I’m turning into a grouch

Basically I have things that hurt all the time, even when I take painkillers. I mean seriously I wake up with a pain in the neck, butt, and my feet are touchy and sore. I’m a grouchy old man, because I’m in constant low-grade pain that never quits, and I can’t do the things I want to do if they cost money because I don’t have any disposable income.

Anywho, getting back to the painkillers, I have two (ibuprofen and gabapentin) I take before bed to let me sleep, and another (celebrex) I take when I wake up because I hurt during the day. And I still hurt at night and all day long, just not as much. I just “don’t hurt” enough that I can function most of the time. And I hate it. I hate just being “functional” instead of enjoying life. And I hate just existing instead of doing things I like because “disposable income” is more a concept than a reality in my life because I was killed 20 years ago and never recovered from it.

I’m still thinking about the Sprint-T project because I have to, I have been thinking about it every day for the last decade, and off and on since I saw the movie in 1968, The Lively Set, on NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies. That’s a long time to be thinking about a project. For years it was a back-burner because I wanted to fly, then because I had a family, then because we became desperately poor because I couldn’t get a job after the wreck.

Basically before the wreck I relied on using my brain to get work, then I had TBI from the wreck and all the stuff I used to do better than anyone else I could barely do at all. I lost all ability to compose search strings that took me to the answer in a database in a single step, which we now call having good “Google-fu”. Basically I had google-fu before google was a thing, and after the drunk with the truck I didn’t have anything. I also used to be able to write and perform poetry to a high level, and now I write… this. I do good “stream of consciousness” writing because I still have that, but planning out a post/article is basically gone. I still can clean up a bad translation like nobody’s business, because I have the train wreck sitting in front of me to work with, and mostly it’s just bad grammar, or confusing word order that means something different than what the client wanted to say because machines don’t do emotional context.

And that’s enough “pitiful me” kvetching. Go find something useful to do that makes beautiful things.

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I survived the trip to pay bills

Well it wasn’t easy but I managed. Most of the bills are caught up, and I managed to get fed and stayed hydrated and even managed to get a naughty treat. There was a new flavor of milkshake available at the Whataburger so I got the smallest one as a treat/dessert. And then farted all night long.😨 Did I mention I discovered I have been lactose intolerant for the last few years? It is not a big deal, I just get really gassy and it has to come out somewhere, right? Interesting story about how I found out, we ran out of milk for my coffee so I had to use non-dairy creamers for a few days, and I noticed I wasn’t gassy, then when we had milk again I was gassy again. And by ran out of milk I mean everything, there wasn’t any plain milk, yogurt, cheese, whipped cream, anything dairy in the house. That was the first time in years we have been without anything dairy.

Right now I’m recovering from yesterday, trying to make my back stay out of spasm, which is easier said than done. The strangest things will trigger a spasm, like a big yawn or turning wrong or bending over to pick something up off the floor, or passing gas. Don’t ask why passing gas causes a spasm, I haven’t the foggiest notion of why that happens. The other stuff I can at least figure out why I get a spasm, usually because I tense up muscles when I do them, and the back muscles don’t like to be tensed up. I have to say I have sympathy for other people with bad backs, because I can get so painful I can barely move, and that’s with my pain tolerance, the guy who pulled his own teeth and walked around on a broken tibia until it healed two months later. So when I say something hurts a lot take my word for it I really hurt.

I was mentioning I was being kept awake because my mind won’t shut down and keeps coming up with crazy ideas that it won’t let go of. Well last night was a doozy: Transplanting the FWD minivan drivetrain as a FWD drivetrain on the bucket. You think I’m having weight distribution issues with the drivetrain in a mid-engine configuration you don’t even want to know what happens when you hang all that mess 10″ in front of the front axle! It doesn’t just add weight to the front wheels it actually reduces weight on the back wheels because of leverage effects. The minivan gets away with this because it has almost 2 tons distributed over the 4 wheels before driver and payload are added. So it ends up with a controllable understeer that’s mostly from the effects of driving through the wheels that steer the car. But this crazy contraption would spend most of its time getting towed out of ditches it had slid into nose-first. So, sorry sleep-fighting mind, this one is never going to even get sketched.

One that I wish I had the time and money to build was the A-Mod Solo racer with the V-twin engine. The quick-and-dirty calculations on that one are scary quick with even balance and extremely low moment of inertia. The weight distribution would be exactly 25% on each wheel. I would actually have to add ballast to make minimum weight. And it would cost less than $10K to build with a little watching Ebay auctions for a good price on the engine. But it ain’t gonna happen while I’m “p’ ” which means “too poor to buy a vowel”.

And now I have to get to bed.

Nice kid, but he’s sometimes a bit slow on the uptake

In April of 2002 I had an operation to try to repair the damages done to my knee by the wreck after I discovered that I couldn’t stand on the pedals and continue to pedal the bike because something was funky in my knee. During the operation they discovered there was nothing they could do because the torn ligaments had already healed up and couldn’t be shortened back to their original length. They also discovered this was not the first time this had happened as all the ligaments in my knee were covered in scars where they had torn and healed up without surgery.

Last night I finally put π and e together and said “This is why my knees were always sore as a teenager.” When I was in college I was diagnosed with “chondromalacia patellae” which basically means pain in the knee after a couple of falls where I twisted my knee really badly or landed on my kneecap sideways. Too bad it took me 15 years after the operation to figure that one out. I’m sure the Army doctors who were trying to figure out why I was in constant low-grade pain would have loved to know I could tear ligaments and just go “Ow!” and not fall down.

So a mystery 40 years in the making was finally solved. It doesn’t fix my knees, but at least I know why they used to hurt all the time.

Now I know how I’m unkillable, too dumb to know I’m dead (J/K).

Thinking heavy thoughts on Transgender Day of Remembrance, and the Feed

Today is a bit strange for me. I’m not Trans*, I’m not even bi, or gay. But I do have 6 Trans* friends including the couple that is living in my house now. And I read several web comics that are either written and/or drawn by a Trans* person/s, or are about Trans* people, or both. One of them subscribes to this blog (Hi!). So it’s not like this is an invisible world for me, it’s one I interact with several times a month on a personal basis. I’m not Trans*, but I’m part of their world, hopefully one of the better parts. And the statistics on violence against Trans* people, particularly M2F trans people, is just overwhelming. I’m not going to bring up the statistics here in a bike blog, but if you think you have it rough because you ride a bicycle, you don’t know how rough it can get. Sure there are people trying to kill us for existing, just like LGBT people, but they are relatively few in comparison. People are much more likely to kill one of us by “accident” where any hatred is unstated and unknown. People who (that?) kill people for being Trans* will come right out and say so while they try, so you know why you are getting killed, and they will frequently kill in the slowest and most painful method available to them. This is the truth of living in the LGBT world.

Well after that the rest of the post will be just a freaking ray of sunshine up your butts, innit? I hope so, as I go to Filter the Feed now.

Up first a slightly alcohol-impaired person on a bicycle is refused service at a fast-food place not because he was drunk, but because he was riding a bicycle. Bicyclist arrested after trying to order Taco Bell in drive-through The cyclist “resisted arrest” when he refused to allow an officer to grab a tool hung from his belt.

More on Bono’s NYC wreck. Bono’s “High Energy” Bike Accident Caused Severe Injuries Turns out it was a bit more than was first released, the most visible of which was a compound fracture of the arm. Whatever he ran into was hit with a high relative velocity to get those kinds of injuries. Either he was going really fast for a guy his age, or what he ran into was going the opposite direction at a moderate speed. The initial report said Bono was trying to avoid another cyclist at the time of the wreck, is it possible he ran into a salmon?

Another stupid driver ignores the weapon that allows someone to kill with impunity in favor of the one that gets cops to try to kill you if they find you… UPDATE: Arrest made in drive-by shooting of cyclist I’m sure Gigi will love this one for her “Stoopid” fix, because this one is really “Stoopid”.

Our Daily Ted. Morning Links: Bono hurt worse than we thought, biking to cancer care, and WeHo kinda talks bike safety

A link that was also in the previous link about the debate over facilities and vehicular cycling envisioned as a rap battle. Epic Rap Battle: Vehicular cycling guru John Forester vs. @Copenhagenize kingpin Colville-Andersen. I drew this.

Speaking of vehicular cycling and street safety, some stats I used to quote have been updated from their 20^th Century status quo to the 21^st Century, in this graphic.

I’m really hoping this was not the result of bias against cyclists in Oz. Injured cyclist’s painful ambo wait The cyclist was hurt bad enough that she was taken with lights and siren to the nearest trauma center after waiting 45 minutes for the ambulance to get there and stabilized as much as possible during the trip. That sounds like broken bones or head trauma to me…

A photo spread of what bad infrastructure means for cyclists. Photo journal: Another cyclist dies

Is “Bad UK bicycle infrastructure” internally redundant? Jane Greaves: Calls for safety improvements after cyclist dies at Trefnant ‘accident blackspot’ I write that because I have yet to see any good UK bicycle infrastructure, all of it has been varying degrees of bad from “ugh!” to “What homicidal maniac designed this piece of crap?” And that includes the badly over-hyped “Cycling Superhighways” painted bike lanes in London, which cover the entire spectrum of the above list.

LAB has not been setting the bar too high on being “Bike Friendly”. National Award for New Britain as ‘Bike-Friendly’

Yet another article on making a bicycle easier to see when drivers “not seeing” bicycles has nothing to do with how visible they are. New products shine light on bicycle safety

Park your car and ride up to 9 miles each way on this scooter. MINI exhibits foldable electric scooter Citysurfer at Los Angeles Auto Show

And an explanation of why the Daily Ted hasn’t been daily as of late. Today’s post, in which I talk pain and what the hell is wrong with me I’m really sorry to find out Ted has joined the Chronic Pain Club, that is a club that should have no members…

And those are all the links for today.

Billed @€0.02, Opus the unkillable badass Poet