The Irony (and the Stupidity)

After limping around for several weeks with what I thought was plantar fasciitis (self-diagnosed, of course) I finally went back to the podiatrist to get checked out and he quickly diagnosed my ailment as a sprained tendon on the inside of my ankle, just under the ball of my foot (this tendon has a fancy anatomical name, but you're not going to remember it and neither am I, so I'm not going to bother to look it up) and this is great-- he give me a prescription for an anti-inflammatory and said I'd be better in two weeks but the irony (and the stupidity) is that all the crazy stretching I was doing to alleviate my self-diagnosed plantar fasciitis was actually aggravating this sprained tendon, causing me a great deal of pain, and making me depressed and me cynical about the rest of my boring, monotonous life, sans basketball, tennis, and soccer.

This Makes More Sense Than the Whole Dipping A Baby in the River Styx Theory

Last week, I was discussing heel pain with my friend Greek friend Argiris-- we were both lamenting the fact that we couldn't play Friday morning basketball due to foot pain-- and he came up with an interesting theory: perhaps Achilles legendary heel wasn't metaphysical at all, perhaps he simply had plantar fasciitis or Achilles tendonitis, this would explain why he did all that melancholic brooding in his tent during the siege of Troy . . . I can certainly attest to the fact that heel pain leads to brooding, as I played indoor soccer yesterday and aggravated my plantar fasciitis and I've been depressed and brooding since then, as you can't do anything with any kind of alacrity or good spirits when every step you take hurts; as a bonus, both of these ailments are due to tightness in the calf and Achilles tendon . . . so maybe the legend about the bum heel that laid a great hero low was a simple (and very common, especially if you're wearing footwear without support . . . sandals!)  physical ailment which gained mythical status after many years had passed.

Monday, Garfield Style

I normally don't mind Mondays-- my existential woes usually come to a head on Tuesdays-- but this morning I felt Garfield's curse bearing down on me. I walked down to the park with the dog at 5:45 AM, wearing my Oofos plantar fasciitis clogs because I strained my calf playing soccer on Sunday (probably due to the excessive heat, and some dehydration from drinking too much tequila Saturday night).

Lola was off-leash, as she always is at that time of the morning, but a couple of joggers and another person walking a large white dog came down the hill-- at 5:45 AM! On a Monday! The audacity.

So I had to put Lola back on the leash, and I didn't get a chance to pick up her poop, and while I was searching for her poop in the darkness, I stepped in it. Firmly. With my absolutely vital plantar fasciitis clogs. So now they're sitting out in the sun on the back porch, and I'll have to clean them when I get home.

While I was walking back up the hill, scuffling in the grass trying to remove the dog poop, I saw Garfield, in my mind's eye, laughing at me-- because I thought I was above his "Monday blues" humor. But he got his, and so did Monday.

During the Pandemic, A Loss is Still a Win

During the pandemic, we're considering every game we play a win-- but today's trip to Middlesex was a tough one . . . it was the third game of the week and varsity got spanked 5 to nil and my JV squad was a wreck; we lost 4-0 and I've never run on and off the field so many times for injuries--many of which were already present before the game and were compounded by extreme effort against an excellent team-- here's a quick rundown: Tyler with an ankle sprain,; Ian got the wind knocked out of him and has plantar fasciitis; Anthony twisted his ankle, Sebastian with a tender hamstring; Theo had trouble with his back and also got close-lined; Max got elbowed in the eye; Jake has turf-toe, and Eric has a pulled groin . . . with only thirteen players on the roster, these numbers don't add up (but it was still better to have an adventure and lose rather than the alternative . . . so despite the drubbing, we're staying positive: at least we are getting games in . . . there are plenty of games being cancelled . . . especially at East Brunswick, where I teach; also, my son Alex played the game of his life at left back . . . it was a full throttle assault from Middlesex because we had no midfield).

Loath and Loathe Revisited

Two things I should be loath to admit that I do not loathe: 1) spinning class-- because of plantar fasciitis, I am going light with the soccer and basketball for a few weeks, and so my wife convinced me to try spinning while I am healing, and I must admit the time goes very quickly and the work-out is intense-- though I feel very goofy biking to the beat 2) the Marky Mark song "Good Vibrations," which I was actually pleased to hear during the aforementioned spinning class.

Good Walkers, Spoiled

There are few things I enjoy more than taking a brisk walk with my dog on a fall day; I usually listen to a podcast or some jazz (lately I've been into jazz organist Dr. Lonnie Smith, who should not be confused with jazz keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith or base-stealing left fielder Lonnie "Skates" Smith) but today's walk was short, slow, awkward, and quite lame . . . I've played pickup basketball three times in the last week and apparently that's enough times to make my plantar fasciitis flare up-- so my left heel feels like there's a spike lodged in it-- and my dog pulled a muscle in his rear leg and he can barely walk, so anyone who saw the two of us limping around the corner from my house must have thought we were not long for this earth, but now it's raining and we're resting and I have a good feeling about tomorrow (hopefully I won't wake up in the night again and nearly collapse while trying to walk to the bathroom, that tendon gets tight as a banjo  drone string in the middle of the night).

The Eternal Bronchial Return

The search bar on this blog allows me to look back on my life and see if The History of Dave is repeating itself . . . and in regards to two topics, I certainly am on a loop: plantar fasciitis and bronchitis . . . but I am getting a little smarter each year (at least in regards to the bronchitis) because now that I know the symptoms, I'm getting to the doctor before I actually get a full blown case and getting some meds (and avoiding scenarios like this one) but I'm not that smart . . . I still went out and coached our travel game yesterday, though my assistant coach did all the talking-- it was weird, watching the game, unable to speak above a croak-- just letting the kids do their thing; we played a team that was better organized than us and could knock it around fairly well and we were missing our starting goalie, so we settled back on defense and gave them nothing, played a 4-4-2 for the counter, and ran a number of give-and goes through to breakaways and won handily, 4 - 0 . . . if I wasn't shivering so hard, it would have been delightful to watch them figure it all out on their own.

Remembering Louie

Morning darkness, loads of essays, plantar fasciitis, weariness from coaching soccer, and general ennui with the constant routine were getting me down, until I remembered what Louie Zamperini had to endure . . . and how he had to endure it without Wikipedia Click-Olympics, Tetris, or Netflix . . . and now I feel better.

Dave Accessorizes!

It makes me extremely jealous that women have so many fabulous choices on how to accessorize their outfits-- scarves and brooches, feather boas and scrunchies, bangles and handbags-- so, to combat mundanity, I've added a couple of items to my fashion arsenal:

1) with my battery powered headlamp, not only am I a shining beacon of coolness in the 6 AM darkness, but I also don't trip on the uneven pavement near my house (the streetlight on our corner is out) and I'm able to let my dog pursue his interests (chasing deer in the park) without losing him . . . so shine on, you crazy fashionable Dave . . .

2) around the house, in the driveway, and even in the car on a quick errand, I am sporting a pair of OOFOS OOClogs to help my feet recover from plantar fasciitis . . . my wife is not smitten with these-- in fact, she called them "the world's ugliest pair of shoes," but I should point out that she has a long history of clog-hating (when she met my friend and rugby phenom Brian Hightower for the first time, she was not impressed, mainly because he was wearing a pair of hideous black clogs-- but also because he's short with a big head; Hightower let me try on the clogs and I really liked them, they were comfortable and easy to slip into; Catherine made some derogatory comments about the clogs and the type of men that wear them and then we went out and got drunk and I forgot all about the entire incident, but Whitney didn't, and a year later he gave me a pair of them for my birthday-- to Catherine's chagrin-- and I wore them until they fell apart . . . I'll never forget that gift, as it was both incredibly thoughtful and incredibly vengeful in equal measures).

Trilemma of Dave

I read to encounter new stories, new ideas, and new words, and I found all of these in Paul Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 . . . I read stories of economic disaster in Latin America, Japan, and Thailand; I read that the global crisis of 2008 might not have been completely caused by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act (which was put in place after the Great Depression and ensured compartmentalization between commercial banks and investment companies) and might have been more the result of a "run" on the completely unregulated "shadow banking system" . . . which wouldn't have been regulated by the Glass-Steagall act anyway; and I read the word "trilemma," which Krugman used to explain the problem with national monetary policy . . . you can either let your money "float" and fluctuate on the exchange rate, which fights recession but adds a great deal of uncertainty to your economy, or you could fix the value of the rate and attempt to guarantee that the currency would never be devalued, or you can maintain an adjustable peg . . . and he explains the defects in all of these and calls the problem a "three-cornered dilemma" . . . a "trilemma" and the only trilemma in my life right now is not particularly exciting . . . it's not like Heidi Klum, Karolina Kurkova, and my wife are all battling for my affections . . . but there certainly are three corners to my problem: I have a knee injury, but it's not a terribly bad injury-- my knee cap popped out of place and I sprained the inner ligaments and my bursa sac is a bit swollen, and so I can either: 1) rest it properly until it heals . . . which is what I should do, but is rather impossible since I have two active boys, a dog, and I am hyper-active 2) I could do light exercise . . . jog, walk, play with my kids, lift weights, bike, and swim . . . which alleviates my hyper-activity but is rather boring, or 3) I can tape myself and wrap myself and brace myself and keep playing basketball and soccer until my knee explodes and my plantar fasciitis returns.

Anti-natalist Chickens

During the latest episode of Waking Up With Sam Harris, David Benatar discusses his philosophical stance "anti-natalism," and how he believes it is sinful to bring new lives into a world dominated by suffering . . . in essence, he believes that it is better to not be born at all rather than to exist, and that once we exist, we attach a sentimental bias to our existence (unless it is so painful and awful that suicide is the only recourse) and so we go on existing even though not existing would have been better in the first place-- he likens this to attending a movie which is pretty awful, but not so awful that you would walk out, but certainly awful enough that you would have not gone to see it if you knew how bad it was (in my mind this movie is The Accountant, which "stars" Ben Affleck as an autistic action hero number cruncher . . . so dumb, but just barely entertaining enough that we didn't leave) and this is the metaphor for life, it is a movie that you would have chosen not to see if you knew how bad it was going to be, but once you've paid for a ticket, you generally decide to see it through . . . but Benatar believes you should definitely not drag anyone else to see the movie, thus you should not procreate and bring children into this awful world-show . . . I tend to disagree (especially since I just got back from circumnavigating the park in the snow, my dog bounding ahead of me from snow pile to snow pile, which-- despite my plantar fasciitis-- is a big check mark on the pro side of existing in the universe) but I still enjoyed employing the term "anti-natalist" in Philosophy class on Friday, when we were discussing Peter Singer and animal rights . . . more specifically, we were discussing the Douglas Adams bit in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe about the cow that wants to be eaten (and can express this desire eloquently) and the ethics of breeding animals that either desire to be eaten or-- even better-- are decerebrated vegetables with no consciousness at all (or perhaps even growing meat in chemical vats) and this leads to the question of whether being delicious and stupid and plump (and essentially of no nutritional value) is a good thing for chicken-kind or a bad thing for chicken-kind; numerically, the chicken species is doing fantastic-- couldn't be better-- as there are zillions of them, but fitness-wise and experience-wise they are doing atrociously . . . and so I think as far as chickens go, I'm an "anti-natalist," because the life of a modern chicken is so chock full of suffering that it's certainly better to have never been born (hatched?) in the first place rather than to have to endure living in a tiny box with fatty legs that can't support your obese chicken body while you're force-fed a disgusting diet full of hormones so that you grow at an exponential rate into a giant infantile avian ripe for slaughter . . . anyway, that's the word of the day over here: anti-natalism.

It's Not Like I'm Trying To Be A Gymnast

So for those of you anxiously awaiting my decision regarding the Trilemma of Dave, I actually rested my injured knee, and I have been wearing my orthotics, which has really helped my plantar fasciitis . . . so this Sunday I was able to return to the soccer field-- with one wrinkle: I did no stretching whatsoever before I played . . . I read some recent research that suggests that static stretching actually weakens muscles, and I always thought when you were injured that you should do a lot of stretching, but I've given up on that philosophy-- not that I ever did that much stretching to begin with-- and I had no problems on the field, and both my legs and my feet felt good after the game, so this makes me very happy, because I find stretching really really boring (so now the question is, do I forego stretching when I am coaching kids? . . . I think we will warm-up and do some sport specific exercises before we play, but no more of the tedious circling up and stretching as a group).

There's Always a Tradeoff

Acupuncture alleviated my plantar fasciitis (but now my calf is really sore, which makes sense since my acupuncturist stuck a bunch of needles into it).

Mystery Solved!

So I spent several periods on Thursday wondering why my shoe felt so loose, almost as if I was going to walk right out of it and leave it behind me on the floor . . . I wondered if my right foot had shrunk or if my plantar fasciitis insert was to blame . . . but then-- after a good two hours of this nonsense-- I had the bright idea to actually lift my pant leg up and look at the shoe, and-- wonder of wonders-- it was untied.

Chris McDougall vs. Dr. Kates (Literature vs. Podiatry)

It's a showdown remisicent of Godzilla versus Rodan: my foot doctor advised me not to run until the lab finished making my orthotic shoe inserts, but Chris McDougall, the author of Born to Run, told me that not only are orthotics bad for your feet, but that I shouldn't even wear traditional running shoes, as these will weaken my feet, and instead I should run barefoot . . . and I don't know who to listen to . . . I ran barefoot the other day, despite Dr. Kates warning, and my plantar fasciitis felt okay . . . but I don't want to push it and run too far, especially because of what happened to Caballo Blanco-- the problem is that I need a clone of myself, so that one of me can run with orthotics and one of me can run barefoot, and then my clone and I could truly judge which works better (and there's RockTape to consider, as well . . . so perhaps I need a third Dave).

Ouch

Right now I'm suffering from a case of plantar fasciitis, and (based on some half-assed Googling) this might be caused by bare-foot running (which I've been doing for a while now) or it might be cured by barefoot running-- this reminds me of Homer Simpson's maxim about alcohol: "the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."