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I kind of want to write something erotic and edgy, full of nameless back-alley couplings, violent, passionate encounters, or stolen moments in dark smokey bars.

Unfortunately, I keep getting disrupted by things like severe lack of sleep the last four weeks.

Supposedly, I'm still healing incredibly well; my doctor cleared me today to start working out (slowly), and to resume normal activity. Not that I have any idea what normal means, but I'll assume that means I can ride a motorcycle or put full weight on my knuckles now (both things I've been generally avoiding for a while).

However, I have no patience with weakness or discomfort. The fact that it still aches at night may be 'normal', but it's drivin' me up the wall, and completely interfering with my sleep. I want to attack things, and the lack of sleep is leaving my generally ineffective and groggy (and pretty severely grumpy as well).

Next week I start physical therapy, which should hurt, but in more of a good way. I'm hoping the aches of activity will be far preferable to the aches of inactivity (ie, I'd rather have it hurt for a good reason, if it's gonna hurt).

I keep trying to actually get writing done (with 'done' being relative, since I haven't been able FINISH anything in forever), so possibly, possibly, I'll get traction here soon.

I kind of had this plan to blog my way through my surgery this week. I kind of think that was over-optomistic, considering a) I haven't been blogging at all most of the last year and b) I haven't really had much use of my left arm.

I didn't quite get there; best I managed with posting photos f the inside of my shoulder on facebook, and tweeting about how looped I was on percocet in the middle of the night.

To summarize though, for those who aren't following me elsewhere - December 23, I had arthroscopic surgery on my left shoulder

So here's how it's been the last month or so.

First, about a month ago, Barb had to go in for abdominal surgery - a long story, which maybe I'll tell much later. The short version is that the surgery was more complicated than planned, lasted twice as long as planned, and had a much longer recovery than planned.

The week before surgery, one of my kids brought home some ailment, the primary symptoms of which were dizziness and fatigue. Barb came down with it the evening she came out of surgery. Which means that in addition to pain and wooziness and nausea from surgery, she had spectacularly bad bed spins for the better part of a week.

At this same time (the actual day oo surgery), my eleven year old daughter Ruby sprained her ankle so badly we all thought it was broken (clearly she inherited my feline grace; she did it by trying to walk while her foot was asleep). She wound up on crutches, barely able to move; her whole foot wine purple and her ankle swollen up like a grapefruit.

Also around this time, we took one of Olivia's favorite pet rats (Eddie, which is short for Edgar Allen Poe) in to the vet to have a cyst on his foot looked at. The conclusion was that it wouldn't heal, and the choices were looking like euthanasia, or amputation. Now, normally I'm opposed to major intervention of any kind with pets that don't live more than a couple of years; but I think we all transferred a bit of worry about the rest of the members of the family onto this big gray lump of a rat; we made a choice that's opposed to my rules, and had him de-legged.

Since that time, Barb has caught every ailment that goes around. She's had two or three different cold-like viruses (one of which might have been swine flu, her doctor says, though he can't tell for sure). The last round developed into - in order - a sinus infection, then bronchitis, and then into full-blown pneumonia, with a lovely case of pleurisy (just take a look at the famous cases for a fabulous list of people who died of pleurisy.). She was very close to needing to go back into the hospital. She's been fighting that - with an array of meds that makes me very, very glad I have good health coverage) - for well over ten days, and is still unable to do much of anything.

So it's been a bit of a rough patch.

Last week, Eddie (legless ed, eddie the tripod, eddie three legs) took a turn for the worse. He'd been healing well; he was moving around like a tiny fuzzy elephant seal, eating like a champ, and seemed happy to get picked up twice a day for his medications. We figured he was out of the woods. And then infection set it.

I again had to make that hard choice; follow my rules and euthanize, or spend more damned money. I broke my own rules again. The vet had to remove a hunk of infected muscle the size of a sugar cube, and then stapled him closed again and sent us home with a double dose of antibiotics.

We though we were losing him; he pulled out his staples and left behind something like you'd see on a battlefield. And then, suddenly, the wound started to fill over with granulation tissue, stopped weeping, and Eddie started to come out of his little house to greet us when we come to get him out. He's back to moving loping like an elephant seal, pathetically clumsy and yet fully able to get around his cage. He's not, as they say, out of the woods yet. But we're starting to hope.

Eddie and Barb and Ruby all seem to be on the same schedule; Ruby just got put of her cast, Barb's ailment is slowly receding, and Eddie the Gimp is looking better. So (I almost want to knock wood here) maybe we're past the end of one of the worst octobers in memory (at least the worst since last October, but more on that later.

Amazingly, Olivia and I have gotten through all this without ever getting sick, despite stress and severe lack of sleep. I've missed way too much work due to my nurse-and-single-parent role this last month, and I've been at no better than half capacity when I'm there; but I haven't picked up a case of the flu, haven't come down with a sinus infection, didn't pick up the swine flu.

Either there's a crash coming, or it's my immune system doing that hyperdrive thing it does when I'm under extreme stress. We'll wait and see how that plays out this next week or two.

Forty years ago today, I sat in my family's living room in San Jose, watching ghostly black-and-white images and listening to a message from as far away as any message ever delivered by a human voice.

The little things are what I remember; the furniture, where the tv sat. The color of the drapes. And my brother's screaming tantrum, while Neil Armstrong said one small step.

The universe changed. The sci-fi world inside a seven year old boy's head was, suddenly, real, and possible.

All of us have moments that sear into memory forever; in a real way, moments that define generations. Where were you when Kennedy was killed, people used to say, for the generation just before me. My parents told me about about hearing serious, breathless voices reporting over the radio - A day that will live in infamy. Some of you, younger than me maybe, talk about Kurt Cobain's death that way, and almost everyone I know over the age of 10 remembers the exact instant when heard, or saw, or read about two planes hitting two towers in New York City.

Some of these moments change the world; some only define a generation. I say only as if that carried less significance; yet for some, the death of Elvis or Janis, Buddy or Kurt or Jimi, \Jim or even Michael, may be the day your music died. The point is that they're those moments we will always remember, for whatever reason. Time and place and feeling burned like a brand into us.

But some of these moments, in a real and permanent way, do change the world. Who knows, when Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto sailed his fleet of aircraft carries toward an archipelago in the middle of the pacific, if he had any inkling that he was steaming toward the hinge point in the most significant war of his century, possibly the most significant war in human history. The nineteen hijackers in 2001 may have been in the grips of some delusion of grandeur; personally, they were simply fools attacking an irrelevant symbol, for the imagined glory of a mythical god. Yes, they cost many lives and billions of dollars; but the impact that lasts, decades later, will be changes to the political and social landscapes of the United States, the middle east, Europe; in a sense, the entire world. Industries were permanently changed. The word Terrorism entered the daily lexicon of ordinary people. Governments fell.

Violence, fear, destruction, and death defined both of these events. And ripples continue to roll outward from them; even now, 64 years later, Perl Harbor and WWII still define much of the relationship between Japan and the USA.

But some events change history, not with destruction, but with creation.

June 20, 1969, an entire world looks up at the moon, physically, or virtually, and say, we're up there. Men stand beyond that unimaginable gulf, we realize; they may be looking up into their own sky, and seeing this blue and green ball. They may be walking, leaving footprints where no living thing has, ever.

Children looked up and said, I have no limits. I can go up, and never stop. I can fly. Men and women looked up and said, that's why I do what I do, making what I make, learning what I learn. For one moment, we had won an almost inconceivable battle. We'd done the impossible. We waved flags and claimed a victory in an imaginary race, but every pair of eyes, every pair of ears, every mind that was in any way able to hear or see or read Neil Armstrong's words, knew we'd just won some intangible victory over space and impossible odds.

Every scientist I know, every engineer, every writer or teacher or pilot; every one who was old enough to know men stood there above our heads, felt things change around them. We felt the limits move unimaginably far back.

We could do anything.

The generation who witnessed that moment went on to invent almost every single thing upon which our lives depend today. Medicines, weapons, tools. Computers, networks. We invented ways to fly, ways to go to space, ways to live in space.

And ways to die, tragically and pointlessly; proving that no matter how many years have come since, space is still a dangerous place, a place we don't belong.

I was seven years old when Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong lifted off a launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, and already, I lived only for space and adventure. I played with my G.I. Joe space capsule, watched Star Trek and Lost in Space with my father, and knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I would be up there one day.

At 7:39pm PST on Sunday July 20, 1969 (forty years almost to the minute, as I type this), my family were clustered around a TV set that seems absurdly small now, watching a picture that was all but incomprehensible with snow and interference. And I was as glued to that image as I ever have been to anything, before or since.

Behind me on the couch, my brother Ian - five and a half years old - was in the middle of a screaming tantrum. He'd given himself a nose bleed, and, twenty nine years before the invention of TiVo, was demanding at the top of his lungs that we make the TV wait until he could watch it.

My memory of the event is rich in detail. Ian's insane screams and wails, my parents frustration as he distracted them from the event; my own confusion and elation, (and irritation) as I tried to make sense of the snowstorm on the TV and Armstrong's brilliant, nonsensical, unforgettable quote over my brother's howling.

That night I lay in my bed, looking at G.I. Joe and Major Matt Mason, and all my other space related toys and books, and I imagined heroic men in space suits cooler than anything artists or toy makers could think of. I wondered what they were doing, where and when they slept, what they ate, and how they went to the bathroom.

Over the next days, I watched every piece of television news I could get; I read the papers with my parents. I ate and drank and dreamed words like Apollo, Eagle, LEM, Mare Tranquillitatis, Command Module.

I'm not sure, once the country had gotten used to the idea, gotten over the wonderment, that most of us really knew how much human history has just changed. I'm not sure most americans, busy with work, with school, with getting by, scoring, getting laid, thought about the hardware left behind in the deep thick dust, about the men who'd gone up there, about the ones on the ground working non stop to get back again, only better, and safer.

But for a generation of children and young adults, that was all we thought about; the gateway that had just opened. The fundamental difference the universe had after.

Eight years later, Star Wars premiered; movie makers who's sat in front of their televisions like I had, had turned it into mythology that would leave it's own explosive impact. That same year, the first space shuttle, named Enterprise by science fiction fans and young man who lived and breathed space ships flew it's first test mission, as far beyond the Gemini and Apollo craft as they were beyond bi-planes.

In the years following the Apollo program, technology advanced in almost every field upon which the high tech industry depends. The study of power, physics, heat; battery technology. Things as basic as the teflon that coats our pans, the chips that drive digital wacthes and iPods and cell phones. Aerodynamics which are used everywhere from airplane design to cars to bicycles to speeding up swimmers in the water and skaters on the ice.

There's been a great deal of dark history for Nasa and the space program in recent years. Budget cuts in the mid seventies caused stagnation in culture and technology; we've seen two massive, entirely preventable shuttle disasters, and no forward progress on what's next in decades. Nasa, like any under-funded, over-worked government agency, began to make choices based on protecting itself instead of reaching out and up. Today we fund Nasa at a fraction of the (effective) budget they had to spend in the mid sixties; and worse, we began to say, as a culture, space? it doesn't matter. We felt we needed to worry about here and now and how I'll pay for a tank of gas.

Today, while I should have been catching up on work, squashing bugs after some weekend network updates, I instead watched videos of the Lunar Module docking with the Command Module, remembered building plastic replicas of them with polystyrene and glue and paint.

I'm not sure when I, personally, said goodbye to my certainty that I'd walk up on the moon some day. Maybe it got lost in my adolescent discovery of girls and music and drugs; maybe it was when I realized that astronauts weren't the daredevils of fiction, but in fact were dedicated students and military men. I wasn't a good student, hating authority and having no attention for anything that wasn't interesting to me at that exact moment. I never forget that dream though; when I glide through deep water, the images of men and women in zero g comes to mind. When I watch video of multi-billionaire 'space tourists' visiting the international space station, I feel a searing envy, not over the money they have to waste, but that they have what it takes to go out to the far frontiers of human experience.

What changed in 1969 was that, for the first time in human history, we were there on the outer edges with adventurers and explorers. No one saw Richard Francis Burton search for the source of the Nile; no one but a few sailors were witness to Captain Cook's 'discovery' of most of the islands in the south pacific. And in both cases, the discovery was one culture finding what another culture already knew.

But in June of 1969, an entire world watched and listened, in real time, as one single foot stepped on a square foot of dust no human foot has ever trod, no human eye had ever seen. And we knew it minutes after the explorer himself. The world of 1969 was decidedly short on frontiers; Neil Armstrong and his compatriots defined, for every human being alive, where the frontier was.

It's going to be a long time until someone moves that line. When it moves, the universe is going to change again.

I've had my share of hallucinations in my time. Both the pure-fatigue type (which consist mainly of non-persistent but repeating peripheral visions), and the chemically induced type which can be persistent, but also include a distinct muzzy-headedness, and often don't repeat.

Last night, though, I experienced a wholly unexpected side effect of a medication i take semi-regularly.

I suffer insomnia sometimes; not consistent, but often enough that it's a factor in my life. Sometimes this is good, because I used to get a lot of writing done after 2am, with bleary red eyes and fevered mind. More recently though, it's been more the in-bed-on-the-edge-of-sleep kind; the kind where worries dominate and the brain gets stuck in repeating loops.

So on occasions, I use sleep aids which easily gets me past that portal to the land of dream.

Now, hallucinations are known side effects of certain meds; I see that every time I read the labels and warnings (which I obsessively do; I research every med I take, and every med my friends and family take, just because pharmacology fascinates me). BUt I've never experienced a single hallucination from normal sleep meds.

Last night, I had a full-blown hallucinatory experience, from a very normal dose (10mg) of a very normal med (@mb1en, spelled that way to avoid spammers).

I was watching the tail end of this week's the fashions show, bravo's project runway knockoff. And as the show ended and I turned off my teevee, I began to see ghostly cobwebs reach out from the still glowing teevee toward my ceiling fan.

I looked around the bed, and there seemed to be similar cobwebs on on the bed and, and then they began to stretch out onto the walls.

I looked at my bedside lamp; in bright light, I saw nothing other than a very slight haze. But in shadow, the general moving, drifting webbiness increased.

"I'm starting to hallucinate," I said.

I began to describe the visuals to my nearly-sleeping bedmate, who tolerantly said 'go to sleep'. But as I looked around, I found my wall paper (which is covered with a deeply-detailed, dark leopard print, as can be seen in the background of this image) was beginning to breath and roil, and then manifest in living, dragon-like shapes which would move as I did (likely it was my shadow and shifting point of vierw that animated it; the motion generally ceased when I held still).

I got up to pace around the room, wanting to explore what I was seeing. Close to the wall, the paper's patters became blowing prairie grass, so vivid I felt I should feel it moving. Yet to my fingers, it was cool and papery-smooth. My eyes retained the visual of blowing fur or grass, but the experience wasn't the least bit tactile.

I turned on bright overhead lights, and was left only with haziness; but when I turned the light out, all the visuals returned.

One corner of the room began to manifest as a sort of bio-mechanical, moving figure; made of webwork, but some sort of intricate flexible metal spider web. The shape resembled a witch or scarecrow, and again, it moved with my movements, breaking down into hazy cobweb when I moved close, but re-assembling into a consistent form when I walked away. Lights cleared it completely.

I turned and looked into my closet, where a figure stood - and this was the first one I actually found alarming. What looked like some sort of three-musketeers swashbuckler all in black, with a broad-brimmed hat. He grinned, though only grin was visible, no eyes. He bent his head and then faded into the shelving as I moved close, one of my hats and a pair of my boots clearly the source of the vision. I saw that only once, but it was startlingly vivid.

I prowled the room for several minutes; the experience was delightfully puzzling; never have I experienced hallucinations so consistent and visually organized. I roamed the rest of the house, still seeing creeping cobwebs and movement in shadows, but nothing in bright light (I think my daughters guinea pigs thought I was death from above when I tried to pet them, but I wanted to feel the webby trails they were creating as they scuttled and squeaked.)

I tried looking at my face in a mirror, and saw nothing but sleepy eyes and vague haze. Whatever I was seeing clearly had a light threshold. And I began to feel too sleepy to continue investigating what I was seeing. I went to bed and turned out the lights, and darkness obliterated any further experience. "I wish I could write this down now, so I don't forget any of it," I think were my last words before I drifted off.

The most interesting things about the experience, for me, were that I felt completely lucid; I wasn't high, or confused. I was sleepy, because that was the intent of the medication. But I wasn't befuddled, so my attempts to define the difference between visual and tactile stimulation felt organized, almost scientific. The other thing was that the medications I was on - teh sleep med, above, and an anti-inflammatory I sometimes take a bedtime for my achy shoulder - are things I've taken many times, separately and together. So I have no explianation for why the hallucinations manifested so strongly this one night. I'm puzzled about it, and curious about a repeat of the same experience. The sleeping dose I took was on the higher side (I usually take a half, but a whole 10mg isn't unusual). I tend to have a high resistance to medications, so this amount wasn't anything Id' have ever expected a visual side effect from.

I remain curious.

I think one of the reasons I haven't be blogging lately is that I feel like a broken record.

No time, fatigue, stress, burnout, beat until frothy and place in 350 degree oven.

I get tired of saying it. There are few thing in the world a hate like I hate self-pity. Those who put themselves in a situation and then bitch; those who won't take action to solve a problem.

But when I try to write, what comes to mind first is, how completely fucked up I feel right now. To the point that in blots out all other thought.

I look back at my last year's blogging and in between tattoo posting and links to porn, humor, music and art, I find the interconnections all have the same theme. Burnout.

So I'm trying to figure out why it is I feel that way. It's not that I'm working that hard right now - in fact, I'm not really getting much done at all. But I feel, for the first time since I joined apple nine years ago (almost to the day), like my job is dragging me down into quicksand.

My life is organized around my greatest strengths. What I do is solve problems. I didn't have any grand plan for a career, so I derive what my career has been only by looking back at it. And to a one, the jobs I seek, or create, or thrust into, all have that thread. I'm not a projects guy, I don't do organization and follow-through well. What I do, though, is look at systems and see the flaws, the missing pieces, the inefficiencies. My life also seems to follow that pattern. The people to whom I've been most drawn are broken in some fundamental way. Not that they need help, per se, but that they have some vast physical, mental or character deficiency

The cost of all that, of course, is that I put myself into broken systems, and being that I can't stand things that are broken, I strive fix them, often via sheer brute force. I become the link that holds the chain together, and I'm the strongest link, because I tolerate no less of myself. But to steal a line from genesis and a hundred others, we’re only as strong, As the weakest link in the chain. So no matter how strong I make my one link, the chain will always fail elsewhere.

Chaos is the default state of the universe. We impose order for a while; but only will and energy can maintain it. Living things are a system slightly more organized than the baseline chaos of an ecosystem; an ecosystem is a system slightly more organized than the universe. Only man's mind can create and maintain a system more tightly and carefully organized than biological organisms, and only constant thought can produce the ongoing effort that maintains such systems.

Thing want to fall apart; buildings want to fall down. Computers want to fail.

Due to inherent aptitude, genetic inheritance, and the way I was raised, I feel a great compulsion to hold that line against chaos. When I think if it, it turns into an almost cartoonish vision of some Moorcockian champion of order (where's my black fucking sword? Where's my companion and his winged cat?). But the reality of it isn't as much fun; I won't have another incarnation to continue the fight; I can't call another version of myself for help through some portal in the multiverse.

I do this alone. Not because there's no help, but because I can't stand help that isn't absolutely under my control and on my terms. Help, when I ask for it, has to be exactly the help I need and no more.

The cost of this is that I put myself in situations where I'm absolutely vital, and absolutely irreplaceable. Not only at work, but everywhere in my life, I have vast lists of things that need to be done, and in ways that no one else I see around me can handle. Because solutions have to do more than solve a problem; they have to strike blow against encroaching chaos.

That battle seems to get harder each year. I don't know if it's simply the natural progression of the world, the inherent growth of a system over time. I don't know if it's that life, inevitably, grows more complex as one acquires more things, builds investments, raises children. Or if it's the inevitable fact of age. To steal another line,as soon as we're born we start dying. But it isn't linear; it accelerates with time, picking up speed with each round of auld lang syne.

Whatever it is, more and more of late my mind is full of the maddening minutiae of life, the crushing weight of task lists that grow only longer. And I find, at the end of days which flash by ever faster, that I have nothing in that part of my mind that yearns to put words together in creative ways. It's easier to reach for a beer and the remote control. Because when I reach for my computer, nothing comes out but the same worn and blacked refrain about time and burnout.

Holy shit it's been a week.

This is almost entirely work stuff, so of course I can't talk about details; you know how my employer is about details.

But it's been the kind of week that phrase like 'for fuck's sake' were invented for. I've reached the point where I'm jumpy and flinching every time I open my email or check my phone for messages, wondering what's broken now.

Here's how things have been this week, in the insult-to-injury department: we actually had a server farm taken down this week due to a lightening strike yesterday, and then early this morning, my key software vendor who's doing support lost his home phone, internet, and cell, all due to intentionally cut fiber optic cables.

Because we needed more goddamn chaos.

I don't even have time this week to get my taxes finished, so I'm in danger of having to take an extension; I don't have time to go to the doctor even though I'm pretty damn sure I've got a sinus infection going (wow, the allergies have sucked this season). I don't even have time to take a goddamn shower.

Anyone want my job for a day so I can go sleep? No? I didn't think so.

On the other hand, I had the most wonderful dream last night, about a stunning, exotic brunette, though I woke before we could get past the 'looking at each other like something good to eat' phase. But still, it was enough that I woke up vaguely in love/ Maybe I'll actually have time to write the rest that down sometime next goddamn year.

Philip José Farmer, one of sci fi's great minds, is gone (see entry on him in BoingBoing).

Damn. I shed a tear.

PJF was one of the writers who turned me on to the genre. Not just to what sci fi was, but what it could do and where it could go. WHen I discovered his work as a youjng teen, First via his Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche, HAdon of ANcient Opar, which actually was one of the best books he ever wrote), and then with 'vebus on the half shell' and the 'world of tiers', it changed how I read sci fi.

When I began reading, it was because I wanted fantasy and space. Narnia, Tolkein, Asimov. But it wasn't until I found two authors (Farmer and Zelazney) that I encountered what I'd call 'adult sci fi'; sci fi that isn't just about space, but is about life and people.

Farmer isn't by any means a great writer. His work can be clunky and awkward to my reader's eye today. But it wasn't his prose skills that made him important. What made him important was the wild, bizarre imagination, and the impossible yet believable world he created. Who else could have invented River World, with every human ever to live reincarnated along the banks of a seemingly endless river? Who else could have invented the World of Tiers (a world shaped like a giant wedding cake), or Day World where everyone's in status 6 days a week and gets to live only on one week day. Who else could have gotten into the minds (and crotches) of tarzan, doc savage, teh Wizard of Oz, and so many other characters? He invented the 'Wold Newton' concept, interconnecting characters and real people in common universes. Zelazney's 'lonesom october' and alan moor's "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" certainly owe him direct debt, as do dozens of other writers who use this device.

PJF was, for many years, my favorite write; and he's still one of those few who I think changed sci fi, not just for me, but for the genre itself. He opened doors between the real world and the fantastic one in a way no other writer I can think of (then, at least) ever did.

He'll be missed.

I had these plans to post additional pictures for two of my last posts; better pix of the Thurxton, and of course, new pictures of my back once it was healed up.

Clearly we're still waiting.

My back is, to the best of my ability to tell, completely healed. Which means it's time for more ink, obviously. Only thing is, I have a conflict next week when I was scheduled to get the next session. So it's going to be another month or so 'til we have progress.

The bike, though, is everything I'd hoped. It is, without question, the most fun ride I've ever had (at least the most fun ride that didn't have a pulse). As I've gotten to know it, I've liked it more with each ride. The handling is fantastic, the exhaust note from the TOR pipes is gorgeous, and it's got all the speed I need (no, it's not the fastest bike I've ever owned, but I'm ok with that). I just need better weather to get on it and ride every day (I no longer own any rain gear for riding, so I'm still your basic fair weather rider).

However, both things need to get postponed for a while, since I'm going in next week for rotator cuff surgery; I'll be off my bike for three weeks, and obviously the surgery conflicted with my tattoo schedule.

Honestly, that's the main reason I'm bothered by the surgery. The repair in my shoulder will be minor, and the recovery should be reasonably quick. But for a boy with a brand new toy, hearing "not for three weeks" sounds like an eternity.

On the other hand, enforced time off work isn't sounding that bad, even if it comes with pain. And there's percocet. Mmm, percocet.

EDIT:

After spending the weekend working on clearing out mom's house and my brother's long-ignored storage space, I realize there's no fucking way I can be down for three weeks right not. I've postponed the surgery (for a couple of months, I suspect).

Luckily, my tattoo appointment was still clear; which means I *can* get inked after all. Which is WAY better than getting cut open.

Looks like I need surgery on my left shoulder. You know, the one with the flower tattoos, not the one with the swirly black tribal ones.

This shoulder has given my trouble ever since I took up weight lifting ten years ago, and eventually it got bad enough that I pretty much gave up weight lifting a couple years back (because every time I lifted, I hurt myself). The last year it's gone from occasionally annoying to painful when I sleep, so it's now having daily impact.

My diagnosis based on the location and character of the pain was a tear in my rotator cuff.

I had an MRI the monday after xmas, and while it didn't confirm a tear, it did show a lot of swelling and fluid buildup in the joint, and what my doctor called a "down beak" in the bone which is rubbing on a ligament and causing the damage.

Verdict: I need surgery. At very least the damage to the surrounding tissue needs to be cleaned up, and the bone needs to be ground down to reduce the wear. There may be a small tear we can't see on the MRI, which he'll also repair.

The doctor wanted to do the surgery the 14th of Jan, but I have too many schedule conflicts (including a tattoo a week later), so we had to put it off until early Feb based on his schedule.

I'm not looking forward to this. I have little patience with things that impede my physical ability. Pain is no problem, but having my arm useless for two weeks really, really annoys me. The good thing is, it's going to be arthroscopic so the procedure itself is quick and the recovery reasonably short. Plus, there will be pain medication, which is always a treat.