If all goes according to plan—something which I’m given to understand things generally do—this week should mark the start of the new format on this blog. The ancien regime of producing low-end clickbait once or twice a year had its merits but really failed to move the needle on either viewership or content, both of which I understand to be core attributes of a blog. You have to have at least one.
Going forward, I’ll be making a weekly post on the general state of my life, current endeavors, a gloss on whatever current events I find interesting/infuriating, and—the blog equivalent of fan service—some media picks. I may or may not include a cover pic of me, my dog, and the area around us. On a biweekly basis, I’ll also post a short on a topic of my choosing and adequate quality to post on a free blog. This is intended to give me an outlet without the crippling anxiety of having to routinely produce works of staggering genius for the web while also writing stories of—it goes without saying—staggering genius.
Recent News
In recent news, I’ve been navigating my second ACL tear in as many years and the possibility of a return to that sprawling concrete mistake known as Houston.
Yet Another Hobbling
I tore the first ACL during a brief foray into the world of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu where I was dismayed to learn that combat sports can really fuck up your body. The second tear happened about a month ago when I was dismayed to learn that stepping blindly off a ledge without double-checking how tall it is can also fuck up your. body.
There’s been more than a little dismay, is what I’m getting at.
The first time through I opted for a hamstring graft and the attendant body horror of seeing your knee swell to the size of a softball and your quads atrophy while you spend weeks teaching your body to walk again. The whole process is simultaneously less frightening because I know I can survive it and more deeply frustrating because I know what surviving it entails.
On a positive note, this new injury offers an astonishing variety of options to run bad science experiments on myself. Do I opt for a conservative treatment approach and see what’s possible with a rigorous regimen of weight-lifting and functional yoga? Maybe I should try for a patellar graft this time and see how that compares with a hamstring graft. My natural gait went out the door with the first surgery but with a little time and effort I could really get a sense for how jacked up my legs can get.
On the flip side, maybe I’m falling prey to the naturalistic fallacy by insisting on harvesting my own ligaments. A cadaver graft sounds gross but it also sounds like the start of a necromancer’s backstory on the other and, given the state of the US healthcare system, an investment in the dark arts could go a long way to future proofing my job skills.
The Great Concrete Mistake
It’s not fair to rag on Houston like this. The truth is that the vast majority of American cities are some combination of terrible mistake and corporate plot, and Houston, having been platted out by plot on a swamp surrounded by open prairie by the Allen Brothers, has the dubious distinction of being both and more of these.
Given an intro like that, it would be fair to ask why I’d consider anything quite so awful as a return to that sprawling petrostate and the answer, in appallingly predictable fashion, would be the people. Grant that its endless miles are nearly identical to one another—with some natural allowance for the variances between the poor and the elite—but the city is so incredibly rich in the diversity of its people that a fellow can’t help but wax a little poetic.
Houston is home to people from every country on Earth including more than its fair share of refugees. The last time l attended the Houston Hackathon, my team had members from every continent on Earth. Did we win? No. Did we have a good final product? Also no. But did we work together in common cause for little more than free drinks and the promise of doing something good for our city? Damn straight we did.
I will point out the many flaws of that damn city until I’ve drained the air from the room like an oil man fresh turned to suffocation, but look past those and there is a rich vibrant city where people from across the planet are going to school, breaking bread, making art and and starting businesses together.
I’ve always said I didn’t want to die in Houston--and it is no small matter to decide how you might die--but after enough years I’ve started to understand how I might manage to live there.
