By MONTE DUTTON
On the night of January 2, something unprecedented happened. My stomach blew up. It perforated. I couldn’t get out of bed till morning. I went to the hospital without shoes, laptop and keys, from home to Laurens to Greenville. Surgery was late that night.
I had posted 40 stories in 40 days. I haven’t since. This seems weird. I’m learning to write again. The hospital gave me ketamine. Ketamine is a painkiller fortified with artificial intelligence. When EMS picked me up, they they wouldn’t let me take my laptop. Apparently I thought I could write stories sitting on the edge of a bed with staples holding a 10-inch gash together.
In the emergency room, when my eyes opened, I could see the TV in the room. When they closed, my imaginary laptop showed up.
After surgery, late night TCM showed the original The Manchurian Candidate, full of brainwashing, assassination and intrigue. I knew it was a movie. It still terrified me.
I’ll never watch it again.
One night I thought a 23-year-old nurse was the center of the universe. Or maybe I was. It was something of a tale of fantasy and sci-fi. When I awakened, it dawned on me how absurd it was. I still wanted to go to ballgames. I wanted to take photos. I wanted to put them on this website. I thought of a Tom T. Hall song.
Four hundred hogs / They just standing out there / My wife can’t feed ‘em and my neighbors don’t care / They can’t go out and roam around like my old hunting dogs / Here I am in this damn bed and who’s gonna feed them hogs?
That’s it. That what it’s like. Everything is more complicated. Everything is harder. It’s harder to walk. It’s harder to type. It’s harder to sleep. It’s harder for Furman basketball to win. My arms are fine. My legs are a mess.
I’m going to to be fine. It is going to take a while.
There’s nothing I can do to speed it up without slowing it down. I learned how to write sports when I was in high school on a Remington manual typewriter. I wrote a daily diary about football practice. I’m looking on the bright side. I’m a lot better than I was then. Or yesterday.
I expect no one was as nice to Napoleon on Saint Helena. No one would believe the friends who came. I was barely in the Laurens County Hospital when I got a call from Keith Richardson. I don’t know he knew I was there. Two weeks later, I had a setback and got shipped back from Encompass Health to Greenville Memorial. As soon as I got there, he called again.
He still looks out for his boys, 49 years ago or not. Not just the good ones. All of us. I’ll never forget it. I almost didn’t have a chance.
I’ve been trying to see what condition my condition was in, quoting a Mickey Newbery song. Since Tuesday, it’s been getting better and better. I’ve still got a long way to go and a short time to get there. At my age, can’t rush it anymore.
Folks from Laurens County, NASCAR, Furman, music and family have come see me, and on account of how many there were and what condition I was in at the time, I’m sure I couldn’t remember them all. The MVPs are Coach Richardson and my nephew, Ray Phillips, and his wife Jessica, fellow Paladin Chad O’Rear, Al Pearce came from Virginia and Vince Pawless from Saint Jo, Texas. Rick Minter’s called a half dozen times. Amanda Capps brought a thoughtful care package. John Clayton kept me as up to date as a man can been whose job is in darkness. I’ll to try make it up to everybody as soon as I can.
Wellpilgrim.com is adjusting to the winter chill. In fact, it’s frozen.
Times are changing. I am aware of how irrelevant what I do for a living has become and thus how unimportant my efforts are. The readers appreciate them, but there aren’t enough of them. I doubt there ever will be again.
It’s what I do. It’s what I know.
Support the advertisers. They are all fine people who want their businesses associated with honest coverage of local sports.
In the off chance you’d like to read my novels and other books, they’re available on Amazon and many prominent bookseller sites.
You can read them on your phones and other devices for a modest cost. I make a bit more if you purchase the actual books, but what I mainly want is for folks to read them.
The Latter Days is a baseball novel about a former player and manager, Clyde Kinlaw, trying to prove the game hasn’t passed him by. His proof is a raw talent named Taiquan Wattson.
Photo galleries are posted on Instagram @furmanatt and @laurenscountysports.
Thanks for putting up with me.
Nightrider's Lament 
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