Concussy bruise!

No one asked for this, but you’re getting it anyway. This post-concussy bruise didn’t start to fill in, colorwise, until a few days after the incident. It started out with those pointy bruises you can see, in the shape of a semi-circular series of puncture wounds, not unlike a half-bear-trap, if such a thing were possible. As the days went on, it started to fill out with red hues, and then purple, on to black, and, finally, as the healing gets underway, a yellow tone suggestive of pus. Who wants breakfast???

Concussy

So, I went to a glorious Pavement gig on September 21 with none other than Herr Gordo. It was great catching up, having a raucous night in the city, and feasting on some Nobu afterward.

 

However, a concert that was largely about celebrating the work of a great 1990s band wouldn’t be complete without another kind of flashback – to the Dinkins days, as Malkmus jokes in the liner notes to the S&E reissue. Evidently, I took a vicious blow to the back of the head that left me feeling concussy (as in, memory loss, profound disorientation, etc) and bloody, and staple-y (9 in the back of the head to close the wound.) I got the staples taken out today, and lord do I feel better than I did at around 7 am last Wednesday morning, when I woke up in Bellevue with nary a clue as to how I arrived there.

 

What have I learned? Well, basically, beyond the need for caution and occasional modesty about my levels of alertness after scotch, I’ve learned that it’s absolutely insane to allow football players to get back into a game after a concussion. The experience of thinking a thought but not being able to integrate it into the rest of my brain was incredibly confusing. I would think of an obligation, or something I wanted to do in the not-too-distant future, and instead of having that thought “downloaded” (for lack of a better word) and integrated into the rest of my brain, into whatever I was doing, the thought would just kind of float out there, with no apparent relationship to me or to my thought process.

 

Not having any memories is sort of a blessing, from a PTSD standpoint. I’m still fighting with Bellevue to get a copy of my medical records faxed to my doctor – a process that is unnecessarily difficult and laborious given the flintiness of the hospital’s medical records staff. Given that my wife works in a hospital, she’s aghast at the exchanges we seem to have with Bellevue every day. It seems to unnecessarily add salt to the wound of what was already a pretty harrowing ordeal.

 

Oh, and there’s no way they should have discharged me that morning. My memory of the morning is very episodic – Memento-esque, if you will – and not at all linear. I don’t know what kind of operation they’re running over there, but it’s not one that appears to put a premium on patient safety…

The "real" America

So, here's a feeble attempt at returning to some semblance of regularly writing here, or at the very least, addressing one of the central topics of this blog: American-ness and non-American-ness.

The other day I found myself in a strange situation, talking to someone at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was a Vietnam vet, and was classmates at the USNA with Jim Webb and Oliver North (whom he called "Larry North.") He actually told a fairly engaging story about how they all used to box each other, because they were in the same weight, and that Webb fought North in the USNA championship bout - a bit after North had completed a full recovery from a nasty leg fracture. Though Webb knew North couldn't turn to the side of his healed leg, he refused to sneak into North's blindside and give him the business. The rest of the boxers couldn't believe Webb was going easy on a guy with one functional leg. Amazingly, there's a reference to this fight on wikipedia.

Anyway, it turns out this guy's son-in-law is the famous cigar marine. And he is VERY proud of his son-in-law, who is evidently running for office on a cookie-cutter tea party-type platform.

The reason I'm talking about this chortly gregarious fella is because earlier I heard someone ask him if he'd left the United States recently, and he said, "No, I have not left the States. I haven't been to DC." I wasn't sure what he meant at first - was he acknowledging DC's non-stateness? If so, that seemed like a pretty unlikely political statement for this guy to make - but then it dawned on me that he was simply repeating the Palin-type trope about how there are real parts of America and not-so-real parts of America.

I thought about this as we packed up the Smart Car for some tailgating on Labor Day. We went to support Ms. AC's hokies in this debacle. (I should hasten to point out that the game itself was actually highly entertaining despite the result - several lead changes in the second half, etc.) We packed up some beers in the back of the car (there's actually storage back there.) We hopped in our little city car and drove out to some big stadium. We may not have had flags adorning our car, and maybe we mostly don't eat meat. Maybe our pregame music is NPR and rather than Bon Jovi, and maybe one of us wasn't even born here. No matter. What we were doing - packing up the car on a national holiday and heading to a football game - should be eminently recognizable to any American.

I thought of this guy as we loaded up the car, of his conception of America somehow excluding us. I can tell you that, in the parking lot, we chatted with strangers, answered (yes) questions about the tiny car we were driving, and even got chummy with some Boise State people. I still don't understand why our existence in America is any less real than anyone else's.