Music, After I Sprained My Thumb In Bed
At first I thought it was broken. 
These pictures, taken moments ago, demonstrate the basic difference between my damaged right-thumb (left), and normal left-thumb (yeah, right) after one month of guitar avoidance. My behavior since the injury has contributed to some local banter about the state of Alberta medicine and my attitude (problem) towards it.
In the past few years my use of public health-care has become somewhat arbitrary. The general-practitioner I had from the time I was fifteen was recently driven into retirement by the grace of It’s Divine Majesty the Real-Estate Market, and my experiences with hospitals and clinics since then have been frustrating, to put it mildly. Therefore, since my familiarity with doctors, nurses and paramedics in my family have kept me somewhat hip, I evaluate medical-crises by comparison to what other crises may prevail at the time. I hope that the eventual result is satisfactory life-management.
Meanwhile, I am still a middle-aged musician, caught between things which are clearly in my past and an ephemeral shared-future in which my vision of a role for myself is equally ephemeral. After leaving my manufacturing occupation in 2009, I spent a brief time returning to show-production, but it has become clear that I won’t be able to sustain that work physically. I have also done some work in publishing and plan to continue, but my role in publishing is not currently based on wages and the wisp of security which comes with them.
Quit everything and become a rock-star? If it were that easy I would have done it a lot sooner. They weren’t lying in the eighties when they said that, “rock is dead.” But I always want to play, and my hands, voice and pen always just do what comes naturally. Which brings me to the archives. Archives?
First, I have an accumulation of the songs from my 2005 recording, “Regulars”, and later songs in various states of remixing. Second, an associate who records the Ship and Anchor Saturday Jams under the handle, “AmbientSound” has provided me a continual stream of CDs which document my performances there over the past few years, as well as those of other performers.
I have recently begun filling a portable drive with them, intending that I will be able to release bootlegs of my own performances, and perhaps others if it turns out that they would like to work with me on it. I’ll do a bit of minimal processing on the recordings with the software I have – volume, noise and trimming, not much else – but let them stand otherwise in the interest of getting them out there. I have little truck with the idea of noise-pop as a genre, but I’m not presenting a case of deliberate sabotage, just expedient release. I’ll keep you in the loop.
Meanwhile, I’m finally able to play again as of this past weekend, one month after the injury. What happened? It took a couple of days to figure out. I woke up screaming “oh, f—, f—, f—,…ahh shut up you’re waking the neighbors, go to sleep,” which is not a tremendously unusual occurrence for me. Waking the next morning, I noticed my swollen thumb, but completely forgot what had happened. The next day I remembered the time and circumstances of the incident, and a few days later I caught myself perilously close to re-enacting it: a posture which created some potentially destructive leverage.
Over time I tested it with various kinds of leverage while striving to keep it straight, but still using it just enough that it would not atrophy and prolong the healing process. There are very few muscles in the hand, and the location of the pain and swelling made it clear that I was still dealing with a problem of ligaments and tendons. Stress and movement testing made it seem unlikely that bone injury was much involved.
I looked around on-line. Something needs to be done about on-line information about hands – we writers and artists can do better than that…, “This looks like a job for…” I might have something to say about that again soon too. Meanwhile, I’m ready to get out playing again.
