Day 4

I don't know why I'm numbering my days. : )

Here's a business card I designed for CREC. It was printed on recycled brown paper, which makes all the difference.

Do I want to move to Germany? I'm seriously considering it...

Victory!

I just finished my first knitting project ever! It's the second project I've started, and it only took 2 days! It's a pretty, multi-colored scarf!

Uuuum... Pics to come. My tragically specialized cord for my camera is AWOL. Both of them. They must be lost in the sea of still-packed boxes that is my bedroom currently. But it's totally pretty and I'm totally proud of myself!

So new skills learned:

Casting On

Knit Stitching

Casting Off

I supplemented the learning I already did with tutorials from a website called videojug.com. It's a DIY/How To site. My favorite part about it is that the search bar says "I want to be good at..." before you click on it to enter your keywords.

Disneyland tomorrow! XD

Oops

I was in a car accident on the 29th. It was snowing and we hit a particularly treacherous curve in the road that was covered in slick snow. The road kept curving, but the car didn't and my girlfriend and I ended up crashing into a telephone pole at somewhere between 35 and 40 mph. There was a crunch, a sensation of hardness that I'd never felt before in my life, and puff of black smoke filled the cab. Laura fled the car, I managed my seat-belt and discovered my car door was stuck. She rushed around the other side of the car to help me but I used my adrenaline to climb over the seats and out her door. Then the pain hit me. My shoulders and neck felt like they'd been sledge hammered and my waste felt cold in a few places. I chalked it up to ice until later when I found out that my seat-belt had given me two burns on my iliac crests (better burned than comatose!).

After getting snowed on for a couple minutes, the paramedics arrived and put us in neck braces, then an anbulence took us to the hospital to be checked out. Laura came away with a bloody nose and a mild case of whiplash. My injuries were worse.

At the hospital, they got me out of my jacket and sweater and cut my shirt off. Then they put me in a gown and took my vitals and started me on an I.V. for pain killers which I initially refused. As the evening went on, they gave me a CAT scan and took some blood. I finally accepted morphine, and found it to be absolutely no fun, albeit effective. Then they pumped me full of anti nausea meds and atavan for the MRI. That was no fun either, even the anti anxiety meds didn't help, and they wore off in the middle of the scan. They found a bump on my thyroid. I have to get that checked out now.

The final diagnosis was that I have damage to my ligaments on C5 and C6 in my neck and need to remain in a neck brace until the neurologist says I can take it off without fear of paralysis.

The last week has been a percoset "soma holiday" and I've gotten a lot of knitting done. I see the neurologist on Wednesday, and hope to get my brace off. I am not allowed to lift anything, take the brace off, move my head, or much of anything. They said I could return to work on the 13th, but I'm going to play it by ear.

The injection for my trigger finger went well and it's feeling a lot better now. I almost punched the Doc out when the shot was delivered; it hurt like a mother...

Here are my thoughts on morphine. It sucks! Everyone I've ever talked to and read about opiate based drugs praises "the rush" and says it's the greatest thing in the world. In Trainspotting they say "Take the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by a thousand and you're still nowhere near it." My ruling, horse-shit. They are so incredibly wrong. The nurse described "the rush" as "a blizzard in my brain" which is surprisingly accurate. It isn't pleasurable in the least, and neither is the high afterward. The rush gives you static, like a snowy TV screen, then it's like you're normal, but with a balloon for a head with 3D glasses on. Nothing special, nothing especially pleasurable, just normal-plus. I'd like to take the opportunity to judge opium enthusiasts as retarded and in need of better drugs. Opiates are crap. At least I know I'll never die a heroin addict!

Today I get to begin the process of packing my house for others to move. I can't lift anything, so I get to rely on the goodness of my circus friends to move and place my things in my new lodgings. And since I tend to micromanage my moving, this is going to take a lot out of me. But I am touched by the amount of people that volunteered to help right away. Thanks, everyone. It means a lot to me. And I promise, the food and drink I give you in return will be excellent.

MythoLogic: Visions and Patterns

"Pobrecito"

"PMS"

"Ouroboros"

"One Side Will Make You Grow Taller"

"Network"

"Lucy"

"Chimera"

And there you have it! The line-up for the show.

Vacation is going well. I have gotten all of the things I wanted to get done finished.

Flagstaff has always been an interesting place for me. I grew up here, so, naturally, it is hard for me to separate all of that experience from the place. This time around, I decided to be objective about my stay and try to find a Flagstaff that I could appreciate; a Flagstaff I could actually call home instead of adolescent hell. As I was walking around downtown, sort of the alpine equivalent of 4th Ave., Tucson, I met a guy named Adam. He introduced himself with rose quartz, a giant hunk of non-crystaline, record-keeper mass as big as his fist. At first I thought he was trying to sell me something. I was wrong, and he was just out for conversation. We ended up talking for an hour or so and he introduced me to the "meditation bed" at Sacred Rites, a musical, metaphysics store downtown. The "meditation bed" is a wooden couch that acts as the resonator of a 3 octave monochord of strings running down the side of the bed. The owner of the store sang a beautiful mantra and played the bed while I reclined on it. It was very relaxing. Just the kind of revelation I needed.

So, underneath the Flagstaff I grew up in, there are small pockets of highly pressurized beautiful people and experiences. I had hoped that it was possible, and I think I've reconciled with the place on a very basic level. Now I understand why people live here, on a geologic hot-spot, at the foot of a sacred mountain that is due to explode any day now, just north of the vortexes, just south of the largest canyon in the world, in one of the coldest places in Arizona. It may draw a lot of snowbirds, and passers through, but the actual inhabitants of this place are what makes it beautiful. It's nice to be able to walk down the street and say a word to people and have them respond in a friendly way, without looking at you funny. I'd forgotten what small town life is like.

I've been doing a lot of journaling, reading, visiting old friends and brainstorming for my next few series. I also found two places that would quite probably display my work up here, once I make more of it (Black Hound Gallerie, and Animas Beads). Wouldn't it be fun to take my hometown by storm? I have a feeling I could rock this place.