So, I was allowed out of the house today, for the first time since my surgery. SWHTL loaded me up into the passenger seat of my own damn car, drove me to the surgeon who had new x-rays made, checked my incisions (4 of them, all told, one in front, right alongside the belly button, and 3 in the back), and proclaimed himself satisfied with my progress - but then looked startled when I told him I'd taken myself off the pain meds because they weren't doing anything and I was wondering when I'd be cleared for "real" PT. He replied that he didn't want me doing anything more than walking for a few more weeks and still no BLT (bending, lifting, or twisting).

He might have a point. By the time I got home again I was quite done for the day even though there are a ton of things that need doing. I think I'm spending ~20 hours a day in this recliner.

But he also repeated a claim he'd made to me before surgery, and I've been turning it over in my head all day without any idea of what to make of it. He said that I must have an extremely high tolerance for pain both because I had already stopped taking the pain pills and because, based on the rapid degeneration of my back, he believed I had to have been in extreme pain throughout 2022.

The thing is, my chiropractor had been saying the same thing up until the beginning of May while I was going around telling people I was feeling much better, thanks. Even after I realized that the chiropractor was no longer helping, the only reason I gave in and saw the new surgeon was because a new set of x-rays showed me how my spine had gotten enough worse since January that I was beginning to worry about paralysis. (I learned after the surgery that one of the vertebrae had so thoroughly jammed into another that it had dug a furrow into the vertebra below and they had begun to naturally fuse together. The surgeon had to cut them apart to get them back into alignment.) 

So now I'm trying to figure out if any of that actually means anything - if it matters in any context beyond the fact that 5mg of oxycodone doesn't do fuck-all for me except make me constipated. I've always believed that in the moment of emergency/crisis/accident I seemed to be able to keep a clear head and to do (or keep doing) whatever had to be done despite any injuries. But I've also known that during the weeks of recovery after such an event I always behaved like a whiny toddler. (And it is also true that I have blessedly never been really tested by a serious physical injury - major road rash, slashed hand, slightly cracked noggin were the worst of it and at this point I don't need a more serious test, thanks.) It's not like I don't feel pain right now, either, my legs throb from hips to toes and my lower back feeling like someone sandpapered it - it's just the pain pills don't seem to have any effect on either of those things. I just don't seem to notice either during the daytime unless I stop and think about it and nights it might be worse or it might just be that I have nothing to think about so it seems worse, if you see what I mean...

Does it matter? I mean, possibly, in the sense that by not noticing (admitting?) how much pain I was in I probably let things get much worse than they otherwise might have been. But I'm definitely too old to play Darkman so I'm staying in the recliner as much as possible no matter how good I think I feel.

Which brings me to the subject of this diary - I am so tired of heroes. 

I mean, let's be up front here. I'm a geek. And when I was a kid, I was a comic-book geek. I was a Marvel geek. But live-action movies and tv shows of comic book shows (that weren't Batman) from the 70's through the 90's were just... awful. When the first Spiderman movie appeared in 2002 I had very low expectations but when it turned out so well I was thrilled. And when Iron Man came out... I mean, hell, I'd been an Iron Man fanboy (they call them "stans" now?) since I was in first grade and RDJ just nailed Tony Stark.

But that was, what, more than 25 movies ago? Plus all the other franchises, the DC stuff, the indie stuff, the X-Men (another childhood favorite) and, somewhere along the line, I just stopped caring about any of it. I stopped watching them in theaters quite a while back, can't remember exactly when, but I know I didn't watch End Game till long after it was on streaming and only because SWHTL was away for the weekend. There's a bunch of X-movies I haven't seen at all, I haven't seen any of the DCEU stuff except Aquaman which I only saw because my mom and SWHTL wanted to ogle Jason Momoa, haven't even seen much animated stuff, no Invincible, for example. Stopped watching Agents of Shield when they jumped the VR shark.

I did enjoy WandaVision but I only watched No Way Home just before surgery because I literally had nothing else to do, and the only scene I enjoyed where where Peter 2 cracked Peter 1's back because it was a meta-reference to the real back injuries Toby Maguire suffered when he filmed his Spiderman movies. Haven't watched a single episode of Ms Marvel even though twitter assures me that that means I'm an anti-Muslim bigot.

Now I'm stuck in this recliner and I'm trying to watch The Boys because I like Karl Urban and there isn't a single character in the series I care about and, despite having enjoyed both the Jane Foster/Thor and Gorr the God Butcher runs in the comics I have zero desire to watch the film.

And I can't help but thinking that Disney is planning to invest potential billions in the next wave of Marvel movies and series but I can't be the only one who's burned out on the whole idea...?

Instead of watching heroes, I'm burning away the hours playing wordle and all it's ordley variants.