living on the back. no longer an upright animal. except part-time. and no driving for another couple months. perspectives are limited. constant aching. phone calls with empathetic Others, emphasizes the distance of distributed being, how help is only visceral. hmmmm.

Loki leaves for San Francisco tomorrow evening. another summer gone past. on the cusp of his 13th year. it started so fine, and imploded in the course of a few seconds, changing character completely.

Kevin's show opens tonight at Martha's office space in Chelsea, sounded like a lot of fun, lots of people, and he ended up selling around 20 works. yippee! thanks for the photo's Andrea!

now concerns have all shifted to simple things like how to manage post-surgical edema in my left leg, as it migrates slowly towards the figurative ground of foot-dwellers. this seems to be the most intensive source for problems (pain and discomfort). unless there is an underlying neurological pathology, which I hope not.

still have a yet-uncounted 12-inch string of surgical staples decorating my left abdomen. my surgeon is on summer vacation, so, won't meet with him until next week to find out what is going on with the surgery, recovery, and probable causes of the bone density problem. almost two weeks out of surgery. should I feel better or worse. having no baseline makes life frustrating. although my base health was excellent going into the whole thing, it's not clear where I would be or even how the original injury actually happened to begin.

still processing the whole paradigm-shift of plan-changes, and possible life-changes. hmmmm.

fighting for breath, heart bursting, the horizontal trauma that surgery imposes on the body is severe. can't imagine being older or in worse shape. fighting to get enough air, but no diaphragm muscles left, and pushing against the suture wall, non space for air. heart compressed into smaller-than-average ribcage. pulmonary edema. can't draw anything near a full breath. even with an oxygen feed. a horrible suffocating night.

post-op. 12 bleary and medicated hours later. I am splayed open for 6 hours of spinal surgery -- anterior L3 corpectomy combined with a L2-L4 fusion in titanium -- from noon to 6 pm with a team of doctors lead by Dr. Papadopoulos. he tells Janet that the surgery went perfectly. I have no coherent memories of the ensuing 3 days when on heavy morphine IV. the self-delivering clicker kind that Janet says I am clicking on all the time.

waking moments bring the perception of the room, nurses coming and going checking on my body's status, the IV machine sounding like a child shuffling down a long corridor and back, forever, shoes scraping on an institutional tile floor. why don't they stop them running back and forth so I can sleep?

when eyes close, like a junkies eyes grafted onto my own, as lids drop, another reality rolls into place. immediate, present, and dynamic. sometimes I find myself reaching out to touch the objectification of vision. knowing it's not there, except a sliver of doubt, maybe it is. scenes as real as any reality, urban, details everywhere, even where the eye is not focused, textures impossible to render except in real time. changing, evolving, and the self, wraith-like moving through it all, soaking in the experience.

after four nights at home, a call to a local emergency transport company is in order for a trip to the ER. the shocking news. a shattered L3 lumbar vertebra. almost medivac-ed to Phoenix, but instead, a 2-hour ride to St. Joseph's neurology ER on a backboard with a neck brace.

the ensuing flurry of activities I experience with a certain detachment, partially induced by the heavy meds, but also by a basic curiosity, as I have never spent a night in a hospital before, and certainly had never experienced such a trauma before. riding a gurney around, the world takes on a peculiar perspective. ceiling lines tend to converge towards the toes, eyes are blinded by Lights that penetrate the wounded body, the Other becomes a haloed face warning, bump coming up! to be a gurney driver is to transport the minimal common denominator of the hospital environment, the injured and sick body. from here to there, to be probed, radiated, and sampled, and once again docked to the variety of machines that sustain life.

the full spinal MRI marked a peak experience: one of the best industrial noize performances to date. can't recall whether they actually added a claustrophobia-fighting concoction to the rest of the meds, but with headphones on, sliding into the extremely narrow white tube didn't seem too bothersome. the operator stayed in contact with a mike, checking in with me every so often during the hour-long procedure. how to describe the sonic stimulation (along with the intense tesla-flux shivering through my body electric), glitch, techno, noize, industrial. and so on. excellent. I told the operator upon exiting, that it was one of the best noize performances I'd ever heard. how to reproduce it? probably impossible to record it with the heavy magnetic fields. what did it do to my embodied presence?

details aside. woke up this morning in peak condition, ready for a lively 4th of July. hours later, stretched out in pain on the bedroom floor apparently suffering from a herniated lumbar disk or so.

1.2 GHz G4 Powerbook, my mainstay for mobility and the core machine of an array of three other machines dies today. ignominious, blanked grey screen demanding a restart that will not take place. stupidly take it in to the local authorized Mac repair place, Argosy West, run by one of the most arrogant and often disagreable persons I've had the misfortune to run across. seldom anything but a condescending comment. last I'll see of it for more than three weeks.

hadn't made a primary backup since before leaving for California three weeks ago. whups. so the data on the drive along with the drives integrity suddenly leaps to the foreground. older data is backed-up with triple redundancy. after the two historical drive crashes (1996 and 1999?), aside from having alternative off-site storage for a third rotating backup, I am religious about regular backups. period.

the month starts. hottest temps, dry. and a fire on the southern horizon that occasionally resembles a volcanic eruption. it's threatening to become the largest in Arizona history. no danger here, but as always, people start to get nervous with dry grass and tinder all around the area. just takes a cretinous smoker of off-roader driving without a spark-arresting muffler. instant conflagration. the party weekend looms.