Current mood:
pensive
In a week when it seems that every move I make is a bad one, I made one really good call, which was to get a massage tonight. Oh hell yes, it was so fuckin' sweet. For all the usual reasons, of course, it feels good, it's relaxing, sometimes they actually fix stuff, etc. The best reason, though, is the way it makes your mind wander. I've had so much junk on my mind lately, just garbage, and the constant question of how to feel about all the garbage, you know, but I didn't think about any of it tonight during my massage. Instead, I thought of these things: Did you know massages raise your blood pressure temporarily? I thought about the last time I got a massage. It was from a friend who was "in training" to give massages. It was also on the same day I gave blood, and I started to feel woozy while she was working out my neck. Then I went out on the deck and went straight the fuck down. If someone hadn't made a half-assed attempt to catch me and slightly altered my trajectory, I would have hit my head on the corner of a metal table and probably died. That's just how hard I went down. I thought about how in elemenary school people would come up to you and squeeze your neck and if you flinched they would call you boycrazy. Fuck them, I like variety. I thought at one point I could actually feel her squeezing the lactic acid out of my back muscles, and how that lactic acid represented months of my life. Months of running, climbing, dancing, playing. I thought about how as the acid was squeezed from every part of every muscles, the muscles became still and empty and free of everything a muscle can understand - passion, anxiety, sex, violence, perseverance, fatigue - everything. I thought about the woman who was doing this to me. Her name was Sharon. I wondered what she was thinking about. I wondered how much of it she was phoning in. I wondered if she was thinking things like, "Oh, here's a tender spot," or "I can't wait to get back to my BK Broiler." I wondered if she was thinking about the money she was making, and if that made her feel relieved or greedy. I flipped onto my back and, as my muscles grew quieter still, I lay with my eyes closed, perfectly relaxed, and thought about one day when I would lie again like this, muscles finally still and quiet for good. There would probably be a woman hovering over me in much the same way, doing her work on my little pile of flesh and bones. She would do an efficient yet imperfect job while thinking about money or getting laid or whatever it is we think about while we work. Ocassionally thinking things like, "God, no wonder she croaked," or "Oops, should have done one stitch less." I thought about how it will be so nice to not give a shit, for once, about the quality of work I'm paying for. I thought about snow.
