Forty-one Days

It had been forty-one days since I’d slept through the night, tipped my head back, lifted my left arm over my head, or felt anything with my left thumb but a disconcerting tingling sensation. I woke up – you guessed it – forty-one days earlier, in the middle of the night, in agonizing pain, unable to move. My spine caved in on me, compressing five discs, crushing the nerves that trail along my shoulder, down the arm and into my left hand. I spent weeks immersed in pain, complicated with sleep deprivation and existential agony, wondering if I’d ever be back in my body again. I lost my motivation – my book proposal, my scripts, the new bungalow I no longer cared about decorating, the soul mate I had no energy to call in – it all fell away – everything except for Radiohead at The Bowl. Aside from an abstract notion of living pain-free, the concert was all I cared about.

Luckily, I’d launched a multi-tiered manifestation strategy months earlier. Between hounding the editors of the LA Weekly and bombarding the band’s management company with requests for press passes, I meditated on the concert daily, listened to their records constantly, and asked everyone I knew, and even a handful I didn’t, for tickets. Ultimately, a twenty-nine day hunger strike and promises of grooming and bathing helped me convince the Weekly’s music editor to take me as his +1, even though we’d never met.

Of course, the show was amazing. The sound was spectacular, the lighting was phenomenal, and Thom Yorke is the sexiest man alive, especially when he’s dancing. The band was on fire. Johnny ripped, as usual, folded over his guitar, as usual, coaxing other-worldly sounds out of its secret insides, weaving a shaman’s web of inspired, ecstatic connection among the mesmerized crowd. I got lost in the music – the trippy vibrations and the portals they opened; lost in Colin’s stunning bass and in the infinite depths of Thom’s voice and all the complicated human experience it reveals.

A couple songs in, my (gorgeous) girlfriend Jessica came beaming over to our box, beer in hand, red hair flowing, silk mini-dress cut up to there, as the band broke into “Bodysnatchers.” I was suddenly reminded of a recent Tuesday night when the pain and the ensuing exhaustion and metaphysical confusion of it all had driven me to a state of sedentary delirium. Laying on the couch as the sun slipped away and the blooming moon took it’s place overhead, drenched in a gritty heap of exaggerated exhaustion I’d never known, I decided to go crazy. I leapt up, growled as I maneuvered my way into a sports bra, laced up my sneakers, grabbed my iPod, and bolted out of the house. Left-arm tingling, achey and dragging, I hauled ass up to the trail at top of Beachwood Canyon, where I hiked under the moonlight for three and half hours, while singing at the top of my lungs, losing my mind, letting it all go. I found my way to radical surrender and made peace with my broken body while Thom Yorke and I sang to the stars:

I HAVE NO I-DEA WHAT I AM TAAAAALKING ABOOUUT
I’M TRAPPED IN THIS BO-DY AND CAAAN’T GET OUT

And this is why I love Radiohead and why I dream of someday dancing with Thom Yorke and telling him how amazing he is and how grateful I am for his music without gushing spazzy and stupid all over his shoes; because in those crushing bouts of lonely four a.m. existential agony, praying for a morsel of mercy, literally crying out to the heavens to please, please, please take this pain away - this hurt, this black hole, this what the fuck?, this searing, sinking solitude, Thom Yorke holds my hand and has my back and serenades my soul, telling me I’m all he needs and everyone is broken and there’s nothing to fear and nothing to hide. And we share this intimacy, these liminal milestones, these soul-crushing lows and these unforeseen karmic blows - along with new love and inspired adventure and mind-expanding highs - together; and there we were, sharing another one, as Jessica grabbed my hand, and we took off, sprinting down the aisle onto the promenade behind the sound engineers, and again, I went crazy. I sang and danced my way back into my body for the first time in forty-one days, screaming at the top of my lungs:

I HAVE NO I-DEA WHAT I AM TAAAAALKING ABOOUUT
I’M TRAPPED IN THIS BO-DY AND CAAAN’T GET OUT

And, for the night at least, I had my body back. I grooved sultry and slow to “Climbing Up the Walls;” I tripped out to the disassociative mind-fuck that is “I’m Not Here;” and I danced my ass off to the furious explosion of sound and rage and oomph that was an epic version of “Paranoid Android.” I jumped, I beamed, I danced with unbridled abandon – arms wide and high, heart pounding, glowing and alive and happy as happy has ever been or will ever be, drenched in gratitude and grace and Thom Yorke and twinkling lights and electric, ecstatic everything in its right place.

Thank you, Radiohead. Please come back soon.