What do tires and lungs have in common?

Both need to stay inflated to be effective, and when they do deflate suddenly, it's a very bad thing. Friday night, I blew a tire on the 405 and completely lost control of my car. I was going 75 or so and I remember thinking, "Okay you're going to crash your car now, so just relax. They say the worst injuries happen because people tense up before the impact." And sure enough, I plowed into the concrete retaining median wall, smooshing my car, my glasses, my phone, and my lung, though I didn't realize the latter for a night. In short, this past weekend things that are supposed to hold air, did not.

I was pretty banged up but nothing seemed broken except possibly a rib, and I know from my experience with my guy, aka "The Elbow," that they don't do anything for a broken rib. I was pretty clear-headed and the EMT guy said I seemed fine to him, but he could take me to a hospital if I wanted. What I now realize is that when you crash into a concrete retaining wall at full speed and pass out--even if it's only for a second--there shouldn't really be a decision-making process about this. You're going to the hospital. But sometimes I'm too stoic for my own good I guess. One of my father's favorite sayings was always, "I cried because I had no shoes, but then I met a man who had no feet," which always made me protest that meeting that man would only make me cry more. It's sad enough to have no shoes but clearly it is worse that there are people with no feet. But I digress. The point is that if you feel like someone threw you down stairs, you should go have medical professionals check you out because when you get thrown down stairs sometimes the insides of you don't fare so well.

So Saturday we went by K's folks. His dad's a doctor and took a look at me and speculated that I had a fractured rib perhaps. He said I should go in and have a chest x-ray taken at an urgent care place. We came home and napped, went out for some dinner and finally Saturday night went by a medical center to get a chest x-ray. They did a chest x-ray and a brain scan and took blood and then the doctor came in with something of a furrowed brow and said they wanted to do a CT scan of my chest because the x-ray was unclear. It could just the angle of the thing, she said, but she was concerned. Of course, it was Saturday night, so as the hours progressed, the ER was filling up with all of the other auto accidents taking place on LA's westside. Eventually they did another chest scan and--what do you know--turns out my left lung is in the process of collapsing. Go figure.

It's a pretty interesting thing really. I didn't know anything about collapsed lungs before this experience. I guess what happens is that your lung gets a little rip in it and when you breath some of the air that you exhale (carbon dioxide, I guess) escapes through that rip and collects in the chest cavity. But it has nowhere to go because the chest cavity is a closed container so it just accumulates there and the more it accumulates the more it displaces the lung itself--thus the collapsing aspect. The particularly pernicious thing about it all is that as the left lung collapses, the heart also starts a-roving, and begins to travel over to the right side of the chest. Hearts are really supposed to stay put. They are not nomadic organs, and when they ramble the aorta and stuff get all messed up (I'm sure there's a good Yiddish word I should use here).

So what they have to do is suck all the bad air out of your chest and reinflate your lung. After a while of being reinflated it reattaches itself to the chest cavity and, Bob's your uncle, you're ready to go.

Interesting stuff.

The long and short of it is that before I knew it they were punching a little hole in my chest and attaching me to a "pleurovac" which sounds like an aquarium or a bong depending on who you ask. I spent a few days fearing the tube would somehow come out and I'd go flying around the room like an inflating balloon when you let go of its neck, but it went fine and I apparently heal more quickly than most people.

I am now at K's, which has become quite the clinic of late, being cared for quite well. (For those of you who are keeping track of such things--yes, this does make the second trauma unit and second totalled vehicle in four months) I have very little energy which is why it's taken me two days to write this and I'm not adding any more even though I have more to say. I'm tired and I need to go lay down for a while. I'm pretty much of a weakling right now.

But it's a good day. I'm wearing pants and I can go to the bathroom unassisted. Oh the simple pleasures.

The sit-com possibilities are endless

Stephen Hawking appears to be the latest in the growing list of Al Gore-esque doomsayers who are looking to global warming as the sort of liberal rapture. He's arguing that we should be looking for homes in space somewhere because a disaster of some kind (global warming, nuclear war, genetically engineered virus...) may destroy earth:

"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking, who came to Hong Kong to a rock star's welcome Monday. . . . Hawking said that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

And we wonder why reality TV is so popular.

Things that should make you worry

If your office-mate buys one of these.

Public transportation

From the side of a DC bus.

Everyone needs a role model

It just so happens that my latest is a hamster.

And on the seventh day, god rested

Okay, I know the blognoscenti are all over this one, but I can't help but post it here as well. Apparently, this past Sunday, some overly zealous wanna-be Daniel figure, upon crawling into a lion's cage in Kiev and shouting "God will save me, if he exists," became lunchmeat. Reuters reports, "A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down and severed his carotid artery."

Um yeah. And if he doesn't, well...you're meat. So much for Pascal's wager, huh?


(Thanks to Shakespeare's Sis for the story)

You know it's going to be one of those days...

...when you can't get out of your own parking lot because the batteries in your clicker have died overnight.

Yeah.

Leaving tonight for DC with my squeeze. He's never been there; I haven't been there in over a year. Yay for cheap airfares.

A sign of how things are going at work.

I'm not sure I'd have the surgery, honestly. Maybe after my big September deadline.

But does she shave her legs?

That's what I want to know.

Making bold new political headway in the arena of male fantasy--DC comics has announced that the latest incarnation of Batwoman is a dyke.



DC is describing her as a "lesbian socialite by night and a crime fighter by later in the night." Yeah.

It's like this

That's all I'm saying. Just that.

I have the coolest boyfriend ever

He just sent me an email saying he read my blog and bought me a blunderbuss domain. I think that may qualify as the second greatest present I've ever gotten.

Here's George Jetson

You know that moment at the beginning of the Jetsons when George Jetson is taking Astro for a walk on the automatic sidewalk and he can't keep up with the conveyer belt and starts spinning around and around?

That's exactly how I feel today. Like I'm trying to fit a size twelve life into a size eight dress.

But you know what? I've got Mission of Burma playing, and I'll be damned if it's not making me feel better. Academy Fight Song has lost nothing in the more than twenty years since it came out.

And I bought tickets to see the Walkmen in a couple of weeks yesterday. And that makes me feel better too.

And it's Friday.

And I look cute today. (I maintain just because someone has sucked all of the oxygen out of the room is no reason not to wear lipstick.)

The things I think about at work

I know I used to be a political blogger once upon a time. And someday I will return to that in a more serious way (in the meantime, just be aware that I haven't forgotten the world is still going to hell). But it's all I can do to blog these ridiculous orts while I'm as busy as I've been.

Today was one of those days at work where everyone was just in my hair and I couldn't seem to dispense with anything (task or person) easily. Last week when I was having a day like this, K sent me an email with this picture:

18th Cent. flintlock Blunderbuss that scatters shot, nails, rocks, ceramic fragments or whatever through a crowd.

And now when I get frustrated I think about how great it would be to have a blunderbuss. And then I think "blunderbuss...hee hee...blunderbuss..." and before I know it, I've been cheered up.

(As an aside, I got to thinking today that Blunderbuss would be a great name for a literary magazine or a blog. It's a sort of goulash shrapnel idea. Think about it for a minute--it's like scrapbooking for arsonists or something.)

But today the blunderbuss fantasy wasn't enough. As more and more people kept popping into my doorway, the fantasy today began taking on a Godzilla-ish cast. I so totally wish I could blow lethal fire through my nostrils. Never mind killing people by pelting them with tiny pieces of fiestaware, I want to be able to incinerate them without taking my hands off the keyboard.

So that's where I'm at. Oh, and Ken Lay is going to jail. So it's not all bad.

Quote of the day

From Nick:

"Here's an interesting fact: If you wish to become a resident of this country, you must find an elderly doctor to touch you just behind the testicals while you cough."

My friends are all brilliant

Okay, I suppose it's a cop-out that all I seem to do is repost emails I get from my friends lately. But it's not just because I'm drowning in work. It's also that my friends are damn funny. This comes from an email C sent me yesterday, and it's just a great paragraph:

i've been checking your blog sporadically enough to have heard about k (hooray for great companionship!), his wreck (boo for fear and stress and anxiety) and his new elbow (hooray for medical science!). it's funny to me to realize that i don't really know anything about your life, but to feel like i do. blogs are so great. almost as great as faulkner, with whom i am having some kind of post-graduate-school love affair. why did i never realize that his writing is really, truly beautiful? (perhaps because i was always so busy being grateful that at least southerners are more fucked up than mormons. thank god somebody is.)

Just click your heels together...

The man on the left, the one wearing a fabulous vintage chiffon-lined Dior gold lame gown over a silk Vera Wang empire waist tulle cocktail dress, accessorized with a 3-foot beaded peaked House of Whoville hat, and the ruby slippers Judy Garland wore in the Wizard of Oz, is worried that The Da Vinci Code might make the Roman Catholic Church look foolish.

(I got the above from my friend SK and in my opinion, the shoes really make it.)

5-7-5

From Master Kim comes word of Newsweek's latest feature--celebrity haiku (you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page):

Ashlee Nose Best
That bump on my schnoz,
like my sister's spouse, is gone.
Nose job? I am coy.

Clean-Plate Club
Like a waterfall,
my confession tumbles forth:
I don't eat, like, ever.

Dawn of the Spawn
Out, out, damned K-Fed!
Wait, don't go: impregnate me,
baby, one more time.

I like it.

W stands for "the worm turns"

President Bush . . . has a positive job approval in just three of the 50 United States. This according to 50 separate but concurrent statewide public opinion polls conducted by SurveyUSA for its media clients across the country. Only residents of Utah, Wyoming and Idaho view the president favorably.

Dog dag

So K is collecting daguerreotypes, and like any good collector, surfing e-bay daily for the pickings. (Dags, I only found out from him, are not reproducible. The image is the plate. And they take two minutes to expose, so the subjects have to stay still for the whole time. Thus some people used braces to hold people in place, and you rarely see a picture with an animal.)

Today he sends me the below.


Which apparently comes with this explanatory note


"Sylvester Beardsley, Louise Beardsley, Grandma Ann Beardsley's dog. When she went away, she missed him just like she did the kids. When he died, they had his skin tanned and Aunt Nettie Hogan's feet were wrapped in (it) the skin when she was buried."

How fantastic is that?

We'll always have Paris

Those bunnies are at it again. This time Angry Alien gives us Casablanca. (This and the surrounding posts brought to you by my favorite retoucher.)