Sunday, February 8, 2009

LIKE JAMMING YOUR FUCKING THUMB INTO A SHEER ROCK WALL


I went rock-climbing this weekend. for some reason my friends are way into rock-climbing now. they have membership passes to this rock climbing place that's like a gigantic warehouse filled with 150 foot climbing walls and other x-treme shit. i have been x-tremely hesitant to go on these rock climbing excursions because a) my arms are pale and lifeless b) yo, what if that shit breaks? and c) you gotta drop like $24 to climb for the day. and i could have just as easily stayed in bed and gotten another hour of sleep for free and casually smoked a bowl instead but NO. gotta mix it up. can't fall into routines buddy, that's where they get ya.

so i'm climbing with some bros and brodettes in this indoor climbing monstrosity (it's called island rock, it's on long island you'll love it) and we're doing free climbing. no helmets, no ropes, just a cushy mat under you that you have to fall onto to not break your world. there are different ascents up each rock wall marked by colored strips of tape. so we're all five of us trying to do this one particular free-climb path. when it gets to me, i fuckin give 'er my standard 85% and come close to the top of the path, about 12 feet up. i can't get a steady hold on the top spot but technically you just have to be able to touch the end of the path, which is marked by an X in whatever color you've been following. so instead of securely establishing my post atop the Red X, i kind of hoist myself up high enough to slap it five, then drop off into nothingness. i landed hard on the edge of the mat, slamming my back against the wall in the process. everyone was all like 'are you ok are you ok' and i'm all like 'im ok' and i start to get up and take stock of my various appendages when i realize my thumb doesn't feel right at all. not necessarily broken, but definitely not normal. the pain starts to grow and suddenly my thumb is swollen to twice it's size and hurts to move.

i decided to stop climbing for the day and dwell on the fact that my thumb was severely fucked up. rather than seek medical attention, i decided the best course of action would be to go to the movies, eat a large dinner, and get wasted. later, while wasted, my friend greg asks to see the thumb. after looking at it for like a second, he came to the conclusion that it was dislocated and would have to be snapped back into place in order to ever return to normal functionality. for those of you who have never had to re-locate your thumb into its socket, it involves yanking on your thumb as hard as you possibly can. there was no way i was going to do this to myself. 'you do it, man' i say to greg. 'just get it over with'. he takes my thumb, and after an ungodly tense few seconds, he pulls. the cracking sound that emitted from my thumb was almost worse than the pain itself, but all i could do at that point was deal with it and hope for better times and a working thumb. a few minutes later, greg decided that maybe the thumb was messed up on the lower joint and not the upper one, which would require a different kind of yank (lol). i hesitantly volunteered him to do it again, just to make sure my thumb wouldn't go further into its plump unfunctioning state. this time it hurt like a motherfucker, a moment that was captured in the picture above. it was a grueling gauntlet of pain to endure, but i honestly think it had to be done. now it's been about 24 hours since i let a guy yank me and i'm a lot less swollen. it was a weekend of pain, hilarity, and the ongoing reminder that yo, everything's a test. sometimes shit gets real and you have to pay a hefty price to get out of it, but man, once you do, you can look back on all that pain and all those trials and tribulations and be like yo, i fuckin did it. i fuckin did it.

1 comment:

Harrison said...

both of you are obviously enjoying that pain