Tripped up on trips

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

One of the more jackassy things I’ve done lately is buy a small stack of books about Berlin, where I travel to in October, and buy a smaller stack of books about Hong Kong, where I’ve rather rashly decided I will travel to in January. That means I’m planning two big trips at once and it’s not financially healthy nor psychologically joyful. It’s kind of driving me crazy. It’s what is called, in polite society, a dick move.

I’m getting greedy. Or antsy. My wanderlust is in labor, twin trips ready to pop out. Travel is one of my prime passions, and when it’s piqued, I gotta scoot. Move over Berlin, Hong Kong is a’calling. 

After marinating for weeks in all things Berlin, I’m now thinking about Hong Kong more than the German capital. Honestly, I haven’t even read all my Berlin books and here I am scouring hotels on an overpopulated island with precarious ties to China. It’s like I’m leapfrogging, snarfing down dessert before the second course has even arrived.

Before I decided on Berlin, I made two false starts in my annual travel plans. I bought a ticket to Santiago, Chile, why I’m not quite sure. I scuttled that. Toronto (wha?) was next, until I ditched that idea, too. Then somehow Berlin — massive history, fine fall weather, beer, bratwurst and beer — zapped in my brain like a neon laser in a sweaty, druggy East Berlin club. Haven’t been there in many years, I mused, let’s check it out as a real adult, which is an entirely relative concept.

Berlin. Cool. Right on. My brother’s coming. Six days. It will be a blast.

And then Marrakesh beckoned. That’s right. 

In the midst of planning Berlin, the travel bug — a venomous, cackling black widow — bit again. It left an awful, itchy wound that somehow led me to Morocco’s great, dusty, tout-teeming desert carnival, even though I’ve been there before, if briefly. I stocked up on Marrakesh guides from the library. I viewed YouTube travelogues. I re-watched Hope and Crosby’s “Road to Morocco” (not really, but now I want to; it’s sublimely funny). 

But Marrakesh quickly proved a desert mirage. That place is hard work — posh but primitive, hagglers hectoring you incessantly, too many redundant souks or bazaars, and, this one gets me right here, open animal abuse, from chained-up performing monkeys to broken-down donkeys. I’m in no mood for a personal PETA patrol.

Back to square one in planning trip number two, which, recall, is preposterous as I’m still shaping up Berlin. So I decamp to the attic, where I read and research trips. The attic is my hermitage, my retreat, my man cave (wait, scratch that last one). After I nixed Marrakesh, I brainstormed places to go in January: Singapore, Taiwan, Croatia, Switzerland, Brussels, even Slovenia. Fail, all. 

I alighted on Hong Kong for myriad reasons: cool, dry winter weather, world-class cuisine, zesty street culture, neon insanity amid forests of skyscrapers and breathtaking mountains, island getaways, ravishing exoticism, Jackie Chan. 

And so I juggle two journeys, one in fall, one in winter. I try to keep my angst in check — the costs! the logistics! — and I think I’m holding it together.

“Boo-hoo,” you say. 

“Such problems,” you cluck.

I know, I know, I reply, face the shade of a ripe radish.

B-sides: Beatles to Berlin

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

Lying in bed, listening to music, the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” comes on, and I’m entranced anew. What a weird, wondrous thing it is, this John Lennon tune from 1967. Not quite rock, not quite orchestral, the four-minute track is something like psychedelic balladry meets woozy dreamscape. Yet it grooves and sways. Lennon’s cryptic poetry garlands the song’s kaleidoscopic effects — strings, horns, Mellotrons, tape loops — arranged by studio wiz George Martin. The result is marvelously sui generis. Listening in a nocturnal haze, it hits me that “Strawberry Fields,” a late-period masterpiece, may be my favorite Beatles song, a strong statement considering how many stone-cold gems the band produced in a mere seven and a half years together. I love so many Beatles songs — “Here Comes the Sun” to “Blackbird”; “I Am the Walrus” to “In My Life” — that I’d be here all day typing titles I can hardly live without. I’ll take “Lovely Rita” and “Norwegian Wood” over “Across the Universe” and “Come Together,” but that’s like saying I’ll take oxygen over water. Impossible. Their music is that gloriously essential.

The wonder boys.

In Berlin, where I’m headed this fall, I’ve signed up for a whack-sounding tour called Get in the Van! DIY & Subculture City Tour, in which you board a classic 1972 Ford Econoline van and “explore Berlin’s subculture and all things DIY, past and present, from the 1970’s until now: the bars, the squats, the venues, the backyards and the basements.” David Bowie’s heralded Berlin years, with pals Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Brian Eno, are covered, as is the post-Wall cultural efflorescence of the ‘80s and ‘90s. The tour is run by the planet’s only legit Ramones Museum, a punk paradise bulging with artifacts and more from the fugliest band ever. The Ramones, who I saw live twice, were deep-dyed New Yorkers. A museum in Berlin? Besides the fact bassist Dee Dee Ramone grew up in Berlin, another reason for its existence there is that the so-called biggest Ramones fan resides in the city and opened the shrine to all things Ramones. I hear he shouts “Gabba gabba hey!” unprovoked. One can hope.

Don’t sweat it. Yeah, right.

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

Not even summer and already I’m sweating like swine. It seemed nice out, about 80 degrees, a soothing breeze, sky marbled with clouds. And then I began my walk and promptly sensed something was off. The atmosphere was thick, dense. Then it was gooey, like clam chowder.

I love clam chowder, but this was just gross. I was getting damp. My hair curled into a Medusa ‘fro. Liquid beads lined my upper lip. For a moment, I felt like an Olympian.

It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, goes the old saw, which I wish I never saw. I should have known swamp conditions were rife with a New Orleans exuberance: The day’s forecast showed a lightning bolt shooting out of dark clouds with a temperature of 84. Soup du jour.

I was mid-walk. No turning back, just forge ahead. An ample puddle formed in the small of my back. My brow bubbled with warm dew. My pits were the pits. The nightmare of swamp butt was becoming a wincing reality. 

By the time I got home, I was nearly sodden. And the sweat kept coming. I toweled off, though I wasn’t shower wet, just sticky and irrationally moist. About ten minutes later the body faucets petered out. I stood in front of the fan to finish the job. I’ll probably catch pneumonia.

That’s the trouble with sun, heat, humidity, sweat and all that other summery crap. It’s a prolonged hazard, from sunstroke and sunburn, to day boozing and clammy underwear.

But really — am I right? — it comes down to sweat. That’s the worst of it all, the bane of the season. Of course it’s a necessary evil, our own physiological AC, even if it feels like the opposite. The process of sweating is to help keep the body cool when the perspiration evaporates from the skin. Dogs, cats and birds pant. Humans, so beautifully evolved, perspire in buckets. We get antiperspirants and, if we’re John McEnroe, rocking headbands. 

Sweat isn’t all summer’s fault. Occasionally I’ll wake up in a panicky sweat, courtesy of nightmares about a particular recent felon. When I’m drumming I often break a healthy sweat the way meatheads at the gym do, by sheer physical exertion. That’s the good kind. Then there’s nervous sweat, aka flop sweat, like the time in high school when I gave an oral report about Mozart and a dribble of the wet stuff ran from my forehead down my nose, onto my 3×5 cards. You can tell I’m traumatized because I remember it 100 years later. 

By the way, my opening line was a lie. Swine, like dogs, do not actually sweat; they don’t have sweat glands. Lucky pigs.

Back in black

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

After an unintentional hiatus of chronic brain farts, here are a few bite-size entries:

Tripping over trips

I bought a flight to Chile. And scrapped it. I bought a flight to Toronto. And scrapped it. Fickle? Right. Even after planning and paying I decided neither destination would slake my thirst for culture, art, food, action. So I scotched them in favor of the capital of the European Union’s most populous nation, that mad beehive of historical and cultural abundance, Berlin. Chile would have happened this month, Toronto last month, and Berlin, well, it’s a ways off — October. Yet as with any trip, I’m already committing vigorous reportage, booking tours and meals, boning up on the history and italicizing gotta-see sights, from the fabled Reichstag and remnants of the Wall (now vibrant murals) to Hitler’s bunker (that fetid suicide pit) and the enticing Museum Island — five museums colonizing a mid-city isle on the lovely Spree river. Sounds great, I think. Equally terrific: I got full refunds for the Chile and Toronto trips. Did I mention my brother is coming along? Fine company, he’s also a crack navigator, which is perfect for me who gets hopelessly lost the second I step out of the hotel. I’m the guy holding a huge, creased paper map upside down, battling fluttering winds.

Doggy style

I don’t laugh out loud very often while reading, but I did, a lot, soaking in Miranda July’s new novel “All Fours,” a warm, warped, touching, unashamedly naughty and riotous love story that goes places you’re never quite prepared for. It’s a joy. The story follows the romantic zigzags of a 45-year-old artist who’s a married mother but stumbles upon unlikely love with a much younger man who likes to dance. Sex, perimenopausal panic and motel redecorating ensue. It’s conventional until it’s not, both bawdy and bizarre, with just the right touch of July’s signature kookiness. Never has the writer — who’s also an actress and filmmaker — been more in control of her habitual twee impulses. And never has she been so seamlessly funny.

Doggy style part II

Cubby the magical mutt is, I’m afraid, getting old. The guesstimate age for this chipper rescue pup is seven to eight, solid middle-age in human years — paunches and ear hair, janky joints and jowls, gray and grumbles. Yet while he can be a bit creaky scrambling up the stairs and some tiny warts have mushroomed on his compact body, Cubs still plays chase with his stuffed Yoda and barks with shattering verve at the random car horn and rumbling UPS truck, more than ever in fact. But he’s also more neurotic than he was in his slavering, carefree youth. Sometimes if landscapers are extra noisy or the wind rustles the trees in violent whooshes the dog will quiver and hide under my legs or behind a chair. Also, his outside duties (doodies?) seem harder to coax out of him. Otherwise Cubby’s a hale old boy, snapping up treats and begging for belly rubs. He sleeps well, too, though his snoring can register 7.5 on the Richter scale. Those little earthquakes are a thing of most assured comfort.

His head looks enormous.

Words and whiskey

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Back when I regularly haunted bars, usually dive bars and usually alone, I would carry along some kind of reading material, a newspaper or, in a burst of middlebrow bravado, a New Yorker magazine. Something less intense and more foldable than an actual book.

Knowing that poring over prose looked odd in a place of revelers, pool pushers and loud music, I tried my best to be inconspicuous, settling down at the end of the bar, bathed in the neon splash of beer signage, or at a far-off table near the bathrooms, where the perfume of urinal cakes and dollar-store Glade lent a dubious olfactory ambiance.  

Reading in public is acceptable in cafes and airports, but in bars it seems to be a pretentious faux pas, some sort of performative act. It could be a sly “pick-me-up” gesture, a “dating hack,” as LitHub recently put it. 

That never occurred to me. A woman reading alone in a bar might be misconstrued as a come-on, but as a guy reading the police blotter in the paper, that was hardly the case. I simply wanted a whiskey with my words, then get out of there. At times I felt like a noir character — bruised alienation with a newspaper under his arm, trench coat optional.

Only once did someone mock me for reading in a bar, an annoying professional acquaintance who wanted me to join him at his table to gab. He teased me for reading a magazine, as if I was showing off, when really I was blissfully absorbed in my own inky world and couldn’t care less what anyone thought (proof: I was drinking Miller Lite).

I was having none of it and, in more polite terms than these, I told him to buzz off and leave me the goddam hell alone, that I’d rather read a mediocre Shouts & Murmurs than have to fake my way through vapid conversation and be as social as a mannequin.

In general, most good bars are too dark for reading, like Club De Ville in Austin, although the late Longbranch Inn, also in Austin, was ideal, especially on slow weeknights. The lights were strong but not glaring and you could always find a good half-hidden spot at the massive wood-carved bar, which looked like the bow of an ancient ship encircled by mermaids.

One of my favorite reading bars is the gloriously art deco Vesuvío Cafe in San Francisco, which shares Beat Generation bona fides with legendary bookstore City Lights, right next door. Have a drink, stroll on over, browse the shelves, buy a book, go back to the bar and read. In that case, a book in the bar couldn’t be more fitting. (Just don’t get Ginsberg’s “Howl.” That’s a little too on the nose.)

I’ve also written in bars, a lot. That’s when I’m traveling abroad. After a long day, I crack open a moleskin notebook and record the day’s doings, the contact info of people I’ve met, and attempt the occasional pen and ink sketch, which are invariably doomed to violent preschool abstractions. I draw as well as I play the tuba.

Bars are unique reading arenas. Bars are special. They’re where you unwind with a funny movie review by Anthony Lane or a lyrical music profile by Michael Corcoran while sipping a cold one. It beats sitting on your sofa doing the same. For bars are communal. You’re around people, and that might just afford a whisper of hope. 

Maybe I look dopey sitting at the bar, alone, nose in a periodical. But believe me, I am rapt and content. Content as could be.  

Not me. I don’t have a beard or such a suave sweater. Also, I think he’s Spanish.

Pet peeves

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Between the cat eating the house plants then vomiting greenery all over the place and the dog expressing his anal glands by scooting his butthole across the cream-colored carpet, the animals are just asking for a one-way trip to the pound. 

I jest, but it’s true that pets is only one letter away from pests. Love them as I do, these free-roaming (if housebound) creatures are high-maintenance, not quite like human children, god forbid, but demanding and nerve-wracking nonetheless.

Oh, what’s this adorable chunk of indescribable disgustingness? Just another hairball upchucked from my favorite feline. Thanks, Tiger Lily, you charmer!

Any responsible owner of pets knows the aggravation of keeping animals. That’s why I’ve owned so many pet rats over the years — low-maintenance while being cleaner than cats and smarter than dogs. That’s a truism that happens to hold water. And the rodents may just be funnier than cats and dogs, and more affectionate to boot. Plus they have a life-span a little longer than the common house fly, which actually drop-kicks your heart.

Rats always like to play and snuffle around. They are great explorers, endlessly curious and insatiably social. They hoard. They drink beer. They dig in the plants, climb all over you, squeak during belly rubs and, yes, even giggle with joy. Then again, they nibble anything in their path, from electrical cords to your favorite book.

Pets aren’t perfect. People aren’t perfect. And while my girlfriend isn’t going to express her anal glands on my light-hued carpet, she might dog-ear the pages and break the binding of my favorite book. Infallibility — let the Pope bask in that rarefied delusion.

So as I write about these pet peeves, the dog goes ballistic over the arrival of the mail. Screeches and door scratches, head nearly exploding with the notion of territorial intrusion. The dog is bored. Let him fulfill a sense of purpose for 20 seconds. Though, thanks to the hyperactive scratching, the front door needs a fresh paint job.

The dog, Cubby, grumbles as he comes off his hissy-fit. He relaxes, peers out the window for more invaders, then curls up in a ball like a sowbug on the couch. (He’s dark gray, charcoal, and small. Like a sowbug.) The cat … who knows where she went. She vanishes like the Cheshire Cat, but leaving no toothy smile in her wake. How come cats rarely smile? Entitled, they are, seething with grave self-importance.

Last week the dog shat on the dining room rug, an impressive tower of leaning Lincoln Logs, a bonfire yet unlit. The cat barfed out something bile-colored — an intoxicating shade of yellow, beige and lime green — and I, ha ha, got to pick it all up. Rascals!

The price of pets is worth it. They cost time, money and exasperation. They get sick. The dog needs grooming. The cat tears up the carpet. Then there are the Sea-Monkeys, which live in a miniature saltwater tank. Let’s not get into the Sea-Monkeys.

Pets are gems. Strange animals strolling the halls, licking themselves obsessively, barking and meowing the call of the wild, oozing reciprocal love in our gorgeous, fantastically maddening peaceable kingdom. Sit, Cubby, sit. Thatta boy. 

The cat’s seething self-importance

Nature calls. Take a message.

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

As I read about Chile — the country that curls like a tongue down the Pacific coast of South America — it seems more and more to be a platonic ideal for naturists, hikers and outdoorsies. Mountains, snow, rapids, ocean, flora, fauna, all doused in a magenta sunset glow that shouts once in a lifetime experiences — that’s what I see. Alpacas! Elephant seals! Avian abundance! Maybe a merman, or a yeti! The whole thing is almost mythological in its exotic, boot-trekking glories. Binoculars mandatory.

Here’s the thing: I’m not going to Chile to hike or ski or bird watch or scale anything that’s not human-made or shaped like stairs. Or, for that matter, anything that doesn’t have numbered buttons in a metal box with sliding doors. 

More than 12 minutes of hiking reduces me to a gasping heap of implacable boredom. Snow skiing I absolutely adore, but I haven’t done it in eons and I’m afraid at this late date I’d put on my skies and immediately crash into a tree, snap untold bones and forever reside in a wheelchair, speaking with a keyboard and a pencil between my teeth. 

During my Southern California childhood, I was a fiend for the forest, creeks, lakes, waterfalls, trails and, of course, the crashing chaos of the ocean and its silken beaches. We’d roll up our Toughskins and splash in pools looking for frogs and pollywogs, snakes and lizards. We always got poison ivy, always. Beyond the Santa Barbara area, we made Yosemite and Sequoia national parks paradises of youthful plunder. It was majestic.

Today, my idea of a jaunt in the wilderness is a day trip to the countryside — like a  winery. That sounds pitifully fuddy-duddy, but I counter that impression with my love of the ricketiest rollercoasters, the loudest Metallica, a good late-night tipple, hip sneakers and an innate aversion to Adele and Hootie and the Blowfish.

What I’m saying is that I have approximately zero nature planned for my approaching trip to Chile. For one, it will be winter when I go in June and I’m not packing boots or a beanie, and I am defiantly indifferent to spotting penguins in their natural habitat. A winery or three will be the gist of my wild country safari.

That’s not to say Chile’s outdoor offerings aren’t uniquely attractive. Glossing my guide book, I note three regions that more than tempt this tent-resistant traveler: 

“Norte Chico: Beaches, Stargazing and Verdant Valleys”

“Sur Chico: Ominous Volcanoes, Pristine Waterways and Outdoor Adventures”

“Northern Patagonia: Mountains, Rivers, Glaciers and Fjords”

Wait. Maybe I …

No. 

I am an urban creature, a pavement pounder, a museum roamer, a wannabe epicure, a streetwise wiseacre — whatever. I simply don’t like rocks in my shoes, rattlesnakes or hauling a backpack the size of a Kia up craggy hills.

Take me to Tokyo for the wild nights and neon sizzle. Paris for the boulevards and bouillabaisse. New York for the noise and neurotic hustle. Istanbul, Madrid, Berlin, Montreal, San Francisco … In none of those cities do I need a walking stick or a can of Off!

I’m headed to Santiago, Chile’s capital, a metropolis of turbulent colonial and Pinochet-era histories, creative hives of Nobel poet Pablo Neruda, a patchwork of neoclassical, art deco and neo-gothic architecture, museums, grand parks and hills and the rushing Mapocho River, all backdropped by the Andes Mountains. 

I’ll take day trips to the aforementioned wineries, as well as to Valparaiso Port and Viña del Mar, which provide access to the countryside, coastline and beaches, about as nature-y as I’ll get. (No, I don’t own flip-flops or sandals.)

With a population of seven million people, making it one of the largest cities in the Americas, Santiago promises a breadth of urban sensations. Really, who needs the sanity of the great outdoors when you’ve got dinner reservations at a downtown restaurant called Dementia?

Recent tomes I’ve tapped

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

I’m never not reading a book or two. These are a few new titles I got my grubby paws on: 

Mike Nichols’ 1966 film of Edward Albee’s corrosive play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” remains a dish-rattling, drink-spilling, daggers-in-your-ears delight, all marital earthquakes and social Molotov cocktails. (Cocktails. Of course.) Booze is big in that cracked portrait of a long-wed couple on the rocks. (On the rocks. Of course.) And you get a contact high reading the riveting “Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’” by Philip Gefter, who capably captures the play’s serrated edges, dubious morality and verbal drive-bys, as well as the behind-the-scenes hoopla of making a controversial movie with a controversial couple, no less than Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor — Hollywood nitroglycerin. It’s a bracing blast of theater and cinema history.  

“Headshot” is by a woman named Rita Bullwinkel. Let’s get that out of the way. (There, done.) This slim, tightly coiled novel is also a muscular debut, damp with the blood and sweat of a passel of female teenage boxers, zesty characters realized with pointillist panache. Time-leaping and fragmentary, the girls’ stories are told in intense vignettes for a scrappy scrapbook of pugilistic profiles that pounds with humanity and life. If not quite a K.O. — more tonal and rhythmic variety would shake things up — the book is a fleet-footed contender. 

With irksomely precocious flair — at 35, he’s a wizardly wunderkind — poet Kaveh Akbar conjures worlds of art and ideas in his radiant fiction debut “Martyr!” Reeking agreeably of auto-fiction, this dense but delectably readable novel is about an Iranian-American poet scouring past and present, life, death and love with the insight of an artist and the squishy heart of the wounded. Gorgeous language propels you through its lush, gently philosophical thickets. And despite some muddled mysticism near the end — I’m allergic to spiritual allegory — “Martyr!” had me pleasantly reeling. 

Lorrie Moore’s a personal favorite and her latest fiction is the knottily named “I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home.” Like all her books, tangy prose festoons the pages (a bite-size sample: “Fluorescent light rinsed the room.”). Yet the novel, with its arch surreal touches, rubbed me wrong. The narrative, centered on a man and his dying brother, is gawky, with sharp elbows and knobby knees. Plus, there’s heaps about chemo, cancer and croaking, and I’m not in a hospice mood. The novel just won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, so call me bonkers. In this rare instance, Moore is less.

Not for the feint of heart but perhaps for suckers for sentiment, the bleak memoir “Molly” — breathlessly written by Molly’s husband, Blake Butler, a noted novelist of thrillers — starts with her gunshot suicide and continues with another bang, the crack of bared emotion and tell-all candor. This is the story of Butler and Molly Brodak’s three-year marriage, a melding of art and nature and words and, in her case, bouts of inconsolable darkness. Brodak, a published poet and author who said “I simply wasn’t good enough,” killed herself three weeks before her 40th birthday, in 2020. “Molly” is so much about her and her devastating secrets, yet equally about Butler’s clawing to the other side of grief through deep (and verbose) psychic excavation. He includes Molly’s suicide note (“I don’t love people. I don’t want to be a person”), along with the frantic blow-by-blow action of finding her body in a favorite field of theirs. These passages are tough-going, not only for the forensic particulars, but for Butler’s writerly histrionics as well; he pants on the page. A cult sensation, tugging readers to and fro like emotional taffy and kicking critics into superlative overdrive, “Molly” is a divisive read, by turns lovely, wincing and overheated. It is the first book I’ve read that opens with the phone number for the national suicide hotline. 

Sole asylum

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

So we’re wandering through the smashing Henry Taylor exhibit at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan and, like that, flash-bam, my right foot spontaneously combusts. It burns and sizzles. I seize up and sit down like a premature geriatric. Wincing happens. Cursing occurs. And yet nothing diminishes the pleasures of the show one bit. The art is exquisite — raw, funny, moving. I’m between awe and ow.

The foot becomes an issue. The pain, the throb, the burn. And we still have miles to trek through the unforgiving corridors of the city. The day is young, and it is often excruciating.

A day later, I call the podiatrist. An X-ray of my right foot is taken. I wait in the doctor’s minute room, slouching on the elevated exam bench, whose thin tissue covering crunches at the tiniest move, like aluminum foil, or tracing paper.

The doctor at last enters, assistant in tow, and she asks me to denude the offending foot. As I peel off my sock, I intone dramatically, “Behold the monstrosity.”

She laughs. I was expecting a scream. My foot is an objectively ghoulish sight. 

Pro that she is, the doc instantly unriddles what’s before us, which is, in all its homeliness, sort of poignant. It’s something Cubist, maybe Surrealist. Perhaps a strain of elephantiasis.

What’s really happening is a honking medley of maladies: a bunion, a hammertoe and a flat foot. Hearing this, blinking dumbly, I inquire about a wholesale foot replacement, say, a grocery cart wheel, or a deer hoof.

Ignoring me, she administers a very gnarly cortisone shot into my toe while her assistant sprays a freezing liquid on the entry area so I don’t shriek like Axl Rose. The needle goes in deep. And deeper. I swear I hear the crunch of bone. A choir of angels sings.

Amazingly, my foot feels instantly better. The burn is extinguished. The doctor cautions that the cortisone could last a week, two months, forever, we don’t know. I’ll take any of those. She has me order an $11 toe splint from Amazon and suggests I buy fancy insoles. She checks to see if my insurance will cover the insoles she can provide, at $450, but, no, of course not. They will not foot the bill.

I sort of hobble out of the podiatrist’s office. My foot feels so much better. I’m walking on air. I’m about to do a little jig, until, out in the sunshine, I realize what a heel I’d be. One step at a time. One step at a time.

Eerie and incandescent, my X-rayed foot, a web of symptoms.