Wanna buy a monkey? (an update and a promise)

God I'm handsome (see below). Devastatingly handsome, but lately, crippled.

Here's what: the devil-may-care lifestyle of Luke John Baumgarten -- a fitness enthusiast, socialite, journeyman writer, scoundrel and peddler of various salves (and a mere 25 years old I might add) -- finally caught up with him on no less a day than July 4th.

The irony.

The very day on which he was to celebrate his great country's 230th year free of the yoke of bondage, the young chap himself was placed in the manacles and leg irons of his ill-functioning middle region. After a nice sun-warmed wake up, a "how do you do Lord's morning, hail and well met," and a spry run of no less than three miles, the young and estimable Baumgarten was cut down in his prime by what would be diagnosed via MRI (some two weeks and like 300 dollars in Blue Cross co-pays later) as two herniations between the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebra and the fifth lumbar and first sacral vertebra respectively.

Two bulging discs, kids, and I'm twenty-mother-fuckin-five.

The good news: I might not need back surgery. Might not. The twenty-five year old mightn't need to have his spinal chord laid bare and fiddled with. Sometimes young bodies can fix themselves. Unsure as yet but, fingers crossed.

Some bad news: After four days of chiropracty and general homeopathy failed to offer relief (and four nights of sleeplessness, punctuated by midnight thigh cramps that made the usually cool-tempered lad Baumgarten scream like a wraith and very nearly piss himself), I went the route of Western medicine and was given a round-robin cocktail of drugs. An anti-inflammatory, a muscle relaxant, and enough Vicodin to bring down a team of bear wrestlers and their bears. The bad part: one of those three drugs, it seems, I have a fairly severe allergy to.

Not sure which, really, because modern medicine hasn't yet mastered the art of figuring out which drugs kill which people. That is: while we know how to figure out which molds and pollens will give junior a runny nose come hay fever season, we haven't figured out which opium derivative will -- in the dead of night, some weeks after junior began taking it -- cluster his body with hives, seize the muscles in his chest and block his air ways, then continue doing so nightly for some five days after the drug ceases to be taken.

(actual conversation with my primary care physician: "which [drug] is it?" He asks, rhetorically, "Short answer: we don't know." Shrug, chuckle. Eyes widen to show good-nature, light-hearted sympathy, then narrow to denote solemnity, earnestness, a Clintonian feeling-of-my-pain.)

Sweet.

A bit more good news: I went and had acupuncture, something that's been on my list of things to do for some time. Didn't seem to accomplish anything at all, but it's nice to dabble in the art of the Orient from time to time, and though it didn't fix me straight away, it at least didn't cover me with leprous, weeping lesions.

Whatever else can be said of the Chinese, they don't often make things worse. Except for that Great Leap Forward, which was remarkable for its ambition and decentralized focus, but was a clusterfuck of implementation. The goodly Mr. Liu (the acupuncturist, you see) took this lesson-learned and relieved a bit of pain, reduced a bit of inflammation, and sent me, head-well-patted, scampering on my way, one good leg trailing one now-slightly-less-crooked one.

There are no miracle cures in life, my friends, only herbal anti-inflammatories peppered with quaint Chinese glyphs that leave your breath smelling of kelp.

I'd planned on making some grave and foundation-shaking conclusions about youth, agedness, life, death, the market economy, the frailty of the mind and it's indebtedness to a stout body, but it seems I've run the hell out of time.

Though I will say this: from a careful study of the acupuncture chart (which was gorgeously illustrated), the place I'm most frightened of catching a stray needle is the old' taint. Yes, male friends, there's an acupressure point on our respective perineums, though I didn't have a chance to ask what aches a needle so-placed is good for relieving.

Ask your boyfriends what a perineum is ladies, you'll be horrified.

And yes, it seems, Chinese -- at least so far as the chart suggests -- practice (male) circumcision. I didn't realize until I was looking at the poster on the wall there that I really have no idea about the foreskin trimming habits of far-Eastern cultures.

I left edified.

So nothing brilliant or groundbreaking, I'm afraid, but at the least, as always, I strive to be informative.

I love you all and I think I'll be writing more now. Pay for words isn't as much fun as words for their own sake. You've been warned.

Pray for Mojo.