March 7th, 2010

Even the newly headless chicken knows how to run in an ever tightening circle. It must feel like progress until you reach the center, and then there is nowhere to go but down to the quiet. If you follow backwards along the widening spiral of blood perhaps you will build a whole new chicken in the process. Some say it has happened.
My right leg has been making rumblings; there have been incidents of nonconformance, assertions of individuality bordering on the brazen. This has gone on for some time. It seems to want to do its work under cover of darkness -- during the daytime it plays along, more or less, with what the rest of the body might be doing. I’m sure the frustration is building in it all day. It wants to be on its own. It has plans. The head, the torso, the other limbs, they are all holding it back. There is seething anger in there, a wall of defiance building brick by brick.
Politely describing it as “restless” I have begun taking medication to soothe the leg’s urges. Has this worked? Well yes and no. The medication can induce the desired effect, but the dosage seems to require regular increases in order to remain effective. And each night before I take the medicine, or if I forget to take it on time, the right leg seizes the chance and moves into open revolt. It kicks and jerks, veers off in God only knows what direction and for God only knows what purpose. It refuses the efforts of the brain and other elements of the nervous system, when they try to give it instruction. It does what it wants, until the meds kick in and it is slowly, reluctantly subdued, in the manner of a charging elephant now riddled with darts tipped in powerful tranquilizer.
I can’t help but think that someday, when my guard is down or other circumstance facilitates it, the right leg will succeed in breaking away. It will free itself of the jail of bones and sinew that binds it to its core. Off it will lurch, jerking and jarring itself like some anger powered pogo stick with a faulty guidance system, careening in all directions at once, and giddy with the freedom of it. But somehow going round and round, in ever tightening circles. Heel prints dimpling the earth at irregular intervals, signifying nothing, understanding nothing.
Somehow this will be the sign of progress. It’s something that we recognize when we see it; it is the definitive definition.