fascist architecture

sports massage as body horror

Some time last year, I paid a small woman from London a few hundred dollars to rip my calves in two. I mean this literally as much as I mean it metaphorically — for most of my life, the fat bellies of my gastrocnemius muscles have fired as though they were fused together, in both legs. Whether this is due to chronic stress, my childhood toe-walking habit,¹ my fallen arches,² or some long-forgotten injury I don’t know. The muscles — whose primary job is the flexion of my ankle, who each stabilize and flex my two knees, have been webbed over, as long as I can remember, with several tight protective wrappings of fascia, the body’s first-responder tissue.