Planet 22 Butte Montana Summer '03
I went back outside and opened the rear doors of the bus and began my workout. I could feel the hot dry wind. My auditory cortex was lit up trying to come back from the trance the song _-_-_-_ would put me in when I tried to remember the triplets in 7 part. It seemed like my prefrontal cortex would try to gluadiuos maximus its way into the neural network. “What about Good ‘Ol …1, 2, 3, 4?” My H zones and I bands immediately shrunk like Alice. The zones of overlap got larger, z-lines closed in, and the A band stood solid as a rock! “Do you mean like “Get Nutz”?” I replied to the echoes bouncing from my auditory association area to my prefrontal cortex. I may have even mumbled out loud a little, as some signals leaked through my Broca’s area and out into my body. The A band was still motionless as the thin filaments began to slide to the center of each Sarcomere right next door to the thick filaments. The muscle pulled tight and I lifted the empty box. The Integument touched the worn wood corner. The Intrinsic muscles of my left hand seemed to all flex in concert as I formed a cup in my hand for the corner of the 2x4x6 box. My cerebellum worked like a well oiled machine keeping me balanced as my A band in my flexor carpi ulnaris remained still, as the sarcomeres,myofibrils, muscle fibers, muscle fascicle, and Skeletal muscle contracted like the layers of an onion pulled tight! My biceps joined in to raise the old speaker box up to my Deltoid which with the help of my supraspinatus the weight was transferred to my backbone and leg muscles. I tried to stay in constant motion. My eye’s receptors sent signals back to cilliary ganglion which entered the pons of my brain at Cranial nerve #3 and right into my Pons. This data was filtered up through the Wernicke’s area. I wondered if visual sensory information went through to the Cerebellum some how after the Wernicke's area filtered it (Visual Sensory Information) to help with balance and walking. Perhaps the cerebellum maintained balance just through the info from the proprioceptors. I walked away from the van, through a door, and up to the stage where I reversed the process shifting the weight of the bass amp back from my legs and back out to my arms, hands and than the floor. My muscles relaxed and I took a few deep breaths as I turned and went back out to the van for the next trip. I started feeling a little warmer as I grabbed the bass drum and snare drum. My body tried to maintain homeostasis as the hot Montana summer day worked with my cerebrum instigating the medulla oblongata to increase the rate of visceral functions in response to the neuron that held the thought, “where is Josh while I carry his drums?” Before I even realized my body temp was increasing sensible perspiration gave insensible perspiration a helping hand. Millions of merocrine sweat glands were activated near the edge of my integumentary system. My skin was cooled and homeostasis was back in style for a moment. The rounded condyles of my femurs rolled across the superior surface of the tibia. I had promised my wife I would bend with my knees, not my back. I lifted the bass drum with a flexion of my antebrachium, I circumducted the Bass drum to me posterior over the shoulder and it hung there supported mostly by the lateral head of my triceps brachii. I bent with my knees briefly again and picked up the medium tom-tom drum with my left hand hung mostly loose at my side with my triceps, flexor carpi ulnaris and flexor retinaculum holding it up. As I began to walk back into the building homeostasis was disturbed further so some striated uni-nuclear cells, which were joined end to end, gave a syncyntium pump and helped push the blood to my lungs with a little more force. The frequency of beats was rising too. A second1 later the cardiac muscle pumped the newly oxygenated blood out to the body. This oxygen eventually traveled out to the tiny arteries and veins of my cutaneous plexuses. Up went one oxygen molecule from the subcutaneous layer, through the reticular layer, papillary layer and epidermis right back out of my body. Inside vs. outside the body? It is possible I breathed it back in a week later when the jet stream carried the O2 molecule back to PA. This time as I headed back into the bar my Cerebellum had a tougher time because my pants started falling down but my hands were full! I held onto a belt loop with the thumb of my left hand. For some reason this change in posture seemed to make the medial head of my Gastrocnemius tense but I hardly noticed. I made it to the stage and supinated my antebrachium , then circumducted my whole arm around, extended my antebrachium, turned my hand prone once more and in an instant my tendons of extensor digitorum opened my hand and the bass drum dropped gently to the stage. I stood up straight and took a deep breath and headed back out to the van. I saw a row of mountains in the distance that stood together like a row of soldiers2. Butte, Montana seemed cool. I’d been riding across the country for weeks with 3 brothers playing music. Before I started my exercise routine that day I had run to the Greyhound station and bought a ticket back to Pennsylvania with money I won gambling. I stepped aside to let Caleb and Eli come through with the heavy Keyboard case. I wondered why you need a 100 pound case for a 5 pound keyboard. I grabbed the guitar amp and keyboard amp one in each hand. I was in good shape from repeating this exercise routine 30 times in 6 weeks. I lifted with my knees. I felt a little pressure on my external oblique muscles from the weight hanging from each arm but the pressure was diffused across the trapezius. This must have been apiece of cake for the cerebellum because I was balanced like I was carrying two buckets on a pole. The proprioceptors’ signals traveled along afferent neurons to the dorsal root ganglion, where the signal entered the spine, right up to the Cerebellum. My knee moved gracilis and sartorius as I entered the bar again. I dropped my latest cargo on the stage and my pacinian corpuscles stopped sending pressure signals up my arm. I walked back out into the sunlight and my ciliary ganglion instructed my intrinsic eye muscle to contract causing my pupils to shrink to pinpoints. As I approach the van for the last item, the “greenie meanie”, I thought about how our band was like the organization levels of cells and tissues with in the organs3. Each of our individual instruments were like cells. They were grouped together into to types of tissue, the rhythm section tissue, and the lead/melody section tissue. When we worked together we formed an “organ”. We did our job of making music in an involuntary way. We hardly could think consciously, and we couldn’t stop. My abductor hallucus and abductor digiti minimi tightened and with a tug from my tendon of fibularis brevis my foot became a spring prepared to take on the extra weight of the greenie meanie. The greenie meanie was I large canvas bag like soldiers receive in the service. This big canvas bag wasn’t filled with uniforms and machine guns; it was filled with all the steal pipes and rods that made up the skeletal system of the drum set. I hadn’t been able to lift this item 6 weeks before, but now I threw it over my shoulder with no problem. My bones may have been specially modified for this since I had been carrying around drums and amplifiers for 11 years on the day of this story. Some theorist claim that repeated exercise generates electrical fields from mineral crystals. As the electrical fields attracted osteoblast my bones actually grew in a way to make me a good roadie. My muscles were as strong as they have ever been and I was all warmed up. I brought the heavy greenie meanie into the bar. My eyes sent data about the floor of the stage through my optic nerve, past my optic chiasm and hypothalamus into the medial group of my thalamus. The ventral group then projected my view of the stage to the primary sensory cortex. My occipital lobe translated the incoming signals to create an image. My cerebral nuclei, cerebral cortex, and cerebellum worked together to compare the picture I was seeing with the memory engrams I had stored in my visual association area. Millions of electrochemical reactions took place and I placed my heavy load down in a perfect spot. I stared to relax. We set up, had a sound check and began to play. About half way through the show I heard a loud noise and smoke started poring in the front door. My reticular activating system was stimulated giving me a burst of energy. My pons and medulla oblongata increased my blood pressure, heart rate, breathing rate, and depth of my respiration. My medial and lateral pathways were stimulated so my muscle tone was elevated and I even began to shiver a little. I experienced an accelerated breakdown of glycogen in my muscles and liver. I started feeling a lot of energy surging through my system as my adipose tissue released lipids. My cerebellum kept right on making my body play “Miss You” by the stones as I was quaking in my boots waiting to see what the loud cacophony out front was. It turns out it wasn’t a bomb, it was just Robbie KNIEVEL arriving on his jet bike. Now we had a real party going on, and the brief stimulation of the band’s sympathetic nervous system brought the energy level of the music up a little. We finished up at midnight and reloaded the van. I was scared we would miss our greyhound but as I got off of the Dodge Van tour bus and onto the Greyhound I began to relax physically. My parasympathetic nervous system got a lot of action over the next couple of days on the bus. I found that the 5 years since my last marathon bus ride taught my body to relax more, but the psychological torture of long time greyhound exposure seem to take a more profound toll this time. A few days later my love Jessica picked my up at the bus terminal in Pittsburgh and I started my recovery form the road by concentrating on my favorite 2 of the 4 F’s. 1: (a second is T1/ T2) T1= 1/28th of a lunar cycle T2= C/T1 (with C being the time between contractions before transition during birth.) 2. Phalages; ”They call them phalanges but you never see them phalangin’ …oh there they go!” 3. based on chapter notes “analogies” section
Copyright © 2005 Robert J Speers |