basketball jones

File under 'Poor Me'.

This lament relates to a recent report to a circle of men on the subject of addiction, habits, and conditioning. I talked about some of the unintended consequences of becoming addicted to t'ai chi. In short, I'm so hooked after 30 years that I don't function very well if I miss a day or two of practice.

Truth be told, I'm just high-maintenance, as those who know me best will confirm. It has taken me many years of study, meditation, and practice practice practice to fine-tune my particular wants and needs, and I'm not about to let all that work go to waste. All those classes, all those books read, papers written, seminars and workshops and retreats shouldn't go down the drain. By now, I have a pretty good idea of what works for me, and if I get around to doing it all, I invariably feel good.

The downside is what happens when I miss a few workouts. I'm a train wreck.

I think it was late November when I neglected some key elements of my regular practice. Stayed inside, read a lot, brought work home, didn't work out much, and promptly became a habitat for a colony of viruses, sniffled for two weeks, and got over it.

Now it's other complaints. For a while I was hanging from my knees on a trapeze, but that put a strain on already weakened ligaments, so I stopped. Then I was hanging upside-down while gripping with my hands, and I started getting a sharp pain in the wrist, so I stopped. Now that I'm off the trapeze altogether, my back isn't getting that nice long, gravity-reversing stretch.

Like I said, poor me. If it ain't one thing it's another. Life's a bitch.

Next came the hip thing. Somewhere between the sacrum and the right thigh, a muscle (the piriformis?) has been pulled beyond its capacity by something I was doing - or not doing - so now it reacts to anything I do - or don't do. Bending forward, bending backward, sitting, standing, lying down, getting up, flexion, extension, sleeping, waking, ouch.

And another thing: why is everything falling apart on the right side, while my left side seems just fine? Something Jungian, no doubt, something dark and shadowy. My animus disintegrates while my anima integrates. The warrior archetype is injured in a battle with the editor archetype.

Or it might have something to do with the post-holiday letdown, when the anticipation and stress, the changes in schedule and diet, the increase in fat, sugar, and alcohol find the vulnerable body parts and do some damage. Mea culpa.

Even with unreasonably warm weather, I'm getting an early attack of cabin-fever, unable to go outside and play like I did the other three seasons of the year. To make it worse, I don't have a home court anymore, and I simply feel the need to shoot hoops.

If you spent half of your first 18 years in the driveway with a ball, you know that shooting hoops cures many ills. It not only gives the legs something to do after sitting in an expensive ergonomically designed chair all day, but it gives the hands a tactile sensation like no other.

Throwing and catching and dribbling are akin to drumming on an animal-skin drumhead, the percussive beat of the bouncing ball off the hardwood, the backboard, the rim. I haven't had those sensations lately, and I miss it. Not to mention the muscle memory of shooting a jumpshot that uncoils from the feet through the legs and torso, ending with the crest of that vertical wave releasing a spinning spheroid arcing up and through the net. Swish. The inner crowd goes wild.

But what I really need is a workout, something to make the heart and lungs pump more oxygen to more places, organs pushing other organs to push back, recover, and push again a little more. My knees will adapt and not snap sideways. My hips will limber up and not seize up. My wrist will regain its range after a hundred rusty attempts to lay the ball up in a fluid motion. My shoulders will get over the initial shock of repeated reaching, and my spirit will soar.