It’s incredible what you, but really I mean I, can do when not in physical pain.

Like, chronic, often excruciating physical pain.

For the last…I’m always trying to calculate just how long it’s been—I remember walking stiffly in Chicago last year (May)—and in New York one of my hips was fucked up (July)—but I have been really thinking of September, when I met a friend for a walk and I brought trekking poles I’d bought for my partner and her bad knee—so, like, chronic. Time is stretched thin, stretched out, I feel like I remember the winter holiday season of 2024 better than I do the winter holiday season of 2025.

Inflammation running up and down one leg, having transferred from one hip to the back to the other hip and down the leg. X-ray, MRI, the word degenerative in the report, as in, normal. It’s aging.

I am fucking inflamed by the assholes running this country and the paramilitary they’ve unleashed. Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis. Picture inflammation on the map of the country. Hot spots. Sore to the touch.

Yet inflammation is a defense. The body’s response to, as Cleveland Clinic aptly calls it, “injuries and invaders.” It’s “normal.” Inflammation—a certain amount, and always in response to the injury or invader—is part of the healing process. When chronic, though—well, maybe you already know, intimately.

This is my first chronic pain rodeo.

This is not my first asshole president making everything harder and worse rodeo.

I have a new appreciation for physical therapists. Physical therapists: You’re My Heroes. And my ability to write this post? Prednisone.

The inflammation points on the map of this country are inflamed by ice.

I realized today how much I’ve been avoiding because of this pain. Aside from the fact that my favorite and closest park to walk in lost funding (like all county parks did, going from free parking on weekdays and open 7 days, to $10 to park and only open Tuesday-Sunday), I’d also lost my ability to walk the uphill to the bowl and around it twice without horrible pain to follow, for days. So I avoided it. Chores piling up because I need to lie down with a heating pad. Losing the ability to focus due to pain. Needing to wind down hours earlier than I’d like, therefore putting off what I need and want to do until the next day, over and over. Et cetera.

And I can only realize it because I’m experiencing relief from this pain, relief that I know is only temporary.

There is no real relief in the cities I named above. They’re still irritated, aggravated by the intrusion of invaders.

But I’ve seen so many instances of inflammation as a defense. The whistles. The postures people must adopt to stand up to the poison that arrives in their neighborhoods. The care in the warnings that arrive via Telegram, Signal. Even the memes are an inflammation, as in defense—the video of the ice stooge that slips on the icy street, set to music; the plethora of sometimes poetic descriptions of how Bovino departed Minneapolis, in which he is a fly, a worm, a flea.

I arrive to you on a Wednesday, burning hot with rage. Maybe you’re inflamed, too.

Let’s use that heat to melt ice into oblivion.