war

Old Draft, why not post it

Running full speed, looking back at Nick, waiting for him to throw the ball, I slip on the autemn dew of the Sunday grass and fall backwards. Suddenly my arm feels really weird. Later my friends said they heard the snap. I stand up and my arm looks even weirder than it feels, the middle of my forearm is bent inward like an elbow at a 45 degree angle. I wasn’t going to get the ball. I hurry over to Chris, who is on the other team, and ask, “Chris, does this look normal? Its just a muscle cramp, right?” it wasn’t a muscle cramp. “After the play, man.” he replies. “No, Chris, look at this!” He whips his head in the direction of my arm, “Holy shit!” The game is halted to get the wound (me) off the field and into a car to take me home. The car wasn’t driven by one of my friends because we were all 14, rather it was driven by a one of the juniors that had come to inflict pain on our smaller, less developed frames by way of football. I thinks, after seeing the mangled skin, muscle, and bone stemming from my arm, those plans changed.

I knew the guy that drove me home, his name was Jacob. He was the assistant swim coach at our local pool. He was a fairly nice guy over the summer, when his friends weren’t around. During the the school months, however, he was kind of a jerk, trying to keep up his bad-ass reputation I guess. He wasn’t a bad-ass on the drive to my house, he was scared out of hs mind. The drive from the park to my house takes maybe three minutes, it took us, what felt like ten. He was driving slower than three year olds’ on their big wheels. When we got to my house, he pulled into my  drive way, which made my dad stop his yard work, opened my door and said to my father “Mr. Parker, I think your son broke his arm.” Wow, ya think, dumb ass? I arm is bent in a ridiculously unnatural angle and there is a knot of flesh the side of a grapefruit at the bent. I really wanted to say that, but, hey, the guy just did me a favor. My dad’s response to Jacob’s statement still rings in my ears as clear as it was that day “Oh, god damn it, Alex!” Alex is what he calls me because we have the same name. Ah, yes, my loving father. I don’t think he was really mad at me, in fact I know he wasn’t, he was just really freaked out because this was the first time either of his children got really hurt. After my dad’s eloquint and hospitalable greeting Jacob exits stage right and my father, my younger sister and I get in the car and head to the hospital.

We get to the hospital and check in; the hospital is a little more dilibrate than I had hoped in having someone see me, but I am seen by a nurse before a few patients partly because of their curtousy and partly because they were really grossed out my my arm. I am given pain killers just after the adrenalin wears off, so I only feel the full magnitude of my injury for a few moments. The doctor I get is sort of a jokester, but when I bring up the question of “You’ve seen worse breaks, right?” he responses ”This one’s pretty bad.” which is doctor code for “Hell no, kid! Your, shit is fuck up!” And I was I was thinking same thing, I just hoped he wasn’t. Don’t ever ask a doctor how bad your injury is because I think they are obligated to tell you the truth and if you have to ask that, chances are, you won’t like what they have to say. Instead, ask your doctor “Will I be okay?” or “Can you fix this?” those questions tented to receive a happier, less devistating answer.

In any case, I have to have surgery and the doctor tells me that he is going to try to set the bones without metal plates but if it’s not stable enough he will have to put them in. He would tell me after the surgery what he did. When I woke up in my room six hours after going under and two hours after surgery I knew. The pain in my arm was unexplainable. It was sharp, throbbing, shooting, and stinging all at the same time. I knew that I had plates in my arm.

Today I am fully recovered but I have two three and a half inch scars on each side of my arm and metal plates around both the radius and the ulna which are secured by metal screws. My dad says that the doctor could have done a better job in making the scars less visible but I like them the way they are. They are a reminder of the that day, of who I was that day, of what my family and friends were like that day, and how all of those things have changed in the eight years since then. So this is the condensed version (yes, there’s more) of what caused those scars on my arm. I find it simply fasinating how parts of a person’s body can tell a story. Move over, I think it is fantastic how those stories can show you something deep and unseen about that person.

In order to capture an array of emotions, I’ll write part of this blog while experiencing the first half of Tuesday’s reading, My Boyfriend Came Back From the War.

On the very outset, which, what, where or when is not explictly offered for this reading, so I cannot say whether the war refers to the current war in Iraq, or war in years past. Regardless, one can still argue that the emotion tearing and impact can be very much the same. Onto the hypertext.

Written as I went along:

I keep checking every page for hidden, black-on-black text. So far, that does not seem to be the case.

I have somewhat cheated in the exploration of this site: maybe the hyperlinked text is meant to be chosen at random, but in order to maintain some sort of order, I have been mousing over each link, and quickly checking the URL as it displays on the Internet browser status bar. I attempt to click 117.html before 130.html, etc etc. Overall I have kept some semblance of numerical order. I will see whether or not that changes how it is experienced.

“Don’t kill.” Click. “Him.” Click. “Them.” Click. “ME”

Several new frames have appeared since starting this part of the homework. Four are now empty and sit at the bottom of the page. It is possible for a link on a separate part of the page to redirect its contents to any chosen frame, I will wait and see whether or not that happens. Maybe the whole of the page will be divided into HTML frames and left blank at the end.

Who are the tigers the page mentioned?

“I keep your photo here” — three clicks later, the photo disappears. I checked the black background for text, there still is none. Onto the next link, its destination is marked as 164.html. The other visible link is 169.html, but I will still maintain some sort of numeric order.

Why a 20th Century Fox logo?

I found an equivalent of a newspaper byline: the author’s e-mail address and an external link that is titled the Last Rest Net Art Museum. The copyright of this particular page by Olia Lialina is 1996. (That means it is not about the current Iraq War…)

Found a clock. The time is 9:16.

Another clock, the time is 6:02. Is it a.m. or p.m., I wonder?

Third clock, 1:57.

No more links left to click, a total of sixteen unevenly distrubted frames cover the webpage, in addition to a seventeenth frame that holds half the space, and has two pictures. One picture looks suspiciously like a window, but it is too heavily pixelated to conclusively tell.

Exercise done. What was the intent of this text?

My opinion is that it was meant to evoke an emotion response, hence why I recorded it as I did–so I could write done my immediate thoughts to each part of the piece. To me, the short, unpunctuated phrases, read to me like halting, hesitate or quiet conversation–conversation that was occasionally interrupted by sudden outbursts, as signified by capital letters.

But beyond interpreting the language and grammar of this piece, overall it seemed to be an unfolding maze. Perhaps my attempt to somewhat organize it was a good one, because each segment seemed to lead into the next as long as it is done in some sort of order. Still, there were several times when I could not track done the page that was to proceed another, and still other times when I would jump ahead to page 169 without reading 140-147. However, this overall did not seem to affect the understanding of the text, which read to me like something from an art museum: war can tear people apart, make them sad, make them angry, and put distance between life before and life after a war.