Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Scratching a Nietzsche

For a couple of days now I have been complaining that the nail on my right little toe has been hurting, because I accidentally pulled half of it out and now it's a bit sore.

You might think that this is a minor injury, but perhaps not when I inform you that there was actually a spot of blood when I did it. And the side went all red and swollen for, like, maybe half an hour afterwards.

I say complaining, but not a huge amount because I am, and this is objective fact, super-rufty-tufty, and you would barely notice my limp were I not wailing and dragging the affected limb behind me like a crocodile's tail.

Then yesterday I met a great chap called Paul, in his eighty-ninth year, who told me how he lost an eye in a Lancaster bomber in 1943. He was a front gunner and, after about twenty searchlights cheerily lit up his plane somewhere over Essen, flack exploded in front of them, shattering the perspex of his canopy and sending shards throughout his confined space in the nose. One shard entered his eye, bouncing of the back of his socket and exited via his forehead. The Lancaster limped home, the crew all surviving and he was patched up, with the damaged organ removed and replaced with a prosthesis.

He described how he had adapted well to this because he "had a spare".

Then, in his early eighties, he suffered a stroke, leaving him with mobility problems as the whole left side of his body was affected. Again, he had adapted superbly, walking with a stick and adjusting his lifestyle accordingly telling me "It could have been worse, and I've got a spare arm and leg as well!"

This gave me pause. I thought about what I had just heard and seen. About Paul's eye and my toe. About Paul's arm and my toe. About Paul's leg and my toe. About Paul's general stoicism in the face of adversity. And my toe.

You might not be surprised to learn that I came to understand something of myself after that. Not just myself in fact, but of all of us. Our suffering means nothing to the cosmos. Call it self-realisation, or an awareness of  one's own humanity in the face of nihilism, or maybe even call it enlightenment, but those thoughts took me to a conclusion I had never reached before.

I realised we have a lot in common, Paul and I, because I also have a spare toe.

In this little spark of clarity that we call existence, this flitting sparrow of life flying briefly through the banquet hall of eternity from one dark window to the next, don't we all have a spare toe.

Yes we do.We all have a spare toe.

Unless, you know, you haven't, in which case, sorry about that. Have you tried wearing Crocs?


17 comments:

  1. "I cried when I had no toenail, until I met a man who had no feet."

    Something like that.

    (And yes -- we could all learn something, couldn't we? I regularly come across people in wheelchairs, some of which are guided through the use of a straw, seemingly, and it makes you glad for the opportunity to have sore feet...)

    Pearl

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    1. Pearl - Oh, that's good. As long as you don't ask if you can have his slippers.

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  2. I don't care how hard Paul is, anything about nails makes me wince like jessie.

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    1. Tony - I bet even Paul would have winced if he'd pulled out half his toenail with his Gerber multi-tool!

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  3. Well if those aren't words to live by. I have several spare toes. I have yet to figure out the meaning of any of them because I'm pretty sure I can stand with a club foot if I had to although, sometimes, I admit, I get lazy when picking up pens and well...if a chimp can do it, never let it be said I can't.

    This actually happens to me fairly regularly. I get all "Woe is me and my sore knee I banged off a door frame" then see some person missing limbs managing to navigate a goddamn ESCALATOR then I'm all, "Oh."

    I'm also too tired to form a coherent, intelligent comment so I'll leave it there. Sorry for your toe nail though. Might be insignificant but man, those things still hurt!

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  4. Veggie Ass - It's all about perspective, innit! And from my perspective . . . me toe 'urts!

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  5. I love this. I can't wait for someone to whine to me about something so I can tell them to buck up, they have spare toes!

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  6. Wow, TWA - Good. Only check in case you meet Pearl's no-footed man . . .

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  7. Did you try and one-up Paul by showing him your toe? Or perhaps mentioning the thumb fatigue you were experiencing from trying to find a decent show on the TV box?

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    1. SkylersDad - Ooh, I should have totally black catted all his problems with the chronic condition of sofa-thumb! Do I get a disabled parking badge for that?

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  8. Can I just say, at this point I have only read the title of this post. (I have scrolled down thus far averting my eyes). A hahahahahahah! Right, the rest of it had BETTER BE GOOD.

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    1. OK. It was JOLLY good.

      We're all big jessies nowadays aren't we? (Apologies to any Jessies who may be reading, especially the particularly anachronistically rock-hard ones.)

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    2. Chants Cottage - I was actually a bit worried then that it wouldn't live up to your perusal. And I wonder if people called Jessie are tough, like Big Daddy's parents calling him Shirley?

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  9. Who are you calling Shirley? Anyway, must have been something in the water back in the day because my 82 YO dad just had dental surgery and refused pain meds to take home and his best friend GAVE me HIS leftover pain meds ("I only needed just the one, it was a simple quadruple heart bypass") because he knew I had wrenched my shoulder opening a 1.5 liter bottle of merlot and just couldn't take the pain anymore.

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    1. Shirley - Ha. I bet he was impressed with the size of the bottle! At least your injury was for a just cause. And Big Daddy was a famous UK wrestler in the 70s who's real name was Shirley Crabtree, his parents logic being that having a girls name would make him extra tough. Which I suppose it did.

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  10. I had just such a moment, many long visits to a Pain Clinic 400Km away and sitting in the waiting room feeling sorry for myself I met a friendly chap who spent over an hour giving me good advice and recommending things to try. Eventually I asked him what he was in for and was stunned to find out he had only a short time to live. The pain clinic and cancer clinic shared a waiting room and he was there for his pain killing drugs...I felt like such a pathetic example of humanity but it changed my life forever....
    I Googled it and apparently toenails grow back... eventually

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    1. Tempo - I'm pretty lucky in that I get to meet a lot of people like that, and joking aside their fortitude impresses me every time. However, I think only lizard toenails grow back, so don't give me hope where there is none.

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