One Week On...

So it was a week ago today that I got mowed down by a negligent cab driver. Cut down in the prime of my life. The overall 'everything hurts' soreness has mostly subsided and I'm left with a couple of more acute injuries. The x-rays say nothings broken but my leg feels differently. It's the only thing that feels worse as time goes on. My neck is still all fucked up but is slowly easing up. I went to physical therapy today and go back next week. Hopefully that will help things along. I'm due to leave on tour a week from tomorrow. I've been having doubts about being able to go but I think I'll have to muscle through. I shall "Cowboy Up" as the rednecks say. In the meantime I've been laying low, watching movies and maintaining my pain meds schedule. I've settled into a groove of Vicodin during the day and the stronger, sleepier Percocets at night. This basically means I haven't had a sober moment since I got hit. I hear lucidity is over rated anyway.

I've also started the legal end of this ordeal. I've been contacting attorneys and witnesses and records departments and whatnot. This blog may well devolve into a series of rants about the absurdist nature of our health care/insurance and legal systems. I'll try to keep it at bay as best I can.

Fuck You Yellow Cab

I got hit by a god-damned taxi today at the airport. And I mean hit. Like 'fly-upside-down-thru-the-air-15-ft-and-land-on-your-head' hit. I was in the crosswalk too. The guy didn't even slow down till he hit me. The best part was that I got to get strapped to a board for an hour and then, after being taken to the ghetto SF General Hospital, get left in a hallway full of crackheads and homeless people who were all screaming and crying and being restrained by police. There were easily as many police in this trauma ward as medical personnel. I ended up being discharged without even getting an xray. This truly is the greatest country in the world. Schools, heath-care...we really are a shining example to the rest of the world. So instead of going to NYC and looking at apts. and seeing Sonic Youth and seeing the Arcade Fire play in some sweet ass church, I'm sitting at home counting time off in four hour chunks between vicodin feedings. So fuck you Yellow Cab. I'm sure our lives will be intertwined for many moons to come. Now, anyone know a good lawyer??

Surrealistic Pillow

The other day Val & I went to see David Lynch's new film, INLAND EMPIRE (title MUST be in all caps according to Lynch). I think it's safe to say that most artists, filmmakers included, are almost always trying to express something with their creations. Maybe it's not always some grandiose truism, but it's usually something. David Lynch's work is always diffiicult, if not pointless, to try and interpret in any literal way but I think I know what he's saying with his latest. He's saying "I'm David Lynch and I'm the darkest, most surreal fucker who's ever walked the earth". If 3 hours of dark surrealism sounds like your cup of tea, get thee to your local art-house cinema and dig into this shit. If Blue Velvet was a little too weird for you, better skip it. I have to say that Laura Dern gave an amazing performance that's worth witnessing, even if it means having to soak up enough fucked up imagery to give Dick Cheney nightmares.

In other Lynchian news, season 2 of Twin Peaks is FINALLY coming to DVD in April. This is a good thing.

Can You Dig?

After raining pretty steadily for the last few days, the sun finally did it's thing today and made for a beautiful 'partly cloudy' day. After a lazy start and some french toast at Crepes On Cole (who, by the way, have the best french toast in the world) I headed out to the Sunset to meet Val & her friends Mitch & Chris. We walked out to Ocean Beach which was well populated with various folks soaking up the last of the day's sun. Someone had planted an old x-mas tree in the sand which made for a strange image. Mitch, in an apparent fit of Scroogian angst, was compelled to throw said tree into the ocean. And so he did.

Next we came upon some crazy girls who were swimming. Mind you I was wearing a North Face jacket over my sweatshirt and was quite comfortable. Mitch had a theory that they were from some land-locked Midwestern state and had never seen the ocean before. When we walked back by them some photographer dude had taken to chasing them around in the water and then directing them to pose in various 'seductive' ways. It was a bit surreal. This is a picture of Chris taking a picture of an Asian woman who was taking a picture of the dude taking a picture of the girls.

This is said Asian woman posing with the swimming girls posing behind her.
Our last and favorite character of the day was this crazy dog who was maniacally digging holes all over the beach. There were like 12 people standing there watching this dog dig the shit out of the wet sand. Good dog.

The Dark Of The Matinee

Sunday was the last day of the Noir City film festival. This is easily one of my favorite 'cultural events' in SF. I've missed it the last few years while I was working but this year I was home. It's 10 days of double feature Noir films shown at the Castro Theater. The Castro is one of the nicest theaters I've been in, and I've been in a few. It was built in the 20s and is one of the few old moviepalaces left in the country. They have a huge Wurlitzer pipe organ that a guy plays before movies and a great, huge screen. Easily my favorite place to see a movie. In all I saw 9 movies in 10 days. It's a lot of sitting in a theater but the movies were great, all dark and bleak. The ones I saw were: Raw Deal (1948), Cry Danger (1951), Framed (1947), I Love Trouble (1948), Pushover (1954), Scarlet Street (1945), Wicked Woman (1953), The Damned Don't Cry (1950) & Possessed (1947). Good times.

Viva Espana

While watching my local Fox network, there was an ad for the 10 oclock news. One of those short blurb about a story they'll be covering sort of things. The kind where they'll say things like "How a certain kind of car seat may kill your baby. Find out if you should be scared shitless, at 11". Only this one was "Find out why you've been paying taxes on long distance calls to pay for the Spanish-American War". Rather than try and say something clever and disparaging here I think I'll just leave you with that.