middle toe emoji

on christmas day, i whacked my right middle toe against a weight bench in the man-cave part of my basement (the other half of which looks like a day-care, filled with piles of children's toys strewn about as though hurricane hal was just there; and, often the hurricane hits my half of the room as well)

what was i doing crouched behind the bench like a chinese tiger? perhaps i was fixing my wife's spin bike, picking up a toy car, or piece of plastic food...i cannot remember, not for the life of me. yet i was there, lurking, and jumped quickly in a  ballistic moment, with the velocity of a ferocious cat about to capture its prey

so, whack my toe i did, and pretty good. i let out a sudden cry of animal fury and then forgot about it, rather like the way one forgets the pain of birth...

several hours later, one of our christmas guests pointed out that my toe looked swollen and a bright purple band encircled it, like a ring around saturn.  i freaked out.

my toe 2 days later

yellow nails aside, the image above doesn't do the initial injury justice. but it is all i have.

all of this set me to thinking about several things, now safe to write about from my laptop perch of academic neutrality. safe because the threat to my way of being seems to have lifted.

and at least for the time being it is. but that is all any of us have, the "time being" which serves as a weak bar by which we form some notion of the status quo. but anyone with half a brain knows that is all illusion.

it first really sank in while watching pretty woman with my wife during the evening hours of christmas day; if i have fractured my toe, i can't run...for several weeks...panic set in. i became instantly sour and focused on the essential injustices in life.

things have been going well. yes, i have have had shit luck at races with my kids getting sick just days before 2 of 3 ironman races this past year, and getting dunked and stripped of my goggles in texas, but outside of racing, my training has been excellent. it has become a fabric that i wear. it keeps me warm. it dries me off. it anchors me. it is just always there. my training and my ego have become enmeshed so much so that if my training collapsed, i fear my ego would suffer the same fate. i would be lost; searching blindly for any kind of identity, but not quite grounded in the universe.

and what a ridiculous set of words those last six are. how can one be grounded in a universe that has no direction, no true centre, no modus operandi???

what happened when i pictured myself not running for six weeks was something that only another endurance-animal/douchebag can understand. it was gut wrenching, painful, and required me to write alternate versions of reality for myself about myself. and this, i did. but it was not easy. no sir.

so what is a middle digit? an interesting thing to ponder. the middle digit of the lower limb is nowhere as inglorious or expressive as the middle finger. it is short. it just sort of sits there, incapable of standing alone, doing nothing, rising above nothing, limply limping along until, until one day, maybe something bad happens to it, and then it suddenly becomes  a source of woe, powerful enough to cause one to need to re-invent oneself, if even for a while. wow.

"i wasn't born with enough middle fingers..." (marilyn manson)

middle fingers express our rage, our out-rage, our indignation. they are glorious, phallic and offensive.

middle toes are like the invisible masses. they exist. we could live without them.  but if they are not working right, if they are swollen and inflamed, we will all feel their fury, and to the point of immobilization. middle toes are like all of us. we are all middle toes in some way aren't we???

so, everyone has a middle toe. everyone is a middle toe. everyone's middle toe is a metaphor for some  important part of existence. silence is temporary, as is everything else. what does not matter now, may  be the most important thing in the universe in the next second.

my middle toe is not broken. it has healed. fast. no more saturn rings enshroud its stubby projectile self. it is once more quiescent, goes along for the ride, an easy, if not complacent passenger. my middle toe is no threat to me now. i am more relaxed.

but,  because of my lower middle digit's recent trauma, my year has ended  with me a notch "wiser" perhaps, a notch more "grateful", whatever that means, a notch more indifferent yet also sensitized to the essential random suffering which occurs in the universe, the walls we erect to survive it, how meaningless they are, and to how much i need to swim, bike and run. long.