"Delusions of grandeur keep me going" once wrote William H. Luse (don't know his middle initial but it sounded more impressive to add one; we'll edit this later with the correct one should he willingly divulge it).
Same with me, hence this title. We ape our betters and Fr. Neuhaus recently said he liked the title "American Babylon" so much he decided to write a book around it. He was only half-jesting. And I liked this title so much that I'm going to try to write a post around it.
Specifically, I mean to write about the recent drama of my visit to the doctor concerning a minor medical condition. See, I've never been quite willing to give up writing about the mundane. I've never quite accepted that to be authorially successful you have to either have been born in an interesting place or travelled there, or, alternatively, have Shakespearian gifts. (Proust and St. Thérèse of Lisieux had at least one thing in common besides being French. They didn't need to travel or do great deeds in order to excel.)
But I've never quite accepted the awful truth that I don't live in an interesting place nor do I travel to exotic locales nor am I a brilliantly gifted writer. I even take shameful solace that better writers than me - like Tom o' Disputations - aren't published either. (Though Tom was in an anthology a few years back.) There's faux solace in not being the biggest underachiever.
Many are fearful of trying to spin poetry from the banal. They shrink from the challenge. But bloggers (amen brother!) can go where pros like Paul Theroux loath to go. No, Theroux didn't come to the plate with the donut on the bat in the form of his "boring" hometown of Medford, MA:
Medford itself, a colonial-era city just outside of Boston, wasn't worth returning to on paper or in person. Theroux's literary heroes were Graham Greene, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad — writers who traveled and were inspired by travel.Of course Columbus makes Medford look like Rome.
But that only steels my resolve because a blogger has to write like a horse has to pee, or something like that, and the drama this week was a rare visit to my doctor (doctress?) concerning the sudden appearance of a few suspicious moles. Because, you know, the price of sun worship is eternal vigilance. And to my surprise Frau Doctor said that they should be removed and so I came back four days later to have it done.
She was charmingly shy in fumblingly asking me to take off my shirt. (Now there's a sentence I usually don't have cause to write.) I save her further embarrassment by offering to remove it. She goes to great pains (a proactive pun) to explain that this will be painful, as she'll be numbing the areas via a needle-injection. It was not nearly as painful as advertised and I began to wonder if men have a lower threshold for pain than women and whether her expectations were unduly low. I'm certainly all for lowering expectations of pain since that means likely more pain reliever. My theory, apparently not shared by the medical community, is that it's better to error on the side of too much pain reliever than too little.
The numbing worked, and soon there were deep gouges in my skin each perhaps a hundredth of a millimeter in depth. She deftly sewed the canyons of skin back together, requiring multiple stitches (where multiple is defined as two).
Post-op, I was tired but appreciative of living in a town with such solicitous doctors and staff. Real drama, I realized, would be a high cost to pay for art.
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