So far so great. Especially compared to last year. Last year on Christmas Eve I went to sleep with a big toe that was bugging me, had I stubbed it very badly but just didn't remember? Then, around three in the morning I awoke to find my toe on fire. Odd, because I couldn't actually see a blowtorch being held against it but that's about how much it hurt. Was it some sort of hairline fracture? How on earth could something hurt so badly. I got to thinking about Abu Ghraib and the limits of tolerability of pain. In the movies they just pass out when the pain gets bad enough. I was hoping for that. Didn't come. I just looked out the window waiting for dawn, wondering how bad it would have to get before I would have to go to the hospital. Around five I decided I had to go. Walking, however, was a bitch. The slightest pressure on that foot shot bolts of pain through me that a masochist would have orgasmed over. I drove with my left foot the ten minutes to the country hospital. I was here again in Social Circle, Georgia. I just wanted to be seen quickly and return home before the kids woke up. There was no way in hell that I'd wreck their Christmas morning. The intake lady said gout. The nurse said gout. The ER doc said bunion, gave me a powerful opiate and sent me home. We opened presents with me on the nod, my foot up and iced. I left for Italy to see my girlfriend the next day, high, high, high and hobbling on a borrowed cane from my now-deceased ex-great grandfather. In Italy I called my own doctor back in LA and she said gout. Most definitely. It turns out that the pills I take for my kidney often cause the uric acid to form and it the sharp edges of those crystals grinding against your bones that causes the unforgettable pain.

Oddly, I preferred having gout to a bunion. A bunion made me think of a my grandmother's hammer toes, an affliction of the old and the poor. But gout? Gout was the disease of kings. Henry the Eighth had it. It was the price paid for a life of jolly excess. Cristina the Countess and I went to La Scala in Milan in a box seat, me still on crutches, and I imagined the gout-ridden kings and princes that had occupied this very same box over the centuries. The gout pills finally kicked in and by the time we were in St. Tropez I was fine. And a week later I was snowboarding in St. Moritz. La dee da.

This Christmas I feel fantastic. Strong like bull.