Lack of writer's block and other misadventures in electronic publishing

So here’s the thing: I have lots of ideas, so the usual excuses for not writing don’t really apply here. I have, for example, a piece half written on my desk even as I sit here at work listening to some teenagers being callow assholes for the sheer enjoyment of being callow assholes, which is the sort of thing you have to expect from teenagers, I suppose.  Telling myself that they are simply engaging in the teenage imperative doesn’t make their stupidity any less annoying, however.  So yes, there is no real reason why I haven’t been writing busily away here.  It’s just that RA[1] has raised its ugly head once again and I have had other things on my mind.  Having been medically evicted from my hips for non-payment of rent, RA has, like so many people in the past few decades, decided to improve its life and move to the suburbs.  I’ve never thought of my ankles as being particularly suburban, but I imagine that if the mind itself can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven, an annoying autoimmune disease can find suburban bliss and better schools for the kids in somebody’s ankles.  Its’ just that I would prefer that if find its bliss in someone else’s ankles. Mine hurt enough as it is.

In order to find some relief from the new tenants, I went to a very nice Chinese doctor who x-rayed my feet while I had unexposed photographic film in my pockets—yes, I know that the film is ruined, thank you for the reminder—and then told me that I had an inflammation in my ankles. The doctor was a very nice man, as I said, and so I did not tell him no shit, Sherlock, where’d you leave your squad car?  No, I simply nodded politely and asked what he intended to do about it.  He indicated that some cortisone was in order and he left me alone with my thoughts and my bare feet for a few moments to go get a nurse and some cortisone as well.  When he came back about five minutes later with both nurse and drugs in tow, I hopped up on the table as brightly and chipperly as someone who just invented the word chipperly can hop anywhere, whereupon the good doctor sterilized my right foot and then jabbed me in the ankle with a very large needle.  This being my first cortisone shot ever, I and my ankle did not respond well to the sudden intrusion of the corpus, and I wish to take this opportunity to apologize to the doctor for screaming, what the fuck, at him at the top of my lungs.  The doctor, however, did not so much as blink an eye at my comment, which leads me to believe that I am not the first person he’s injected with cortisone who has had this reaction.  Afterwards, I was left in the hands of the nurse, who proceeded to show me how to use the ankle braces the doctor told me to wear.

One of the braces the nurse gave me was a simple ankle brace that anyone who has had a sprained ankle will be familiar with. The other brace looked like a bondage device for foot fetishists.  The simple ankle brace came with a forty page pamphlet in twelve European languages (including Slovenian) and four Asian languages, two of them being Chinese in both simplified and traditional pictographs.  The foot fetishist’s wet dream came with no instructions in any language at all (including Slovenian).  The nurse quickly showed me how to put the thing on and then rushed off to see other patients.  As you might imagine, I have worn the foot fetishist’s delight exactly once, because I cannot figure out how to fasten and secure the device to my ankle.  In fact, I wear the brace for my left ankle on my right ankle; it seems to work, but there may be dangers here that I will comment on at a later date. As for the left ankle brace that I wear on my right ankle, it strikes me as decidedly odd that anyone would choose to print out, in twelve European languages (including Slovenian), four Asian languages, two of them being Chinese in both simplified and traditional pictographs, detailed instructions on how to put on a sock.  I realize that the bureaucratic mind will seize at any opportunity to make itself annoying to the public it allegedly serves, but this seems to be unnecessarily annoying. Didn’t we all learn to put on our socks before we started kindergarten? And even if our mothers put the socks on for us, I think that the majority of the world’s sock wearing population would have learned how to put on their socks simply by watching Mom do it every morning.  I, and I expect billions of other sock-wearing people as well, do not see the need for subjecting the gimps of the world to a forty page pamphlet in twelve European languages (including Slovenian), four Asian languages, two of them being Chinese in both simplified and traditional pictographs.  We already know how to put our socks on, thank you very much, or did I miss something along the way?

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[1] Rheumatoid arthritis, if you are not a long time reader. I would say that this particular ailment is a royal pain in the ass, except that my ass is the one place it doesn’t bother at all.