The Real Back Pain Solution

February 18, 2015December 26, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

Did you wake with the level of excruciating back pain I did the other day? It can ruin an entire day. Sometimes, it ruins a couple days. I’ve been there too. When we’re experiencing that much pain, it doesn’t matter that other people might be in more pain. Pain is pain. It doesn’t matter that others may experience chronic back pain, where ours could be called occasional and temporary. Pain is pain. It makes us irrational, emotional, cranky, and it disrupts our lives.

The first culprit we seek for interrogation is sleep. Did we sleep on too many pillows, or in some other way cause our head, neck, or back to be at an odd angle the night before? Sleep is often a hostile witness, however, never answering questions, or if it does, those answers are often incoherent and incomplete. Our next step, is to retrace our steps leading up to the moment we fell asleep to see if any of our actions were the culprit. We analyze every minute of the day, every time we grabbed something, reached down, up, or around, and we can do this, because we have all day, check that ALL DAY, to lay there completely still, staring up at the ceiling to retrace every single step of the day.

To deal with that pain, we take whatever meds we can find. We heat, cool, cool, and heat, and if it becomes a recurring we may take a trip down to the massage clinic to have them work it out until it’s gone, and to provide us tips to prevent it in the future.

When we’re immersed in that pain, we may vow to develop a routine at the gym that will strengthen those particular muscles as a form of preventative medicine, but that vow often lasts about as long as the pain does. If the reader is serious about solving recurring lower back pain, a therapist informed me of her expert opinion on a cure: The leg press. There are a variety of methods to avoid in the procedure, and a variety of optimal methods to use that are relative to the person and the location of the pain, but as one who has experienced recurring, lower back pain, this machine has proved to be a cure all for me. Another method that never occurred to me (embarrassing? sure) was to pay a little extra for a quality mattress, then when that mattress loses its quality, replace it. These seem like such easy fixes, and they are, even if there is no cure all, there are cures, and it’s your job to find it. If one solution doesn’t work, try another.

The next, and more prominent, question is how often does back pain occur in our lives? The answer to this question gets to the heart of why we should not complain about intermittent, minor, and temporary back pains as often as we do. We all complain when it happens, but some of us complain in a manner that suggests that God and nature are somehow against us. Some of us even act like our body has failed us in some manner for which we are not to responsible, and we go to a doctor to tell them to fix it.

On the situation comedy, Louie, Louis C.K. complains to his doctor, a Dr. Bigelow, about the temporary back pain he is experiencing. Rather than treat Louie in any manner, Dr. Bigelow informs Louie why he has back pain.

“You’re using it wrong,” Dr. Bigelow says. “The back isn’t done evolving yet. You see, the spine is a row of vertebrae. It was designed to be horizontal. Then people came along and used it vertical. Wasn’t meant for that. So the disks get all floppy, swollen. Pop out left, pop out right. It’ll take another. I’d say 20,000 years to get straightened out. Till then, it’s going to keep hurting.

“It’s an engineering design problem,” he continues. “It’s a misallocation. We were given a clothesline and we’re using it as a flagpole.

“Use your back as it was intended. Walk around on your hands and feet. Or accept the fact that your back is going to hurt sometimes. Be very grateful for the moments that it doesn’t. Every second spent without back pain is a lucky second. String enough of those lucky seconds together, you have a lucky minute.”

The human body may be a marvel in many ways, in other words, but it also has structural flaws. The back, for instance, has structural flaws, and it functions for most of our lives from a flawed premise. So, rather than complain about our temporary back pains, we should take a moment, consider our age, and calculate the number of days when our back was defying nature and providing us with a pain-free existence. We don’t appreciate the back until it fails us, of course, and now that it has, we should take that opportunity to thank it for supporting all of the innumerable actions we’ve asked it to perform for all those years. If Dr. Bigelow’s assessment of the back’s design flaws is to be believed, those days of peak performance shouldn’t occur as often as they do, and that’s the marvel of the back.

When you’re in pain, however, such twisted logic is about the furthest thing from our mind. Pain is pain, and when our back pain is so severe that we can do nothing but crawl on the floor, you’re not going to be comforted by the idea that the sole reason that your down there is a structural flaw that human evolution has yet to iron out. As for the idea of being grateful to your back that you’re not down there more often, as a result of its flawed design, that’s about as irrational as being grateful that at least you’re not being attacked by a big brown bear. As a former ground bound, back pain sufferer that has never been eviscerated by a bear, I can relate, but I still have to imagine that being attacked by a predatory, brown bear would be worse.

At maximum size, a brown bear can weigh 1,500 lbs., and they reach a height of ten feet when standing erect. On all fours, some brown bears have even been measured to be five feet high, near the height of the average human. After imagining the hysteria one might experience with something that large racing at them, the victim should know that bears aren’t known to go for the throat in the manner wild cats will, and the nature of their attack is such that they often don’t employ tactics that would lead to a more instantaneous form of death. If they are protecting their young, or acting in a manner that could later be determined to be defensive, they may let most humans off with a warning. That warning may land you in the hospital for a year, and leave lacerations on your head and face that have you looking like the elephant man for the rest of your life, but it is just a warning.

I would have to guess, however, that in the aftermath of a defensive bear attack, fruit will taste better, and the victim will begin to say ‘I love you’ to their loved ones more often, after park rangers inform them that the bear was not acting in a predatory nature, and all that that implies. If the victim is witnessing a bear acting in a predatory manner, and they don’t believe in guns, they might find it interesting that a brown bear can sprint at speeds of up to thirty miles an hour over short distances, and that they can break a caribou’s back with a single swipe of one of their massive paws.

If a potential victim is unsure as to whether an oncoming bear is acting in a predatory nature or not, they should know that there is no substantial proof to suggest that bears prefer us alive. Cannibals have refuted the notion that the adrenaline that courses through our system, as a result of fear, unnecessary suffering, and pain, makes humans taste any better. So, even though playing opossum may be the only tactic for a victim to explore at one point, it may not do any good if the bear regards us as food. Bears appear to have little regard for the state of consciousness of their victim while feeding.

Due to the fact that bears are forced to store food for their long hibernation periods, most of their dietary needs involve fat content. What this means to you, if you are being attacked as a food source, is that they’re prone to go after intestines, and other internal organs. To get there, of course, they will have to claw away at the skin casing, and the rib cage, while you lay conscious, trying to fight for your life, with one paw holding you down, as they rip these fat-laden morsels from your body.

“That still does not help me!” screams the victim of agonizing back pain. It may not, I’m forced to admit, but it may answer the question why God can’t hear your cries. Some people are screaming louder.

Artistic Images vs. Artistic Creations

December 31, 2014January 1, 2015 RilalyLeave a comment

Imagine that someone tells you that an artist’s self-portrait is now on sale. “Who is it?” would probably be the first question you ask, and if it turns out to be the work of a relative unknown, “What’s his story?” would probably be your next. If the answers to these questions aren’t very satisfying, all of your follow up questions would probably involve the story behind the particular self-portrait painting in question. If these questions yield no satisfactory answers, your final question might be, “Why should I be interested in this piece?” The quality of any artistic piece is subjective, but most art enthusiasts generate enthusiasm based on a number of factors, most of which have little to do with the actual quality of the piece.

It may be a little unfair to criticize the desire some art enthusiasts have for “a story”, or more information, of a self-portrait of a relatively unknown author before vesting any interest in a piece, but in the case of artist Bryan Lewis Saunders such interest has been generated. This event leads to the question, how does a relatively unknown artist generate interest in his work?

That’s easy: paint a masterpiece. Most works of art are not masterpieces, however, and they fall into the subjective, relative arena of appealing to the patron on some level. Very few pieces of literature, musical productions, or sculptures are so great that they can attract an audience without a great accompanying story. Most art falls into the middle ground of subjectivity, and it’s that subjectivity that requires a great story we can identify with, or that which tantalizes us in some fashion.

The self-portraits of Bryan Lewis Saunders appear to be –to the non-enthusiast crowd– marginal works of art at the very least. For those that are interested in making their own determinations on his art, these works can be viewed here and here. In the second link, and in Jon Ronson’s piece on Mr. Saunders for the Guardian, you can learn of the story behind these self-portraits, and how they involve Mr. Saunders doing roughly fifty different self-portraits on fifty different drugs, be they of the prescription or controlled substance variety. This story has generated a tremendous amount of interest in Mr. Saunders, and his work, and it appears to have added tremendous value to his pieces among the chichi crowd that wants to have his story hanging on their wall.

Let’s say, for a moment, that I’m right about the artistic merit of Mr. Saunders’ work, and the greater value exists in the narrative. Are you one that would love to give that narrative to visitors of your home? Are you one that would love to have a Saunders hanging above your shabby chic armoire, so that you could say, “Mr. Saunders did that while wrecked on the prescription drug Klonopin, otherwise known as Clonazepam. And let me take you down the hall here,” you say with excitement. “This is Mr. Saunders interpretation of himself after experimenting with butane honey oil, and in our master bedroom is my personal favorite that Mr. Saunders created after taking 250mg of Cephalexin. He actually mixed some of the cephalexin into the painting with water and a watercolor pencil. It’s the prized piece of my Saunders collection,” you say with pride.

If your audience isn’t necessarily impressed with the paintings, they would probably find the narratives so exotic, that they probably wouldn’t want to discuss the actual artistic merits of the piece. They also probably wouldn’t want to enter into a moral discussion of recreational drug use, and how your piece seems to glorify it in some way. Most people do everything they can to avoid appearing puritanical, and they want others to perceive them as hip and cutting edge. That having been said, if the pieces are as marginal as I believe them to be, most of your friends will silently wonder if your interest in the narrative may have clouded your judgment. They would probably not call you out on it, however, with something along the lines of: “So, if it came out that Mr. Saunders was actually completely sober when he did these pieces, would you feel like you were robbed?”

What if you spoke to the author of the painting, at a gallery that presented his work, and you found out that he was actually a loving father of four that had a full time job as a UPS truck driver, and he did the particular piece you love on a caffeine buzz, as a result of putting down an extra cup of Folger’s, and the only reason he came up with the whole “drug thing” was to build some sort of mythology that his artistic career lacked. Would you give that narrative to prospective admirers? What if it turned out that this author had a sensible haircut, wore Levi’s jeans, and spoke in a manner that never wavered from the Queen’s English? How would you enhance your admirer’s enjoyment? What if your friend didn’t enjoy the piece you purchased, what kind of defense would you have? What would it say about you that you even purchased such a piece?

Too often, the definition of art is conflated the image of art, and we like those images to be festooned with notions of troubled, reclusive individuals that suck in a potent drug at high volume; and we prefer them unhappy, inconsistent, singularly focused, and driven by the vagaries of the heart as opposed to a concrete, rational mind. We want to hear that our artists are so singularly focused that don’t understand how toasters work; that they didn’t know how to tie a tie, until they were forty; and they don’t understand the intangible merits of kissing. The only images we want in artistic profiles are those of quirky individuals that never learned how to fit in with society properly. The normal person that happens to have a creative flair about them are just not very interesting, so we choose to believe that all artists, true artists, fit an image we’ve constructed in our head.

If you’ve ever watched a docu-drama about an artist, you know these images well. By the time these movies are over, you’re left with the impression that it’s far more virtuous to be labeled a creative genius than it is to create art. The constraints of these entertainment vehicles being what they are, the director cannot have a 90-minute movie about a guy painting. That wouldn’t be very entertaining. It might also be just as boring to have the characters sitting around discussing interpretations of the pieces, but when the directors of these movies portray the polar opposite, and focus on nothing but the narrative behind the artist, and the subsequent image of the artist, the notion of the narrative of art being more important than art is fostered, until it’s possible that some truly brilliant, yet unnaturally normal artists could remain obscure.

Those of us that have heard about the near divine inspiration that informed the masterpieces we all know, occurred within an elegant hotel room that overlooks the streets of Pamplona, Spain –where the running of the bulls occurs– begin to question these narratives after hearing them for the thousandth time. Is it a marketing campaign that they use to influence the perception of the final product, or do some people really go to “different places” and receive a degree of insight into the human condition that overwhelms them to such a degree that a seemingly inhuman masterpiece is born? It’s possible, and it’s likely that it has occurred on occasion, but for the most part, most art is created in boring places, on the backside of all of the mundane routines, and the dogged determination that has persevered through all of the trials and errors that eventually led to a product that an enthusiasts might find so pleasing that they litter their walls and book shelves with them.

Artistic brilliance can be defined as an individual perspective of the world, and the presentation of said material. It can come from the most unusual places, but it can also come from such usual places that it doesn’t fit the mold of artistic brilliance. Does this presentation of material require a narrative, does a well-crafted, somewhat spruced up narrative make a final product more beautiful or more interesting? Maybe, maybe not, but I’m sure that every mid-level artist that has made their way into the chichi art world would tell you, it doesn’t hurt.

Mr. Saunders work can be used as the idyllic form of the mold, but it shouldn’t suggest that there is any less merit to the artistic creations Mr. Saunders decided to produce. That’s his art, his niche, and it’s what he does, and how he perceives the world through a purposely unfocused lens. What should bother anyone attempting to create art is the manner in which the world views the artistic world. If you create an excellent piece of do you have to indulge in mind-altering substances to tantalize the imagination of the chichi contingent, or should you just lie and tell them that’s what you’re doing? My advice would be to do the latter, and simply give them a narrative to sell to their friends. Your art may be better received for it, and you may be invited to live the artistic life, for the chichi crowd is vehemently against drug-testing, even if it means that they’re being duped into believing in it.

The Fanatical Fallacies of Football Fans

December 22, 2014September 21, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

After a lifetime spent watching college football, the only thing I find more disturbing than the disillusioned fan is the idea that I may have been disillusioned for most of my life. Watching college football now, I realize how little I actually know about the game. I may know the history of the game as well as most fans that I encounter; I may know the terminology of the game as well as most of these fans; and I may even surprise some fans by the obscure knowledge I have of some obscure players on some relatively obscure teams. For all of us fans that “know” the game, however, it can feel like a revelation to learn –because most of us have never been involved in the game in any organized capacity— how little we actually know about what goes into the determinations and decisions, made in football meetings, involving those “in the know” coaches of even our favorite teams.

A revelation, by my definition, is a different way of looking at something you’ve been looking at for a long time. Some revelations, such as “Coaches game plan according to the talent they have on the field” can be perceived as so obvious that it may elicit laughter from many quarters, because that’s as obvious as the nose on your face. And I’ve always known that coaches coach according to talent, but when I realized that it answered just about every complaint I’ve ever had about “my team”, I began to complain less and less. When you say that to someone that has been complaining about their coach’s game plan for longer than you’ve been alive, however, they may look at you like that’s as obvious as the nose on your face.

“We have the talent,” is something a fanatical might say, because they know you don’t know “their team” as well as they do. “Trust me, we have the talent.” At this point, you may detect that they think you’re insulting their team, so you clarify:

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t complain, and I’m not saying you have nothing to complain about. I’m saying that most of what you’re complaining about is based on all of the decisions and determinations your coaches, offensive coordinators, and position coaches have made based on what they learn in the spring, and throughout the season, regarding how to game plan according to their team’s strengths, and weaknesses.”

“We have the talent,” he repeated.

When you have a revelation of this sort, you may want to share it, because you may believe that your friend is in an earnest search for truth in the same manner you were, you may think that they’ll chew on your revelation, and reconsider it the next time they think of complaining. When I presented my revelation to my friend, I didn’t bother to consider that I was treading upon the precarious line that exists between emotion and rational thinking. I didn’t consider that I was doing an injustice to the time-honored past-time of all fans: The art of the complaining. I basically told him that once you come to grips with the fact that the talent you believe you see on the field is probably not a very good indication of the actual talent those “in the know” know, you’ll begin to understand why the game plan of “your team” is what it is.

The gist of this complaint, as I see it, is that all fans live with the notion that their team’s quarterback (QB) is an as-of-yet, undiscovered John Elway –a player I use as a high water mark of the greatest individual talent the game has ever seen at the position of quarterback, as opposed to the other talented QB’s that happened to fit into their team’s brilliant system perfectly— and the complaint stems from the idea that the only thing holding “our team’s” QB back from recognizing that kind of potential, is the conservative game plan that the coaches decide to implement. The question I had for my friend, and all football fans, is how well do you know the strengths and weaknesses of your team’s QB? How well do you know, really know, your team’s strengths and weaknesses? He, like most fans, suggested he knew. He watched them on TV, and he went to their games, and he probably read editorials, and listened to sports radio.

When an offensive coordinator (OC) is first introduced to the potential of a newly recruited QB, he may be led to believe that the sky’s the limit with this kid, and he may develop an explosive game plan that seeks to explore the extent of that QB’s talent on the field. The OC may be as excited as the young QB to employ this explosive game plan, as it will make the OC look as brilliant as the young kid if that kid is capable of executing it. At some point in the spring workouts, and/or throughout the season, the OC begins learn to game plan around the extent of this young man’s ability. It is the OC’s job to not only explore this young man’s talent, and put him in a situation in which he can succeed, but also —and perhaps most importantly— avoid placing him in situations in which he fails too often. At this point, the OC, together with the head coach, and the team’s position coach, may deem it necessary to thin the playbook, or develop a more run-heavy, more conservative game plan. The latter fact drives most fans crazy, because no head coach, no OC, and no QB coach is going to say, “We had to make that change, because the golden boy that we worked so hard to recruit is not as good as we thought he’d be, or as good as you fans think.”

When my friend’s team’s QB first took the field last year, in 2013, the young man came out of the gate as a highly touted gunslinger. The initial game plan ended up resulting in a shockingly poor interception to touchdown ratio for the young kid. The resultant talk that sprang from that ratio –among fans, and sports radio personalities— involved replacing that QB with the as-of-yet undiscovered abilities of the backup QB.

There’s an old joke that every fan’s favorite player on the field is the backup QB, and the reason for this is that, to some extent, analysts and fans learn the actuality of the starting QB’s abilities, while the extent of the backup’s are still a source of exciting speculation. The fans and analysts know that the backup, much like the starter, was a highly recruited young man that their school happened to land, but they haven’t seen him in practice, they have never attended QB meetings, and they don’t know that young backup QB’s demeanor in the manner the coaches do. When those meetings between the coach, the OC, and the position coaches conclude, and they decide that their best chances at success involve that starting QB, coupled with a new, more conservative game plan, the fans revolt in their little echo chamber, and they come to the conclusion that the coach doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Why did they recruit the backup if they aren’t going to use him? Didn’t they watch the games where the starter threw interceptions all over the place? The head coach, they decide, is just stubborn. He decided to start the starter, and he can’t get out of his way long enough to understand that he needs to do go in a different direction.

Regardless the emotions involved in this situation, I would think that most fans would recognize that every coach, on every level, will do whatever they have to to succeed. “No, he’s a stubborn, old rooster that always believes he’s right,” they say to this. Fair enough, I say, but if he were wrong, don’t you think that the OC, and the position coach, would tell him he’s wrong. “They probably do,” the complainer would suggest. “And I’m sure the stubborn, old rooster tells them to go to hell.” You think that this head coach is willing to lose games to prove he’s right? “I sure do. I think he’s willing to go down with the ship. We need a new coach even more than we need a new QB, and that AD (GM if it’s pro) needs to go, and if the owner (pro) doesn’t know that, then we might need a new owner too!”

After listening to my friend gripe about his team’s underutilized golden boy, with a golden arm, he switched the discussion to the manner in which the team audibles at the line. “Everyone in the stadium knows that they’re going to see an off tackle right when the QB audibles out of the called play.” To further my “Coaches game plan according to the talent on the field” belief, I offered my friend a response that I believed to be a helpful, if not humble, insight:

“At one point, in one season, (my team) decided to switch up the snap count, to slow, and presumably throw off the timing, of defensive ends, and blitzing defenders. The only thing they ended up doing, unfortunately, was throwing off their own offensive lineman. The result was an embarrassing amount of false start penalties. The coaches decided that their 18-22 year-old offensive lineman could not keep the switched up snap counts in their 18-22 year-old minds properly, and the coaches were forced to adjust to that by having the QB use more consistent snap counts, silent snaps, and the “slow clap snap” that has been en vogue in college football of late.” My point in introducing that humble analogy to my friend was to prove the point that a game plan has to adjust to the player personnel you have on the field. Rather than acknowledge that larger point, my friend chose to focus on those deficits that I had mentioned with regard to my team.

It’s important to note here that prior to this discussion with my friend, I held his overall intellect in high regard. I wasn’t trying to belittle a person I considered beneath me, in other words, as much as I was trying to move an otherwise silly discussion to a higher level, a level I believed was more true than I knew for most of my life, and a level that I fantasized might place me in a higher level of esteem by my friend. What I found, instead, was that my friend had an unshakable belief, a wall that that he had presumably erected for the purpose of shutting out contrary opinion, and that this wall of was based almost solely on emotion. I’m quite sure that when I repeat this story to another disillusioned fan that they will laugh, and nod, and say they’ve had such a discussion, until that discussion moves to “their team” at which point the cycle will start all over again. When it does, however, I will be armed and ready with Kenny Rogers’ prescient rules of life: “You gotta know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.”

We don’t know what we’re talking about when it comes to the finer points of football, be it college or pro. You don’t know why the coaches made the decisions they made, and I don’t know why. We all think “our guys” are supremely talented individuals who can throw every throw, block every defensive player, and run like the wind. We think this guy should be the starter based on what we’ve seen. We don’t know. We don’t know their weaknesses as well as the coaches, and we don’t know why they’ve coached the players how to compensate for their weaknesses in the manner they do. No coach is going to tell you that, however, as doing so would insult his player. No sports announcer is going to tell you this, because they do not want to insult their audience. Only someone with nothing to gain and nothing to lose would tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about, because if they’re truly paying attention to the finer points of the game, they’re finding out how little they know on a weekly basis. You’ll probably agree with us, because you think you know far more than we do, but by doing so you might be exposing your own ignorance.