CRACKPOTS #41: BRAD PHILLIPS (Patreon)

Hello it's Brace. You already got an amazing email from us today about the live show (link here) but wow, it's time for yet another incredible one. Who doesn't love an email. But we have RETURNING GUEST Brad Phillips here yet again. He does writing here and you can buy his book Essays and Fictions here. He also sent me pictures because I asked him to, but I couldn't figure out how to resize them. They are pictures of his foot in a sling and then his lower body in a hospital bed. There's some other pictures, too. Not pornographic. But I go crazy trying to resize stuff.

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It just started suddenly, and now it won’t stop.

Aging. Not the mournful, Prousty part, where I feel nostalgic for my youth. The physical part, where things break down, and hair grows in new, unseemly places. Where doctor’s appointments involve actual problems, instead of fabricated ones intended to result in prescriptions for painkillers and sedatives. 

I recently wrote a ‘guide to aging’ for a big mainstream magazine. It comes out in a few months. The magazine’s readership is mostly men between twenty-two and thirty-six. I pulled my punches, in part because I didn’t want to scare anyone, but mostly because the magazine pays well, and I’d like to write for them again. They wouldn’t have liked it if I turned in something dark.

Brace also pays well, I imagine because he respects workers. He won’t care if this is dark. I think he values realism, and unpulled punches. I worried the previous thing I wrote for him was too dark, but here I am, invited back to be depressing again. 

I don’t know the average age of a TrueAnon subscriber, but I feel like a larger than normal proportion of you are sober, and are actively attempting to ‘work on’ yourselves, be healthy, and face reality. So in the spirit of comradeship—as someone who’s like that myself—I thought I’d be honest about where I’m at, and what I’ve learned.

I’m 51 years old, and in many ways, a cliché Gen X white guy. I was never quite as bad as this, but for the sake of illustration, imagine a man. This man. 

He’s 32, or 26, or 41. He equates obscurity with value, and broad appeal with worthlessness. He thinks Jandek is great (he actually is) because hardly anyone has heard of him, and that Tom Clancy books must suck (they definitely don’t) because they’re for sale in airports. He’s got a bad back, and one day, after listening to him whine about the pain, his girlfriend suggests he try yoga. He laughs, lights a hand-rolled cigarette, and makes a snide remark about guys with man-buns and giant linen pants who reek of patchouli. He lumbers toward his record collection to file new Shellac and Cannibal Ox LPs, unmindful of his posture and satisfied in his self-righteousness. His back pain does not improve, it instead gets worse. Eventually his girlfriend breaks up with him, having realized that you only date guys like these briefly, and never past the age of 26. 

Pointing out a guy like this isn’t hard, and it’s been done countless times before. But I see some of myself in this dipshit, and it bums me out, because today I’m facing the consequences of having been such a moron. Much of the pleasure in my life results from my having dismantled this part of myself. In 2006 someone told me Whitney Houston was a genius, and I decided to ignore my instinct to disagree, despite hardly knowing her work. Today I listen to Whitney often, and I can’t overstate how much I like her music. There are countless things I now enjoy that I would’ve missed out on had I not gotten over myself, but none of them bring me as much joy as a pain-free body would. 

I chose to be open to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Styx instead of healthy food and stretching for twenty minutes every morning. Learn from my mistakes.

When I was a kid I saw my dad’s mother every weekend. She was crippled by arthritis, and rarely left her room. Her hands were gnarled, and reminded me of tree branches in horror movies. Later in school I learned that people inherit syndromes and illnesses from their parents and grandparents. I was told that my father was losing his hair because his grandfather was bald. In my twenties, I started to develop pain in my joints. I saw doctors who recommended I stretch, and exercise, and I flatly told them no thank you. Never once did I think of my grandmother—unable to grasp a pen, a fork or a knife—and consider that I might end up like her. That in fact it might already be happening.

In my thirties the pain got worse, as did my opiate addiction. When things hurt, I took to my bed, where I ate morphine, Oxys and Dilaudid like candy. Occasionally a doctor would recommend physiotherapy, or exercise. My response was unchanged. “No thank you” I’d say, then extend my hand to receive their prescription for another painkiller.

In my forties, I had a smart partner who loved me. She suggested I do yoga, and because I’d mostly abandoned my contrarian instincts, I took her advice. As is almost always the case, I found that I liked the thing I’d been dismissive of. Yoga was pleasurable. I was able to change my body, and use it in ways I’d never considered possible. At 47 I could place the palms of my hands on the floor without bending my knees. Around this time someone else recommended weightlifting to me. I’d previously associated any masculine effort to increase muscle mass with jocks, and muscle queens. Only one of those groups was cool to me, and it wasn’t the one that bullied me in high school. Instead of looking like a bookish loser with atrophied muscles and no ass, I now looked like a bookish loser with a hint of muscle, and the suggestion of an ass. I also felt stronger, and vaguely confident.

But the pain did not abate. No longer addicted to drugs, I began to see doctors for sincere reasons. A CT scan of my neck showed arthritis, as did X-rays of my hands, my knees and my hips. 

As if I’d just recovered from amnesia, I remember my grandmother. It was happening. I was indeed my father’s son, and had inherited his mother’s shitty bones. 

Osteoarthritis is apparently common, and almost unavoidable. It’s basically a six syllable description of wear and tear brought on by aging. Last month I tore the cartilage in my knee, my meniscus. I got out of bed one morning, heard and felt a pop, and was met with stunning pain. I have an ice pack on my knee right now, and I’ve been going to physiotherapy twice a week. Three months ago I was hobbled by sciatica that appeared out of nowhere. Apparently these are just the side effects of both aging and arthritis, which I’d still have today even if I’d been doing yoga and lifting weights my entire life. But flexibility and well-developed muscle would help counteract the effects of arthritis, and prevent the damage to my cartilage. Unfortunately I only did yoga for a year, maybe a year and a half. Once I could no longer afford my membership, I stopped going, and never thought to just do it at home. And while I didn’t stop weightlifting, I’ve hardly ever focused on building leg muscle, because I rarely wear shorts, and I want—shamefully—people to notice my new biceps and pecs. As a result—because my quads and calves are weak—my poor, arthritic knees had to bear too much weight, and boom, I tore the cartilage in my knee. I’m suffering today in part because beyond being judgmental and snobby, I have other traits that need dismantling, like laziness, and vanity. 

Beyond the bones of the body, the bones of the mouth. Teeth. In the piece I wrote for that mainstream magazine, I mentioned coming to learn the meaning of the expression ‘long in the tooth’. It means that you're old, that you’ve lost bone in your jaw, and that your gums are receding, so that your teeth look longer as your face sucks itself into a skull. My teeth have always been my nemesis, because of opiates, and because I’m Irish. Numerous were the dentists who encouraged me to floss. To each, I offered a laugh, and a hearty ‘no thanks’. As a result most of the teeth in my mouth are removable, courtesy of the Canadian healthcare system. Those that remain are long, and getting longer. And because I now live in America and am struggling under the boot of capitalism, once I lose them, they won’t be replaced. 

There are other things—obvious things—like smoking. I smoked cigarettes for nearly thirty years, then I switched to vaping, deludedly telling myself it was somehow safer. I’ve since stopped that too, and now suck on Walgreen’s nicotines lozenges every waking moment. I quit smoking because I was scared of cancer, which is rampant in my family. As a hypochondriac who dreads disease, I wanted to stop doing the one thing that was actively inviting my personal bogeyman. Obviously, countless times throughout my life, doctors, partners, and the culture at large encouraged me to quit smoking. I offered them the same response I offered my dentists. No thanks. 

Since I quit smoking—and vaping—my mother—who quit smoking twenty-five years ago, developed lung cancer, which she’s since recovered from. This hit me like a brick, although I shouldn’t have been shocked. I’ve always silently judged as stupid the person who quits smoking the second they’re diagnosed with cancer. “What are they thinking?” I think to myself. Don’t they know it’s too late? But the idea that I’ll be immune to cancer just because I quit smoking after thirty years is similarly delusional. Clearly it’s wiser to quit, but regardless, my lungs will be a landmine until the day I die. 

I never want to sound like the kind of person I once found irritating. Like a sanctimonious prick who’s ‘learned the hard way’ and now tells others how to live. But I have learned some shit, and it’s often been—and still is today—hard. Maybe you’re 21, and not as dumb as I was at that age. I had Penny that year, at a Boss Hogg show in Toronto, 1995. She was the first. She saw me clutching my neck and recommended yoga. I laughed, and she looked away, already exasperated by men like me who thought they knew better. If I’d listened to Penny—and all the other kind people over the years who were just being helpful—I might not be limping today, preparing myself for knee replacement surgery, almost always in some kind of pain. If I’d listened to Dr. Chevalis, and hadn’t drunk a two-liter bottle of Coke everyday throughout my twenties, I might not have to put my teeth in a glass each night, and struggle to eat steak, which I love. And if I’d just have listened to Jojo—or Dr. Fung, or Rachel—I might be less likely to end up like my mom, struck down by a ghost from her past, despite her best intentions.

After all, Ewan was right, Billy Joel is pretty good. And Jody was right, Adam Sandler movies are funny.