This morning I hurt my hand from punching a wall. My upstairs neighbours have been noisy – stomping and crashing – and I feel like I'm coming a bit unstuck. I could have punched a pillow, but no – it was a wall or nothing! My neighbours must think I’m insane. So I am finally starting to look for somewhere else to live. I wish I could make something better out of the fact that I hurt my hand punching a wall. I wish I could call it art. But no. It was very ordinary and idiotic. To try to calm myself down, I decided to go and get a massage. But I didn’t enjoy it because the whole time I was seething about my flat situation and my fool hand. I started thinking about all the times I’ve laid on massage tables. I wondered why it was that I’d started going to see massage therapists in the first place. There is something inherently silly about massage. (I wish there was a different word for it, too. ‘Massage’ is now too loaded with Weinsteinian tones. ‘Rub-down’ is worse, and ‘manipulation’ or ‘palpation’ sound too medical.) The silliness seems to come from the way that someone is touching your near-naked body with warmth and tenderness but in an essentially therapeutic, totally non-erotic way, often in silence or while asking about your weekend plans. It takes a while to get past the silliness. At the same time massage is deadly serious, because of the intense focus on the body and the ways in which it’s disintegrating, and the knowledge that this practice has been going on for millennia. Your animal body, one in an infinitely long line of animal bodies. Alongside the physical specificity of it, there’s something abstract about the process – maybe the hope that you’ll just ‘feel better’, that being touched will relieve you of whatever dread or worry you have, for a few moments. It’s a hope of being comforted, which must be the oldest hope we have when receiving physical touch. The first massage I ever had was after the Christmas rush one year when I was working in retail. I was strung out and over-peopled and my legs hurt. I decided to book in, for a treat, to a cheap place. The massage seemed okay, but then every so often the therapist, a soft-voiced spiritual man in shorts, would raise his hands and start sweeping them back and forth through the air above me. ‘Just clearing the energy here,’ he’d say apologetically. It didn’t feel like anything, though it seemed like the air was getting a nice massage. Over the next few years I’d go back every so often and have my air massaged. I don’t know why it took me so long to realise that it was bogus – or something that helped only if you truly believed in it – and there
Just clearing the energy here
Just clearing the energy here
Just clearing the energy here
This morning I hurt my hand from punching a wall. My upstairs neighbours have been noisy – stomping and crashing – and I feel like I'm coming a bit unstuck. I could have punched a pillow, but no – it was a wall or nothing! My neighbours must think I’m insane. So I am finally starting to look for somewhere else to live. I wish I could make something better out of the fact that I hurt my hand punching a wall. I wish I could call it art. But no. It was very ordinary and idiotic. To try to calm myself down, I decided to go and get a massage. But I didn’t enjoy it because the whole time I was seething about my flat situation and my fool hand. I started thinking about all the times I’ve laid on massage tables. I wondered why it was that I’d started going to see massage therapists in the first place. There is something inherently silly about massage. (I wish there was a different word for it, too. ‘Massage’ is now too loaded with Weinsteinian tones. ‘Rub-down’ is worse, and ‘manipulation’ or ‘palpation’ sound too medical.) The silliness seems to come from the way that someone is touching your near-naked body with warmth and tenderness but in an essentially therapeutic, totally non-erotic way, often in silence or while asking about your weekend plans. It takes a while to get past the silliness. At the same time massage is deadly serious, because of the intense focus on the body and the ways in which it’s disintegrating, and the knowledge that this practice has been going on for millennia. Your animal body, one in an infinitely long line of animal bodies. Alongside the physical specificity of it, there’s something abstract about the process – maybe the hope that you’ll just ‘feel better’, that being touched will relieve you of whatever dread or worry you have, for a few moments. It’s a hope of being comforted, which must be the oldest hope we have when receiving physical touch. The first massage I ever had was after the Christmas rush one year when I was working in retail. I was strung out and over-peopled and my legs hurt. I decided to book in, for a treat, to a cheap place. The massage seemed okay, but then every so often the therapist, a soft-voiced spiritual man in shorts, would raise his hands and start sweeping them back and forth through the air above me. ‘Just clearing the energy here,’ he’d say apologetically. It didn’t feel like anything, though it seemed like the air was getting a nice massage. Over the next few years I’d go back every so often and have my air massaged. I don’t know why it took me so long to realise that it was bogus – or something that helped only if you truly believed in it – and there