A Left-Handed Salute to Wretchedness

by Jim Washburn

I’d like to express my gratitude to the wretched of the world: Thank you, wretched people. Thank you very much.

When my wife complains about our lot—a mood set off only by major cosmic events, such as the sun rising—I hasten to remind her that whatever our petty travails, we’re still better off than four-fifths of the poor saps on the planet—the ones who make our tennis shoes for pennies; or who live where our bombs land; or don’t have potable water, food or a roof over their heads; or who forage in a dump or fish toxic waters to scrape through the day; or whose crops wither and children die in the dust; or all of the above. Those guys.

Compared to them, we’re living the dream. We shack down in a Mediterranean climate. We luxuriate in hot water. We buy packages with food in them. I’ve lived on my block for 33 years without one bomb going off.

Jet Lee in The One

So we feel sorry for the wretched, and maybe do some small things to help, but mostly they help us feel better, because there’s something about human nature that exults in the knowledge there’s someone worse off than you. I wonder if that feeling’s amplified for the very wealthy, where, like Jet Li in The One, you’re godlike atop a pyramid, having vanquished and stolen the power of the lesser beings below.

Not to change the subject, but have you read all the reports in recent years of the nation’s wealth flowing increasingly up to those who are already the richest, while the rest of us are working harder but leading fiscally diminished lives? Or about this latest thing under consideration in my home state of California, where the Governor is looking at using millions of federal economic stimulus dollars to convert diamond lanes into toll lanes for the rich? This at the same time bus services for working people are being severely cut back?

I like saying “I told you so” as much as the next guy, and can dig out columns where 12 years ago I predicted the ride-share lanes would end up becoming Lexus lanes peopled with important, pretty lads and lasses gliding past our sorry asses. I also predicted log flume rides would become the prevalent form of mass transit, so keep an eye out for that happening.  

I don’t have to ride the bus yet, so I suppose I should be feeling relatively better that so many other people are doing relatively worse. But it doesn’t quite work like that. No matter how sincerely you may tell a legless Katrina victim, “I feel your pain” you never feel it as much as you might your own hangnail.

And so it is with me. I feel sorry for the Afghan villagers we’ve bombed, and the people in drought-stricken wherever, but not as sorry as I do about my left elbow, which has been paining me for seeming ages now.

Along with practicing supply-side ergonomics, I bang into things, so when the pain hit the one-month mark, I started worrying that maybe little bone fragments were sawing away at my tendons in there. I figured I should see a doctor. Being of limited means, and with $5,000 deductible, self-paid insurance, my wife suggested I go to her barbershop instead. No, she’s not one of those real old-school barbers with the leeches. But one of her customers is a retired doctor, so she arranged for me to drop in on his haircut. I was his first patient in two years, he told me, reaching an arm out from under the smock, squeezing a particular elbow juncture and asking, “Does that hurt?”

“Like a son of a bitch.”

“You’ve got tennis elbow then. Try not to use that arm for a month or two.”

Then my wife took some of the gray out of my hair. This wasn’t my idea: She had a new product and needed a guinea pig before she tried it on her customers. It works! My hair now feels so revitalized it says it’s leaving me for a younger head.

As for my elbow, I think doctors named the condition tennis elbow because it’s only people in the tennis club lifestyle who have the wherewithal and leisure to take the doctors’ advice.

Don’t use my elbow? I’m desperately trying to sell stuff on eBay before we have to move—I shipped 200 pounds of old tube hi-fi gear this week. I’ve shifted maybe 1,000 pounds of stuff in the garage to ferret out the record albums I need for a museum exhibit. Tomorrow, I’m moving a garage full of my late dad’s stuff into a storage unit. I’ve got lawns to mow, trees to prune, words to type, and sundry pressing tasks calling for a full complement of elbows.

I’ve played tennis maybe twice in my life; it hasn’t been a source of repetitive motion for me. So I’ve taken to calling my impediment penis elbow.

I mentioned this to a friend, who advised, “You’ve got to alternate hands.”

Jimi Hendrix at Royal Albert Hall

“I can’t. I’m monogamous,” I replied. I get all the punch lines in this column.

I am trying to learn to do common household tasks with my right hand, making me realize how determinedly left-handed I am. In school, they tried forcing me to write right-handed, getting me so screwed up I went the wrong way on the Maypole dance. When I got a guitar at age 12, my parents made me take lessons, where the teacher insisted I learn right-handed. I was dreadful at my weekly lesson, while at home I learned to play left-handed, but with the strings upside-down because I had to keep the guitar strung right-handed for the lessons.

I play upside-down to this day, mostly on right-handed guitars, because just try finding a decent left-handed one. Why is it that government requires businesses to have wheelchair ramps and restrooms, even in Ladder Emporium, yet nine percent of the population has to struggle unaided with right-handed instruments, cell phones, scissors and school desks, while getting sinister left-handed compliments from left field?

Check Wikipedia: left-handedness is disparaged throughout the world. In Latin languages, being left-handed puts you in league with the devil, though you don’t get the tail he does. In several languages, having “two left hands” connotes clumsiness and dullness. In Estonia, their word for left-handedness, vasakukaeline,  means “stupider than a Vaseline sandwich.” In some Middle Eastern cultures the left hand is so reviled that they defecate into it. Ha, take that, stupid hand! Now, squeeze!

I’m glad I’m left-handed. Jim Hendrix was left-handed and made an upside-down right-handed guitar look and sound like the coolest thing in the world.

“I’m the one that’s got to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to,” Hendrix sang, and that’s our moral for today.

I am noticing, after 54 years on this earth, that money makes things easier. Being handsome, white, right-handed, male, of good lineage, and other factors also apply. But you’re still gonna die, and none of that other stuff is going to help you sing your song when darkness falls.

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