#3 meniscus explain things to me

long white month

I grimaced through jan focussed on keeping my hope machine running with a frigid sort of urgency, with repetition of the only practices I know will work. what a gift at least, to know !!! every morning i make my concoction, the cordyceps and the creatine. every evening i poach chicken breasts and pull them apart with my teeth. i am in the present tense. i am also waiting for the fortieth anniversary of being born and wondering what will happen to me.

I’ve been getting physiotherapy on my fucked up knee all month, which has involved my first real encounter with the deep strangeness of the healthcare system here. treatment is covered by my mandatory yet ‘only just valid’ health insurance which eats up any leftover cash i have every month, because i am self-employed, and which i deeply resent paying for to the extent that i was almost pleased to fall down the train station stairs to get some value out of it.

The orthopaedic specialist I pick out online purely based on there being an appointment two hours after i realise the swelling wasn’t going away has thick and beautiful green carpet and they offer you tea. i am terrified i’ve misunderstood how it works and about to be thrown out or forced to pay.

The notes from this day on my phone say the following:

After an MRI which I get two days later (the residual whiplash, having grown up in a system I would die for on principle but where noone pays but nothing works, is pronounced) the physio I’m referred to for treatment asks me more than he needs to know about my life given we’re here about my big knee.

I make what is sometimes a mistake of mentioning that I work with gender-based violence. He immediately enters the vibe of guy selling something and tells me about a book I should read but he can’t remember the name in English, and starts trying to sell me on various machines he has invested in to ‘help’ this. When I try to respond politely or concur with what I can to move the conversation on he fully cuts me off and makes a gesture which comes up from behind the desk using his hands to non verbally warn me not to interrupt him. A deeply familiar genre of clinician. I have no choice but let him hoot on about fucking van der Kolk (natürlich) and zone out for a second. I wonder if his machine looks like the men in black memory stick thing which I have noticed I deploy as a simile at least once a week. It is 7pm and minus five outside and a 5”5 little fella in a labcoat is telling me he has a machine to zap trauma and did i know it’s actually all about your heartrate. My mind quickly generates the phrase ‘trauma is stored in the body, pee is stored in the balls’ which pleases me to the extent that i let out an audible laugh which I have to try to mask with a cough as he’s just getting to the part of the story where he tells me in a lurid amount of detail about one of his patients who was ‘harassed by his uncle when he was a child’ and was sweating through three pairs of pyjamas every night and now after one session with his weird machine, the patient ‘forgot all about it’ and now sleeps through. I can’t tell if I’m more spellbound by his cavalier approach to confidentiality or his use of the world forget, how in nearly twenty years of doing work with and thinking about sexual violence, forget as a goal never once came up.

I’m often early for my appointments which takes place next to one of the cities most clasico liminal spaces Mall of Berlin, which has plaques in the floor with quotes from Barack Obama and Angela Merkel. I cannot find a single pair of gloves. The bus has a new announcement which they’ve very wonkily translated as they occasionally like to do “Berlin is tough but sincere please show respect and be kind to each other.” I have to do another cough giggle. A a woman tells the driver to call the police because a guy has lit up a cigar. When others ask him to stop, and one young guy squares up to him, clearly pumped for a socially sanctioned reason to fight, cigar guy refuses. ‘I’m very tired.’

I get off the bus and pick up gloves from the stall on my street that also sells scarfs with red, green and black paragliders sailing high above a pixelated Al Aqsa.

//

I went to watch this documentary - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - on Friday which I’d somehow never seen, and is already firmly in my top ten. The type of footage that seems like it can’t possibly be real, two irish filmmakers are in Caracas in 2002 making a film about Chavez and accidentally capture the entirety of the failed military coup against him. Real Adam Curtis source material type shit.

Afterwards, Geo Maher spoke, whose book on the Venezuelan communes I read by accident in 2017 in the Verso sale. He named this current thinning of the veil between violence meted out in the periphery and that in the core, and I thought about the video I saw of the Minneapolis street and the voices screaming ‘they’re coming, they’re here, they’re here’ and whistles being blown. I thought about the the breath in the whistles rattling the ball bearings.

The other guest speaker is Cira Pascual Marquina, a professor of Political Studies at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela. She is speaking with big eyes from the commune where she actually lives, with ten thousand others. She underlines twice that the communes are supported by the government. She is sat under a tree, fronds moving and out of the Zoom window. The police do not enter here, she explains. There is the popular defence committee for that. Afterwards we walk into the frozen world and I think about the palm trees and feel a deep comfort to imagine her going about her day, the same day on the calendar as mine.

A whirring frequency under and through this month has been the waiting. We are waiting for a verdict in a trial happening six hundred miles away.

I will say more about this soon.

For now, with love until next week.

PS. The gay hockey show touched a nerve but I won’t say which.