BASKETBALL KNEES

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"Strong white legs, losing their strength and form ..."
-- Paula Cole "Hush, Hush, Hush"

For most of my life, given the opportunity I have generally chosen to take stairways in lieu of elevators. I've even run stairways, including the Washington Monument, for fun & fitness - no shit. I'm tall and deep-chested, a hard-core basketballer into my 40's, and thereafter a prep official. No one beat me downcourt, and I took sinful pride in being 'last man standing' during the most excruciating of summer scrimmages.

Long ago knee injuries put me out, but subsequent corrective surgeries allowed me to prolong my days on the courts. Now I'm finally paying the full price of admission. All my life basketball courts provided a Haven, refuge from whatever in the World troubled me. Stepping on to a court always slipped me into a Zone of pure Here & Now. I'm sure athletes of all sorts have had extraordinary experiences such as described by George Leonard in The Ultimate Athlete of sometimes being able to all but stop Time, to Know what was to come before it had come to Be ...

Those daze on the courts are long gone for me. No more jump-shots, no more rebounds, haven't dunked in decades. Can't even run anymore. Spirit is willing but not the Wheels, and I've had to make a lot of downward adjustments to former capabilities. Now each day almost always imposes its own limit on my knees. Used to come fairly deep into evening ~ I'm Night Person, still ~ but now its more like middle of afternoon. Some days I never get ahead , and there are more than a few nights which find me crawling up the stairs in my Great Lakes home.

Let me amend that: Not literally "crawling." More like "knuckling" up the stairs. Picture yourself on your knuckles bearing weight three or four treads ahead of your feet. Better yet, try it yourself. Really. See how it lessens the Load imposed on your knees, and imaging knowing that if you don't they will take it out on you with serious doses of Pain & Fatigue. Nothing I care to do in public, but it is the best way for me to get up my stairs.

I'm surprised by how many medical cannabis users I encountered in Las Vegas. Most were addressing various neural & pain issues and one certainly can learn a lot from Other People's Experience ... "Don't do your surgeries here," one fellow told me at a salad bar. I already knew better ~ one of my host's friends was at home, his leg immobilized as he awaited a replacement part for a pin which broke during his last knee surgery. This after a year battling staph infections which almost killed him, just as the "black box" warning on my Rx for the arthritis eating at the bone in my joints, what's left of them, warns me it might just do to me.

Nevada has 'legalized' medical cannabis but you wouldn't know it; it lacks a supply system, and people "just get it, don't they?" Legal status in Nevada may mean nothing more than a limited immunity from arrest, no small consideration for people who work in any number of environments. But the greater Fear has not been driven from the field, and many medical users simply don't bother to enroll.

Now that I have come into Chumash Country, I can speak more comfortably about the nexus of Cannabis and Medicine, and of its ancillary aesthetics. With the exception of an increasingly petulant Governor who recently vetoed a bill restoring discrimination protection to workers whop are legal medical cannabis users (take note, please), California has effectively committed itself to protecting my right to mitigate Pain with Cannabis.

Unlike Nevada and other medpot states, California actually has a safe, effective, and regulated Supply system in place. Here I can easily legally obtain Cannabis of appropriate strain & potency from licensed, tax-paying farmacies, or my own secured garden.

What a concept ...


= 20 Oct 08