Hey cool - they have "knackered" as a mood on here! So, it's been awhile since I last wrote. If anyone was wondering, I am trying to do less of the "My Life" sort-of thing and dabble more into insightful discourses on stuff, and social commentary. You know, shit like that. It's very much a work in progress. "Nevertheless... onward!" as I once said. So onwards we go. Spent some time at my gym yesterday, paling into woeful insignificance next to the man with the biggest schlong in the world. People generally up at my new gym have this whole anti-naked phobia thing going on - at the old gym, nobody seemed to care - and guys literally head to the showers fully clothed and shoed with their bags and get undressed in a cubicle which is barely one foot square. It's because of the doors, I reckon - the old gym had open showers, 2 rows of 6, with partitions in between so you didn't get molested by the dude in the cubiclet next door, I suppose, but with no doors on 'em, so privacy was never an option. The new gym has much the same layout, but with doors on each little cubicle. "For your privacy," they said. "Whatever, fine," I said. "No, seriously," they said. I'm thinking aloud, "hang on, people are going to get undressed in the locker room proper, then mosey through to the showers, then mosey back to the locker room to get dressed. Unless you do all that under a towel - and some people do - there is very little privacy anyway." The consultant maintains, "it's for your added privacy." Cool, dude, whatever. I digress. Anyway, there in the locker room, wandering about with no abandon whatsoever, the man with the biggest schlong in the world. By comparison, everything else is very much a schlort. Such is the way of things, unfortunately; these are the things we get to deal with. And if it doesn't kill you (and it could - you could have beaten someone to death with it), it makes you stronger. Even if it blows your self-confidence to shit. But that is merely an aside. The reason I was up there is much more severe. I was there because I had tme to kill after taking my sister for an appointment for an MRI. My big sister, who is 17 months my senior, is ill. In the mental sense of the word, apparently. With temporal lobe epilepsy. [jarring chord] Well, okay, it's not nearly as dramatic as that. At best, it's a sense of disconnection, usually carrying a massive feeling of deja-vu, occasionally followed by hallucinations (well, hallucination, singular: the smell of burning toast) followed by general fatigue. That's kinda all there is to it. No thrashing about, or foaming at the mouth, or hurling of obscenities at random strangers, or projectile bleeding, or extreme psychosis, or speaking in tongues, or feats of undeniable strength, no direct connections to God or Satan (apart from whatever is usual for you, that is), no immediate increase in intellect, no telekinesis or channeling of poltergeists, no uncontrolled flailing of limbs. Just the mild disconnection, deja-vu, occasional cookery mishap and a bit of tiredness. Hardly seems worth the trouble, really. She just went to our doctor with general run-downness - you know, overworked, underpaid, general stress etc - and this is what this woman comes up with. We were expecting her to say something like "burnout;" privately, I was also expecting her to say something like "depression." Nevertheless, off we went, referral to neurologist in hand, to the larney private hospital just across from the new gym for an EEG and an MRI - CAT scan, yeah? - and this is what he managed to find. Fair play to our house doctor, I suppose; well spotted. I don't mean to be flippant about living with this condition, but really, it's nothing. And since I am, as always, merely in it for the entertainment, this represents a severe lack thereof. Bearing in mind when I had my blood pressure fiasco some years back, and I had to go for the radioactive kidney-function assay test thingy, we had a blast with a portable Geiger counter pretending we'd spilled some radioactive phosphorous in the corridor, because you could detect me from 20 feet away with it. This is very much who I am, and what I am about. Some say it's a way of dealing with a crisis. I say I'm in it for the entertainment - for the look of hseer disbelief and shock'n'horror on the faces of Other People. Which is why I am not shy moseying around the new gym in my dodgy Speedo. Well, the new dodgy Speedo, recently purchased, without the enormous hole in the arse of it. And this probably explains the lack of concern for privacy there. It's all connected, you see. Onward! Again. The other MRI - because there were two, which is why I called this entry "The MRIs," plural - happened to my mate Andrew. Not Andrew the poetic accountant, my erstwhile travel-mate with the new house with the jacuzzi, not him. "Click" Andrew, who we call Click, for reasons which are hilarious, more so if you are drunk and/or stoned and/or high on life (and crack). It involves 4 boxing gloves, two sets of body armour - which feel like bras - a mis-timed punch and a counter-strike from a guy who, with his pale skin, little designer bead, shaved blonde hair and limpid blue eyes, looks not unlike a Nazi. That's Tony for you. The MRI, I'm talking about here; not the reason for calling him Click. So we were all kitted out for fighting, Tony and Click on one mat, boxing gloved and body armoured, Keenan and I on the other, likewise boxing gloved and face-masked, enjoying a bit of kick-ass hardcore combat. It's very primal. You can smell the rage and the fear. We attack each other like there is no tomorrow, like this is it, the time has come, do it now or die trying. It's cagey. We are giving each other more respect than we deserve, when Click swings at Tony, a decent-enough left cross, and misses. He loses his footing with a grunt as Tony pips him one in the ribs and drops like a stone. At the same time, I mung Keenan something chronic with a quick uppercut as he cuts through my cover and lands an equally solid knock on my jaw. Out of the corner of our eyes - we were not giving each other any breathing room, not in the least - we can see Tony and the two chief instructors crouching over the fallen Andrew. Eventually, we reach a tacit agreement to put our gloves down and not pummel each other and see what the consternation is. Keenan: Woah, Clicky's down! Me: Clumsy bitch. Must have lost his footing on that tricky flat section of the floor. [Laughter.] Keenan (Excited): Dude, check his shoulder! [Dale checks out Clicky's shoulder, stage right.] Me: Fuck, it's popped out! For indeed it had. It was protruding from the front left-side deltoids liked a small, round, bony, misplaced man-boob; a barnacle of the keel of his torso or a corn on the toe of his chest, and other such metaphors. Pop, dislocation, cheers, thanks for stopping by. He's trying very, very hard to not puke his guts out, because the heaving motion would be agony on a popped shoulder. Fair play to him - I would have screamed my lungs out, I reckon. The other instructor, the Chief's wife, a former nurse, asks if he'd liked it popped back in. He declines politely through clenched teeth and a veil of pain and is carted off to another local private hospital. Yeah, we have a couple around here. They knock him out and stick it back in within a half-hour. Two days and 900 painkillers later, he gets an MRI on it and the docs tell him "cartiledge stuffed; ligaments wrecked, muscles ripped to shit. Surgery for you, buddy." And also 3 months out of action and one month of no driving. He drives a great deal while earning a living, so it's all kinda tricky for Clicky. He tells us on Monday how awkward it is to drive with one arm in a sling (which has no power in it anyway), and how difficult it is to shift down and take a corner with only one hand - and his usually non-shifting hand at that - but that he's managing admirably. Kudos, I say. Put that on top of his wrecked knees (yup, both of 'em - cruciate ligament left side and just general mayhem on the right) and you got yourself a survivor. Or a nit-wit who can't take care of himself, I'm not sure. Moral of the story: Don't swing at at Tony the Nazi. As we leave, the Chief says "well, boys, (for we had an all-dude class that night; schlort city, it was) sometimes things happen and it's coincidence. And sometimes things happen which make you think. They say things happen in threes, and this is our second major accident here. This week, I mean - I'm not counting the time when Dale stabbed Alistair." Now, that was a long time ago, and rather an unwarranted snipe at me, I thought. Turns out he was referring to our little kiddies class the preceding day where one of our little girls managed to break her collarbone trying to do a combat roll. "I don't believe in fate, myself; but if any of you do believe that things happen in threes, well, take care and look out for yourselves. See you on Tuesday." So we're all just hoping that it happens to someone else. Not a good thing, with tonight being Hell Night, I reckon. take care out there -d- wow - this is the longest entry in the world.