BH 15: Agony’s elisions
Pain can be an unreliable narrator
Last week’s walking was excessive.
That is, too much for me, the only greater LA resident you know with a fundamentally pedestrian lifestyle. A breakdown in my transportation arrangement brought about this extreme. Until I mastered my public transit route into the day gig efficiently, I was doing over as six miles a day, culminating with a quarter mile strides up a 22 percent grade.
“This too shall pass,” I would assured myself nightly, halfway up the hill. “This is how greatness gets made. This is necessary.”
And then I shot my metaphor in the head.
An undisclosed location
The home where I am dwelling has a German Shepherd who has become my great companion. Before dawn on Saturday, 48 hours after my intense walking streak died, he and I were sitting in the vast backyard. I hit the pipe while listening to Mortimer’s new album, From Within.
Off the dog wandered.
The pain from my mileage uptick was still real. To preserve myself, at my schoolyard day gig I’d limited myself to one session of football quarterbacking over the eight or so days. Moving my energy and focus to Charades preserved strength. Still, my midsection was shouting inside of me. My groin and hips in particular were hitting high notes. This midsection chorus screamed:
Donnell is ancient!
Outside of my musculature, emerging from the predawn quiet came the faint and unmistakable noise of a small growl forming, deep in the house pet’s throat. If that small growl were to become a bark, the neighborhood’s other canines would start a cascade of barking.
On Monday I taught a student who’s experiencing homelessness how to play a rudimentary game.
Not wanting any part of that, I was up and out of my seat in an instant. No wobble or struggle at all. Through the outburst I thought, “Where did this come from, old man?” Then, I bent the corner around the house like a free safety with a line on the opposing tight end. Bearing down like I was about to tackle something.
The bark failed to materialize, on account of a gesture. My companion followed my signal to get back inside.
The top takeaways from this week are that the old man has still got a bit of juice, and that sometimes pain only tells part of the story.
At the schoolyard day gig we’re starting to dig into hoops. Soccer is the universal jam out around this aera adjacent to NELA, where there is minimal adult Black male presence. Parents don’t seem to be teaching the kids basketball.
The volume walking—and the recovery time—seem to have prepared me for the action. On Monday I taught a student who’s experiencing homelessness how to play a rudimentary game. Watching the effect of making baskets play across the student’s face and entire physical demeanor was brilliant, a reason better than money for coming in to work.
Their little brother and a few of my regulars would join in. Tuesday saw me bring the intensity up a notch, trusting my body and my students. They are comparatively terrible at basketball and truly need me.
My weight remains below the target of 189 pounds that I had set for my July birthday. Getting lighter didn’t just make me feel better—the fitness was visible. For a big window of the long-walk stretch, I had to force myself to stop staring in the mirror at my naked body; I looked unfathomably good.
And I haven’t been to 24-Hour Fitness in months. It’s the yoga and half hour-stretching sessions—practiced consistently—that got me here, ready to serve; throughout last weekend’s laptop film festival, I held plank pose as often as possible. And of course what’s working is the walking, now that the pain has subsided.
A 3-on-3 game sprung up around me and two boys. I played with two absolute neophytes against a trio who thought they could play, repeatedly hitting my raw teammates with excellent passes and coaching them up when they blew the opportunities. They scored more, but our opponents got schooled, too.
Today will be a good shift at the day gig if I am able to follow-up on this teaching. By winter the play should look legit.
Let’s break for Kratom!
Last December I created a (since-deleted) Substack gift guide that mostly touted cannabis products. A little psilocybin was in the mix, too, and for novelty I decided to cover the little chewable kratom number. I had known nothing about this very legal drug,
Turns out, I really liked kratom. My nickname for it became Consequence-Free Heroin. The stuff had me feeling so free that by the time my kratom dalliance was done I no longer had my romantic relationship.
“Consequence-free” was not the apt descriptor.
Know that this was my expectation upon trying the kratom-featured Very Berry beverage that LA-based Dialed Moods mailed me.
Dialed Moods’s energy drinks makes use of “the plant at different life stages and combining it with time tested herbal supplements.” Kratom is a plant native to Southeast Asia that the drink’s makers tell me “for thousands of years has been used as an herbal medicine.”
Because I wasn’t taking heroic doses of kratom, the consequence-free heroin illusion this time was not a thing. It’s a perfectly fine energy beverage that happens to have a little extra bit of that thing I experienced last holiday season. If you’re looking for an adventure in this area, I’d recommend it.
“Are you going to be here next year, Mr. Alexander?” asked one of the fifth graders.
“If I am,” I said without looking up from my clipboard, “something has gone horribly awry.”
These kids know that I’m blunt, but also incredibly fun. Regardless, us tutors were told at orientation that the school year’s first six weeks are about setting expectations. Real talk is that young lives are my side hustle, another compelling challenge that someone gives me money to work on.
And then I’m out. I hope.
Oh, didn’t drop this? Mercí!”
