Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Bum ankle benches antsy columnist

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, Feb. 20, 1998 | 9:06 a.m.

SO HERE'S the mighty lifestyle columnist -- about to turn a creaky 36 but feeling the vitality of a 34-year-old -- as ferocious walleyball competitor.

Now here's the mighty lifestyle columnist -- boldly defying the sensible axiom, "Write men can't jump" -- heaving himself skyward to slam a monster spike down the other team's throat.

And, of course, here's the mighty lifestyle columnist -- after enjoying major hang time an impressive six inches above the floor -- coming down on an opponent's foot. Naturally, his own right ankle immediately folds to the side with a sickening pop. Much writhing ensues.

In other words, here's the mighty lifestyle columnist with a bum ankle. I've been beached on the couch, doctor's orders, for what seems like an eternity but is really just a few days, with what appears to be a swollen purple grapefruit at the end of my leg. I am going nuts.

So this is pretty much how I will mark my 36th birthday today, old and broken and stranded on a couch and pondering self-understanding and the passage of time. If there are lessons to be drawn from this episode -- lessons about limitations and fragility and so on -- then the chief one is this: There are a lot of lousy shows on daytime TV.

I am roasting in couch-potato hell! If it's not a bad '80s movie on cable, it's another celebrity stepping into Rosie O'Donnell's daily kissing booth. Only the occasionally worthy offerings on pay-per-view have kept me from hobbling off on a tri-state killing spree.

It is, in fact, amazing how one's favorite diversions wear thin when they're all you have. One can spend only so much time Drudging web sites for fun and gossip; the Internet is still largely triviality chasing inanity, most of it so badly written you're reading under duress. Such magazines as came my way, I swallowed whole.

A few days in my own company was like being in an echo chamber. Spend enough time rethinking your life and the twists and ankle turns that have brought you to your present position, and, well, you can see why I had to get out.

Reluctantly, and only after much crabbing on my part, my wife ferried me to the bookstore, where I crutched around, slightly embarrassed by my boot splint, a Darth Vaderish bondage rig of black foam, plastic and much Velcro strapping.

Then I got to pet the tiger.

"There's something you don't see every day," I said, spotting a tiger pacing in an enclosure in a nearby parking lot. A pet store was hosting a picture-with-the-tiger booth. I should have objected -- is it really OK to exploit wild animals for refrigerator-mounted family photos? -- but I was craving something unusual.

It wasn't much a big cat, "kind of scrawny," I thought as I patted its flank. But it was a tiger nonetheless, a genuine link to the wild. A reminder that for all our modern survival skills -- protective irony, cell-phone dexterity -- there's still a place for us in the food chain. To the cat, I was just another gimpy prey, no different than a wounded gazelle. Which is how a bad foot and a tame tiger reminded me that you only live once, and perhaps only to 36, so maybe there are worse things than rotten TV and online drivel. See, the ankle bone is connected to the brain bone.