... and I'm writing about it here, because it was something I'd never experienced before. Or at least, not to this degree.
Early this afternoon I bent down to pick something off the floor - and BAM! I slammed my forehead into the corner of a wood desk. It's probably the hardest I've ever been hit. The impact left a gash on my head about three or four centimeters long, maybe a millimeter or two wide. And you know what they say about bleeding scalp wounds? It's true. That sucker bled for a while. Not a lot of blood overall, but it was this dark red trickle. Kind of scary.
But the worst part is how I felt after. It was like... being dizzy, like my head was a million miles away from my feet. Or maybe punch drunk, like in the cartoons when somebody gets hit and they see a bunch of little stars and birdies flying around their head. I didn't hallucinate anything, but I sure wasn't thinking straight. I spent twenty minutes just staring out the window for no reason, then set up a movie for my Dad to watch (he doesn't know how to use the VCR or computer, so I have to do it for him), then stumbled off to buy this week's comics. And once there, I had a really weird conversation with the guy who works in the store. I was asking him about Mouse Guard and he was telling me about Maus, and it took me several minutes to realize we weren't talking about the same thing. God knows what the other costumers thought of this guy with dried blood on his head, stumbling around the aisles. But I did end up buying four comics, so it was a good trip.
Anyway, it took about five hours, but the symptoms seems to be mostly gone now, and my head is firmly located back on my shoulders. No more dizziness, thank goodness. I just hope the gash heals over without scarring.
Sunday, 8 July 2007
Wednesday, 4 April 2007
Peeing In The Pool
You know the moment. Everybody's having fun in the pool, splashing and laughing. You get in slowly, a little intimidated by all the loud cheerfulness, wishing you had a better pair of trunks. Then somebody notices a yellow tinge in the water near the wall, and every head swivels to look straight at you.
I feel a bit like that now. Despite being on the Internet for many years, I don't have a lot of friends here. So it seems a little presumptuous to start up one of those personal journal blog things, particularly since no one is going to read it. I mean, why would anyone here care if I've had a bad day and need to vent, or if I'm proud of something and want to crow a bit? But what the hell. The bright side of anonymity is that no will laugh at me either, so I might as well give it a try.
I've wanted to start a journal or something for many years, but I always abandon them after a few days. It just seemed... pretentious, somehow, to scribble away in a book about this and that, writing down all those disconnected thoughts no one else would ever read. Spending five minutes staring out the window and thinking or spending an hour writing in a journal accomplished pretty much the same thing, except that staring out the window didn't make me feel foolish afterwards.
But there is something about the written word. It has real power, and that's no joke. I still remember how it felt to discover Internet message boards for the first time. It was so wonderful, taking the kinds of thoughts that I'd normally ramble on and on about in conversations with disinterested friends and actually write them down on the screen, then post the message to a board. Presto! Suddenly my ramblings became concrete sentences and paragraphs that actually existed out there in the world, real as cheese. And people sometimes replied to me! Jesus Christ, that felt good. To go on and on about science and fiction, tv shows and movies, politics and philosophy, just like always, but then instead of someone saying "Uh huh" and switching the subject, other people would reply right back with just as much intensity and passion, and everything would be saved up there in the thread so other people could follow the conversation and jump in whenever they wanted to. Those message boards were like crack to me. I'd sneak away from my university classes as quick as I could, and go off to the computer lab to write more lengthy essays about the reality of global warming or a wonderful explanation of the Casmir Effect that I'd found in a book, not caring a bit about the homework and studying I was supposed to be doing.
This blog probably won't be that good. That part of my life is gone now, and I don't think it will ever come back. You can't step in the same river twice, and so on. Blah blah blah. But I do hope that some fun will come from it. If nothing else, it's kind of therapeutic to think in complete sentences and paragraphs again. The Internet is a place that encourages sentence fragmentation and abbreviations, and I think I've acquired a few bad habits over the years from participating in all that cyber culture. My prose has degenerated into a kind of Net-standard bogspeak, so maybe this blog will help get some zing back in the old writing muscles.
No promises here, gentle reader. I know you're deathlessly hanging on every word, waiting with bated breath for the next installment of my glorious thoughts. (That was sarcasm, by the way.) But there might not be any more posts. Or I might keep it up for a few days, then drop it like all those old failed journals of the past. Or I might update this blog from time to time, writing on whatever. We'll see.
Oh, and if I did it right, the blog should now be called "Threat Or Menace?" That's a reference to an old Lee/Ditko Spider Man comic book story, in which J. Jonah Jameson proudly holds up the front page of the Bugle to display the headline "Spider Man: Threat or Menace?" You just can't improve on perfection like that, so I'm stealing it. Google says there already is a blog called Threat Or Menace, but screw it. If that pussy has a problem, he can come find me. And it's not like anyone will ever see this.
So that's it for now. Time to hit "Submit" and send my words out into the world. Fly, my monkeys! Fly!
I feel a bit like that now. Despite being on the Internet for many years, I don't have a lot of friends here. So it seems a little presumptuous to start up one of those personal journal blog things, particularly since no one is going to read it. I mean, why would anyone here care if I've had a bad day and need to vent, or if I'm proud of something and want to crow a bit? But what the hell. The bright side of anonymity is that no will laugh at me either, so I might as well give it a try.
I've wanted to start a journal or something for many years, but I always abandon them after a few days. It just seemed... pretentious, somehow, to scribble away in a book about this and that, writing down all those disconnected thoughts no one else would ever read. Spending five minutes staring out the window and thinking or spending an hour writing in a journal accomplished pretty much the same thing, except that staring out the window didn't make me feel foolish afterwards.
But there is something about the written word. It has real power, and that's no joke. I still remember how it felt to discover Internet message boards for the first time. It was so wonderful, taking the kinds of thoughts that I'd normally ramble on and on about in conversations with disinterested friends and actually write them down on the screen, then post the message to a board. Presto! Suddenly my ramblings became concrete sentences and paragraphs that actually existed out there in the world, real as cheese. And people sometimes replied to me! Jesus Christ, that felt good. To go on and on about science and fiction, tv shows and movies, politics and philosophy, just like always, but then instead of someone saying "Uh huh" and switching the subject, other people would reply right back with just as much intensity and passion, and everything would be saved up there in the thread so other people could follow the conversation and jump in whenever they wanted to. Those message boards were like crack to me. I'd sneak away from my university classes as quick as I could, and go off to the computer lab to write more lengthy essays about the reality of global warming or a wonderful explanation of the Casmir Effect that I'd found in a book, not caring a bit about the homework and studying I was supposed to be doing.
This blog probably won't be that good. That part of my life is gone now, and I don't think it will ever come back. You can't step in the same river twice, and so on. Blah blah blah. But I do hope that some fun will come from it. If nothing else, it's kind of therapeutic to think in complete sentences and paragraphs again. The Internet is a place that encourages sentence fragmentation and abbreviations, and I think I've acquired a few bad habits over the years from participating in all that cyber culture. My prose has degenerated into a kind of Net-standard bogspeak, so maybe this blog will help get some zing back in the old writing muscles.
No promises here, gentle reader. I know you're deathlessly hanging on every word, waiting with bated breath for the next installment of my glorious thoughts. (That was sarcasm, by the way.) But there might not be any more posts. Or I might keep it up for a few days, then drop it like all those old failed journals of the past. Or I might update this blog from time to time, writing on whatever. We'll see.
Oh, and if I did it right, the blog should now be called "Threat Or Menace?" That's a reference to an old Lee/Ditko Spider Man comic book story, in which J. Jonah Jameson proudly holds up the front page of the Bugle to display the headline "Spider Man: Threat or Menace?" You just can't improve on perfection like that, so I'm stealing it. Google says there already is a blog called Threat Or Menace, but screw it. If that pussy has a problem, he can come find me. And it's not like anyone will ever see this.
So that's it for now. Time to hit "Submit" and send my words out into the world. Fly, my monkeys! Fly!
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