A Dyke A Broad #107 Stabbed in the Back Edition
Home remedies for pinched nerves, and the anniversary of the 2015 Paris attacks.
Sunday, I woke up with a little twinge just above my left shoulder blade. After coffee I tried to stretch it out. Bad idea. By the afternoon, the slightest movement made me feel like someone was stabbing me in the back with an electrified knife, and it was all I could do not to scream and puke.
I had to see the doctor on Monday anyway and told her about it. “A pinched nerve,” she said, poking around in my back until she found it by randomly squeezing places, and waiting for me to howl. “Take some ibuprofen. It’ll probably go away on its own.” I told her I’d actually discovered a cure, but wasn’t going to try it again. Not on purpose.
After it happened last time, I went out for a bike ride, arrived at an intersection where there were dozens of pedestrians, several other bikes, and a tramway idling. Paralyzed by indecision, wondering—should I go around that person, let them pass, is the tramway coming or not?—I rolled slower and slower until I finally just tipped over and crashed smack on the pavement with my bike on top of me. After I got over the shock, I noticed that the pain in my back had disappeared.
I told the story to the doctor. She stared at me like I was insane. “No, not feasible to do again,” she said. “Stick with ibuprofen.”
The whole thing was weird. My bike was barely scratched. I continued on my way, hesitant and shaken, waiting for my injuries to show themselves. The first week of lockdowns in France, in 2020, when we were dying by the thousands and tens of thousands, I was merely going up the stairs to our fifth floor apartment, and without doing anything special, ripped something in my knee. Six months later I managed to fall off a ½ inch carpet and sprain my ankle, spraining it again a year later stepping off an invisible curb. That was just last December and it swelled up like the trunk of a medium-sized Christmas tree, turning all sorts of interesting colors. I should have strung it with lights.
But the day after the bike accident all I had was the faintest blue bruise on my knee, and the humiliating memory of some guy standing there and repeatedly asking if I was okay, only stopping when I forced myself to stand, smile, climb on the bike and pedal away. I suddenly felt strong, indestructible, capable of withstanding things.
Like all of us, I’m both—frail and indestructible. November is a reminder that everything is. The nights are long and dark. The last leaves fall from the trees, though we know they’ll return. Sunday, the morning I woke to pain, was the anniversary of the 2015 Islamist terrorist attacks here in Paris, when 130 people were killed.
That weekend, Ana and I were hanging out with her mother in a quiet provincial town, while her brother that usually looks after The Mom stayed in our borrowed Parisian apartment on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine.
It was just a normal Friday night. I remember we had the TV on, waiting for a soccer game to start at a stadium out in the suburbs of Paris. But there was some kind of disturbance. A terrorist threat. Then the news started to come from Paris itself. Bombs, people dead. Shootings. A hostage situation at a club, the Bataclan. So many people slaughtered or maimed. Newscasters showed the trail of destruction on a map, much of it happening within walking distance. One bombing actually a place we used to go to for a quick Happy Hour drink at a table outside in the sun. It took us hours to reach Ana’s brother who had gotten trapped somewhere when the city shut down.
We returned to a city of broken glass and grief. Candles burning everywhere. Fear. Few dared sit on the terraces. There was a huge European hunt for the men who helped carry out the attacks, but hadn’t killed themselves, living to publish a letter or a manifesto saying Paris was being punished for her decadence. They were very clear about that. The horror of music and laughter and dancing. Sinful women polluting men with their presence when they should be hidden at home. I remembered New York after September 11, 2001. All the shrines. All the posters of the lost taped up on every flat surface, their faces fading in the rain. Gone. Just like that. You could feel how fleeting life is.
The government of France hunted down the perps, put them on trial, as the U.S. had done after the first World Trade Center bombing, like it should have done after the second. Despite the terrorist attack, France didn’t bomb anybody, didn’t start a war. Just mobilized cops and lawyers. Lit candles. Mourned. Swept up the glass and scoured away the blood. Continued.
In Other News From Twitter
A French journalist, Laure Nouahlat, suggests that
“old people over sixty in Europe have a huge carbon footprint, and a level of consumption stemming from the Thirty Glorious” years of growth following World War II. She doesn’t come out and say that the ancient over-sixties should be taken out and shot, but I don’t think she’d protest much.
French people from that period remember things differently. In fact suggest that Laure’s generation has their own problem with consumption.
Ah yes, “consumption during the glorious years, I remember them well. Few supermarkets, garden tomatoes, no vacations on a plane, only two hours of TV a day, no smartphone or computer, no dishwasher, clothes washer, video, netflix. And fewer assholes getting air time.”
Is Twitter Really Over—or Evil, not according to @DocStockk
Linguistic dinosaur bones discovered…
And last but not least, a little art…
That’s it for this time,
Disgruntledly yours
xoxo K
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