Pretengineer 1

I’m not sure how I am going to do this.

What I SHOULD do is finish the book and then come back and write this because I’ll then be pointed a few degrees more towards the direction of the end that I have envisioned in my mind.

When I’m done, I’ll know what I am talking about.
But I don’t, and I am in love with that truth.

One of my favourite ghosts is Richard Feynman. Various geeks, nerds, and scholars could tell you all sorts of reasons why he was an extraordinary being; something about physics, Nobel prizes, and shit like that. He’s not a man that was often seen getting angry, and the only time I ever saw him hazard the boundary of that emotion was when he was asked about his Nobel prize. It was as if the honour was a strange and foreign thing, and he wasn’t really sure of how he was supposed to take it. I think he was disgusted that he had to talk about it, and I thought that was a beautiful thing to witness because all he wanted to do was get back to talking about molecules, and beauty, and fun. One of the books that I just remembered that I was reading is called Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life, and it’s the (true) story of a guy who “lucked out” by publishing a physics paper-or whatever mathletes do- and won a residency at a prestigious university with a hallway that placed his office door directly adjacent to the office door of Mr. Richard Feynman, who would soon be dead of cancer.

He would kind of sneak in and out of his office because he felt so insignificant and intellectually puny sandwiched between Feynman and....the guy in the other adjacent office who obviously isn’t as memorable though clearly no mental midget; but he thought that he was, and had convinced himself that his best thought, his brilliantest discovery, his magnum opus was done, and he was essentially washed up.

Like that other book, I, as yet, haven’t finished this one, but by the title and from what I know of Mr. Feynman, Leonard conversed with the charming old doffer and cheered up enough to at least write a book about the whole affair-that I AM going to finish-and is likely, to this day, doing some VERY interesting math.

Sadly but understandably, Richard Feynman is dead, and thus, so is the dream I never really had to learn physics. I believe that I appreciate physics, but I couldn’t describe it to you, not today. I did grab a physics textbooks from a free box once, but-and this could get embarrassing if I was still haunted by the innumerable sprites of unfinished books-I never finished it. You try casually reading a physics textbook sometime and let me know how it goes.
Alas, my physics teacher is no more, because Richard Feynman has departed, and I’d need someone to make me fall in love with the science, and he was one of those rare beings that could make someone fall in love so hard that unexplored regions of the brain have their gates blown off, and when that happens the unconscious response is to calculate fragment trajectory, and consider the effect of the sound and pressure waves on eardrums, and ask why gunpowder can burn in a sealed environment, or how smell came along for the ride, and how come they can’t narrow the margin of how much better a dog’s sense of smell is than mine to less than 1,000-10,000 times?

I guess if I was really good at math I could...I don’t know....mathticate this data into math that would prove...something, but I’m not, and I can’t, and I don’t even want to because I’m not in love with that. I’m in love with words, and I’m so much in love with them that I make them up, and, thinking about that, that pattern may not work as well for math... Regardless, that wasn’t Feynman’s gift to me, instead, he gave me an infection, which sounds gross, but hear me out. Or don’t.
It’s more like a booster infection really, a reapplication of pleasurable dis-ease. I always find pleasure in finding things out, but when I saw The Pleasure of Finding Things Out where Richard Feynman, who was, in that moment, dying, sat in his blue armchair and had so much fun talking about flowers and elastic bands, and bouncing balls, and jiggling molecules I...well, I was wasted at the time, but I watched it again later, and, like a puppy that really wants to get up the stairs, but just hasn’t grown that big and strong yet, and needs a leg up to break out of the pace-back-and-forth-on-the-step-and-whine trap, I was elevated to the next level where curiosity is joined by facility, and can be forever piqued while never peaking.

It’s very distracting, but I am in love with that.

I am in love with finding things out even when it’s a little bit annoying. An example of this is cooking the brakes to exert control on my brain as it is trying to break things apart all the way down to a molecular level, which is something I began doing shortly after watching Breaking Bad at night and listening to The Substance of Civilization all day AND while “trying to sleep.” I finish almost all books that I listen to, hundreds of them. In six years I have listened to well over eleven months of audiobooks, and I started listening when I was five; but I do re-read a lot.

Anyway, red hot brakes wasn’t working, so I recently purchased a poster of the Periodic Table that I stare at from time to time, and the answer to the gunpowder question is KNO3, but more specifically O3. It looks cooler if the 3 is dangled, but I don’t know how to do that today.

There is something exquisitely satisfying in taking something that someone else has applied great energy and attention to put together apart, even if you have no need nor desire to put it back together again, maybe especially, if so. I like just seeing the parts and analyzing their relationships. I must concede though, that some things are simply too valuable to leave broken open and dysfunctional (or otherfunctional as in parts for arts), and you really tend to appreciate those who are expert enough to do just that. My spine is a good example, so I’ll move on to that particular thing.

Over the last decade or so I have experienced an increasing lessening of that pleasure in finding things out on account of a certain rider that I have been saddled with named Pain. I’m not going to get into it because I have already, and tonight it’s more interesting to discuss what I’ve discovered about necks, which doesn’t make me an expert, but gives me enough material for a few good run-on sentences during which I will posit, and am now positing, that if you crash dirtbikes and skateboards enough, carry A LOT of sheets of plywood on your head, wear a hardhat and hit it on everything, yank, heave, hoist, carry, and drop all manner of materiel when you’re not leaning over and looking down, or looking straight up and working overhead, for decades, you can hurt yourself, and those handy, somewhat squishy little discs in between the bones of your spine (they’re called vertebrae, you know) can get pancaked and splayed, and they squish out into regions where they are not welcome because that’s where the nerves like to hang out ALL BY THEMSELVES, until the nerves get mad because they don’t like being touched, and the bones are also getting too well acquainted, but they DO like it, so they start growing TOWARDS each other, and there is some unhealthy bumping and grinding, and the radial nerves and spinal chord are getting really chafed and raw and have begun to protest and engage in radical, rampant civil disobedience, and the discs, well, they pretty much just give up on trying to keep everything away from each other because they’re basically dead and their carcasses are just in the way at this point, and I’m getting shorter, and I hurt a lot, and I can’t play guitar, or work over a table to take things apart or put them together, and so my career is over, and I’m scared, and I’m kinda bitchy sometimes, and I’m fucking sober(which is why I’m sane, not to mention alive, but sometimes it’s funny to complain about), and I’m just fucking sick of it, so I learn about a procedure called an ACDF, and then I wait a year for a chance to talk to a guy who everyone says is pretty good at ACDFs, and he says, “Yeah, we should probably get you fixed up because that sounds like it sucks.” and I say, “Yeah, cool.” and he says, “You know what this is, right, what we’re going to do?” and I say, “yyyyyyyyyyessssss.....” and he says, “Cool. I’ll call you in three months or so.” then a week later it was done because someone cancels (or dies) and I get their spot. Bonus.

Anterior Cervical Discectomy and Fusion is what the procedure is called, and this is where I really appreciate people who are inclined to put things back together after they take them apart because it’s me, and spines are important, and as fascinating as this all is, I do recommend avoiding your own personal ACDF, if at all possible.

I’m not sure how they decide which side of the throat to go in on, but my scar is on the right. They don’t cut very much muscle, they just push things out of the way, things like the trachea and the carotid artery and jugular until they have access to the front of the spine, which they then “peel” until they have access to the less juicy bits like the bones, which they insert pins into, jack apart, then grind with power tools, probably pneumatic, to remove bone spurs and other outgrowths, and the interstitial disks, which they cut apart with tiny knives and remove with “grasping tools”, to then grind the bones some more to make room for the nerves, which they can’t touch or, else, as well as for the porous plastic shims called PEEK cages to which have been applied the bone dust from the aforementioned spinal grinding and are then inserted betwixt the also aforementioned spine bones, then they drop the chassis, stitch their way out, and tell someone to wake me up in a couple of hours and allow, or encourage me to take drugs, because I’ll fucking need them
I was walking the next day, not very much, and not very fast, actually, it was more like I stood up and blinked a bunch before laying down to go pee in a bottle, and it wasn’t nearly as much fun being really high on drugs as I was hoping for after all these sober years, but opioids were never my thing, and I had just had my head half cut off, albeit expertly, and it was nice, and I was pleased, that he reassembled me and didn’t lose any parts, although it felt like there was a porcupine the size of a hot wheels car.....somewhere, maybe everywhere between my jaw hinge and my collarbones, that region having been thoroughly disturbed both by intubation and diverse flesh maulings, and I guess I still wasn’t really in the mood for drugs in any other capacity than to settle my old pal Pain with something other than the will and self-control I’d have liked to use for other things.