31 Ghosts – Phantom Limb

I startled awake and became immediately aware of a few things all at once: my mouth and throat felt like they were made of sandpaper and I wasn’t able to sit up because something was holding me down. 

“Whoa there, Tay,” said a voice and gentle pressure of a hand on my chest. Then to someone else, “Go grab the doctor and tell him Taylor’s awake!” Back to me: “You’re okay, Taylor. You’re okay…”

“Why—” I started but my voice felt like fire coming up my sandpaper throat. I coughed.

“Shh…”

“Maj?” I croaked out.

“You got it, Tay. I’m Marjorie. Take it easy. You’ve been out a while…”

I heard people enter the room. “Good afternoon, Mister Nichols,” said a voice I didn’t know. She sounded confident, though. “Do you know where you are?”

I took in all the clues my mind had been processing during these first minutes of consciousness. I sniffed and smelled… myself. Eew. But also antiseptic. And… was that the annoying beeping of a heart monitor? “Hosp—” I coughed again, swallowed roughly and tried again, “Hospital?”

“Excellent,” the new voice said. “Do you know why you’re here?”

I thought hard and just shook my head. I tried to think past the thick fogbank that obscured anything in my brain. Maj and I were going somewhere in my car… “Acc…accident?”

“Do you remember the accident?”

So there was an accident! Crap! “Maj?!”

“I’m right here, buddy,” she patted my shoulder. “I’m okay.”

“What… happened?”

There was a pause – I didn’t like that pause. It said there was something no one wanted to tell me.

“We were T-boned,” Maj said. Even though I had no memory of it, I involuntarily winced. “Yeah, pretty bad. Driver’s side…” another pause. “Your side,” she said, her voice cracking.

“You’ve been unconscious for a while, Mr. Nichols. There was some swelling in your brain that we were most concerned about. You’re still pretty heavily drugged, but we removed the breathing tube yesterday and we’ve been easing you back.

I nodded but couldn’t process that the words pertained to me.

“We’ve been waiting for you to come around, buddy,” Maj said, patting my right shoulder.

I reached up to pat her hand back… but I couldn’t. My heart beat faster. Why couldn’t I move my arm? I looked towards my left arm, and I heard Maj’s breath catch.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, “Your arm was crushed in the accident. We couldn’t save it.”

I was aware of the beeping heart monitor machine speeding up even as it started to sound fainter for some reason.

“Tay?” Maj said from a great distance away.

“He’s going under again,” the doctor said.

The next time I woke up I still didn’t remember the accident, but I remembered the conversation. They must have really lightened the drugs because my brain felt less foggy. I opened my eyes and noticed it was dark – well, as dark as a hospital room ever gets. I was alone. I moved my right arm and was gratified to feel the tactile blankets and side of the bed – actually feel them. So, my right arm was still there. There was an IV line in it, but it was still there. I groped around and felt a bedside table and found what I was looking for – my glasses. The hospital room comfortingly resolved in my bespeckled vision. But after a quick look around at my surroundings, my gaze fell on the mass of bandages just below my left shoulder. I couldn’t look away. I don’t know how long I stared, but I must have fallen asleep because I woke blinking away the sun streaming into the room.

A nurse drew the curtain and then noticing I was awake said, “Good morning! Glad to see you’re awake! I’ll let your doctor know,” and quickly left.

I looked down at the bandages around my left shoulder and gasped – the bandages were still there, but my arm was there! I tried to flex my left hand but nothing. I tried to bend the arm… but nothing again. But it was there. My arm!

The doctor came in and I didn’t wait for her to say anything. “My arm!”

“I know, Mister Nichols, it’s hard to adjust to the idea that—”

“It’s there!” I said, pointing to it with my right hand.

A puzzled look came over her face for a moment, and then realization. “Mister Nichols, there’s something called ‘phantom limb syndrome’ where sometimes when we lose an arm or a leg we have the feeling that it’s actually still there even though it’s not.”

I looked to her, then back at the very corporeal arm. “But… it’s right there!” I said. Then, as if cued to movement I watched as my left arm bent and flexed my fingers experimentally, then the hand rotated around and the fingers contracted. Well, most of the fingers. My hand just flipped me off.

The next few days were a blur – no, I mean seriously, I was still on some pretty heavy drugs. But what I remember very clearly was my damn broken ribs. Wow, those hurt right through the drugs. But aside from the broken ribs was the arm. After getting the bird from an appendage you thought had loyalty to you, I realized it wasn’t actually my arm. And, honestly, flipping me off was one of the kindest things it did. In those following days, the arm, in no particular order, tried to choke me, slap me, poke my eyes Three Stooges-style, tried to knock over a full glass of water, grope Maj regularly, and once reached very angrily towards a butter knife – how did I know it was angrily reaching for the knife? I just knew. I just knew. But none of those attempts came of anything because this wasn’t a phantom limb, after all – it was a ghost limb.

I was discharged from the hospital, but that just meant recovering at home. I talked to my boss and HR and we talked about long-term disability and my job still being there, all the while I stared at my ghost arm making jerking off gestures and twiddling its thumb. When the call ended I said to my arm, “You know twiddling one thumb looks really stupid.”

It flipped me off.

“Wait, you can hear me?”

It made gesture that I could only assume was supposed to be a light bulb moment. The fist nodded in a surly way. Then the hand started moving, the finger tracing something in the air.

“What are you doing? What’s that… Is that an ‘I’?”

Thumbs up.

“M…J…U….S…T…A…N…A…R…M…. I’m just an arm? Yeah, obviously!”

The fist clenched angrily.

“Oh, you’re not done.”

The fist shook negative, then started drawing letters in the air.

“M…Y…B…O…D…Y…I…S…O…U…T…T…H…E…R…E. Your body is out there?

The hand pointed far away.

“Ah, like out in the world somewhere?”

The fist nodded.

It took a lot more spelling, but the arm told me that he lost his arm, too – duh, right? But unlike my me, he bled out.

“Wait, so you lost an arm, died… and now I have your arm, but your armless ghost is stuck here, too?”

It spelled out “I’m not armless. I’ve still got one arm, dipshit.”

“Really? You needed to spell out ‘dipshit’?”

It flipped me off again but was dancing the middle finger around in glee.

“Great,” I said, “You’re very disarming.” I started laughing. The arm tried to stick the finger up my nose.

I explained the situation to Maj, and then I explained it again more slowly. And then she checked my prescription bottles to make sure I wasn’t taking too much, and I explained it all one more time. She finally came around to the idea that we were going to have to find the arm’s body, but it would still be another week before I felt well enough to ride in the (rental) car. During that time, the hand signed everything it knew about where we could find its body.

When I finally climbed into the passenger seat of the car, I’ll admit I was feeling pretty nervous – less about taking a ghost arm to search for it’s one-armed body like some weird spectral version of The Fugitive and more about going out in the car. I was pretty drugged up on the way home from the hospital, so this was my first real outing since the accident. I still didn’t have any memory of what happened, but I had seen the police photos and just being out brought the liminal images of the crushed cars into my brain – like phantom memories, almost. The arm, maybe sensing my apprehension, tried patting my leg comfortingly. I mean, the hand passed right into my thigh every time, so that was weird, but it was a nice gesture.

Maj drove us through town to the industrial area, past idling trucks at loading docks. The sun was nearing the horizon and most of the sprawling parking lots were deserted of their daily occupants. As we started to get closer, the hand started pointing right and left. I called out to Maj and she turned the appropriate way until we found ourselves at a non-descript cement block of a building, the gray stone finish streaked with years of dirty rain and smog. The arm pointed wildly towards the back of the building. I directed Maj and we found ourselves by the back loading dock.

I don’t know if I saw him first, or the arm did – I mean, I guess the arm was seeing it through my eyes? I’m not really sure how that worked, but I saw a figure searching near the enormous dumpster. Only as we got closer, I could see it wasn’t exactly a dumpster, it was an industrial-sized trash compactor. And the figure was missing an arm. I didn’t need the arm to spell this one out for me…

“Maj, he’s here,” I said.

“He?”

“The arm’s owner. Handler?”

“Handler! Ha! I see what you did there…”

The arm tried to slap me.

I opened the door and started out. The ghost looked up and our eyes met. We walked slowly towards each other. We stopped a few feet apart. He was staring at the arm – his arm.

“I don’t know how, but I managed to end up with your arm.”

He looked up at me and nodded. We were silent for what seemed like a long time.

“I’m sorry, I don’t really know what else to say. Should we finish this, err, arms deal?”

The ghost rolled his eyes.

The arm reached out and the man reached out with his right hand. When the two hands met, I felt something like a deep electrical shock right in the bandaged left arm socket. At the same time the space around the man lit up in brilliant, shimmering light. When my eyes adjusted, I could see the man smiling, holding his now-attached left arm with his right hand, flexing the fingers of his left hand and grinning broadly. He looked up at me and mouthed “Thank you” before the light flared blindingly and then winked out completely leaving the area seemingly darker than before.

“What the hell was that?” Maj asked coming up next to me.

“You know,” I smiled, “Just arming a ghost.”

“Ugh,” she groaned. “I think I need some of your drugs!”

We started back towards the car. “Are you saying you can’t hand-le this?”

“Keep going, Tay, and I’m personally going to take off your other arm.”

She was joking, but the thought made me think about my missing arm for a moment. It felt… gone. I was sad for the loss of my arm, of course, but I was glad that I wasn’t feeling the phantom limb.

I’d had just about enough of phantom limbs…

31 Ghosts – I Don’t Believe In Ghosts, But…

You wake with a start in the middle of the night. You check your phone – 3:37am. Something woke you up, but listening to the silence of the house, you don’t know what disturbed your sleep. You hear the dog snoring softly at the foot of the bed, the familiar rhythm of your partner’s deep sleep breaths. You listen more intently and hear the ice maker in the fridge downstairs hum to life – maybe that was it? No… Wait, what’s that? That’s the door to the kitchen creaking open. Footsteps. Someone – or something – is walking across the hard wood floor in the living room.

You take hold of the bat you keep alongside your bed and quietly climb out of the bed, padding silently across the room, not even disturbing the dog. As you start down the stairs, the footsteps move back into the kitchen. You reach the bottom of the stairs and reach for the light switch and flip it on. As the room fills with light, you stifle a scream – there are clothes everywhere.

Your partner swore they were going to finish folding the laundry and take it upstairs and here they all are, half-folded and strewn all over the room. With a sigh you drop down onto the couch and start folding the remaining clothes – it’s got to get done, right? And you’ve got that meeting in the morning – don’t forget the business trip at the end of the week. And Tuesday is your doctor’s appointment, right? No, dentist appointment – crap, did you book both this week? Did your partner pay the water bill? And what’s with gas prices? Do you have time to fill the car before going to work in the morning or after?

In the kitchen, the ghost stands there tapping his feet and says to himself, “Jesus, what do I have to do to get someone’s attention?!”

I told a lot of people about 31 Ghosts last year outside of October. The first volume of 31 Ghosts came up in conversations more frequently than I would have imagined – sometimes I’d mention it in relation to something we were talking about, or Akilah would mention the book, or a friend would ask about it. What I found fascinating was a pretty common refrain after hearing about the subject matter: “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

But almost every time, they follow “I don’t believe in ghosts” with “but…” which could lead to “…this one time…” or “…my friend said this happened to them…” or “…my grandmother used to tell us about…” They may not believe in ghosts… but they’re not against believing in ghosts. One person said “I don’t believe in ghosts,” and then added, “I don’t like scary things!” …And then told me about the time she saw a ghost staring at her.

Ghosts can be a tough sell – despite what the innumerable ghost-hunting shows would lead you to believe, we don’t have any incontrovertible proof ghosts exist. “Believe” is a verb – it’s something you have to actually do. And, let’s face it, we’ve all got enough to do!

Last year I wrote that 2022 to that point had been a crazy, busy year – and it had been! But 2023 looked at 2022 and said, “Hold my beer…” It started off partially evacuating my home because of a potential flood – seriously, that was the beginning of the year. And just to hit the highlights: I got married, I moved out of Guerneville after living there for more than 19 years, did another Tough Mudder 5K obstacle race, went on my first cruise, and through all of it I managed to keep my 10,000 step streak going. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a conference of a dozen ghosts in the kitchen right now complaining about how “Jordy is just not paying any attention to us! I’ve rattled so many chains I’m getting carpal tunnel!”

Outside of writing this month, this October is already shaping up to be one of busiest, craziest months of an already busy and crazy year. But it’s October 1 and there’s no time for the ghosts to be sequestered and ignored! Join me on inviting the ghouls in from the garage! Bring the specters in from the study! Let the poltergeists out of the pool! Okay, yeah, that last one was kind of a stretch, but you get the point! It’s ghost time, baby!

I don’t know what kind of stories are ahead this month, but I can tell you there’s going to be something for the next 31 days! So stay tuned because 31 Ghosts is back for the seventh year!

Happy New Year!

I woke up sore yesterday. It seemed fitting for the last day of 2022. The day before I ran on the treadmill at the gym because it was pouring rain. But I ran — something I couldn’t say I could do at the beginning of 2022. I wanted to run a solid hour, but my body told me I shouldn’t push that long yesterday. So, I listened to my body (something I didn’t do a great job of last year).

When I got off the treadmill, I was a little disappointed I didn’t get as far as I wanted to but I was quick to remind myself of just how much I had accomplished — again, at the beginning of last year I wasn’t running at all. Three and a half miles is an accomplishment, but my mind tends to focus on the negatives… it’s just the way it works. It’s something I’ve been working on. Last year I hiked Mount Umunhum, Mount Saint Helena, and Mount Tamalpais. But what I think about most is how I didn’t finish Mount Diablo, getting sick just a mile from the summit. Didn’t listen to my body. (But look at what you did do!).

I started my own company – Think Dude Think LLC – and used it to publish my first book, the first three years of 31 Ghosts (which [shameless pitch] is available here at Amazon). For the record, I put it together myself – all the layout and design – that’s me. Months detached I can at least appreciate the effort. These are lifelong goals I can check off! And yet, I’ve been beating myself up over not getting the audiobook done before the end of the year, or really writing anything since finishing October’s run of 31 Ghosts (my god, the sixth year I’ve done that – another accomplishment I don’t think I’ve let myself appreciate).

And let’s get back to being able to run and hike, shall we? Back in November I wrote about accomplishing one year of consecutive 10,000 step days. Well, I’ve kept up on that – I’m on my 416th consecutive day of at least 10,000 steps now. Isolating 2022 – because this is a year-in-review kind of thing – I walked (or ran or hiked) 2,249 miles over the course of the year. That sort of thing can change a guy – I also lost 34 pounds. I’m now down to a weight I haven’t seen since the Clinton administration.

But in June I was shocked to discover during a routine physical that, surprise! I’m diabetic. Type II. I didn’t take it well. I haven’t written about it at all, and if this is the first you’re hearing about it, don’t feel bad – it took a month before I could mention it to anyone other than Akilah, and even then I don’t think I told anyone outside of immediate family. I went on medication, I dramatically changed my diet (and the combination was key to losing most of those 34 pounds), I logged my glucose twice a day (as well as a weight, resting heart rate, temperature, blood pressure – I was not going to be surprised by my body again!), and I kept up the exercise. I have a series of short videos of me staring into my phone sweating and panting at the top of various mountains saying, “Fuck you, diabetes!” And my work paid off – when I went back in September, my A1C dropped dramatically – technically I’m “pre-diabetic” now (so… post-diabetic as pre-diabetic…? Am I my own prequel?). And yet, I was hounding myself leading up to the most recent test on Friday because it had been a super stressful quarter and my diet had slacked more than it should have and I knew I was going to regress because I’m a horrible person, and… look, I know I’m not a horrible person. But this is what goes on in my mind. And, for the record, the results came back and I was actually .1 point lower than the September number. Not much, but the needle moved for the better.

I made a deliberately over-stuffed list of things to do over the week I had off between Christmas and New Years – there were bigger things like “build a spice rack” and clean various rooms mixed in with less intensive things like “meditate” and “go for a motorcycle ride.” With just a day left in my vacation I didn’t get even half the things (big and small) checked off, and that’s fine… mostly. I countered the negative voices by telling myself I should make a list of the things I did that weren’t on the list. One of the things I didn’t check off was “Take stock of 2022.” This post is part of that, though outside of just rolling the events around in my head I didn’t really wrestle with it too much outside of writing it down now.

Part of the problem has been exactly what I’ve put down here already – as soon as I acknowledge, “I did this,” part of me immediately comes back with “Yes, but you didn’t do that.” Voltaire wrote that “Perfect is the enemy of good,” and it’s damn well one of my worst enemies as well. As much as I’ve battled my weight, and putting a book together, and diabetes, I’ve battled myself more existentially on this front. I think I’m winning – I don’t think I’d be able to chalk up as many items in the “win” column this year if I weren’t – but it’s a slog. I’m getting better, but this is my chief adversary again for a productive 2023.

In years past I’ve put together not resolutions, but goals. I’m not going to do that this year. I have some ideas of what I want to accomplish – both vague and concrete – but if these last few years has taught us anything it’s to expect the unexpected. We’ll see what 2023 has in store. One thing I can guarantee is that I’m going to keep moving and evolving.

Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow
Things should start to get interesting right about now.
– Bob Dylan, Mississippi