So, what you're telling me, Percy, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue than something else you have never seen.

It feels like the top half of my spine is attempting to part company with the rest of my body.

The doctors I have visited cannot agree on a diagnosis. One said probably a pinched nerve, the other said maybe muscle spasms. They sent me for x-rays of my neck only, which did not hurt at the time.

These people apparently completed eight years of college.

I lost respect for the first doctor the moment she whipped out the pain scale.

Like are you f**king serious.

Hyperbole and a Half did a much better pain scale, but even with hers I have trouble pinning a number on pain, which is probably why broken limbs have been ignored in the past and I don't notice when I sustain second degree burns whilst cooking.

I have no idea when that happened. I did not notice it until it went all scabby and itchy; all I know is that it is definitely a burn, and that my old doctor may definitely have been correct in his theory that I have some kind of neurological problem. 

My pain scale is more like binary code--there are only two options, 0 and 1.

The back pain went away not long after it got extremely severe, but then it came back in full force yesterday. I shall continue to abuse the muscle relaxers the first doctor gave me until it goes away again. I never filled the prescription for steroids because the side effects make me nervous, and I lost the prescription for physical therapy. I think I'll just go to M.'s shady Chinese masseuse instead.

IN OTHER NEWS

I have acquired an upright bass. I can't really do anything with it until my friend's husband takes it apart to flip the strings (I'm left handed and as as I already play the bass guitar left handed, I am too dyslexic to learn it right handed), but I've been putzing around with it and holy hand grenades is that thing difficult to play. I didn't pay a lot of money for it though (pretty sure it fell off the back of a truck to be honest), so if I never get very good at it I'm not really concerned.

Lil Bro#2 has decided he would like to master the harmonica (Sam Lupin, you'll appreciate this) and so he has purchased a harmonica and plays it [badly] pretty much non-stop. It's kind of hilarious; wherever you go in Dad's house, if Lil Bro#2 is home, you can hear the faint sounds of the harmonica just playing random notes. He's sort of figured out the beginning of the William Tell Overture [by accident], so hopefully he will get good at it before Stepmom steals it and casts it into the fire.

One of our Russian mobster clients came in today wearing one of these:

It is worth approximately $70,000.00, and can only be repaired in Switzerland.

Expectations vs. Reality

I feel like television and movies give us some absurd expectations about life that we don't even realize until life fails to live up to those expectations.

Back in autumn, mumsy decided to get a chimney sweep to come in and clean out the fireplace and chimney in her new house.

Guys please tell me I'm not the only one who hears "chimney sweep" and immediately thinks:

EDIT: I realize many of you automatically think of chimney-sweep-Dick-Van-Dyke. I may be the only child in existence who hated the film Mary Poppins, so the chimney sweeps of other films and BBC period dramas come to mind first. Same difference--we expect a soot covered person in period clothing and that hat. 

A small soot-covered Victorian orphan boy did not show up at the house to sweep the chimney. It was just some burly dude with a bunch of tools.

We all agree that dramatic death scenes should have equally dramatic music, yes? Imagining the most dramatic events of your life that have not yet occurred, you probably add a great soundtrack to go with it. Even remembering past dramatic events, perhaps you mentally add Verdi's Requiem in the background.

This one time, a few friends and I were driving upstate to visit our friend Number2. At one point in the drive, one of the county roads ends at a T-junction, where it meets up with another county road that runs alongside a quarry and dammed lake. So directly on the other side of the road from the stop sign, there is a cliff and a several hundred foot drop onto jagged rock.

This is Upstate New York. Country roads. There are no police monitoring speed limits, so generally everyone drives 65 MPH+ on these windy roads. There are also no signs to warn you that there is a cliff and a several hundred foot drop ahead.

So we're driving along in the dark at night and M., who was driving, wasn't properly paying attention and that stop sign just appeared out of nowhere.

We were going like 80 MPH. We passed the stop sign. M. hit the brakes and swerved, but that cliff looked mighty close to us.

Somehow, presumably by the power of the Holy Spirit, the car did not go off the cliff. You could see the tire marks on the road from us skidding for months afterwards.

We retell this story with much dramatic flair, and a few weeks ago it occurred to M and myself just what we had been blasting on the car radio at that moment, a detail which has historically been left out of all of our re-tellings.

No my friends, we did not have a dramatic soundtrack of epic classical music with full chorus when we nearly drove off a cliff.

We nearly drove off a cliff to this:

I presume that is what saved our lives, because I cannot imagine a kind and loving God would ever let Wilson Philips be the last thing someone hears before plummeting to their death.