I woke up sounding like Sam Eliot this morning.

Bug going around the office. Two people out today, and this week we had a large group at home. Usually I avoid this kind of epidemic somehow, but I guess this time it got to me. I like the challenge of trying to kick it fast. Everyone is saying it’ll take me at least a week to get over this, and as today is Day 1, next week might be a miss. We’ll see. It’d be nice to come in all perfect-like on Monday morning.

It’s fun to speak in this voice.

I have an aching lower back. If I hadn’t broken my back 1.5 years ago, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But any reminder of that period of time, the worst 6 months of my life, is instant trauma. I have ice on it now.

What happens is that certain viruses cause inflammation. Inflammation is the enemy of most of your body, and particularly around nerve clusters, such as the spine. The pain of inflamed tissue rubbing against nerve roots can be severe, and what happens is that the central nervous system will automatically send “freeze and hold” signals to the effected area to protect against damage. In the lower back, this results in spasms– periods of time where the muscles tense up like little fists to prevent certain kinds of motion. When your lower back is spasming, it’s painful. The muscles themselves begin to cramp and remain tense and stay aching, just as if you tightened your bicep and just kept it flexed for a long period of time. It’s a strange kind of pain that passes between numbing pain and aching.

You can take drugs to get the muscle to release, but I don’t need that. This is all from a virus, it’s mild. The ice is working fine. I’m walking and bending fine, I just feel an ache right where the break occurred. So, though it makes me a little nervous, I’m not freaking out. I bet it’ll be fine in a couple days once I kick the virus. No training for a couple days.

Have you ever stripped away the shell and tools of your body and considered what “you” actually are? For instance, are you your hair? Or your feet? Does your physical “body” define you? Most people would say no. For instance, if you lose your arm, do you lose your “self”? No.

But that’s not true for all parts of our body. Our brain literally is us. When that thing changes, we chance. There is no difference. So, what are we? We are this:

This is literally what the “we” in “we are” is.

Everything around this thing evolved to help it get around, to acquire energy, to reproduce itself, to stay alive. Our bodies are tools for this thing, and the better the tool, the longer this thing will survive, the further its genes will be passed along.

But really it’s just this. Everything else is decoration and tool.

Is that neat, or is it a certain kind of terror?