Entries from April 2007 ↓

So I’ve slowly managed to resign myself to my circumstances and truth be told, it’s helped ease my mind a hell of a lot. I’m really hoping that everything goes smoothly on Monday with my hand, another several months as an invalid is not what I need right now.

Anyhow, I feel like a lot of built up steam has just been let off and I can think a lot more clearly. I’m starting to think about projects and plans again, which always puts me in a good mood. There’s no end to the number of cock-eyed ideas and ludicrous ventures that circulate inside my head, and it’s fun just contemplating them sometimes let alone actually bringing any of them to fruition.

I’m trying not to get too far ahead of myself however, because at this stage I might still have to write off another few months to bodily repairs and I would rather think worst case scenario and be pleasantly surprised than to get my hopes up and have my heart broken. Still, it will only be another five days and I will be able to line myself up with the real world again and go from there.

In the meantime, tomorrow is another expedition to see the men in white coats about the large cavity in my head. Noises sound terribly funny when they’re coming from inside your skull.

Target fixation.

You focus on something, you look towards it, you hit it. It’s a straight-forward concept and a trap that catches a lot of new riders out. You see an animal, an oil slick or a stopped car, you look towards it and your head shifts to face it directly. Your shoulders move in turn as do your arms which hold the bars. Unless you catch yourself and look back to the road, before you know it you’ve steered straight into the very obstacle you wanted to avoid.

The idea of borrowing money has always grated against my mind like fingernails grate across a blackboard. I’ve paid for cars, furniture, holidays, motorcycles, all with cash in hand. The idea of being obliged to hold a job down, to be routine, to be chained to a wheel as a result of my own impatience or greed is something I spent many years going to great lengths to avoid. But as if I had never tried at all, here I am at the bottom of a great pit of debt to which I am confined until I have slowly, slowly worked my way out through the menial humdrum of the suburban cycle.

Now I am in no need of pity or sympathy, I wouldn’t even go so far as to give either to myself. It’s just the suffocating irony of the situation, that I, for all of my efforts and desires have ended up in precisely the kind of rut I wanted to avoid. It’s worthy of a morbid chuckle if anything is.

However a small ray of hope in the vast darkness that is my life is that in about eleven days time I hope to be given a golden ticket to start using my right arm again as normal. Most profoundly that means that I can ride again, which is something that has been sorely missing from me these last three months, leaving a gaping black hole somewhere in my chest for the thing that makes my heart beat aloud and floods my veins with life like nothing else. A part of me is missing, and I long for it entirely. There is an outside chance that the doctors will advise me that things are not so rosy and that there is worse to come, but I live in eternal hope (it is hard to get by without it some days).

There is yet another reload this weekend (sometimes it feels like they never end), and although I’ll be of little use without the capacity to life heavy items or partake of other such two-armed grunt work, I will get to spend some time with a bunch of weirdos that I tend to call my friends.

Between now and then however I will work at getting another haircut. The hair has refused to go down without a fight and as such has grown at an atrocious rate since my shave a mere month ago. It shall bow before the power of the almighty clippers once more, lest it break completely out of control. Such things must be done, as with this unbound growth I am starting to look like some kind of hippie.

All the heavy lifting has been done (with as little as possible being performed by me) and I’m now fairly settled in down at Australind until I get my life and bones back in order. I managed to see the whole family over easter, but aside from that I’d say that being a broke and housebound bum is roughly as boring down here as it was back in Perth.

Unfortunately this means that I’m limited in the number of anecdotes that I can relay as I haven’t managed to get up to an awful lot besides unpacking and paperwork, with the exception of a visit to the dentist this morning. I haven’t been in a good number of months and I was about due for a check-up.

With a dentist in your mouth, you speak only in vowels.

After recalling how delightful a time I have paying folks wearing rubber gloves to stab me in the face with all manner of pointy, whirry and grindy things, followed by a couple of xrays, it’s come to light that a couple of teeth at the back of my mouth will need to be ousted in the next few weeks.

As it turns out, a particularly hunch-backed and deceitful-looking wisdom tooth in my bottom left jaw has been muscling in on another fellas territory and smashing up the side of the tooth in front of it. The busted-arse tooth with the hole in the side has then been all roughed up and is decayed right through to the nerve, which I’m told should be excruciatingly painful. One of these days this loopy pain tolerance thing is going to get me into a lot of trouble. Not that this isn’t trouble.

Apparently it’s regular practice when removing a tooth to yoink its corresponding brother above or below as well, since it will no longer have another tooth to chomp against and that can cause complications. So depending on how beat up the victimisted tooth is I’m looking at loosing somewhere between two and four teeth. Thankfully I’ve got a mouth full of the little bastards. The operation will probably be more painful financially than physically, and hopefully it won’t involve too much eating through a straw afterward.

I’ll try and get into a bit more mischief between now and the next time that I post in order to provide a bit more entertainment than a commentary on how my mouth is at war with itself.

It may surprise some of you to know that being an unemployed cripple does not pay as well as you might think it would.

While I was finally free of my plaster cast on the 26th after eight miserable weeks without a right hand, there is still a lot of recovering left to do. The fracture in my hand still needs several weeks of rest before I can safely begin lifting, pushing or leaping tall buildings in a single bound. At the same time, my wrist is slowly loosening up from the plank-like state it emerged from the cast in and my sunlight-shy forearm is slowly beginning to look like a limb again from the miserable state it managed to wither away to over the past two months.

All of this means that I have still been unable to make any kind of living in the meantime. This is only one of several contributing factors that have led to my new-found situation, that being one wherein a promise that I made in the form of a scholarship agreement is to be broken.

I could spin a few thousand words explaining my personal feelings on certain things or how things outside of my control have affected my circumstances followed by a lengthy spell of ranting and pointing fingers, but for all of our sakes I will be concise. Out of the need to resolve a number of matters personal, financial and medical in nature I have accepted the ego-crushing blow of necessity and hauled my bag of tricks back to stay with my folks. How long for I could not say, at least until I am able to function enough to hold down a job so as to meet my financial responsibilities.

Naturally out of my personal sense of drama, I make this sound much more devastating than is honestly is. I am staying in a huge luxurious house overlooking the water in the South-West with everything I could possibly need and a couple of housemates who are overjoyed that I’m coming to stay.

As a regular reminder that the space-time continuum is functioning as usual, I turned 25 yesterday. Aging is a funny thing. I feel a thousand years old half of the time and then I look in the mirror and see this soft and squishy looking fella who has obviously not yet been around the traps as much as he seems to think he has. If nothing else, I’m looking forward to a bike insurance discount.