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Forgive me for talking about this ... but it's on my mind and until I write it out, I won't think of something more important.

Recently, cleaning the bathroom, one of the discs in my lower back slipped out of place.  It happens from time to time and I do exercises to keep my lower back strong, but I'm 57 and this happens.  So, I've been in varying amounts of pain, particularly sitting up and working, for several days.  About four o'clock this afternoon I felt the disc slip back into place; and since, I've regained full mobility but there's bruising down there that will last a few more days.

The hardest part for me isn't the steady ache, or the applications of muscle heat and salve, or the stretching or laying on my back on my hard kitchen floor, relaxing.  The hardest part for me is that I can't work.  I want to work; I want to sit up and write, if not my own stuff than at least the various contracts that have to be finished before the deadline threatens.  But if I can't sit up, and I can't concentrate because sitting in a forward, fingers on the key position, then I can't purposefully write anything.  I hate this.  I hate it because I lay on my back, relaxed, with my mind ticking over and over, thinking of things I would write ... which I can't write.  This is frustrating for me.  It reaches its worst when I'm repeating the same twelve lines in my head over and over, because I don't want to forget what I want to say by the time I get able to say them.

Early today, before the disc found its way home, I gritted my teeth, sat in my chair and worked on the authentic wiki, because fuck it.  Even if it means having to get angry to get past the pain with enough endorphins to get my mind thinking straight — because endorphins will relax anything — it's better than not working.  Anything is better than not working.

The kind of work I do, designing, has a side effect.  It's always new.   It's different from other work, which is same-old, same-old, because the act of designing is to alter something that already exists into something that doesn't, or figuring out what doesn't exist and making that from scratch.  It's not really the "work" that excites me, but the product of the work.  What happens when the fingers fly over the keys and the mind follows what's being written and decides the next thing to say ... a thing that hasn't been said yet because it's new.  It's what I love about writing.  It's what I love about creating content for the wiki.  Or any of the private projects I work on.  Or the opportunity I have now to write for a living.

I don't encounter this craving among a lot of people.  It's what pushed me into the school library as a boy, to read through shelf after shelf of books, usually alone in one chair surrounded by empty chairs.  It's what kept me at the university library in the 80s and 90s until 11 at night, when the library closed, even though the huge office building-sized floor was empty except for me and maybe one other student.  I had ideas in my head that needed explanations, that I hoped the books would have, so I went searching ... a long search that took years and years.  That search continues on the internet.  It will never end.

I am supposedly "a smart fellow."  I've never been quite sure what that means, but it's something I've been told since I was a little boy.  It's never made me feel good about myself.  I've heard people say, "You're a smart guy, Alexis," oh, many many times, but I've never heard it and felt thankful for the compliment.  Okay, let's say I'm smart.  Let's take it as a given that I heard it from every teacher and professor right up through my education, and from more than a few bosses.  Don't take it as a given than I am smart, just accept that I've been told I am very often.  So what.  If I am smart, it only means the person telling me so has realized a fact about me; that's not a compliment.  That's like being told I have feet, or that I breathe air.  Yeah, I have feet.  What's your point.

It's far worse to hear someone say, "I'm not as smart as you, Alexis."  Fuck I hate that.  Where does that come from?  Sure you are.  You've got to be at least as smart in your head as I am in mine; hell, it's not like we've got competition in here.  It's just us.  And the stuff that comes out of my mouth, that's not me being smart.  That's just me repeating words other people have written.  If I make something clever, that's just me remaking things other people have made.

Take the menu.  I showed it to my dentist last week.  He'd asked how work was going and I told him about the menu instead of my job, which I'm not supposed to talk about.  He played D&D 20 years ago and he wanted to see it, so I brought the menu in and showed him.  Not a D&D player, not any more.  He played "a few times" in Junior High School, 25 years ago.  Probably hasn't thought about D&D since.  But he was stunned.  He couldn't figure out how I "did it."  From scratch.  Like, poof!  Right out of thin air.  I explained I worked as a cook, I've seen and made whole menus of food, I've been writing since high school and it's just putting stuff together that I know how to do.

This is a dentist.  He's doing amazing things with my teeth.  With a little employment coverage I was able to afford two badly needed molar crowns and jeebus, do feel good in my mouth over the jagged mortared nightmares my tongue has been sliding over these past 15 years.   Does that make the dentist "smart"?  I guess, since he can perform miracles way over what I can perform.  But if you could have seen his eyes as he gazed over the menu ... that was some warped shit there.  I put something new in from of him, the same way I'd been putting it in front of myself by conceiving and pursuing the damn thing in the first place, about six months ago.

There is no "smart."  That's just bullshit.  There's working and there's not working.  You don't work, you don't learn anything, you don't do anything, you haven't anything to show.  You've just got you, in your head, sitting there, with nothing new going on.  You might as well be watching sports, or drinking, or waiting to sleep or waiting to die.  It hasn't a damn things to do with "brains."  It has everything to do with either you not wanting something new in your life, or not knowing how to get it.

When you've got something to show, something you did, something others haven't seen ... that makes you "look" smart.  People get all impressed.  They don't know how to vocalize that, so they invent this myth that because you did something they wouldn't know how to do, or believe they can't do, that makes you "smart."  It's a meaningless word.  It measures nothing.  It only defines how they feel about themselves and how they feel about you.

The worst shit happens when you believe them.

I don't do all this interesting, imaginative stuff because I'm smart.  I do it because not working is awful.