I pulled a muscle in my back the other day. The injury itself is distressing enough, since my threshold for pain is lower than the IQ of most blonde porn stars.
When I get hurt, I whine. Incessantly. To anyone who'll listen. In fact, now might be a good time to turn to another page and spare yourself the drudgery.
The thing is, it's not the nagging pain in my lower back that troubles me most, it's HOW it got there. It's HOW I hurt myself.
I did it yawning.
On the way home from my weekly Mon-Khmer lesson (I've mentioned my passion for the Austro-Asiatic languages before, yes?), I had occasion to stop and reflect upon life in the New Millennium, in a new home, in a new city (Santa Monica), in a new state of mind (SoCal-induced boredom). And in that moment of quiet reverie I involuntarily opened my mouth wide and breathed in deeply... and that's when something suddenly "popped" slightly to the north of my butt crack.
When I was a young man — last week, actually — I had a swaggering aura about me cultivated by a sense of invincibility. I could run fast, jump high, party hard and make love like a porn star (insert your own IQ zinger here).
When you're a young man, the world is your raw oyster, and it's just waiting for you to slurp it down whole, with a cold beer chaser. When you're a young man, you feel as indomitable as a Randy Johnson fastball.
And then one day, the simple act of yawning becomes too much for the body to handle. That's the day you cease to be a young man ingesting bivalve mollusks to put the carnal ocean in motion. That's the day you're reduced to tossing weak Charlie Hough-like knucklers.
That's the day you first notice the shadow of a social security check creeping across the lawn. That day, you get old.
Floored by this realization, I did what everybody in Hollywood does in the midst of a personal crisis: I grabbed my cell phone and called my agent.
"I'M OLD!" I howled. "I just hurt myself yawning!"
"Have you told anyone else yet?" he replied, his voice tinged with panic.
"Uh... no... why?" He breathed an audible sigh of relief. "Whatever you do, DON'T LET ANY- ONE KNOW YOU'RE OLD!" he said. "In this business, you get old, you die."
The same could be said for life in general, but rather than belabor the obvious to a guy who thinks Katie Holmes is the next Meryl Streep, I did what everybody in Hollywood does when an agent starts dispensing specious counsel: I hung up and went to Starbucks.
How did I get so soft? I wondered while sipping a frothy triple caramel mac-chiato. It seemed like only yesterday I was strong and virile. I'd spent a lifetime doing things a hell of a lot more strenuous than yawning, and not once had I ever come up lame.
It dawned on me that I needed to get in shape. I figured the best way to do so was to resume my cardiovascular routine. Problem was, I couldn't quite remember what that routine entailed. Then I remembered: I never HAD a cardiovascular routine. Caffeine and cigarettes kept me thin in college.
Perhaps it's too late, anyway. When yawns precipitate back spasms, it augurs for an impending respite on a mortician's slab. Surely my post-mortem corporeal decomposition cycle has gotten off to an early start. At any moment, a sneeze could cause my spleen to rupture. One bad case of the hiccups, and I'm done for.
In the end, I decided I wasn't getting enough Starbucks' products in my diet. Caffeine, after all, is a stimulant that wards off yawning. In fact, sipping my second frothy triple caramel macchiato of the day, I began to feel like a million bucks again. So I did what everybody in Hollywood does when they're thinking millions: I started writing a screenplay.
Tentatively titled "The Old Man and The Sea of Hip-Hoppers," my script chronicles the adventures of a feeble thir-tysomething scribe who reconnects with his youth by getting tattooed and pierced beyond recognition. My agent loves the concept - he thinks we can get Katie Holmes to sign on to play the female lead.
And I've gotten serious about reversing the process of my deteriorating physical condition. My agent hooked me up with a psychotherapist/exercise physiologist named Gar who recommended I spend less time yawning, and more time focusing on physical activities that stimulate me, such as baseball.
So I bought seasons tickets to the Dodgers, and my back has never felt better. (Dan Dunn, a Santa Monica resident, writes for Warner Bros. Online and appears in the Daily Press every Monday. For more FunHog fun, check out www.thefunhog.com).
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 25, 2002. Read the original PDF.