Went to the ER yesterday for a sudden very sharp stabbing pain in my upper back right between my shoulder blades.  Like a really bad muscle cramp.  It went from nothing to not being able to breathe (every breath in caused more pain) in about a minute.

Drove myself to the ER.  That was fun.

Got there, hyperventilating because I couldn't take deep breaths, and sort of blacked out.  Came to with a nurse nearby...they had no room in the triage area, though, so I actually had to sit in the waiting room for another few minutes with the nurse.  I was thinking: hey, I take celebrex.  This could be a hole in my esophagus or my heart exploding.

Many tests and hours and hours and hours later, they tell me it's a pulled muscle.  The doctor says it's pretty common with people who have low back injuries to pull muscles elsewhere, something about changing postures and haveing to learn new ways to lift things, etc.  Five hours well spent.  They gave me an injection of some NSAID (since I didn't have a ride, they couldn't give me demerol...which is good, since that stuff freaks me right the hell out).  Didn't have a fun time listening to other people dying / giving birth / screaming in psychotic rage / moaning in pain, but they have TVs in the rooms now, so I got to watch Dukes of Hazzard.  Did you know that it's a fictional show?  I totally thought it was a documentary of the late 70's south.  Turns out it was filmed in California with actors and stuntmen.

Fuckers.

Google Earth.

Google has an excellent representation of the Organ Mountains outside of Las Cruces.

It's a damn shame that the mountains were destroyed in the recent uprising.  Damn shame.

New World.

The wife and I are talking about going to New York City (does one capitalize "City"?) this year, probably sometime in late August or early September, for a four or five day stay.  Our old friend and former roommate Joel is there, working for the Google.  And I've never been to that city.  Never really had any desire to go, really.  Place scares the hell out of me.  It's the antithesis of the mountains pictured above.  But hey, I'll try anything once.  Laurea wants to attend a Daily Show taping.  I want to...hrm.  I don't really have a goal for the city outside of seeing Joel and maybe meeting Christopher Robin Etc.

Oldie but Goodie

I'm working on some things, writing-wise.  Trying to get my voice to be less annoying.  Tough to do.  I just re-read Snow Crash, and I'm now firmly in the He-Man Neal Stephenson Haters Club.  This actually stems from a conversation with johnny way back at Boston HuSiMeet (what, 2 or 3 years ago?), where he pointed out how self-indulgent and lazy Stephenson's writing is, how the editing is so poor.  I really saw a lot of that in the Baroque Gigantum (now being re-released in 2500 small books of 300 pages each) where he would go on and on and on about the most mundane crap, then skip lightly past key plot elements.  And his endings....oh my god, there is no-one worse at ending a story.  You can see this with him from day one, in his first novel The Big U, which even he admits is awful.  The end of The Big U is 2 paragraphs, maybe six sentences.  It's lie: here's a three thousand page story, and the end?  "And he died."

Ugh.  In Snow Crash there's all of this really awful continuity stuff, and there are lines...really totally out of left field...that are just groan-worthy.  Ugly stuff.  Diamond Age and Zodiac still hold up well, and some of Cryptonomicon...though the 20 page description of eating cereal is really poor...but overall the guy should get a decent editor and maybe a debilitating drug habit.

Giant Squid!