Something smaller. Easy.
Well, maybe not. I’ve woken up today feeling kind of gross and disgusted with myself. Contact with friends has been helping that a little, but water can only do so much to wash out oil stains.
I’ve been thinking a bunch about the word fracture recently. Nothing big and dramatic there, it’s just the theme for a game jam i would like to participate in with some friends. Thinking about fractured legs, fractured minds, fractured ground, fractured promises. There’s an interesting conceptual duality there, I think, in the idea of something that is definitely broken, but still mostly fine and functional, but nevertheless very much broken in a way that cannot be ignored. A fractured bone is still *mostly* perfectly fine bone, right? It’s there, it’s solid, you can rely on it, except for the few millimetres (or centimetres, or inches if you’re really unlucky) where it just isn’t any of those things, and somehow those few millimetres of bone make all the difference.
I had kind of a weird dream last night. I got into some accident that obliterated most of the bones in my body, and then when they got put back together with bolts and wires they ended up… different, in various ways. I was a little shorter, because I guess they lost some of the bits of my legs, or maybe a vertebra or two - a little thinner, because they fucked up the angles on my ribs - a little softer in the face, because it turns out you can’t actually reconstruct a skull perfectly. It took a little while to settle in, but after a while i found myself craving a few more changes. Getting into a few more quite bad accidents.
In practice, i don’t think it actually works that way. Adjusting the shape and structure of bones for cosmetic changes works, but it's probably best left to experts in controlled circumstances. But every now and then i am reminded of the apocryphal tale1 in my community of someone doing amateur surgery on themselves with dry ice and i wonder. Realistically, nothing about my body bothers me quite enough to want to do something like that, and i have truly awful pain tolerance so I doubt I’d have the balls2 for it anyway. That doesn’t stop the wondering, though, or the frustration with a few millimetres of bone that make all the difference.
Maybe i do need to push myself to work up to doing this every day; it’s a nice way to keep up with how people are doing, but also yesterday’s post would have been so much more cheerful and it feels bad to be sharing this one but not that one. Goals for the future, i think. But small ones.
