Maybe the dye mutated your lone surviving original fish into some sort of fish super-hero?

Chestnuts roasted by Dane @ 03/11/2008 9:03 PM

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Is the Shrek shake actually a Shamrock Shake in disguise?

Chestnuts roasted by Thorzul @ 03/11/2008 9:16 PM

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I as hoping this was somehow going to be a post about Cloverfield. Alas I guess we can’t have everything.

And yes, Shamrock Shakes are at my local McDonalds again this year! Its like Christmas… only, green.

Chestnuts roasted by Kyle @ 03/11/2008 9:35 PM

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“Cloverf(I)i(E)s(L)h(D)”

Is all I saw when I refreshed the blog – screw green dye, they should inject these fish with monsterous-sea-monster genes – and then give them small sea-city-castles to smash!

Chestnuts roasted by penmissile @ 03/11/2008 9:52 PM

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Aw, those poor fishies. Cute though!

Chestnuts roasted by Ariel @ 03/11/2008 10:02 PM

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Shamrock Shakes turn Grimace green!

Chestnuts roasted by Luap @ 03/11/2008 10:54 PM

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Wait, wait, wait. Do you guys think there is a connection between the Shamrock Shake and Slusho? Because I do now!

Chestnuts roasted by Kyle @ 03/11/2008 10:56 PM

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Okay, here we go… I’ve mentioned on a few recent postings that I would soon share the sordid particulars of my brush with annihilation a little more than 16 months ago, and now I will make good on that promise. Please bear in mind that all the details of the incident itself that I am about to divulge were told to me after the fact; I learned about most of the finer points second-hand because I can’t remember a bit of it myself. In fact, my memory of the entire day leading up to the occurrence (during which I apparently taught The Picture of Dorian Gray to a local class of high school seniors and also bought a pair of concert tickets at the Ticketmaster counter in a local Kroger store) has been wiped clean. But anyway, on to the gruesome main event…

On the day of Friday October 27, 2006, I had planned to travel to the city of Columbus, Ohio (just a shade under a two-hour drive from my home) for what was promising to be one hell of a swell weekend. I was planning to catch a GWAR concert Friday night and then attend a zombie-themed Halloween party on Saturday. In fact, the last entry I posted on the X-E Blog before this heinous series of events was put into motion was probably the one in which I asked the advice of all the X-E bloggers concerning what kind of zombie I should dress myself as. Remember? I think the final consensus was a “Rowdy” Roddy Piper Zombie, but I ended up settling for dressing up as a regular ol’ zombie with all kinds of bite-wound prosthetics on my neck (I never got around to wearing the make-up and prosthetics I purchased that year, but, happily, most of them maintained their structural and chemical integrity until I was finally able to slather myself with them during Halloween ’07). Anyway, that’s where I was heading that particular Friday evening in my pine-green 2003 Toyota Tacoma SR5 — the truck that gave its life to save mine.

Apparently, it was just piss-pouring the rain that afternoon. I probably had no business driving anywhere with the weather as nasty as it was, but, being the devoted fan of the lurid, feral absurdity of a live GWAR performance that I am, I imagine that I felt compelled to make the drive regardless of the perilous conditions on the road. I was heading north on State Route 23 on my way to Columbus, and I was just about one mile north of the city of Waverly, Ohio when a person driving a black pickup truck (a person who has, to this very day, yet to be prosecuted or even identified) came barreling up behind my truck at about 65mph, struck my truck’s rear bumper, and sent my truck (with my fragile self contained therein) spinning into the southbound lane. I’d like to emphasize the word “SPINNING” in the previous sentence because it is undoubtedly by virtue of that spinning that I am still alive today. By the time my truck arrived in the southbound lane, it had done almost a complete 180-degree spin and was practically facing due-south when a fucking Sherman Tank of a tan cargo van came rolling along in the southbound lane and collided with the rear of my truck. Had my truck failed to pirouette as it did on the rain-slicked highway and remained pointing due-north until the time of the arrival of the cargo van, I’m pretty sure that my body would have been liquefied upon impact.

The police report estimated that both my truck and the cargo van that hit it were each traveling at a speed of roughly 50mph when the collision occurred. My poor truck — hardly a match for the cargo van in terms of weight or solidity — was totaled (I’ll try to get some aftermath photos up on Flickr shortly…stay tuned). Although my little pissant truck’s flimsy aluminum frame folded like a cheap suit when the decidedly beefier cargo van rammed into it, it folded in all the right places so as to keep my even flimsier entrails from being strewn all across the countryside like so many non-biodegradable styrofoam Big Mac containers. My dad — after having peered into my truck’s cabin following the wreck — assured me that a person could not have possibly survived that crash unless he or she had been sitting exactly where I was sitting. The truck was turned into a “double-croissant” of sorts (curled on both the X and Y-Axis) which functioned perfectly in protecting the driver. The strategic curling and collapsing performed by my selflessly heroic truck kept me from being crushed under a mass of twisted metal. Truly, my ’03 Tacoma has earned a place of distinction at the banquet table in Pickup-Truck Valhalla. It achieved the greatest honor attainable by any automobile: it sacrificed itself in combat in an effort to save its master’s life. Your courage and devotion will forever be commended and celebrated, pine-green 2003 Toyota Tacoma SR5. I salute you.

As for myself, I did not come out of the ordeal in much better shape than my poor truck did. In fact, I didn’t come out of it at all. I died. I was clinically dead at the scene of the accident. That means I wasn’t breathing, my heart wasn’t beating, I had no pulse, nothing. Amazingly, the paramedics on the scene were able to revive me (“resurrect” me, if you will) only to lose me once again (that’s right, I died twice in one day!). After completing their apparent practice-run, the paramedics revived me for good on the second try and I was whisked away (via ambulance, not in a med-evac helicopter since it was raining so hard that afternoon) to Grant Medical Center Trauma Unit in Columbus roughly a 90-minute drive away (I made it to Columbus after all!) where I was treated for my injuries and placed on life-support.

Now here’s where the shit gets a little scary: I sustained no physically-observable injuries (no broken bones, cuts or lacerations of any kind) that one would typically expect to result from an incident such as the one I had endured except for two funky-looking bruises (called “hematomas” in doctor-speak) on my shoulder and on my hip where my seatbelt had dug into my flesh during impact. The one major injury I did sustain, though, was a doozy. I sustained what doctors refer to as a TBI or “Traumatic Brain Injury”. Yikes. What happened, basically, was my head was shaken around very violently during the collision (it even bounced off the rear window of my truck’s cab, the doctors suspected) and my brain, in turn, was also shaken around very violently inside my skull. Various bits of brain tissue and blood vessels were, as a result, stretched, twisted and torn and my brain actually collided with the inside of my skull and was scratched by the bony surface. The damage done to my brain was essentially tantamount to the damage that is typically suffered by the brain of a stroke victim. I was comatose when I arrived at the Grant Trauma Unit, and the surgeons on hand told my parents (who hauled ass to Columbus in record time when they heard the news of my wreck) that it would probably be at least six months before I would regain consciousness, but they weren’t optimistic of me ever regaining consciousness at all.

Those surgeons, it would appear, weren’t aware of my tenacity, my resolve, and my mutant healing ability (just call me Weapon-X). I had, after all, eluded certain death not once but twice earlier that day…I wasn’t about to allow something trifling like a coma slow me down for long. I was awake and wondering (very loudly) what in the hell happened less than four weeks later. I cannot recall the early days of my recovery in the hospital, but I hear that they were some wacky times (I wish someone had been videotaping some of it). Brain damage can make you do some screwy stuff, and I guess that I was good at keeping everyone present (members of both my family and of the medical profession) on their toes. There were days I would shout obscenities at everyone I laid eyes upon, days I would spout off with gibberish about being lost in the jungles of Borneo with Keith Olbermann (no joke), days I would speak with a British accent, days I flat-out refused to wear any clothes, days I would defiantly yank out the various tubes and hoses the nurses had fed into every orifice of my body…I’m telling you, I was a one-man freakshow.

Of all the embarrassing stories that I heard concerning myself and my recovery, though, my favorite is the following: one night, my brother and his wife came to visit me, and, when they arrived, I asked for them to turn on the TV. The television was tuned to the Bravo channel and Inside the Actor’s Studio was just going off the air. Al Pacino had been that evening’s guest, and, according to my brother, I went batshit-crazy when I saw Pacino on the TV screen. He says that I started shrieking and cursing about missing an Al Pacino interview and how much I would’ve enjoyed listening to his thoughts on acting and so forth. And then, about 2 minutes into my little tirade, my brother tells me that I fired into the most pitch-perfect Al Pacino impression he had ever seen! Apparently, I started off quoting lines from Pacino flicks like The Godfather and Heat and so forth, and then I just began carrying on a normal conversation with my brother and sister-in-law, all the while talking like Pacino. My brother says it was surreal. For the next 40 minutes or something, I talked about normal everyday stuff (like movies and comic-books and crappy hospital food and whatever), but I talked about it while executing a spot-on impersonation of Al Pacino. Truly, the human brain is a wondrous, terrifying device.

So anyway, near the middle of November, after an intense period of treatment and observation, I was transferred from Grant Medical Center to a hospital that was a little closer to home to begin my in-patient rehab. And then, on the 22nd of November (the day before Thanksgiving) I was released from the hospital for good, and I continued with physical, occupational, and speech therapy for an additional two months. I was deemed functionally incapable to live on my own, though, and was remanded to the care of my parents — without whose love, assistance and encouragement I wouldn’t have had a prayer in surviving this whole ordeal. I continued to suffer from a number of cognitive disorders for a little while after returning home. I had some trouble concentrating as well as difficulty maintaining my balance for a few months after leaving the hospital, but those difficulties soon passed. My short-term memory was also totally fucked for about a month after returning home. I mean, I was like the dude from Memento. My short-term memory was never really all that stellar to begin with, but it was practically non-existent following the wreck. I couldn’t remember a goddamned thing for a while, but, happily, that too ran its course, and I returned to college the following Spring to continue working toward a license to teach high school English Language-Arts classes, and now here I am completing my Pre-Service Teaching requirement in the city of Xi’an in the Peoples’ Republic of China. Y’know…onward and upward, and all that!

And then, finally, there’s also this to consider: as if the pain, hardship and indignity heaped upon myself and my family by this whole god-awful, shitty mess wasn’t astronomical enough already, I’m also being sued. The driver of the tan van (at the behest of his insurance company) is suing me for “failure to control my motor-vehicle resulting in the injury of others” or some horseshit like that (the passengers of the tan van refused medical attention at the scene of the crash while I was lying dead along the highway, by the way). I don’t want to sound whiny here or anything, but shouldn’t I be awarded some kind of “get-out-of-jail-free” card when it comes to lawsuits since I was, y’know, DEAD and all? My attorney — a delightfully affable fellow who my dad and I have nicknamed “Dangerous Dan” due to his thoroughly unthreatening demeanor — assures me that the prosecution doesn’t have a leg to stand on with this case (since there were multiple eyewitness accounts logged in the police report naming the “phantom driver” of the black pickup as the instigator of the whole incident), but it will undoubtedly take an excessive amount of time for the courts to arrive at that decision. That is, I’ll keep getting hassled for depositions and sworn testimonies and so forth for at least another year, probably, just so the case can eventually be thrown out. Not exactly what I’d call the definition of “swift justice”, but as long as I don’t have to shell out any dough, I guess I can’t bitch about it too much.

It’s been an arduous, occasionally frustrating, utterly surreal climb out of the gutter since Halloween of ’06, but I should consider myself fortunate for coming out of it as well as I have (I think that Private Joker said it best at the end of Full Metal Jacket when he said: “I am in a world of shit, yes…but I am alive“). If I were a man of absolutely any religious faith at all, I’d refer to my recovery as “miraculous”, but I’m not, so I won’t. I will, however, refer to it as a process that would not have been successful (or even possible) in any sense whatsoever without the support of my friends and family. I came dangerously close to surrendering to my own self-pity on numerous occasions throughout my convalescence and becoming completely embittered about my situation. Thankfully, my loved-ones would have none of that and kept a fire lit under my ass to continually push myself during rehab even when all I wanted to do was lie in bed and feel sorry for myself. As cheesy as it may sound, it was only by virtue of the faith and confidence that my friends and family showed in me that I was able to find any faith in myself. I owe my life to them every bit as much as I do to the doctors, therapists and paramedics who worked so diligently in keeping me firmly fastened to the mortal coil.

Well, it was great fun (and oddly cathartic) outlining this whole mess here on the X-E blog. I hope you enjoyed reading it. I also hope that this rather lengthy explanation earns me the forgiveness of the collective X-E community for my rather spotty posting here on the blog during the past 16 months. If it doesn’t, though…fuckin’ sue me, why don’t you?

“I knew it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart!”

Whoops, sorry…old habits, and all that…

Chestnuts roasted by The Yeti @ 03/11/2008 11:11 PM

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Well, like you said, at least you’re giving the fish a good home.

Chestnuts roasted by Tetsu Deinonychus @ 03/11/2008 11:22 PM

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Totally unrelated, sorry, but for a limited time, Amazon has Autobot and Decepticon collectors watches on sale for $25 each. They come in kick ass tins, too.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=xs_gb_20_right-3_2.1_18535?ie=UTF8&docId=1000206191&pf_rd_p=305207201&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_t=701&pf_rd_i=20&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1RGD1B87G00FJ7YAN6B4

Chestnuts roasted by nork @ 03/11/2008 11:29 PM

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St. Patty’s Day is not stupid Matt, that happens to be me day o’ birth. I will find that shake!

Chestnuts roasted by tigerfan @ 03/11/2008 11:45 PM

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I think my favorite part of fishy posts is seeing if Sean will pop in for an appearance. Can’t recall offhand ever being disappointed

I had the most amazing visions of Cloverfield-themed mutant fish until the scrolldown. As far as the ethical implications, I stand by my initial “meh” assessment. Just as long as the rest of us don’t get inspired to go out and buy them…

Yeti, that’s a pretty incredible story. Good luck continuing fighting the good fight. Be careful, just when you think you’re out, they pull you back in. You know how it is.

Chestnuts roasted by squee4242 @ 03/12/2008 12:09 AM

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