Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Writing this post makes me nervous, because the subject matter is mostly personal, and I rarely write about personal matters on this site (or anywhere else, for that matter). Still, what I intend to write passes my standard litmus test. Anything I put on this site should be something I’d feel comfortable seeing reproduced in two locations:

1. A billboard in Times Square.
2. My boss’s living room.

Oh, what the hell, let’s disclose something without the safety net of sarcasm, critical pretensions, or academic distance. Honestly, it’s a small thing, but it’s a thing I’d rather write down than not.

Last Saturday night, my friends and I were engaged in a game of Ticket to Ride. Like all good games, the rules are straightforward and the execution is fun. The game board is a map of the United States criss-crossed with candy-colored train routes. The goal is to control as many of these routes as possible by the time the game ends. Each player has a pile of little plastic train tokens, and most of the action consists of players placing their tokens along routes to claim them. That’s the most relevant bit here, the tiny little tokens being placed on tiny little sections of the board.

The other relevant bit is my tremor, which, I am shocked to realize after perusing my archives, I have never mentioned. It’s fairly common in people with cerebral palsy. If you’re picturing uncontrollable shaking or an inability to cease moving, you’ve got it wrong. It only activates when I’m doing something with my hands (as opposed to the kinds of tremors you’d see in Parkinson’s disease, which occur at rest). It’s generally so slight as to be a non-issue, but it gets worse when I’m nervous, or excited, or thinking about my tremor, or because it’s Tuesday.

In neuroscience classes, students learn that the nervous system is essentially probabilistic and stochastic (a slight retreat into the comfort of academic distance, so sue me). Factions of neurons are constantly arguing with each other over important issues like, say, whether you should reach for that glass of water, or maybe have an orgasm. The faction that argues loudest and most efficiently gets its way, kind of like the U.S. Senate, though to my knowledge no piece of legislation has ever led to an orgasm. The thing to keep in mind is that just because one faction has won, that doesn’t mean all the other factions go quiet. In fact, some neurons will pipe up spontaneously and for no good reason, kind of like Michele Bachmann. A tremor is really just a visible manifestation of all this underlying chaos. Most of my neurons might be saying, “Carry this brimming cup of scalding hot tea across the room, and let’s not spill it, shall we?” but there are still a few clumps of neurons saying, “Also, it would be good to move your hand a little left, a little right, a little down, and a little up. All at once. And while we’re at it, climate change is tyranny.” Being nervous or excited (or Tuesday) makes a tremor worse because these states increase the general level of activity in the nervous system, making it harder to suppress these unwanted signals. And this is why Michele Bachmann should be given massive doses of horse tranquilizer. But I digress.

Let’s return to Ticket to Ride. I’m having a lot of fun playing the game, but I’m also having a lot of trouble placing the tiny little trains on the tiny little routes. Pinching the train lightly enough to lower it into a precise spot is proving extremely difficult. I’m well accustomed to my tremor and the dash of unpredictability it adds to tasks like this, but even by my standards this is weird, even unsettling. My friends are noticing, but I’m not sure how to address the situation, or even if I should. I’ve played this game before and it wasn’t a problem then, so why now? Is this just a natural byproduct of getting older? Is it a sign of things to come? A harbinger of the inevitable betrayal by the body? The first stealthy, subtle entreaties of frailty and age?

No. It turns out that I had to take a crap. Really badly. An hour after the game ended I was in the bathroom doing what I really hate to do in friends’ bathrooms. Without going into the kind of detail I’d be sure to regret later, let’s just say that the experience was unusually urgent. My best guess is that my enteric nervous system was already stressing out during the game, which elevated my tremor.

So to the list of excited, nervous, and Tuesday, we can now confidently add, “need to crap.” At first I thought I was crazy to believe that gastrointestinal distress could have worsened my hand tremor, but it’s really not so strange. Peoples’ bodies do all sorts of weird stuff when in that unfortunate situation; they sweat, get a chill, and, come to think of it, even occasionally get the shakes. The truth is that the human body is a bundle of strange chaos, and my hand tremor, slight as it may be, helps me remember that.