Blue writes, “Peter Watts has be stricken with debilitating pain, loss of range of motion and motor control. Watts’ doctors remain baffled despite a battery of tests, and Watts has reached out to his fans to ask for their theories and ideas as to what might be causing his illness.”
Peter is a friend and has been given some incredibly bad beats this decade: beaten up at the US border by cops without any provocation and then convicted of a felony to stop him from suing; then nearly killed by a freak bout of flesh-eating bacteria.
If you can figure out what’s wrong with him, let him know.
Thirty-six hours later I could barely move. Every groinal tendon was on fire. My knees felt like little exploding schematic diagrams of cartilaginous balls and sockets and springs, ready to go sproiiiinnggggg! the moment they folded more than a few degrees off dead-center.
The shoes, right? The new fucking shoes. They’d screwed with my gait somehow, thrown everything out of balance. Couldn’t be the distance: I routinely ran further than 6.5 miles with no ill effects at all. So I chalked the pain up to experience and reunited with those beloved stinky old plastic sandals that Caitlin hadn’t quite been able to get rid of after all. I’d stressed my body past some limit, but it would self-repair over time; that’s just what bodies did. So the family packed up, and hugged the cats, and headed off to Greece.
Where my body did not self-repair. It got worse.
The stiffness, the frozen range-of motion, the pain, spread to my shoulders. Lifting a leg, bending a knee became an ordeal; pulling on my underpants was now a major event, each foot having to stamp and lift in repeated warm-up maneuvers until inertia and rebound bounced it high enough enough to crest the elastic of my Joe Fresh gauchies and plunge back down through the leg hole (please God let it be the right leg hole) while the outraged knee, bent briefly past some critical threshold, threatened to explode all over again. Sometimes I couldn’t quite clear the band; my toe would catch in the elastic and I’d topple like a big dumb one-legged redwood, roaring with frustration. The simple act of rising from the bed, sitting on the toilet, of bending over to pick something off the floor— suddenly, they were all spectacles you could charge admission for.
The Salt Vampire’s Ugly Cousin
[Peter Watts/Rifters]
(Image: Peter Watts in Helsinki 2013, Anneli Salo, CC-BY-SA)
