They say having a dog is a good way to meet women. It’s especially true if that dog uses Twitter.
I can’t exactly remember what motivated me to get a dog 20 months ago. I’ve always loved dogs and, prior to my injury, had a roommate who had the sweetest black lab named Sadie. I suppose I had always wanted to have a dog like her. So, nearly 2 years ago, I dropped a couple grand on a purebred and named her Sadie.
In order to have her in my apartment, I had to convince the landlord that she was a “service dog” and got a letter from my doctor (who will pretty much write me anything) saying that she was. She was hardly that, rambunctious and energetic, and quite a handful for me to take care of - I was pretty much her service dog. She eventually settled down, got really smart, and now actually does a few “service dog” things, like picking stuff up I’m too lazy to.
The best thing I ever let her have was my old iPhone, with which she uses to tweet and surf the web. One day, a couple months back, she was begging her followers to get her up to 200. One of her followers, @anonygirl, forwarded the request, and one of those new followers happened to be the woman I’d fall in love with. This woman happened to mention to Sadie that her cousin raised and trained service dogs, which led Sadie to mention that I’m in a wheelchair. And that’s what got the ball rolling.
In two days she will be coming to visit me. The two of us can hardly wait. I can’t wait to introduce you all to her. @nonlineardog can’t wait for the big treat she’ll be getting that day.
I don’t believe in stem cells
I know a couple of people who have spinal cord injuries who wholeheartedly believe in the potential of stem cells to magically cure them someday. One of these people has been injured since 1996 and has pretty much resigned himself to doing nothing other than watching TV and playing video games until the cure arrives.
Another is the son of a doctor whom I see. He was injured a week before I was when a wave crashed into him, driving his head into the sand, while at the beach. His injury is about an inch above mine and impairs him to a greater degree. He is active, but he and his father both believe there will be a cure someday.
Almost everyone who is newly injured insists that there will be someday. I don’t question the new guys, but I do question the lazy ones, specifically the former one I mentioned above. He happens to be kind of a jerk, so I don’t feel so bad when I ask him what he has read about stem cells. Many of those waiting haven’t read very much. They seem to take the promises at face value and block out anything to the contrary.
I should begin by saying that I do believe that stem cells could have a vital role in the treatment of diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. But I can’t bring myself to believe they can repair a severed spinal cord.
The spinal cord is very complex, like a twisted bundle of fiber-optic cables. If you sever through that bundle, you’re going to have a mess of disconnections. If you’ve compressed several inches of your spine, that would be the equivalent of removing an inch or two out of that bundle. I just don’t believe that stem cells could reconnect things without running the risk of misconnecting and possibly leaving someone with greater disability or terrible nerve pain. Now that’s just my opinion.
What is actually proven in the laboratory with mice and dogs is that stem cells seem to provide a miraculous recovery in the days and weeks that follow an injury. After 13 months post injury, they’ve been proven to no longer have any success. Add to that the fact that the spinal cords of mice and dogs control walking in a much different way than the human spinal cord does. For them, walking is a more automatic function within the spine than it is with humans.
So what do I hold out hope for? Nothing much in the way of cures. I certainly wouldn’t be the first person to line up for them, due to potential side effects. For other spinal cord patients, I hope that there becomes more success in treatment within the minutes and hours following a spinal cord injury. When the spine is traumatized, swelling kills off many of the nerve cells. There is also a phenomenon in which the immune system actually begins attacking the spinal cord. In the future I hope that trauma can be limited to the initial damage and not spread.
Here is a sad fact for those holding out hope. Spinal cord injuries are very rare, about one in 300,000 people will suffer one in their lifetime. There are currently many more very good outcomes, meaning mortality, than there ever have been. People can suffer an injury, be stabilized successfully, receive necessary physical therapy, get a proper wheelchair and reenter society more so than ever before. This all means that there is very little financial incentive for developing a cure for such a rare disease. There is also much more money to be made in the lifelong treatment of people with severe spinal cord injuries than there is in curing them. This is the case with many other ailments where there is more money to be made in the ongoing treatments or medications than there is in a cure.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. That’s just the way business is. It’s the reason that much of the funding for such things comes from grants and charity rather than an R&D budget.
I remember when I first read about the mice and the 13 months. I had been injured about 11 months at that point. It shocked me to my core and literally knocked the wind out of me. I think that was the first time that I began to lose hope that I would ever walk again. It hurt so much at the time, but at least I was willing to take in the information rather than staying willfully ignorant and sitting around waiting. It also may have kick started me to begin looking at things a bit differently. If this was how things were going to be, I’d damn well better find a way to make it work. And so that’s what I do and that’s what I continue to do.
If the choice is to be politically aware or ignorant, I’ve decided to choose ignorance
My New Year’s resolution: to spend the year as politically ignorant as I possibly can.
I’m fed up with politics. Healthcare, terrorism, the economy, employment, etc. I’m tired of it. I spent hours volunteering for Obama, I tried to rally people behind the public option, and I called several representatives. I’ve been let down by all three.
Our president has taken on too much, and produced very little. People behind the public option have been shouted down by the ignorant right, so much so that it is significantly influencing policy. Calls to my representatives were pointless, because I ended up speaking to office staff who already had their talking points memorized.
I’ve been thinking lately that politics should not be interesting. It should really be quite boring. Anyone attempting to make it interesting, specifically the 24-hour news networks, is just personality peddling. To go on the air and actually, faithfully cover policy and the goings-on in government would be a ratings killer. It would be C-SPAN. It would be Congressional Quarterly. But it’s not. It’s four hours every evening full of commentary and spin and guests who are on five minutes to talk about a complex topic, usually concluding when the host says something like, “I’m sorry, we need to cut to break. We’ll have you on again sometime and discuss this further.”
They never do.
Someone once said that Washington was Hollywood for ugly people. It couldn’t be truer. The Washington Post and the Washington Times are our People Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. USA Today is USA Today.
In the end, what is accomplished? The average person, average person, has no role in legitimate political discourse anymore. You’re often a foot soldier to special interest groups on the right or the left, spewing the outrage that they tell you to, under the guise of being a “grassroots movement”.
I don’t need it anymore. At one point several years ago, around the time we were ramping up for war against Iraq, my father, a lifelong conservative, and I got into a heated debate over politics. That year I didn’t come home to visit for Christmas, the only time in my life I hadn’t done so. My sister passed away suddenly three days later. I never got to see her that last time. Since then, my father and I have reconciled and pretty much have discussed politics rather civilly. But I’ll never forget what toll it took on our relationship and how we could’ve been spending so much time talking about much more interesting things.
And now we do. It’s been a long time coming, and it’s the beginning of a new decade. I expect many great things to happen for me and the people around me over the next 10 years. I don’t plan on wasting any more of it on the sport of politics. That’s my New Year’s resolution.
So we fell in love at the end of last year…
You could say that my dog introduced us on December 17. Given all that our two lives had been through over the past decade - all of the pain and suffering - it was quite fitting that such a sweet and loving creature would allow us to find each other on twitter.
To be honest, I had thought that she had a very pretty avatar, which is what had led me to her blog. It was there I learned that there was so much more behind her bright smile and lively eyes. There was pain and suffering, guilt, and strength. There was inspiration and thankfulness. So many of these things I could empathize with, and as I read on, anxious to find out what it was that had made her suffer, I found no answer and felt compelled to e-mail her and to send her to my Tumblr (specifically the entries tagged “quadriplegic”).
She e-mailed me back with the details, which I won’t go into here. I will just say that there was an event that happened to her a year before my accident that ground her life to a halt. It was completely different from my situation and something that, if given 100 attempts, you would never guess. But it was tragic and painful and something I wouldn’t trade my situation for.
We both instantly recognized a deep connection, and not that kind of BS e-Harmony connectedness where people carry on about being able to understand each other and so on. Our connection is born out of what we both have been through, the things that no one else could ever relate to the same way.
It is from out of that connection that our friendship quickly formed. From there, things progressed quickly, like so many relationships do, and we fell in love with each other. We share so many of the same interests, beliefs, and hopes for the future, but most importantly, we share something that connects us to the core. The more we talked about the circumstances in our lives, the more we found so many amazing parallels - our crawling back from what felt like a death of sorts, the reliance on our families for strength, the tragedies our parents had suffered through leading up to our tragedies. The list went on.
I don’t want you to think that that connection is the only thing that connects us by any means. She makes me laugh and makes me think, and the way we carry on together reminds me of William Powell and Myrna Loy from 1934’s “The Thin Man” (a reference I did not even have to explain to her). Despite geographic distance, technology has kept us very close together. We share our own private Tumblr, constantly MMS texts, pictures and videos throughout the day, video chat and, my favorite of all, leave our phones connected throughout the night, thanks to our unlimited mobile-to-mobile. Each night, we get into bed and just listen to each other talk or breathe until we fall asleep. One of us may wake in the middle of the night and wake up the other, and we’ll start talking again until we fall back asleep. In the morning, she usually gets out of bed first and gives me a wake-up call later on. It’s the closest I felt anyone before, and we’re hundreds of miles away.
In two weeks she’ll be flying to DC for five days. Neither of us can wait and we’re counting down the days. It is then, that we plan on officially going public to our tweeps.
Until then, I have to thank you all for being great friends and creating an atmosphere where I felt comfortable writing about my accident and recovery. After all, it was our writings that allowed us to understand each other before we’d ever begun talking. Also, I have a feeling that @nonlineardog is going to make sure I never forget who introduced us.
We’re both looking forward together - to a new year and a new decade. We both plan on making it ours.
Quadriplegic Did You Know - Laughter
Did you know that one of the first things you lose when you’re paralyzed is your ability to laugh like you used to. People don’t realize everything that goes into a laugh. Your abdominal muscles all the way up through your chest are involved. You use them to produce a hearty belly laugh. Most of those muscles are paralyzed with me except for a couple of abdominals that come in handy when I need to sneeze or cough. But when I laugh, I’m usually just smiling and laughing on the inside - sort of a quiet laugh. Sometimes it’s literally sort of a “ha ha ha”. Despite that, a sense of humor goes a long way during rehab and in life.
Click on the recording below to hear the laugh that I’ve had since I was injured.
So Dad’s getting engaged
My dad came over today to watch football. All during the first half, I sensed that he had something to say to me and he finally did at halftime.
“I’m going to ask Gail to marry me.”
Gail would be the woman he’s been seeing for the past six months. He’s only been separated from my mom for 18 months and the ink on their divorce papers dried only two weeks ago.
“Don’t you think it’s a little too soon?” I asked.
My dad has always been logical to a fault. Never one to make rash decisions. Always the voice of reason. He himself acknowledges that it probably is too soon. He plans to ask her New Year’s Eve, just as the ball drops. He booked an expensive hotel room with an open view to the ball. They’ve already gone engagement ring shopping, where he dropped $15,000 on a ring.
I asked him why the rush, the two of them were going to be around for a while. What could they do married that they couldn’t do as a couple? He threw out some sort of thing about morality and how it wouldn’t be right to live with her unless they were married. I called bullshit on that. “But you two are already sleeping together.”
He laughed and acknowledged that that wasn’t the real reason. He is in love. He said, “if you knew how we felt about each other…”
“I know exactly how you feel about each other,” I countered, “I’ve felt that way with six different people in my life!”
He’s only felt that way once before, when he married my mom, which is why I know that there is no reasoning with someone who’s in love. They’ll ask your advice, but never follow it if it is counter to what they desire.
I honestly have no problem with him getting engaged and married. I just want him to be happy and I wasn’t objecting strongly to his reasoning. It was just funny to see our roles reversed, I being pragmatic and he following his heart.
My high school reunion - conclusion
I’ve been meaning to write about my high school reunion last weekend but have been procrastinating. I think maybe I needed some time to process it all, because I think it was a life-changing experience for me. As I had written previously, I found this inexplicable desire to go to my reunion, despite not really remembering anybody, and because of the fact that I was never very popular, often depressed and always an outcast.
So I get to the reunion, held at a local bar and restaurant that had a reception hall downstairs. When I say “downstairs” I literally mean “down” “stairs” - no elevator. I assume that the building had not changed ownership since they passed the ADA and it was grandfathered exempt. No problem, the bouncer and one of the waiters was used to carrying people down the stairs. I’ve done it before. I just hold onto my chair for dear life while they carry me down Pharaoh-style.
So I entered the reception hall, and there’s a bunch of grown-ups standing around! I shyly make my way to the reception table to get my name tag, and I’m immediately recognized by Teddy, one of my best friends from middle school and the person that organized a reunion. I hardly remember him, but he remembered me well, down to specific jokes I made. It was a relief. Somebody remembered me. So I began to mingle, I hardly recognized anybody. Many of the faces looked familiar, but it’s amazing what 15 years can add to a person.
I don’t feel like I’m 34. I think it’s because of my injury and the fact that my life grinded to a halt for so many years. I feel like I’m 29 still. Aside from being in a wheelchair, I think that I’ve aged better than most. Part of that has to do with the fact that I lost 30 pounds after I was injured and therefore not overweight. So I would strike up conversations with people that were mingling around and I began to feel very comfortable.
I came to the realization that, unless you did something really horrible, everyone remembers the best of you in high school. They didn’t see me struggling, or notice that I had withdrawn from their particular crowd. While they may have been in the popular crowd while I was an outcast, from their perspective, I must’ve just been in with some other equal crowd that they just weren’t aware of. And because of that, everyone is on even footing. We’re strangers who know each other in some way. It was comforting.
I think that the moment that may have changed my life came when I was mingling around. There was a group of four women who were part of the popular crowd, the pretty girls. I started to approach, but was apprehensive for a moment. They were all talking to each other, and part of me, the shy, awkward teenager inside of me said not to interrupt, to hide in the corner. But something clicked in my head. I think that I was able to step outside myself and see myself objectively for once. I realized that I’m a decent looking guy who can carry a conversation and is comfortable with the reality of being a wheelchair. This is who I am. I’m not that awkward teenager anymore. So I went right up to them and introduced myself. And that’s how the night continued.
It’s funny how, in these group situations, everyone buys me drinks. I started a tab, but never put anything on it because somebody would always say “I’m heading up to the bar, can I get you anything?” I would say yes and tell them to put my drink on my tab, and they would always insist that it was on them. Who was I to argue!
I did meet some people that I used to hang out with, and many of them still live in the area. I even discovered that a current neighbor down the street was in my graduating class. We exchanged phone numbers and have vowed to get together at some point in the coming weeks.
The event was fun, but not wild, which was a bit sobering. But then, we’re not in our 20s anymore. The entire event was over by midnight. I remember one time when I was 20, at a wild party in college. I was having the time of my life. When I was in the bathroom, I looked at myself in the mirror, right in my eyes, and told myself to never forget this moment. This was what being young was all about. I’ve never forgotten that. It’s as if, in that one moment, I was somehow compelled to think of the future and able to see myself in the moment.
Maybe that same force is what compelled me to go to my high school reunion. Somewhere inside of me, I needed to go. I needed to redefine myself in so many ways. I’m not that outcast anymore. You all may not have remembered me that way, and now you never will. Nor will you see me as the able-bodied person you may remember. This is who I am. Remember me like this.
I’ll see you all in five years.
High school reunion tonight
My high school reunion is tonight and I’m pretty nervous. Like most of my high school assignments, I did the planning and work on this one at the last minute. I just RSVP’d and sent in my $20 via PayPal. There’s about 75 people signed up to show, of which I only knew five or six and recognized the names of 10 or 15 more.
Why am I doing this? I still been unable to answer that for myself. I honestly think I’m looking for a challenge. Before I was injured, I don’t think I could’ve walked into my high school reunion by myself. I’m not sure what has changed besides the obvious.
The second thing that being paralyzed instantly takes away from you is your dignity. You’re lying on the ground unable to move and you need to physically be carried to an ambulance. Once you’re in the hospital and conscious, your modesty is quickly taken from you as male and female nurses and doctors are undressing you and redressing you, bathing you and helping you catheterize. If you are still too weak when you go home, it falls upon a loved one to do these things, in my case, it fell upon my mother. The process strips you down to your core.
I was thinking about that the other day, when I was trying to figure out why I’ve decided to go to my high school reunion. Maybe I figure “what on earth do I have to lose by going?”
A few years ago, when I decided to get back into life, I decided to myself, “I’m going to make this look good. I’m going to make this look easy, no matter how hard, and I’m going to smile while I’m struggling.”
So I guess that’s what I’ve done. I’ve tried to maintain a sense of dignity in a condition that strips so much of it away. Maybe that has something to do with why I’m going.
We’ll see what happens.
My 15-year high school reunion
I’m thinking about going to my 15-year high school reunion next Friday, which is a pretty big deal. Not because it would be great to “have the gang all back together” or “see what happened to all my old high school friends”. I could care less, to be honest.
Since graduation, I really haven’t spoken a word to anyone other than my high school/college girlfriend, and even we haven’t spoken in over 12 years. I was a bit of an outcast in high school, self-conscious and awkward and unable to make new friends easily because of it.
I had plans to go to my 10 year reunion. My beautiful blonde girlfriend and I had it on my calendar. I freely admit that I looked forward to showing her off and boasting about how I owned a successful film and video production company and so on and so forth. Even then, I was still uncomfortable with being in a social situation alone with strangers, so I wouldn’t have been able to go to that reunion on my own without her.
I never did get to go. I broke my neck nearly 4 months earlier and, over the months that followed, would lose everything that, at that time, seems to constitute who I was. She left, the business fell apart, and friends slowly peeled away after I moved in with my parents five hours away.
So here I am, five years later, still trying to put pieces back together and now I’m a different kind of outcast than I was in high school. I have yet to figure out why I have the urge to go; I’m not a masochist. It just feels like something I should try to do, not because I remember anyone or even have wondered what everyone is up to. It just seems like a challenge.
Maybe I’m curious as to how people will react when they see me, which is funny because I really hate having to recap over and over. If only I could get on the PA system right at the outset and explain to people why I’m in a wheelchair, and that I don’t need any sympathy unless there’s a free drink in it for me (which does often happen to me).
Right now I’m surprisingly calm about all prospect of showing up, but I’ll probably be scared shitless this time next week. I’ll try to blog my thought processes as the day approaches. I’m just hoping it’s cool like Grosse Pointe Blank.
The Warren Commission Report
A few years ago I came across a dusty copy of the Warren Report - the government’s official findings in the Kennedy assassination. I devoured all 700 pages. It was a fascinating read and not at all as dry or boring as one would expect - in fact I loaned it to a skeptical friend who prefers fiction, and she, too, finished it in a matter of days. You can read it here.
Anyway, I was reading some old blogs of mine and came across this one:
I’m always on the lookout for interesting things to read. Sometimes my choices are very predictable such as: The Third Chimpanzee, or The World is Flat. Sometimes they’re less than predictable, such as what I’m reading right now: the Warren Commission Report. That’s right, I’m reading the hottest thing printed in 1964. I didn’t expect to get far into it before being bored out of my mind, but here I am 200 pages into it and I can’t but the thing down. It’s damn fascinating.
I should start by saying that I’ve always believed that Oswald acted alone and that the conspiracy theories were all a bit far-fetched. After watching the movie J.F.K. - which is an amazing and entertaining film - after reading scores of articles over the past ten years or so; and now after reading 200 pages of the Warren Commission Report, I’m convinced that my long held belief is correct: Oswald, a crazy man, acted alone.
If I hadn’t read anything, there would still be two things that I’d not be able to get over, which would be death knells to any JFK conspiracy theory.
1. If your goal is to assassinate a president using three or more gunman, it would be very difficult to expect to be able to pull it off in such a way that a single gunman could be framed for it. I mean, it would be awfully difficult to pin it all on Oswald if gunman two or three missed one of their shots and it hit a couple of bystanders, if extra bullets were found, or if blood were to spatter bystanders from an odd angle.
2. Secrets are very hard to keep, especially in this day and age where a book deal exposing the truth could make a multimillionaire out of anyone involved if still alive. If it was a conspiracy, one of this magnitude would insure that there would be possibly as many as one hundred people or more involved.
Conspiracy theories are entertaining, I admit that. It’s much more interesting to believe that a great man was brought down by factions bent on controlling the world rather than a lone nut. It’s more interesting to believe that the Bush administration orchestrated the events of 911 (as a recent survey shows as many as 15% of Americans do) in order to justify an attack on the middle east for its oil rather than accept it as an attack of religious fanatics. It is more interesting to believe that the news media is out to destroy the republican party, Christian beliefs, and aid terrorists in their war against us rather than accepting the depressing facts and ugly images they present to us every day. It may be more interesting to believe that the United States faked the moon landing in the Nevada Desert to win the space race against the Russians rather than… Well, my jury is still out on that one (kidding of course).
What it all comes down to is information, or the lack thereof. Conspiracy theorists tend to throw around all sorts of facts and anomalies to support their case at the expense of ignoring the mountains of evidence to the contrary. As I’ve been reading the Warren Commission Report, I’ve been amazed at how thorough it is. The number of corroborating witnesses and pieces of evidence is astounding. For example, bullet casings found at the sixth floor window of the school book depository not only matched the gun (we’ve all heard that) but had apparently been loaded and unloaded into that gun several times previously, as if one had been practicing rapidly loading and unloading, which was necessary in order to fire the three shots in seven and a half seconds.
How about the autopsy? Conspiracy theorists like to point out how Kennedy’s body was rushed from Dallas without an autopsy required by Texas law. They like to point out how the body was manipulated during a military autopsy to remove the evidence of multiple shooters. What they don’t point out is that such an arrangement would require two teams of military doctors at two separate bases in on the conspiracy - National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda and the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital in Washington. Why two? Because those overseeing the conspiracy could not have foreseen which hospital would be conducting the autopsy. The choice was up to Mrs. Kennedy, who chose the National Naval Medical Center because of her husband’s service in the Navy. And why did the body leave Dallas without an autopsy? Because Lyndon Johnson refused to leave Dallas without Mrs. Kennedy, and she refused to leave without the body of her husband - another unforeseeable development.
As I said, it’s all about information. The first 200 pages of this report have an astounding amount of it with very little room for holes. I’m amazed by how thoroughly conclusions are reached and even how the report documents dead ends in parts of the investigation and witnesses whose memories aren’t reliable enough to include as part of their conclusions.
I still have another 500 pages to go. Alas, I fear that my opinion is not likely to change. I know how this book ends. While not the happiest of endings, while not the most exciting of stories, I find it to be a gripping tale none-the-less; one that is closer to the truth. The real question is: can we all handle the truth or is it easier to live in a world we create for ourselves in order to feed our imagination and soothe our fears?
This is the last picture I have of myself standing. I posted it here before, but I thought I would post it again along with some of my thoughts from last night. The picture was taken in late July 2004 at the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial in Washington DC. I’m standing next to Lynn, the love of my life, whom I had only been dating for about six months.
I sort of think of this photo is being the last moment that I was on two feet. I remember the moment the picture was taken. We handed off the disposable camera to a stranger and he took our picture. I never saw the picture until I was in the hospital a few weeks later. Franklin Roosevelt was my favorite president and I find it ironic that the last picture I have of myself standing is in front of the president who became crippled as an adult and spent his life in a wheelchair.
The reason that all of this has gone through my mind is because I drove through a part of town yesterday and over the crosswalk that we crossed to get to the Memorial. It had been the first time that I’ve been that close. It may long so much to be back there, carefree, with her.
She left me right around this time five years ago, not long after the elections. I was in a hospital in Atlanta and she was back in Greensboro, North Carolina where we lived. About a month earlier, before our trip to DC, we had a conversation that all couples have at one point: “would you still stay with me if something terrible happened?”
Now, think carefully about the person you’re with and how much you love them and how much they love you. Because, statistically speaking, there’s only a one in nine chance that you or your partner would stay after a catastrophic injury. Shortly after she broke up with me, I went to the counselor at the hospital and learned that 85 to 90% of couples, married or otherwise, break up after an accident. It’s inevitable. I used to resent her so much for leaving. It stayed with me for years. Hearing my side of the story most people would condemn her, until I stop them and tell them, “I would’ve left, too.”
I would’ve. People will tell you, “you’re still the same person.” But that is bullshit. How could you possibly be the same person inside after something like this? Faced with everything that she was faced with, if it were me, I probably would’ve handled things the exact same way that she did.
But you move on. Physically I may be weaker than I’ve ever been any point in my life, prior to my accident, but mentally I am stronger, more patient, more sensitive, and more understanding than I’ve ever been. So now, when I think about it, if I was in a relationship and something terrible happened to them, I think I might stand a chance of being in that one of nine people who sticks things out.
Okay, true story… and untrue…
I always get asked what happened that landed me in a wheelchair. It’s the same every time.
Them: Were you in a car accident?
Me: No, a bike accident.
Them: A motorcycle or a bike bike? (yes, everyone says bike twice to clarify)
Me: Just a bike bike.
Them: Were you hit by a car?
Everyone is naive as to how easily one could be paralyzed. It’s amazing more aren’t. Statistically, you have a 1 in 300,000 of having a spinal cord injury, and if you do, there’s a 70% chance you’ll be a quadriplegic like I am - the neck is the most vulnerable part of your spine.
But I digress. I once came up with a fictional account of how I was injured, and I wanted to tell someone that I wouldn’t ever see again. As I mentioned before, I was in a nursing home for a bit and they don’t have x-ray facilities in-house, so when one is needed, they call an x-ray tech with a portable x-ray machine. I had pain in my knee and some swelling, so they called for a tech. He’s the one I laid my tale on.
Me: How did this happen to me? I don’t remember.
Him: What do you mean?
Me: “I don’t know how it happened. One day, I woke up, face down in the woods off the Potomac and I couldn’t move. So I screamed out as much as I could - my lungs were very weak. A couple on a walk found me, and I was rushed to the hospital. When I got there, they did an x-ray and discovered that I had had spinal stabilization surgery with plates done and fresh scars on my neck. My family was called and I learned that I had been missing for four months. The last thing I remember was leaving work on August 6th.”
Now, I made a point of talking with a straight face and little affect. He was riveted. After the x-ray, I heard him faintly talking to the nurses down the hall, so I’m not sure how long my story held up. I hope he still believes it to this very day.
Okay, a true story about sex, astronomy, and photography…
Okay, it was my senior year in college and I was SO into my required Astronomy class that I often couldn’t even remember if it was called astronomy or astrology. Anyway, for a project, I chose to photograph the stars with an open shutter for a few hours. My girlfriend Jennie was quite a photog, so I figured it’d be a breeze. Of course, I waited till the last minute on it.
The weekend before it was due, she and I were at her house in Daytona. Around 2 in the morning, we drove out to a secluded beach where there wasn’t much artificial light, set up a blanket and set up the camera. Of course there wasn’t much to do, so we stripped on down and got freaky. We also walked naked along the beach, which was probably one of the most freeing and exhilarating things I’ve ever done.
Of course there wasn’t digital back then, so I had to wait a day to get the result back. When I did, I found that rather than stars streaking in brilliant arcs across the sky, there were random jags and blurs. The best we could figure, one of the tripod legs must have been resting on the corner of the blanket. I think I still got a good grade on it, as the “effort” was clearly there, something just happened in my methodology!
