Tom Coburn Days

Even before my mind started to go, my body began failing me. First it was just a few annoyances. An ankle that had been compressed by a large chunk of tank track would ache and creak and hamper. A knee injured in a basketball game would still fail to do its job even after two arthroscopic surgeries. A digestive tract that would back up before flooding. Blood coming from both ends inopportunely. Bad lower back discs that no longer prevented vertebrae from compressing my spinal cord causing my left thigh to go numb. Even worse cervical discs that led to burning nerve pain in my hands, arms and upper back. Two surgeries and four fused vertebrae later, my neck doesn’t turn right; I can’t sleep comfortably; and I still get pain in my back and arms. The ulnar nerve in my left arm got crushed inside the elbow. Made my left pinky and half of my wedding band finger numb. Had it surgically moved, but I still can’t feel much with those fingers. Wrist surgeries in both wrists were supposed to cure wrist pain. They might’ve once, but most days I can’t remember them not hurting. Makes it damn hard to play fetch with a dog or play guitar, the things that give me most pleasure in life.

Some days I get lost in wondering what it would be like to wake up without a crick in my neck. Without an ache in my shoulder blades. Without a hitch in my step. Without feeling either constipated or so close to losing my shit, literally, that I dare not stray from a safe place to dump. Without having a toilet bowl full of bloody water and darker clotted blood after days of diarrhea. Without seeing stars that aren’t there and dreading the migraine they may or may not be telegraphing. Without the strangeness of knowing you have a right thigh, but not being able to feel it.

If I’m feeling more down than usual, like I was in December of 2014, I start to think about the inevitable dirt nap.

December is just shit for me. My dad lost his first wife and son in a car accident on a Christmas Eve long before he met and married my mother. Needless to say, he was never a fan of the holiday. While other kids new Christmas was coming because of a tree in the house, a tradition of watching It’s a Wonderful Life on the tube, the singing of happy songs, the smell of gingerbread and egg nog, I knew that Santa was on the way because my dad worked later and later and came home drunker and drunker. On good days, he would pass out in the trailer’s only bathroom and I would have to piss outdoors if I couldn’t hold it until sunup. On bad days, I would stay at the neighbors or sleep under the bed or in the closet to avoid the beating I surely deserved for being such a fucking disappointment.

As November slipped into December and the nights grew longer and longer, bad days incrementally began to outnumber good until, around the fourteenth, when I wouldn’t be able to stay at the neighbors and couldn’t hide well enough to avoid his wrath. Hiding under the bed or, when I got too big for that, in the closet, I’d hear him shuffling down the hallway and then I’d hear the sound of leather sliding through cotton loops as he pulled his belt free. He’d rumble into the room. Where are you, you little shit? He’d bend down and see some part I thought I’d covered with dirty clothes. There he is, he’d say and grab an arm or a leg and pull, the carpet peeling away bits of skin as I slid.

I don’t remember a lot after that. The aftermath, sure. Waking up with rug burns on my ass, legs, hips, chest - whatever parts adhered to long to the cheap carpet. Welts with little holes in them where the buckle would connect to the belt. Bruises. Red eyes. A sore throat. What led to the aftermath, though, would just be gone. Like whatever happens during surgery. Something, then nothing at all, and, then, something again.

I get into a pretty good funk every year beginning in mid November and peaking after the new year. I’ve been told its Seasonal Affective Disorder. SAD. Yeah, it’s pretty fucking sad, that’s for sure.

2014 was the worst in a long time. Life had completely gone to shit. I’m pretty sure that things were good not too long before 2014, maybe not great, but pretty good. Whatever led me there, I was in the shitter come the middle of December. It was cold. All my aches were aching, I’d lost something big, important - not sure what - and it was time for things to become as bad as bad gets. I could feel it. Darkness loomed like a drunken man in the hallway tugging on a belt that’s meant to sting and burn and mark, but only just for a while, right? All wounds heal. Isn’t that what they say.

I’m pretty sure it had been years since I saw myself the way I did then. Expendable.

I had been prescribed primidone for this shake in my left hand. It used to be called a benign essential tremor until someone realized that shaking so bad you can’t touch your dick without masturbating isn’t really all that benign. I couldn’t take it, though, because it made me groggy and even more morose than usual. I had a whole bottle of that shit. All I would have to do is swallow it with some good Scotch and I’d be awash in the dirt nap in no time. I knew if I was going to go out, it would be with some good Scotch. You really have to temper justice with mercy and there’s nothing more merciful than an eighteen year-old single malt.

I was laying out this plan while having a double meat cheeseburger off the McDonald’s value menu with some equally cheap fries and Coke. I was in the middle of the idiot belt, so, of course, Fox News was on the flat screen. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on my mood, the volume was turned up and I heard the ridiculously attractive talking head say something about veteran suicides. Now, a weaker mind would think this was a message from some higher being, but I knew it was just some Fox News eye candy reading from a teleprompter. It got my attention enough to watch, though, and to listen.

After more than a decade of Bush’s war of retaliation in Afghanistan and convenience in Iraq, men were coming home broken. I can only imagine. My war was the junior varsity Desert Storm compared to the morass of monkey sheet these men found themselves in. At least our Bush kept his promise not to create another Vietnam. Congress was, after too long, finally starting to pay attention to veteran’s whose wounds, seen and unseen, brought about their deaths after they had returned from the war and were “safe.” But. There’s always a but, isn’t there. But, one of the warmongering sacks of shit who sent these men into this clusterfuck was preventing a bill that was going to help veterans who were at the end of their endurance endure just a little longer from getting a vote. This slimy infected cock dropping was now telling me that fixing the problem he was largely responsible for creating is just too expensive. Well, fuck that guy. I’m not taking those fucking pills. I’m going to hang around as long as I can just to spite him. Asshole.

That was my first Tom Coburn day. It wouldn’t be my last.