my slacking has created a buildup that is crusting over the creative forces usually harnessed to facilitate the production of these drab and lifeless musings. the logjam has not broken, and this all-too-familiar feeling is less than welcome.

the battle is being lost, but the war is far from over. i feel like i've been soaking in formaldehyde for 72 hours. my joints are stiff with punishment and my skin is perforated and shaved off in places as if i spent too much time in a washing machine lined with sandpaper and rusted cheesegraters.

it is commendable how my body has survived life's repeated attacks with minimal protest. when i was young, my finger was ground up in a conveyor belt at the checkout line in the supermarket. you see white bones in cartoons and in faces of death movies, but to see your own is a startling experience. when you grind open the cuticle of your fingernail, what comes out is a liquidy fluid that is supposed to harden to become your nail. exposing this is never a good sign. it doesn't heal all scabby and pretty. it oozes. then the nail falls off. you never know how sensitive the skin under there is until it's exposed. yellowy or clear ooze, and then searing heated barbs jumping up your finger like slow chalkboard scrapes. i'm glad that's over with.

and these are just the visible ones. the funny wrinkle on my finger. my scarred and bumpy shins. stiff ankles. wrists lacking full range of motion. i own a goneometer. just to be sure that the range is returning. slowly. too slowly.

these are just what you see and not all that i feel.

you can never describe with any justice or accuracy the entire pallette of scars smeared across any number of levels of your being. things go unnoticed, even by you, when taking inventory. and they never show up until it's too late to prepare for what damage they can retread. scar tissue is by no means stronger than unbroken armor. i grind my teeth when touched not because i don't like it, but because it's more often than not that there is a contusion at the contact point.

mistaken for coldness. indifference. can you break the bones of a ragdoll? some days that's how i feel.

today the edge of a seven-ply piece of maple hit my shin so hard twice in the same place that it appears that i am growing a calf muscle on the front of my tibia.

this can not be a good sign.things like this are never a good sign.