Day 1:
Surgery day! If you’ve worked in restaurants or events with me over the years, you’ve probably heard me complain ad nauseam about the bunions on my feet that cause me large amounts of pain, pretty much constantly. Today, one of them gets sliced off.
The operation is done under local anaesthetic, which means I have to decide what I’m going to listen to in order to drown out the sound of a drill attacking my bones. I’m writing a short piece on THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN for an upcoming Oscars newsletter from In the Mood, so I decide on the Carter Burwell score (it’s 33 minutes long, which turns out to be roughly the same amount of time as the procedure). I take two Ativan and try to pretend I’m on a windswept Irish coast, wrapped in beautiful wool. It… sort of works.
I get home and read three chapters of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, a wonderful, Pynchon-esque novel I’ve been slowly working through this month. The characters in the book deal with various sources of distress—a fiancée with cancer stuck in space, a tiger roaming the streets of Manhattan, a mysterious chocolate smell—with copious amounts of weed, and soon I realize that I, too, am in the kind of pain that only drugs can solve. I put down the Lethem, pick up the Tylenol-3, and spent the next few hours half-sleeping, half-listening to celebrity gossip podcasts.
Alex returns from a grocery run, I wake up, and we play a few rounds of our new favourite Internet game, Chronophoto. I read Vio-lets by dear sweet ej and it’s better than any drug, lifting any remaining pain away.
After dinner, I watch HARD EIGHT, Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film, the only one of his that I’ve never seen (I’ve been saving it for a “special occasion” and today feels good enough). It’s quiet and slow, which is perfect for my current brain capacity, and the Philip Seymour Hoffman cameo makes my heart soar. I also learn from some brief internet research that David Foster Wallace taught PTA in the English program at Emerson. My heart soars a little more.1 Time for bed.
Day 1.5:
I wake up at 3:30 a.m. (more Tylenol!) and read this essay about the orgins of the term “burnout,” which has a title so great it makes me mad.
Day 2:
First full day of being couch-bound, and the reality starts to sink in. I pull the Queen of Wands and read Jessica Dore’s interpretation, which references Joseph Campbell’s concept of having a sacred space where “you don’t know what’s on the news, what your friends are doing, or what’s on your to-do list that day, but rather you simply find a way to ground and make an opening for creativity.” Touché, cards. I then completely ignore that advice by figuring out both what’s on the news and what my friends are doing by reading this great piece by Neha about racial politics in Montreal.
I spend the day finishing the middle section of Lucy Ives’ Life is Everywhere, which has been blowing my mind. I absolutely am not smart enough to understand this novel, but I adore it.
Not having committed to a TV show to watch during my convalescence yet, Alex and I watch the pilot episodes of Mo, Derry Girls, and Reservation Dogs. All contenders!
I *have* committed to a film project: watching all of the Agnès Varda films I’ve never seen. I start with LE BONHEUR, an absolutely stunning portrait of the horror of heterosexual relationships.
"I imagine a summer peach with its perfect colors with a worm inside. I thought of impressionist paintings with their air of melancholy, though they depict scenes of everyday happiness. I listened to Mozart and thought how death is everywhere." — Agnés Varda
Day 3:
Blessed Sunday: my upstairs neighbour drops off a bag of baked goods (she doesn’t even know I’m convalescing, she’s just a lovely person). I eat an apricot croissant while reading the following: a couple more chapters of Chronic City; the latest issues of Lux, n+1, and The Walrus (highly recommend this piece on land rights and the legal battle happening in Nuchatlaht First Nation, and this one on the Indigenous-led movement to stop Line 3); and uhhh, The New Masculinity by Alex Manley (which you should PRE-ORDER NOW from your local bookstore!).
Three more episodes of Reservation Dogs over dinner. This show absolutely rules.
I’m exhausted so I watch one of Varda’s shorts, UNCLE YANCO, a documentary in which she tracks down one of her Greek relatives she’s never met and documents his life and art in Sausalito. One of the most charming things I’ve ever watched.
Day 4:
I somehow manage to hobble downtown to a follow-up appointment, which zaps the entirety of my energy for the rest of the day. I pretend to work and attempt to write, but mostly I just lie down and read THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN screenplay.
Yes, I did consider ignoring my towering piles of library books and re-reading Infinite Jest during my convalescence instead, “as a bit.”