My Motorcycle Injuries

I am breaking my diabetic diet today (a little) because it's my birthday. It’s the only day of the year that I deviate from the dietary restrictions of diabetes in any way. I’m having a doughnut tower made instead of a traditional cake. I bought three dozen doughnuts early this morning at a local place that only makes one thing, and it isn’t salad. I’ve never really been much into the whole birthday celebration thing for myself, but it makes my wife happy, so there you have it. I was thinking of going to a restaurant later today for dinner and eating a non-diabetic meal, but I’m not sure at this point if I will go ahead with that idea. The doughnuts, however, shall be conquered later tonight at my party. My sister-in-law is expecting a baby in January. She told us all a couple of weeks ago. She and her husband waited a while to tell us because it was an unplanned pregnancy and she is not at an age that is generally considered as being within the prime child bearing years. Everyone ...

We often have ducks wandering throughout our neighborhood. They breed, hang around, disappear for a time, and leave a mess on my driveway. Because they have been around here forever, they have become a very familiar part of the landscape. I’ve gotten to know a lot about the way that they live throughout each season. One even set up a nest against the front wall of my house once. One of the things that I have noticed about the ducks over the years involves the way in which they cross streets. Do you remember the old adage “look both ways before you cross the street”? Yeah, they’ve never heard that one. The ducks around here cross streets, regardless of the amount of lanes or the speed at which people are driving, all with a casual sense of privilege that rivals Yankees’ fans in October. They casually strut across the road, seemingly without a single care, at a speed that leaves you wondering if they have bothered to notice the 4-ton vehicles coming straight at them. I believe that I kno...

The way in which I have started to label events in my life has evolved into a set of terms, either “before the accident” or “after the accident”. I noticed it more last night while I was looking at photos on my computer with my wife and my daughter. I was transferring and editing a number of photos from my camera and the three of us sat together for a while to reminisce. The pictures covered several years’ worth of events and we hadn’t really seen most of them since they were first taken. As I scrolled through the different photos on my computer I kept thinking of them as either pre or post motorcycle accident. You want to know something? I need to change this. There has to be a far better way of thinking when attempting to categorize the events of my life. I cannot allow this one freakish event to define my mortal existence. I’m going to determine to think differently and pick better benchmarks from which I define the timeline of my life. It really is time to move forward in a better ...

I think that one of the strangest aftereffects of the accident is the way in which it has changed my thought process throughout any given day. You see, I was once more like the dog in the photo above. Now I’m more like the guy with the blue body. I remember laying in the hospital bed after the accident and thinking that all I wanted at the time was to be able to enter into a restaurant (don’t know why, but it was a Chili’s) and sit down to drink a soda and eat a meal. I wanted to go in with a body that wasn’t all beat up. I wanted to enter the place as an average guy that nobody really noticed. I wanted to be injury free and spend a night out where I wasn’t all beat up and quite so noticeable. It was such a simple desire that attempted to reach beyond the fact that I was the center of attention in a hospital room that everyone else either attended to or worried about. Even in the hospital I wasn’t preoccupied with much beyond short-term goals and simple desires. I don’t think that thin...