Slowly You Learn

Just let me say now that I understand the gospel of the RSS feed -- which means what I write will be "pushed" to those interested in reading it, sparing them the disappointment of coming to this blog and finding the cupboard bare -- the pressure is off. The blog is now like junk mail. You get it, you glance at it, you discard it.

But junk mail is better than no mail at all.

What do I mean the pressure is off, practically speaking? I mean I don't have to be long, fine or deep. I can be short, glib and shallow. I don't have to produces tomes. I can write postcards.

So: I read a review of a movie called "Murderball," which describes rugby played, the review said, by"quadriplegics." I have been knowing that paraplegics have lost the use of their legs and quadriplegics have lost the use of their arms and legs. Therefore (I'm thinking) who is responsible for this damn sloppy language? A quadriplegic can't play violent wheelchair games.

I google. I find the quadrugby.com website -- it took a while. And I discover that there are degrees in quadriplegia:

Players must have a combination of upper and lower extremity impairment to be considered as eligible to participate. Most of the players have sustained cervical level spinal injuries and have some type of quadriplegia as a result. Players are given a classification number from one of seven classifications ranging from 0.5 - 3.5. The 0.5 player has the greatest impairment and is comparable to a C5 quadriplegic. Of those eligible to participate, the 3.5 player has the least impairment and is similar to a C7-8 incomplete quadriplegic. Both male and females are encouraged to play, and because of the classification process gender advantages don't exist.

In the review, one player said he was a 3.0: one good hand and one "shitty" hand. As in most things, it's a matter of degree. We all live on a continuum. Indeed, we live several. Our lives are an intersection of an infinite number of skills, limits, passions and disinclinations, each of which (if we think about it) can be expressed as some number carried out three decimal places on a scale of one to a billion.

Oh sure it's true, and it's obvious blah blah (you say). I been knowing that (you say). Don't waste my time with the obvious.

Well, recall the conclusion of Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find," where the mass murderer's minion (say that three times fast) says the old lady was a pretty nice old lady, and the mass murderer says (I'm paraphrasing) "All she needed was someone to kill her every day."

Hey a day without Flannery O'Connor is a day without sunshine and periods of intermittent cloud cover.