Saw the surgeon today: Verdict was basically the beginnings of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Ergo, I won’t be using the computer much for the next six weeks and so won’t be posting here much. I’m to remain splint-ed up for the whole period and he injected my wrists/hands with cortisone and an anesthetic which made things really, really weird for awhile. Another injection in six weeks and maybe surgery will follow.

What was even weirder than my hands going suddenly numb after having a needle shoved into the sensitive parts of my wrists was that the surgical office is at Domino Farms, an Ann Arbor experience I hadn’t had yet. Plunked down in the middle of the Ave Maria art gallery, bookstore and radio station is the doctor’s office. When I was sent for x-rays, I had to walk through the whole Ave Maria/Bleedin’ Christ/radio station blaring in-your-face fascist propaganda thing.

In a large glass case was a lifesize plaster statue of the torso of Christ in agony with his arms outstretched and hovering overhead the crown of thorns, about to descend on his bleeding brow.

Being of the protestant/pentecostal background, we were always told that the Catholic penchant for depicting Christ in agony on the cross was a work of Satan because the cross should always be empty, signifying his triumph over it and death. Needless to say, in Duncan, Oklahoma, even at Assumption Catholic Church, there is nothing to compare to the very weird confluence of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, farm animals and bleedin’ Jesus that is Tom Monaghan’s Domino Farms. I’ll never be able to look a Domino’s pizza in the face ever again.

It was all very Mel Gibson, especially when the doctor shoved the needles into my wrists.

I got lots of very pointed and suspicious looks as I walked through the halls trying to find radiology. You think Opus Dei can tell you’re a heathen trailing fire and brimstone behind you? Sure seemed like it.

But then again, it could just be because I happened to have toted along Jimmy Breslin’s new fire-and-brimstone indictment of the Catholic church for its greed, venality and sexual abuse entitled The Church That Forgot Christ. The lettering on the cover is white on black, so it stands out.

Yeah, maybe that was it.

Meanwhile, time to splint things up and lie on the couch. For six weeks.

Good god.