So if you don't know already, I should mention that I've been walking with a cane now for the last nine months, ever since my bicycle accident last summer; or I guess I should say seven months, since I was technically on crutches for one of those months of recovery, and then of course during my first month after the accident was either in a hospital bed or wheelchair and not allowed to walk at all. And that's been...well, like with all the details regarding my recovery, it is what it is, and I've seen no real point in dwelling on it, because that won't change the fact that I still need the cane to get around. And in fact there's actually something a bit perversely pleasurable about using a cane in public as well, precisely for the reasons that make canes seem cool when you're a little kid, in that it's unusual and anachronistic and a bit hip in this weird way and gets you attention and lots of questions about what happened and even people getting up for you on buses and the like.

But that said, I've been looking forward to getting rid of it too, which is why I'm so regular with my daily physical therapy; and my goal this whole time has been to be ready to be back on my bike by the time summer rolls around, which is why starting last month I've been going to a fitness center almost every day as well, and putting in somewhere between seven and ten miles each day on a stationary bike. And that was going just fine for the first couple of weeks after I started; but then just about two or three weeks in, I realized the hard way that I had actually been pushing myself too hard, by which I mean that I developed a whole series of profoundly painful spots all up and down my legs and thighs, and soon got to a point where I could barely even walk for a few days. And so that necessitated a week of almost complete rest, except for the minimum I needed to do to keep my muscles loose; and now I'm on a more limited but realistic schedule, doing either the bicycling or the physical therapy on any given day but not both, and keeping the tension on the bike cranked down to level 1 or 2 (out of 20), when before I had it on 4 or 5.

It's been a big lesson for me to learn, one I'm having a hard time internalizing, which I suppose is for the best that it's coming now at middle age, when I was going to have to learn it one way or another -- that I'm simply no longer at the age or in the condition where my body can automatically keep up with what my brain and sense of discipline is ready to commit to. And again, although this mostly sucks, I suppose there's some benefit to learning such a lesson this way, where my body just literally will quit on me if I push it too hard; because that if nothing else absolutely forces me to learn to cope with it, whether I want to or not, in that there is literally no way to get around it. And so for another example, a few weeks ago when we had our first warm day of the year, I celebrated by going for my first long (three-mile) walk, which before the accident was definitely a long day but nothing too terribly extraordinary; but once again I found myself just completely wiped out for a good three or four days afterward, which made me realize that it's simply going to be a long time if ever that I'm back to the level of physicality that I was before the accident.

This fall, winter and spring has been a time to simply get comfortable with this, to learn to accept it and learn that there's no point in pushing myself to a level I can't accept; and in this you can think of it as actually a very Zen-like process, the process of simply acknowledging your disadvantages and acknowledging that there's nothing you can do to just make them magically disappear. And that ironically has been a very good thing for me, and brings a certain sense of mature calm that I've never had in my life before; but I also admit that sometimes it's a real struggle, in that as an intellectual, I'm used to my brain mostly giving orders and my body mostly obeying, and it's hard for my brain to just completely relinquish that control it's otherwise always had. I mean, it helps to think about how close I came to being a whole lot worse off; that with just a few feet of difference in my crash site or where I skidded, for example, I could've very, very easily been run over and killed, or had my legs taken clean off, or be only one-eyed now, or any of another dozen nightmares. That definitely helps keep things in perspective, to remember that I could right now be going through the process of learning how to live life as a double amputee, instead of merely being frustrated over the fact that I'm probably not going to be bicycling again for a few more months longer than my original ridiculously optimistic estimates.

But still, it definitely is frustrating, a frustration that's even more annoying in that there's nothing that can be done about it; and that's just one of the dozen issues caused by the bike accident that I'm dealing with these days. I'm sure in the coming months I'll be slowly getting around to talking here about them all.

So some random link at some random site a few weeks ago led me to this place called the Encyclopedia Dramatica (or ED), which like so many things online is fascinating like a trainwreck; it's essentially a wiki-style repository of almost every weird-ass internet meme that's ever existed, no matter how obscure, except that the entries themselves are written by the anonymous, monstrous Comic Book Guys out there whose sociopathic "let's gawk at the retards" attitude precisely turned all these bizarre subjects into internet memes in the first place. (Such people are known within the lingo as "trolls," which is how I'll be referring to them myself for the remainder of today's entry.) And it just so happens that the article being featured on the front page the day I visited was on Kevin Havens, who is one of those people for whom internet memes were invented in the first place: functionally retarded, a victim of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, from a poor white-trash family and with a sister who's one of those creepy pro-wrestling-watching Insane Clown Posse "juggalos," Havens' mental problems has led to him over the years developing an all-consuming obsession for those expensive lifelike sex dolls you sometimes see on the news, lives among people who indulge that obsession, and doesn't possess enough intelligence to know not to obsessively talk about it online using his real name, including penning a truly disturbing Henry Darger style epic erotic fanfic saga about the subject. And in the meanwhile, as his ongoing flame war with the trolls was first developing, he ended up getting into a romantic relationship with a grossly obese wheelchair-bound fellow misfit, who has to patiently compete for his attention with his growing collection of "Real Dolls," all of which Havens also obsessively documented under his real name, because of being too mentally challenged to know not to, which was like throwing a can of gasoline on the troll fire that had already been simmering.

Havens' entry at ED tells this entire years-long story in excruciating detail, including archived copies of all the material I've been talking about, using the absolutely most vile and offensive language possible; and God help me, I sat there and read every word, because I'll be the first to admit that trainwrecks really are fascinating, which is why the saying about trainwrecks became a cliche to begin with. And it turns out that this is merely one entry in a whole portal over there devoted to people with Asperger's who make jackasses out of themselves in such very public places like MySpace and YouTube, and the "normals" who obsessively follow and taunt them because of the safety of anonymity; and that's when I realized for the first time in my life that there are actually hundreds of people online like this now, hundreds and hundreds of them, that places like social networks and media sharing sites have in fact created an entire subgenre of piss and vinegar to add to our already hellbound modern society. There's something about the entire thing that I find both queasy and riveting, kind of like my ongoing can't-look-away obsession over the atrocities committed by otherwise very boring middle-class suburban Germans during the Nazi years of the 1930s and '40s, of how mental illness and technology and the psychological horrors of the Bush years created this sort of perfect storm in the early 2000s here in the US, a situation where heavily medicated fame whores and anonymous cowards who get off on random degradation can provide for each other exactly what the other needs, and thus create this unending cycle of pain and humiliation that eats away at the souls of everyone involved like some sort of cancer. Like I said, fascinating like a trainwreck.

And then in the meanwhile, one of the other sidebars in this Havens article is on a guy named David Hockey, who at first seemed like just some normal middle-aged, middle-class suburban guy, who was upset that these anonymous trolls at ED would pick on the mentally retarded in such a merciless way, and tried to voluntarily initiate some legal action to stop it (which of course was a complete failure -- as most people know, this kind of behavior is expressly protected by the first amendment of the US Constitution, a big part of why such behavior has become an unstoppable snowball recently); but this of course brought the crowd-sourced investigative powers of the anonymous hacker-friendly mob down hard on Hockey himself, at which point it was quickly learned that Hockey's real motivation for defending Havens was because of being an obsessive lover of sex dolls himself, including having posted a whole series of images, videos and "humorous photo stories" at various fetish sites, featuring he, his friends and their various Stockholm-Syndrome-suffering romantic partners intimately interacting with said sex dolls in the comfort of their suburban ranch homes.

And this had me really fascinated, to tell you the truth, because it reminded me of something I found fascinating as well about my time in Chicago's swinging community almost a decade ago, back when I was a sex columnist and writing my books on the subject. Because the fact is that I saw some things back then that would shock a whole lot of people, that would undeniably sicken many of these people as well, and I always found it difficult to reconcile these images with the blase middle-class suburban homes in which they took place, to watch for example a sex-slave gangbang take place on a tasteful living-room furniture set while surrounded by an entertainment center from Best Buy filled with Disney DVDs. The simple fact is that we humans can train ourselves to get accustomed to just about any development life can throw at us, so accustomed in fact that we soon forget that there's anything unusual about it in the first place, and will incorporate this bizarre thing into the humdrum details of our day-to-day lives until it too becomes humdrum, until we nearly forget how strange and sometimes monstrous it is until it becomes public knowledge to a whole group of people who aren't used to it.

Looking at these archived photos over at ED of Hockey and his friends, of them making these silly light jokes over the fact that they all enjoy taking their clothes off in front of each other and fucking five-foot-high plastic dolls, it makes me realize how it is that our society in general could've become such an out-of-control trainwreck by the time the Bush years were over, of how we could've had so many thousands and thousands and thousands of people who thought nothing of committing horrendous corporate crimes, of watching an abusive porn shoot taking place in the middle of a frat party, of doing coke off their office desks during work hours, of using their political offices to pull off acts of corruption unequaled in all of American history. When it becomes all you know, when you surround yourself with people who are always doing it too, just about any atrocity can seem normal or even blase; and the older I get, the more I realize that this is exactly how the Nazis came about, exactly how the Bushists and teabaggers came about.

I don't really have any big conclusions to make about all this; it's just something I've been thinking about this week. Um, the end.