More on Unwinding:

I’ve mentioned that the fascia is like a flexible, slightly stretchable, underskin suit packed with sensory nerves. I think that its purpose is to provide our motion-and-position senses, provide for our negative feedback, and control what muscles act, when.

My reasoning: I realized humans understand circular/spiral motion, and, they understand straight-line motion.  You can draw a roughly straight line with any of your limbs; you can move most of your extremities in a circular motion (e.g., fingers, but probably not toes). The tangles in my body all feel similarly – either in a straight line along the bone path, or, tangled up in loops.

In the beginning, I could only mobilize part of my right hip, but I kept struggling, and, eventually, more of my body started unwinding (and, my pain shot up immeasurably). I started to notice, sometimes, when I was unwinding, it felt like muscles were changing control over parts of my body. Sometimes, it feels like the wrong muscles are saying “we used to hurt but… ahhhhhhh” and the right muscles are saying “nice job, guys, we’ll take over now.” Okay, I’m being a bit more expressive, but, only a bit. It felt that natural.

So I thought my muscles were tangled up for a while, but that’s silly. Muscles must follow bones. And yet, sometimes, it felt like individual muscle fibers might be getting pulled loose, so, again, “my muscles feel tangled up.” 

Muscles can’t tangle up; there’s no mechanism for them to form adhesions. But the fascia forms adhesions. And if the fascia controlled which muscles were in control, and the fascia was tangled, I’d feel my muscles were tangled. Et viola, I say, looking for a musical instrument I’ll never find, it must be the fascia causing the issue… or, Occam would tell us we’re numbskulls to assume it’s “something else we haven’t seen evidence for, yet.”

The thing is, fascia bindings limit your range of motion, so, you can’t always undo a binding in place. One time I tried, and I felt a pain like a match lighting, and immediately stopped what I was doing. That “match lighting” pain is a serious warning – I’d only ever heard of it before, but I knew what I was feeling, from that warning! So it feels like I have to follow the tangles, and, if tangles are on top of tangles, I have to handle the top tangles first.

The net effect of these tangles is “subluxation.” Your joints don’t rest in the correct “neutral” position. So, how do you move? Well, you know how to move a bipedal person (assuming you are bipedal, perhaps with mechanical assistance), so you send commands, like, sit, stand, walk, run, jump, and those impulses are translated by the fascia to the right muscles. If you’re not subluxated, those impulses are worked by the correct muscles. If not, they’re worked by the closest straight-line-and-looping muscles the body can use to perform the action.

All of this is frightfully complicated, right? Well, the fascia must also provide for negative feedback, if it decides what muscles are worked. Each muscle must move with a corresponding inhibitory muscle action. That’s what negative feedback is, when you start to lift something, the muscles to drop your load are engaged, for stability, and they all adjust at the same time. What mechanism could provide for that? The human brain, unassisted? I don’t think so – I could be wrong, but I think it offloads that task to the fascia. Similarly, I assume that positional and movement senses are handled by the fascia as well.

I could be wrong about this. I’ve been wrong, and I can admit it. Like, last time, I thought I’d made a mistake? Yeah, remember that? I was wrong, I hadn’t made a mistake after all, and here I am, admitting I was wrong, see what a big man I am? Ahem.

More seriously: Occam’s razor, and my personal experience, strongly support this idea. And what it means is, if you have addictions issues, if you have mental health issues  (most especially including substance use issues), if you have chronic pain, if you’re just miserable all the time, ask a chiropractor to give you a check, and they’ll tell you you’re subluxated. Okay, but, they’re going to point to your spine. “We’ll move your spine, even if it’s your shoulder that’s pulling your spine out of proper spinal alignment.” That worries me. I feel like the shoulder is where we should be working.

Problem: PT, and doctors of osteopathy, they don’t think subluxation means anything. Well, chiropractors will say, if your child has asthma, your child is “subluxated, no question,” because I saw one do that, so, subluxation has become a bit of a dirty word. I don’t think my doctor believes that my hip doesn’t move normally, due to subluxation. I know PTs will tell me that I’m lying about my own body, because they can’t believe my body won’t supply truss (keeping me up) in certain positions. Sometimes, they’re asking me to do something that a normal person could do, because the median femur is perpendicular to the ground. I can’t, because in that pose, my femur is at, like, a 75 degree angle. Ever tried to build anything without something a lot closer to 90? You won’t have truss – you can’t span a space. The weight going down will also push sideways, and you’ll have a collapse. Point and laugh at the gimp, Mr. PT firstname lastname.

What if you’re in neurological pain, and a chiro examines you, and points to subluxation… what then? Well, first up, a warning: it is now a common practice in chiropracty to ask for all funds up front. Your insurance pays so much, our course of treatment costs this much, cut us a check, before we start treatment. I talked to a chiropractor, before I knew this, and I walked out, because I don’t pay up front. I assumed it was a con. But it is now a common practice in the industry, such as there’s an industry.

Why would they ask for it all up front? Well, when I’m unwinding – which is what chiropractic work will do, if I’m right, and chiros are partly right – I have a lot of pain, and, I have a lot of other distress. Wanna know the winner of the annual “worse than it sounds, and it sounds awful” contest? Spontaneous projectile vomiting! I was on a customer call at the time, but damn, I’m good with the MUTE button!!! Look up vagus nerve issues, look up focal seizures, think all GI issues and get some protective undergarments, just in case, because your body can do the same thing as projectile vomiting from the other… okay, you got the idea. Think of all that, and now, you have an idea of the neuro effects one might experience. They would want the money up front, so, they could say “John, please continue; you paid for it, you might as well see it through.” And why all up front? Because my experience suggests (to me) that you might be miserable all the way up until all of your joints are free of subluxation, with concomitant lack of spine subluxation.

Er, that is, I think my spine is out of place, because my hip is stuck in the wrong “neutral” position. I want to fix the hip, because it feels in my head like I don’t want to have the spine pressing against the strength of the hip. That feels wrong to me. I could be wrong. But I also kind of… look, I felt no “call of destiny,” okay? I just had this sense, “I can fix this myself.” And I’ve been wrong, a good many times, over the years, but I’m getting closer to the “fix” I imagine exists. That much, I’m sure of.

I’m in a lot of pain,  and my only escape any more is medical marijuana concentrates, and mindfulness exercises. Don’t get me wrong: during mindfulness exercises, I still feel the pain, I still lose the day, I still can’t clean the kitchen, have sex with my wife, go out of the house, etc., but, during the mindfulness exercises, I see why Buddhist monks can handle suffering. I had something sounding a tone, every fifteen seconds. I said to myself, “if I go mindful, I’ll hear that delightful little ‘doot’ as a complete surprise, and it might make me giggle, instead of tense up,” and sure as shooting, that’s what happened.

I told y’all I was a professional weirdo!

This post may be edited at a later time – apologies for the inconvenience

Scream_9 essay, inspired by SCOTUS lawlessness

People like me die. We’re sometimes accosted, for the same reason: we’re big, scary men who are acting strangely, and you know, you can never be too careful, better to accuse a person of wrongdoing, than leave them alone when they don’t seem aggressive toward anyone. Soon, when we’re pissed off at being accosted, we become Big Scary Men Who Probably Hurt Someone (We’re Not Sure Who).

At this point, one must be aware that, being A Black Man Who Probably Stole Something (We’re Not Sure What) can be a fatal condition in America, so you believe more easily, “so, too, can being a Big Scary Man Who Probably Hurt Someone (We’re Not Sure Who).”

Pain can take over your whole brain, you get it? And you keep expecting that if something happens, and you feel awful, then, A causes B, right? So that cop, asking pointed questions, as your brain pulses like you can’t stand, that cop is hurting you, right? No!!! It’s the pain. Stop. Relax. “Officer, I have a stress condition, and I’m trying to isolate. Could you help me get home, so I don’t have a screaming fit?” Have it printed on a card, in case you can’t speak! Or don’t leave the house, if you don’t want to die.