I’m in physical therapy currently. Twice a week, one hour a session. The knee injury is the most bestest result of the most bestest ludicrous table design. There’s a McDonald’s on the corner of Alameda and that road that veers off Coors heading to Corrales here in Q-Town. It’s the road that skirts the east side of Cottonwood Mall and the McDumbald’s is just past that restaurant for grazing and Rudy’s BBQ that’s amazing. Rhyme! I’m a poet and don’t give a turd because I’m sharing snaps of the ludicrous table design and poetry has no place in this article schmarticle. Rhyme!

I live in a tract housing neighborhood at the terminus of the cul du sac (“bottom of the bag” en francais), and Sivage Thomas twenty years ago figured that if they made the streets two feet wide they could shove a bunch more houses to sell in the same limited area. It made the houses less expensive, and I got a brand spankin’ new house with a warranty. (mmmmmm….. spanking…… Razzie, are you doing anything right now?)

What I figured out early on is that if my house was in flames I might as well kick it and roast marshmallows because there’s zero probability a full-width fire truck is going to make it all the way down the street to extinguish a fire started most likely because Razzie likes using the gas stove but spends most of her attention trying to find the recipe for boiling water on her smartphone (joke, sweetie, as if you actually read my blog… if you don’t mention this joke poking at you specifically I’ll know you’re fibbing when you say, “Yes, okay? I read your blog. Can I get back to watching Buzzfeed?”, because you are neglecting to mention this joke… love you, sweetie 🙂 ).

There’s your analogy for a foreshadowing context. The McDumbald’s at Alameda and that Corrales road used the same logic for their spatial booth maximization. What this means is this McDumbald’s crammed as many booths into the very small eating area for more warm bodies eating Big Heart McTacks and the most bestest fries in the universe. More booths, more customers, more revenue.

I’m 6 foot 3 inches in height. This rocks most of the time. Not on this visit to McDumbald’s. Razzie and I stopped in for an inexpensive $1 refillable drink to wait out the 30 minutes until Ross opened down the street. We got our drinks (and fries), and I slid into one of their micro-booths thinking nothing of the length of my femur and not noticing the unfortunate and stupid design of the booth table support. Why stupid? Because in order for me to have sat down without injury, I would have had to turn my legs completely perpendicular to my torso to miss hitting a support post placed a foot or less from the edge of the table. There wasn’t enough clearance to slide into the booth naturally. The reasonable man can expect to sit and enjoy a $1 refillable drink (and fries I kept stealing from Razzie) without the possibility of inevitable physical injury.

Wham! Bam! I am a man, Job or no job, you can’t tell me that I’m not, Do you, enjoy what you do? If not, just stop, don’t stay there and rot. I just totally betrayed what decade I grew up in.

Wham! Edge of the patella right into the stupid table support post. I hobbled around for a few days before Razzie insisted we go to urgent care and have a medical practitioner inspect the injury and assess the damage.

It’s an entirely different tangent of the annoyance factor that ABQ Health Partners urgent care (off Jefferson at Journal Center) advertised closing at 6 PM on Saturday but instead closed at 5:13 PM that day because “they already had enough patients”. So, I’ll condense this part of the yarn and state we ended up having to go to Lovelace Women’s Hospital emergency care and perched three hours in the waiting room where only two other people besides me and Razzie didn’t have ebola. Annoyed be I. Totally different tangent. Trust me, I’m getting to the point of this blog. Darn it all, I love exposition.

After a few visits to an orthopedist, it was determined I’d bruised the marrow in the left patella, and my leg was immobilized for a couple of weeks on doctor’s orders. By the end of two week of immobilization, my left leg had atrophied big time, and my muscles and tendons are all messed up, and now I’m in physical therapy at Armada. Grrrr. I’m super annoyed, and super inconvenienced. A hoofing down the South Kaibab to Phantom Ranch was in the works, and now it’s totally delayed. The muscles and tendons from my lower back down to my ankle which all work in unison to move my left leg properly are weak, atrophied, and stiff. Grrrrr. Annoyed.

I was just thinking. If my superhero superpower was a magnetic colon, then my Kryptonite would be a shrapnel factory.

Onward. I totally rocked it today on the recumbent stationary bike thing, making it over three miles in 10 minutes. I rocked it. Here’s a picture, to your right, my left. Jokes. Psych your mind. The snap is over there. I rocked it, and this is my warm up before the hurty stuff.

I will say the left leg is getting stronger, the muscles are getting less atrophied, although the tendons have a ways to go to get stretchy and bendy like they should be. The folks who work down at Armada PT rock out with their socks out, and it’s cool working with them. Dara looks like Johnny Depp. Head down there and see if you don’t agree. The therapists and Armada rock out with their socks out.

What didn’t rock out with its socks out were my fellow PT-mates talking about that stupid dead gorilla today. He’s dead. If anyone should be upset about being killed, it’s this dead gorilla. Alas, he is dead. He can’t shout at the interweb about “negligent parenting” or “a gorilla is worth more than a naughty boy” or “the gorilla was only trying to protect the boy by expressively dragging the kid around and tossing him here and there like a banger in mash” because everyone is now an expert in primate behavior because we read Wikipedia and YouTube comments which are the most perfect “concentrated PhD degree program” in the entire history of ever. No, the only creature who should be upset, because it affected him directly and personally, is the dead gorilla. But he is dead and his moral outrage died with him. His nasty oxygen addiction is cured, his worries are over. The moral outrage from my fellow PT-mates about a slaughtered gorilla should be dead as well.

So here I am today, working my butt off to expedite my recovery (by the by, my left butt muscles are some of the most atrophied along my leg, and this explains why my Care Bear Underoos are feeling a bit baggy on the left side), and here I am having to listen to my fellow PT-mates collaboratively bitching about that stupid dead gorilla. Here I am, working my butt back on (ha!), and I’m losing track of the number of reps, and I’m not concentrating on rebuilding my sculpted, Adonis-like bum because of this stupid dead gorilla and my PT-mates who are wasting their precious reserves of moral outrage on this stupid dead gorilla.

After not so long working through today’s therapy session at PT, the isolated muscles and tendons invariably started to burn, and in situations such as these of combined physical discomfort and just-shut-up-about-the-stupid-dead-gorilla discomfort, grumpy random thoughts congeal and grumpy inappropriate jokes blossom. Or rather, I start vomiting out all these random thoughts-to-inappropriate jokes in my head that blast right through whatever social filter there is between my brain and my mouth.

Burny muscles. Bananas. I told Kristin today that I’ve been jamming down bananas for the potassium. Potassium helps alleviate muscle pain from physical exertion. Kristin shared that her mum is a RN and she recommended that magnesium intake must also proportionately increase because muscle potassium absorption is dependent on available magnesium. One without the other and all that banana potassium shoots right on through, never permeating the burny muscles, never alleviating the burny muscle pain properly. That was news to me. And, I love magnesium. I love that chemistry students consistently mistake manganese for magnesium on pop quizzes and lose massive points because of element nomenclature. And magnesium comes first alphabetically before manganese, and that’s cool, too. It’s also before strontium both alphabetically and periodically. Strontium-90 is another favorite element of mine. I like it showing up in my homogenized milk.

Bananas. I shared with Kristin that I’ve been consuming godly amounts of bananas for the burny muscles, and I shared that I planted a banana grove in my backyard because it was more quantity and delivery efficient and it was much more cost effective. Bananas are ranging in the 59 cents a pound cost, and they are picked green and shipped here from Upper Lower Columbaguay. I can grow bananas for less than three cents a ton. Not a pound. A metric ton. Fresh, inexpensive, readily available, and cost effective. Check out the couple of snaps of my banana grove in Albuquerque, and the relocated Columbaguayian farmers who tend to the crops for me.

Bananas. Humor can transform conversations, and today it was humorous dead-gorilla-shaming of my PT-mates and an inappropriate joke all in the same grumpy swipe.

Grumpy mind vomit, commence! Wind it up and watch it go…

I said to Kristin, “Fresh, inexpensive, readily available, and cost effective bananas for me is not the primary reason I planted the banana grove two days ago in my backyard. I’m also being socially aware and morally sensitive to the fact there is one less gorilla on the planet. I’ve increased my personal banana consumption to balance out the newly deficient global banana consumption metric, and I’ve volunteered to make up the difference of having one less gorilla on the planet by gorging myself on bananas. I’m cool that way, always thinking about our biosphere.

“Got to preserve the fragile balance of global banana consumption.”

Did I ever tell you I’m an excellent facilitator? I totally skewed the conversation we PT-mates were having today. All American Rejects came on twice on the radio during my one hour session. I am wearing my 2011 blink-182 tour shirt today. AAR are opening for blink-182 (+44 without Tom, get real Mark and Travis). This segued to My Chemical Romance opening for blink-182 on the last tour. And this continued until my one hour session was complete.

Stupid dead gorilla. He thinks he’s sooooooo much better than I am. I know he’s up in Animal Heaven chastising me for not consuming bananas in the proper gorilla fashion. Just upping my banana consumption isn’t good enough. Stupid dead judgemental gorilla. He thinks he’s sooooooooo much better than I am.

Banana PSA: Men cannot make eye contact with each other whilst eating a banana.

I’m outa here. Peace out, compadres!