New Year Inspiration

Today I got some bad news: I have osteomyelitis. It’s basically an infection of the bone. It leads to some fairly bad things, left untreated. Treatment in this case is either amputation and hardcore IV antibiotics or treatment by an infectious disease doctor. My doc is African, which is a total relief since as everyone knows Africa is the infectious disease capital of 2014 and the continent looks like it may re-up for another year. As usual, aside from my son, my family was utterly supportive and loving. And I want them to know that I appreciate the chance to inject some irony before I am injected with whatever Kenyan lion juice they are going to hit me with. Anyhow, I was pretty upset for an hour or two, and then this totally beautiful film by director Julian Schnabel comes on. It wasn’t a new film: it’s as old as the millenium. It was called Before Night Falls and is about the life of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (played by Javier Bardem). So I’m watching this movie that is on one hand totally beautiful and captivating, and on the other repressive and dark. I realized what kind of hell this guy went through just to WRITE. Some of his novels were smuggled out of Cuba and published abroad, but the novel this movie was based on wasn’t released until after Arenas died in the 90’s. The point–if I have one–is not what the movie is “about”, or even that the cinematography was incredible, or that parts of it were hard to watch and relate to for me personally. I think the point is that this guy SUFFERED just to scrawl his words on cheap paper. Though I may suffer through this condition I find my life dumped into, I have in no way suffered to WRITE. Maybe I should take whatever suffering I am going through and channel it: sharpen it into a needle. Maybe that injection is my cure.