After violently coughing for a week, I broke a rib, specifically rib #5, which an x-ray revealed to be “minimally displaced.” This means, not broken in pieces but not a neat crack either. It is extremely painful, because it hurts with each breath. When you cough, it’s like being stabbed in the chest with an ice-pick. I had to sleep sitting up at first, because it was worse lying down. Obviously there are a million worse things but still, it is awful in its own right.

This constant pain and misery have reminded me acutely of  A Voice Through a Cloud, one of the best books I’ve ever read, an autobiographical novel about a young man whose bicycle accident destroys his health, and led to the author’s early death. The novel beings in the hospital, where the narrator regains consciousness in terrible, unspeakable pain.

Over the years since first reading it, I’ve come to think of my accidents and illnesses as a Voice Through a Cloud, meaning the sense of isolation you feel when in pain. You’re not really you anymore, you have entered a new consciousness as unlike reality as an acid trip. All your sensations are distorted, food is different, the sheets feel different, other people are shadowy figures who live outside your membrane of suffering.

This has gone on too long but it takes at least six weeks for a bone to mend and sometimes longer. Let this be a lesson to you to get enough calcium!

My brain has been altered throughout this ordeal, focused primarily on How long can I stand this, and Why doesn’t anything help, even opiates.

When I’ve been able to think outside the rib pain, my thoughts have turned to deep philosophical questions interrupted by the need to check on Kim and Pete. They are more real to me than my family at this point, and their relationship more momentous and consequential than any other. I mean, all the tattoos, the dinner dates, the threats from Kanye, the impossibility of their whole coupledom, the thought of him dealing with her enormous fake ass…

I’ve been mentally and spiritually haunted by a friend’s angry statement that she doesn’t want to hear about Ukraine because the world didn’t care about the war in Syria. I believe this is a stance of the far left, the wokity woke, who resent the privilege of the white, European Ukrainians. When I said, But what about those poor women evacuated from the maternity hospital only to be killed in the theater they took shelter in, my friend sneered, They don’t even have maternity hospitals in Syria!

I keep compulsively reviewing this, trying to figure out if one of us is just nuts. I am trying to focus on East Africa, which is facing a terrible famine that will only get worse. At least we can all agree on the heartbreaking unfairness of this, except for a guy in a NYT comment thread who insists that it’s Africa’s fault for not controlling its population.

Then, I wondered whether anyone can have a philosophy or value system that is entirely rational and not an outcome of one’s own psychology and, ahem, personal issues. Just think about that. Do I hate capitalism become I’m not rich and I hate the rich (which I do)? Do I think truth is important because the liars in my family have betrayed me so often? Do my white friends who see racist micro-aggressions everywhere feel guilty or an unconscious need to subscribe to all tenets of the progressive left? Does my half-brother, a staunch determinist, just dread the notion of having free will?

These are the rambling preoccupations of an altered consciousness, plus the worry that the internet has ruined life as we knew it without any off-ramp.

Denton Welch‘s A Voice Through a Cloud on the other hand is a masterpiece that I can’t recommend highly enough. The astounding intelligence of it’s author proves that pain can be an impetus to art in the right hands (rather than a drive to see what Kim and Pete are up to.) It is a work of genius that raises a faint hope for humanity and will elevate your soul at least temporarily while the world careens toward oblivion.

Whenever I walk to Whole Foods with friends, we have an adventure, and not just the one where tall thin women ram you with their shopping carts.

This time, it was a guy with an enormous didgeridoo.  We had been drinking coffee, watching the circus that is Whole Foods, Venice. My friend asked the guy if he had made his didgeridoo, and he said Yes. He added that he used it for Sound Therapy.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I saw a documentary called Kumare, about an American-born Indian guy who decides to pose as a guru, to see if people will fall for it. Sure enough, everywhere he goes, people lap up his idiotic impersonation of a Mystic, exclaiming how they can feel his powerful energy, etc, etc. I found it depressing. People are so stupid. Or as my husband put it, more charitably, “People want someone to follow.”

Anyway, there is a Sound Healer in Kumare who uses a didgeridoo, and he looks alot like the guy at Whole Foods. “Were you in that Kumare movie?” I asked him accusingly. He seemed baffled and said no. He wanted me to sit down and let him demonstrate his therapy. He instructed me to focus on “an intention.”  I asked him if he was going to find out what’s wrong with me, secretly thinking “If he only knew!”

A handsome Black man intervened cheerfully, “Why does there gotta be something wrong with you?” He was wearing a fedora and eating a cup of Whole Foods ice cream. He looked as contented as a human being could be. I didn’t want to spoil his mood by answering him.

The Sound Therapist started blowing into his didgeridoo, moving it slowly up and down my back. It felt great! I could feel the sound waves vibrating through my body and I pretended they were evacuating evil spirits. It was extremely pleasurable.

When he was through, he asked me if I had pain in my lower back, noting that he could sense this with the didgeridoo. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings so I told him that while I had pain everywhere, my lower back was a place that sometimes hurt.

The truth is, my lower back is probably one of the few places where I don’t feel pain. I don’t believe in any kind of New Age healing. I don’t believe in gurus, gods, angels, the I Ching, the Secret, Tarot Cards, reiki, colonics, or anything else.

Time doesn’t heal either, as we know. But coffee is wonderful and so is Whole Foods, if you don’t buy your groceries there.

In the current New Yorker, there is a long profile of the performance artist Marina Abramovic that caused me to wonder: Is my life actually Art?

Abramovic has been provoking and shocking people for thirty years. Next week, MOMA is hosting a retrospective of her work, with actors performing some of her most famous “pieces.” That alone is controversial; even her former collaborator and lover, Uwe Laysiepen, thinks it’s fundamentally dishonest to recreate performance art.

Most of Abramovic’s art has involved subjecting herself to pain and humiliation (a genre called ordealism.) Reading about it, you can’t help but feel that this art is beyond parody. My favorite piece is the one where she scrubbed a roomful of rotting, maggot-infested cow bones on her hands and knees, sobbing while video’s of her parents were projected on the walls of the “space.”

In another early piece, she stood still while the audience was offered a wide array of implements with which to torment her.

At MOMA, she will mount a work called “The Artist is Present,” in which she will sit still at a table for ten hours a day, staring into space, throughout the retrospective. Audience members may choose to sit opposite her at the table.

Here is the thing: I personally sit staring into space for MORE THAN TEN HOURS A DAY! I never thought of this as Art, but now I’m mulling it over. Maybe it is Art,   a sort of confrontation with time and eternity, a refusal to interact with gainful employment, and therefore a statement about the subjugation of of modern Man, I mean Women.

Read the article in the New Yorker if you possibly can. It’s a transformative experience that doesn’t even require you to get up off your ass!

Let me begin with I’m Sorry, because I really am. This blog has devolved into a tale of woe that is much too personal but still not personal enough.   Try to bear with me.

I broke my fucking hip. I KNOW it’s not a good time to break my hip. That didn’t stop me. It was dark outside and I tripped and fell on the concrete driveway. I knew something was broken but I waited a few minutes before admitting that I needed an ambulance. In fact, I think I was pretty businesslike, given the pain and horror.

A broken hip hurts so much, you have no idea until you have one. It is agony. For the first couple of hours, I begged everyone not to hurt me. “Please don’t hurt me!” and “Please don’t let anyone hurt me!” over and over. An ER nurse named Debbie and an ex-ray guy did their best to help. Thanks Debbie and ex-ray guy!

The ER doctor told me that I needed surgery. When I pleaded with him, he told me that it was a really “bad” break and that’s why my leg looked “two inches shorter than the other one.” I still don’t know what he was talking about but he gets zero points for bedside manner.

I will try to cut to the chase. It’s five days later and I’m home. The pain is still off the chart but I’m supposed to try to keep moving. I think there are nails and screws in my hip/leg but oh well.

I will let you in on a little secret. All anyone cares about in the hospital are bowel movements. People want you to have one. Patients in other rooms are desperate to have one. I had a little notice board in my room with a list of 3 goals for the day.   Bowel Movement was number 3, after Reduce Pain and Try to Move.

I hope that no one reading this ever has to endure a broken hip, even if I hate you. Please be careful! Take calcium, too.   Max is doing well and I told him that lots of people were sending prayers and Good Thoughts. I know I can count on you to keep up the good work for him while I recover. xo