perfect fit) and have no problems of any kind with any of my body parts, and revel in any kind of exertion.

Sometimes when I’m training with Matt, or any of his predecessors, I find myself so exhilarated from working out that I’ll just start happily talking. I remember, for example, pulling off a really hard lift when I was training with Kevin Carter in Santa Cruz, and practically dancing up to him, shoving my face in his face, and shouting, “Yes! Fucking yes!! Just. Like. That!! Have you ever seen anything so perfect in your life, Kevin? Huh? Have you? No. You have NOT!” Remarkably, we’re still friends.

Another important feature of having a body, I’ve discovered, is learning to listen to it. There’s a constant stream of information, sensations, data flowing in from your body during the day. Again, particularly as one ages, one learns what this stuff means, and in particular, how important it is.

I write these essays over several days, so this morning, as I sit here at 7:16 AM writing, my shoulders and chest ache, again, from a session two days ago with Matt. If I were 25, I’d feel like a young god, because I was one, but not this morning. However, the ache is less than last time, which means I’m slowly getting back in shape. Recovery is two days instead of a week. That’s meaningful, and I know it because I’m paying attention.

I still have the deep cough from this cold. I know from experience that this is one of those long-term, deep colds which will linger for weeks. The energy-draining phase lasted about a week, and is now over, so I’m kind of in the long tail.

And so on.

The third thing I’ve been thinking about in this vein is the unique, overwhelming horror of having your body go wrong. This can be sickness, injury or ingesting something you shouldn’t — food poisoning, say — but when this machine to which your consciousness is so closely tied has a spanner dropped into the works, it has a special, infinitely powerful impact. Something’s not just wrong, but really wrong, and you experience a fear and a kind of animal terror that’s unlike anything else in life. The closest analogy I can think of is that sickening moment when you’re driving and lose control of your car. Or maybe being in a plane during severe turbulence. Something really bad is happening, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The rocks that attacked me.

A trivial example — something going wrong but not really wrong — happened just today. I was out hiking with Koda, and climbed over some railroad tracks to look at an outcropping of interesting shale. I lost my footing in the snow, and fell pretty hard on a pile of fallen rock that was about knee high and was covered in snow. I went down ass over teakettle, as they say, landing on stone. As I lay there, shaken up, it occurred to me that if this were a serious fall, I’d be in some trouble. In fact, I now have a pretty impressive bruise on my thigh, and it took me a few minutes to get back on my feet, calm Koda down (no matter how or why, when I’m on the ground, that means “It’s playtime!” to him), check that I hadn’t seriously hurt myself, and proceed. Once again, my body had saved the day. But the incident, which took seconds, was scary.

I’ve had friends who were less lucky with more minor falls. The classic scenario seems to be women who have aged and loss bone mass. Accordingly, pretty trivial spills break bones. One friend of mine lost her balance while cross-country skiing, tipped over into the snow and ended up with a fractured arm. In her ex-post facto text, she told me that it was “not an insignificant break. It’s a fracture across the whole humerus. 6 months recovery.” Her body did not save her.

And, of course, I’ve experienced the full car crash a few times. Many years ago, I was working at a startup and we finally successfully released the first version of our product after months of massive effort. To celebrate, we threw a party on Ocean Beach in San Francisco, to which someone brought a case of red wine in the trunk of their car. Everybody got very drunk, and in that state, in the dark, I encountered a group of Mexican guys with their dates. And because I was drunk, and because I can be something of an asshole, I informed one of them, in front of his friends, that his date was the ugliest woman I had ever seen in my life.

I got what I deserved. About one minute later, a bottle was broken over the back of my intoxicated head. Unconscious, I was then kicked in the ribs for a while, with the unsuccessful goal of breaking them. When I woke up, about ten minutes later, I had a real, no-kidding concussion. I had also been dragged down to the waterline, but fortunately for me, they decided not to drown me. The bruises healed, as bruises do, but my brain didn’t work right. I had a concussion. For a few days, I could not remember anything for more than about thirty seconds. I would walk into a room and have no idea where I was, or what I was doing.

The late Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of the Grateful Dead, once said in an interview that sometimes consciousness can be a burden. True, but having an ongoing struggle to know who you are, where you are and what you’re doing as a consistent state of being, is awful. And terrifying. Will this end? Will I get better? Will I be okay? God, this is horrible. I am afraid.

An older friend of mine, a man who was a true gentleman and a profoundly good person, contracted Lewy Body dementia in his seventies. This gradually transformed him from a charming, witty, handsome man into an erratic, hostile and confused mess. Early on in this one-way trip into Hell, in a moment of lucidity, he looked at his wife and said, “Janie, what’s happening to me?” She told him, which must have been beyond awful, and five minutes later he’d forgotten the entire conversation, which had to be repeated hundreds of times before he eventually died.

All of this, to me, serves to drive home the supreme merit in people who retain their dignity, their decency and most of all, their kindness towards others when something has, in fact, gone seriously wrong with them. When they’re in wheelchairs, or struggling with mental illness, or they’re being constantly reminded that they’re badly broken. I think this is true of the very elderly, as well, who are constantly contending with limitations, pain and indignities younger people cannot even imagine. It’s not hard to be cheerful, helpful and kind when you’re an energetic, beautiful eighteen year-old girl for whom everything is effortless. It’s much harder when you’re 48, have ovarian cancer, and think of it first thing every morning when you wake up.

And perhaps, for people like this, there’s even some form of spiritual transcendence. Maybe for some exceptional souls, when they’re face-to-face with the grinning, horrible fact of serious illness or injury or suffering, they learn and know things the rest of us normies can’t, or don’t.

One of my favorite Andrew Wyeth paintings is called Chambered Nautilus. It’s a portrait of his mother-in-law peacefully looking out the window from her bed. As a painting, it’s the standard Wyeth masterclass in technique, composition, color, all of it. It’s magnificent. However, as usual with Wyeth, there’s a lot more going on that’s unstated but that informs the piece, and makes it great:

Painted in the summer of 1956 during the last illness of Mrs. Wyeth's mother. The invalid could look out from her bed into the sunshine on the sea. She kept a little basket by her bed, to hold her Bible, pencils and the other little things that were her life. In the late afternoon she would open the door and the wind from the river would blow the curtains. "I did the picture right there in the room," the artist said, "and she would talk to me about her childhood in Connecticut. She was a great woman, one of those people who never grow old. It was a very touching experience. I never painted her head close-up and have always regretted that. But Betsy is very like her and there is a great deal of her in Maga's Daughter"

Terminally ill, with a failing body and oblivion beckoning, she was still serene, and thoughtful, and beautiful. There are things to think about when your body works, but perhaps there are even more to ponder when, as in this painting, it doesn’t.