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Last week: a rough one.

As reported in my last blog post, I crashed my motorcycle last Saturday. It hurt, alot. This post isn’t about the crash, I mean it was all fairly straightforward: I was going fast. I undershot a turn, panicked, got on the brakes hoping to stop the bike and went off into the gravel.

Fuck it-I guess this is about the crash.

Gravel, I learned is to a moving motorcycle what ice is to a giraffe or mud is perhaps, to a wrestler. I hit the ground and slid face-down a bumpy twenty feet or so. My inertia being less than that of the 400 pound bike-it caught up with me, and near the end of our slides we rolled several times, together. When we stopped I was stuck  in a pile of what-the-fuck and roadrash, and the bike’s kickstand was  stuck in a pile of bleeding calf muscle (mine).

Coming-to after the tumble, my bottom quarter under a steaming bike, I tried to crawl away, but could not. It was in this moment, the product of  quick sensory trial and error:  the, “why can’t I get the last of my leg out from under the bike??, ah, the kickstand– my jeans must be caught on it,” then the tugging harder, and feeling, discovering in exposed nerves and torn calf that yes, shaan, you unlucky-fuck, you are shish-kebab.

Dr. Bennett would tell me several hours later, as I lay pinned in a cervical collar, cold and semi-conscious on the surgical slab that rather, I was a lucky-fuck: I broke no bones and injured no spines. But in this moment, the discovering one in the dirt,  I felt more than unluck, and pain, I felt terror. So too must have my foreshadowing friend Dharma who, the night prior, expressed his unease and his quease at the sight of blood. I would ask him later how he felt when he came upon his friend there in the dirt, and how he felt when the friend yelled at him to, “just pull it out!” And he did. There, at the side of the road Dharma learned that just pulling a jagged kickstand out of a friend’s leg is not all like a giraffe on ice, or a motorcycle on gravel. “Didn’t really have time to think about it,”  he responded, “I just reacted.” Two lucky-fucks.

Shock quickly began to set in, a kind man named Carl, I think, holding my hand, my legs unable to stop shaking, a dozen hands  strapping me in to uncomfortable things,  a husky-voiced lady-EMT ordering me whisked away to the nearest ICU from under a halo of spinning helicopter blades, and my body somewhere in midair was given its first taste of delicious morphine.

Morphine, I learned, extends the duration of the average eye-blink from an instant to roughly four minutes, but does not, unfortunately turn a trip to the hospital into a trip to the beach, as I had secretly hoped. Over the course of the next six hours on my back, I believe I took roughly 100 miniature naps–not at the beach.

The rest of the hospital: ice cream: weird hospital clothes, waking up from surgery the first words out of my mouth, “can you tell my friends to bring me a cheeseburger,” achy, half-pains, lobotomized nurses (excepting Pat..she was fully-brained) sleeps interrupted by beeps, bad food, a button at my fingertips delivering a  yummy 2mg of morphine into my arm, two slices of pizza, How-tos on crutching, smiling faces on friends, home.

Home for a week.

Yup, Ive been away from the blog for almost a week now.  I crashed my motorcycle.  Mostly, Ive been enjoying my meds, and finding pleasure in typically mundane things: sitting, sleeping, oranges, sitting. My love affair with hydrocodone unfortunately has come to an end, and I will have to return to waking life (almost out of drugs). Oh, this is a raspberry on my arm. It feels like burning.

You’ll never think of Ferris Bueller the same after watching this.

Thanks Jeremy.

It’s true. I looked it up on Conservapedia.

Thanks, again, t Mehrshad for this one.