You are currently browsing the archives for September, 2004.
I have two very disturbing statements to make.
The first is that I heard a cover song on the radio and it was good.
The second, even more perturbing matter is that the lead vocals are by William Shatner, let alone the fact that it’s a cover of Common People by Pulp.
If you have The Devil (realplayer) installed, you can listen to it from the sony site here.
Did I mention I’ve ended up in a play? Almost a month ago I was tagging along with Glen and Stuart to an audition they were doing down in Melville because I had a busted hand and was taking any excuse to leave the house. Subsequently I somehow got cast as the villain having no real intention of getting involved to begin with. I guess I just eminate evil or something. Still, it’s been pretty fun so far and they’re not paying us, so if I farce it up they can’t even fire me. Ahh, the perks of volunteer work.
Went down, or across rather, to Araluen today to meet up with some people I don’t know, which was really pretty cool. I’m reminded how damn impressive nature is. Though it also reminded me how much I’ve been missing riding, since the way there involved going along some of the roads we take along the Canning Dam run. My arm is steadily getting better, and I’m hoping to be back on the bike hopefully in a couple of weeks time. I’m also back at work full time which is a plus when you factor in bills and credit card debts and so on, selling out to the man does pay, there’s no denying that.
Dostoyevsky had to have had some kind of nickname. I mean surely you wouldn’t go around all day calling your friend Fyodor would you? Sneaky Russians.
I quite enjoy being alive. I really do. It’s just one of those things you remember to notice every now and then, regardless of what you happen to be doing. It’s just so nice to receive stimulus. I realised something the other day, which is that my left hand is pretty much in constant pain, or at the very least it aches. Somehow though it hasn’t bothered me enough to even really notice that much, I mean it’s just a feeling, a sensation to which it appears I’ve become accustomed. I mean I think it’s far better to have a functioning hand that’s in pain than a useless limb that doesn’t give me grief. The thing is, that if you want to do something quite a lot or it’s a requirement to do what you need to, you can get used to pretty much anything. Given you have the courage of your convictions of course. This doesn’t really relate to what I thought was the major point I wanted to write about, but it’s fascinating all the same. Your mind can adjust to get used to things, to believe that almost anything is normal or regular. Conditioning is a very scary thing.
My real thought however was that it’s almost time I started considering if I want to acheive anything next year, or more importantly, what it is that I want the most. Want, of course, being the operative word. I easily have everything I need to survive on a primitive basis, everything else is just whatever I feel the compulsion to do. Sometimes I get these strange feelings that I ought to do some things sooner than later in life, because I wouldn’t enjoy some things as much if I was older, or maybe I’d just be less likely to ever do them if I didn’t do them when I was younger. Most of it is probably superfluous posturing, but it’s there in the back of my mind anyway. It basically comes down to that I’ve got a few very real opportunities to do things that I would love to do, however most of them are quite sturdy undertakings and are the kinds of which you can’t really do several at once (at least not with a natural number of limbs). And so I am faced with the scourge of my generation, choice. Presented with limitless opportunities, the mind simply boggles at the prospects.
The alternative way to view the situation, though, is that I’ve got everything going for me and I’m just a dirty whining bugger, but I tend to prefer to make big choices in my life sound a lot more epic and profound than that.
occasionally I wonder if I should stop using the fire exit at work as a shortcut to the coffee urn…
I know I haven’t written anything in almost two months now, but I probably have my best excuse ever…
I was up at Barbagallo raceway on the 19th of July (the day after my last post) doing some laps on my own bike and trying out the new Honda Fireblade (1000cc sportsbike, 179kg, 150bhp) and I was coming over the crest of the hill towards turn 7 when I had a moment at 225km/h. What this involved was me being thrown from from the bike and crashing and tumbling around 150m down the track and out into the infield. In the meantime, the bike managed to transform itself from a marvel of modern engineering into this piece of modern art in what I was told by some of the track stewards and the guys who race superbikes there was ‘the most spectacular crash they’d ever seen’. As it turns out, once the bike and I parted ways it threw itself into the ground, flipped over and struck the ground again, this time sending it several metres into the air and somersaulting four or five times before thumping into the ground again and screeching to a halt, all the while spreading bits of itself around the place for about 150-200m down the track. They had to red flag (cancel) the session because of the massive amount of debris while the first aid crew ran out to where I was lying in the infield in a crumpled mess hoping that it really hadn’t happened and was busy trying to wake myself up. Unfortunately over the next few seconds I distinctly remembered getting up that morning, riding to the track, meeting friends and everything else that had happened that morning, which meant that I really had just gone through a brief lesson in unpowered flight and turned Mr Honda’s nineteen thousand dollar sportsbike into a pile of mechanical tofu.
After a lot of drugs, an ambulance trip, a trip to theatre that went late into the night and a remarkable amount of ‘ouch’-ing, I ended up with three shattered bones in the fingers of my left hand, a broken left wrist and a broken right clavicle (shoulder thingy). This meant I got 10 wires inserted into my fingers to hold the bones in places and four pins in my left wrist to do the same.
To spare you the gruesomely boring details of what I did (or rather didn’t do) over the past six weeks seeing as how I had no arms, they took out the wires from my hand (icky pictures here) and I’m doing a lot of physio to get movement back in my fingers and wrist (the shoulder is pretty good), and they say I should be able to go back to work soon.
So I had quite an interesting time very quickly, followed by a very long period of extreme boredom. I did however get to catch up on the sleep debt I’ve been racking up over the past 10 years or so.
And just so I end this on a slightly more positive note, here’s “Happy Dwight” on one of the Fireblades that I didn’t crash earlier on the day.