The President of the United States gave his annual State of the Union Address this past week and said a lot of things of a very political nature and I wanted to write some scathing commentary about it. I had intended to focus my rapier wit upon his words regarding healthcare and Iraq. I hoped to verbally eviscerate him and make him look foolish like many do even though he seems to be doing just fine on that all by himself and without any help from anyone. However, the residual pain in my left calf is distracting me too much.

The pain actually came Saturday morning. I occasionally suffer from horrible leg cramps in the middle of the night or early morning in my calf muscles. If you are someone who has experienced this you know that the pain is quite unlike anything you could ever imagine. It is like someone stuck a giant fork into your calf and is now twisting up your muscles as though it were a fork in a plateful of spaghetti. It is intense. When you put your hand to the calf while it is in the middle of this cramp you can feel the muscles tight and quivering. Usually, all I can do is lay there and open my mouth in a silent scream and writhe because the pain is so intense I cannot even catch my breath to let loose with an actual scream.

This past Saturday, however, I was able to leap out of bed and land on that leg. It hurt like hell but forcing the muscle to stretch seemed to stop the cramp. Of course my leg muscle still hurt the rest of the day as though I had been working out all day. If only these cramps lead to stronger and more muscular calves but it doesn’t quite work that way.

I have been told that the muscle cramps are caused by some kind of vitamin deficiency. The problem is I can never remember what vitamin. I think it may actually be potassium. Is potassium a vitamin? I was raked over the coals for not knowing the exact molecular difference between alcohol and water intoxication here not long ago (as though the difference between then somehow exonerated the radio station who helped kill a woman who drank too much water) so I had better not say for sure. I do remember that bananas are supposed to have a lot of potassium in them. So, I bought some. I have yet to eat one and my calf still hurts a bit today.

I wanted to write about the Democratic candidates that have popped up recently. I wanted to talk about Hilary and Obama and Tiny Tim or whoever the hell else has decided to through his, her or its hat in the ring for the Presidential run. I wanted to write about how it seems that the presidential race seems to get earlier and earlier every time one comes around in the same way people complain that Christmas seems to come around earlier and earlier ever year. However, there is a pain on my right side about midway down and that is distracting me.

A couple of years back, when the White Sox were busy trying to win a World Series, I watched a game at a friend’s house. Something very exciting happened and we all stood up and high-fived one another. One of my friends, as I raised my arms over my head to give a double high-fiver, playfully punched me repeatedly in the side. I think it was meant to be playful. He could have been trying to break my rib, but I choose to believe the injury I received was an accident. It hurt like hell for a while, seemed to die out and then I started getting terrible pain there a couple of days later. A visit to the doctor confirmed the pain was likely a cracked rib. I am wondering if the cold, something I lifted, a funny way I slept, my bad posture or my leaping out of bed due to my cramped leg re-injured something over there. It only hurts when I move.

The problem is I am also a hypochondriac. I am also a generally negative-thinking person and I generally assume I am dying at all times. I walk into the doctor’s office thinking I am dying and then can be pleasantly surprised when I am not. So, I am also thinking my liver is dying since I think that maybe my liver is over there somewhere. Then again, I didn’t know water intoxication was because of molecules bursting and that this somehow cleared a radio station of wrong-doing so what do I know.

I was thinking I should finally make a comment about the “Surge” that everyone is talking about like some kind of new soft drink. You have to love these political people who come up with these phrases. Big kudos go out to the guy who came up with the idea of sending more people into harms’ way for a situation that looks utterly hopeless and calling it a “Surge.” That’s a great name for a product, band or something to put on a T-Shirt. Maybe a radio station out there uses the name. You are listening to 94.5 The Surge…

However, I keep thinking about the fact that my car keeps freezing up on the inside. I have a Jeep and it is over 100,000 miles on the odometer these days. The little dial on the dashboard that you use to change the air from blowing on your face to blowing onto your feet to blowing into your feet and face to blowing onto the windows to shutting off the air all-together is broken. This means it is always blowing air right into your face. Whatever that dial is supposed to be hooked up to in order to change from one thing to another is no longer attached. The best you can do is turn it to cool if it is too hot and then turn the fan all the way down to low and shut off the vents if you don’t want air. However, these days it is freezing.

What this has done is made it unable to blow hot air at my windows. Since it got really cold lately this means when I turn on my car the inside of the windows freeze up instead of the defroster warming the windows and preventing such things from happening. This has lead to humorous scenes such as me scraping the inside of my windows with an ice scraper. This morning I was using some of the papers I have scattered all over my car with Google Maps on them to try and redirect the hot blowing air that is blowing into my face back toward the windows. It seemed to work but it is in impossible to do when you are driving unless you have an overwhelming desire to crash into something.

In short, there is a lot going on in the world right now. There is a lot that should be commented on. There are a lot of things wrong and I firmly believe laughing at them makes them easier to deal with and takes away their bite. If you laugh at the monster in the closet it becomes less scary. If you laugh at laughable ideas then the ideas loose their weight.

I believe I should comment on those things because all of the voices can add up to one loud voice. The problem is life gets in the way. Clutter gets in the way and it can be hard to write past that clutter. Meanwhile I still wonder if my liver is about to explode.

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.