Is there some kind of protocol for what you write when you haven't made a blog entry in months and months? Is it better to acknowledge the fact, give some lame excuse, and then launch in? Or just start writing and pretend like you haven't been AWOL for so long that only the two people who have you on their RSS feed have any idea you've made a new entry?
As should be obvious, I've chosen the middle path, whereby you discuss the potential discussion. So what's the lame excuse, you may ask? Well I'll tell ya; I haven't had internet at my gram's place since I've been back in the northwest. I can hear it now; "Pope, why not just go hang out in a coffeehouse, or a bar? Have a cuppa or a fermented beverage and get your write on?" The answer, of course, is that I'm not a douchebag.
But here's the thing; I've finally found the sweet spot from which I can poach the neighbor's unsecured wireless. So now I can actually post stuff from home. Sure, I have to climb the tree in the corner of the backyard, hang upside down from a very specific branch, and hold the computer at arm's length to get it to work. But as they say, beggars can't be... is it "choosers" or "choosy"? I've always said, "choosers," but I know I've heard it both ways. Hold on, I'll go check... just a quick run to the magic tree should do it...
Seems like the interwebs are undeclared. There are just as many choosers and choosy-ers. Not to mention some "begers." I even found a yahoo! answers page that asked this exact question. Jeez, my faith in the world is severely shaken; I mean, if you can't trust something you read on the interwebs, what can you trust?
I guess now is the time to actually discuss something of consequence in my life, eh? There are two things I will mention at this point, one from the beginning of last week, and one from the end. The one from the beginning I can gloss over for now: I took the GREs on Monday. By far the biggest step in my application for graduate school. I'm applying to the UW's Master of Science in Technical Communication for this coming fall. And, after months and months of alternating between psyching myself up and out, I finally took the test. And I did fine, definitely well enough for my purposes. I still haven't gotten back my writing scores (the only non-automated section of the test), but I was most confident in that section for the split second before I got my verbal and math scores back.
The second thing makes for a better story. And, additionally, I can't really remember much of what happened before this event. Hence the glossing over of the GREs. It's not that I don't want to talk about it; it's just that, for reasons that will become apparent, the details have become, shall we say, a bit hazy.
So it's Saturday. The first day of Memorial Day weekend. Absolutely gorgeous in Seattle. Sunny and warm, upper 70's. I spent the morning and afternoon getting stuff done around the house: some cleaning, a bit of writing, yoga, meditation, reading. I watched a movie. (Primer, excellent, $7,000 budget, highly recommended.) Then, early afternoon, I set out to my buddy Rob's house to play some music and barbeque.
I get there around 2:30 and start to set up my drum kit. And—and this is key—I cracked a beer. A Lagunita's IPA. If you're a hophead like me, there is no better beer. If you're not, well, you probably think it tastes like a skunk's ass. But whatever. The important part to remember is that it's not yet three in the afternoon and I'm cracking my first beer.
So I set up the drums, and we play for several hours, taking breaks to go hang out in the sun. A few buddies are coming over later to bbq, so we're just kind of snacking (also an important point). Literally two tons of fun.
Can you see where this is going? Perhaps not. But this is the moment of truth, the grand foreshadowing, like that shot of the cook in Hunt for Red October. But in this movie it's instead a shot of Jerod hopping on Robbie's spare bicycle so we can ride over to his neighborhood bar for an hour or two before the boys show up.
Now you can see where this is going, right? We're not quite there yet though. I made it to the bar just fine. And what a bar it was; they had good beer on tap (IPA, natch), a big rack of records behind the bar (Stones, Cash, Social D... just good solid rock n' roll. I'm a big fan of all kinds of music. I love reggae, hip hop, jazz, various kinds of pop, you name it. But when I'm drinking in a bar on a Saturday night? Sheeet, man, throw some muthafuckin rock n' ROLL on that beyatch, right?), and a huge deck out back with a ping pong table. So we drink beers and play pong for a couple hours, the boys meet us there, and we (finally) decide to head back to Rob's to have some dinner.
By now it's 8pm. So that's five and half hours of fairly solid drinking, and fairly solid not-eating. And yes, there is that voice way, way, waaaay in the back of my head. What do you want to call it? Conscious? Common sense? Ego? Whatever it is, it's screaming so loud that even under all that beer I can still hear it. But here's the thing (and I'm not telling you anything you don't know): beer does funny things to a man. My new name for it is "Id juice." Because it just unleashed that silly, stupid beast from under all the eons of socialization that go into creating a 21st century human being and makes you say to yourself, "hey, there's no freaking way I would drive a car right now... but you know, what if we just took away half the wheels and all the years of German and/or Japanese engineering that go in to maintaining a healthy barrier between you and the concrete? Is that something you'd be interested in rolling down the street?" And beerbeast he nod.
So I mashed my face into the sidewalk. Literally, I mean... I have really no other injuries to the rest of my body besides my mouth. Actually, that's not entirely true; I have just enough other injuries** to kind of recreate what happened. I thought I had it figured out; a few raspberries on my left hand and a fairly significant bruise on my left shoulder made me think I'd fallen off the left side of the bike, landed on my lips, and then a split second later my shoulder and hand glanced off the ground. But here's the thing; my right fricking knee is hurting me now, too! WTF??? I can't for the life of me figure out how my left shoulder and right knee both got hurt.
Okay, I think I just figured it out. I think I just rag-dolled it over the handle bars and landed face-shoulder-hand-knee. Because hey, you know... free dummy. Or maybe it was one of those occasions when you're drunk and just decide to take a nap in "that place." You know that place. It's wherever you happen to be at that moment everything just shuts down. I know a couple guys who took a dirt nap along side of the Burke Gilman Trail for about three hours once. And another buddy who fell asleep with his big toe on the throwing line of a dart board when he passed out mid-throw. So it's entirely possible I just got partway into my flight and decided, "hey, you know... this is pretty comfy. I think I'll just catch a bit of shuteye..."
The first thing I remember when my alarm went off—the part of the alarm is being played by a large piece of rock—was a couple wide-eyed kids running towards me. "Hey man, are you alright?" one of them asks. I actually laughed at that point. Took off my shirt, pressed it to my face. Said, "I dunno kid, you tell me. Am I?" He shook his head.
Lucky for me my buddy Joe was driving past right at that moment (he'd shown up the bar late and only had one beer) and drove me back to Rob's. When I got out of the car, there were a couple more kids riding bikes in the street. I took the shirt away from my face and said, "this is what happens when you don't wear a helmet!" (I neglected to mention the beers.) It totally worked, too; they were like, "that happened because you weren't wearing a helmet???" "Yeah man, totally. You should always wear a helmet. Like, even when you're eating breakfast or pooping. You just can't be too careful."
At this point I'm seriously worried I'm going to vomit. And as the famous showtune goes, if you have gaping mouth wounds, you should really, really try to avoid getting vomit in them. But you have to remember that all I've consumed at this point is a couple handfuls of cheetos, half a dozen beers, and a tall boy of my own face blood. (I felt like an alchy vampire. As my buddy Ryan put it: "Ahh'll haaaave ah blaaaah-dy Maaaah-ry." (That's "I'll have a bloody mary" in a dracula voice.))
I managed to chew it back. I passed out for several hours in Rob's spare bedroom (we checked for concussions first) and then got a ride home from Joe. And, truly, I'm incredibly lucky; one small chip from a tooth, the aforementioned huge gash, and a bunch of road rash. No full on broken teeth, no shattered cheek bones. Everything seems to be healing okay. And I have the kind of lips that middle-aged women pay considerable amounts of money for. So I got that going for me...
Which is nice.
*We also would have accepted "New Look for Luke."**Minor so far, but these things have a way of popping up more and more the farther you get from a crash of this sort. You know how it is; you're so focused on the major injuries—the cracked ribs, or the broken clavicle, or the huge gaping split on the inside of your upper lip with all the fat hanging out—that you barely notice the other seemingly minor aches and pains. And then a few days or a week later you start to notice some weird pain in your back or shoulder or knee... and that's the injury that's still giving you shit a year later.
