I just found out today that a friend of mine from New Orleans, Ryan Porcelli, has been in the hospital since last April following a serious bicycle accident.
We met Ryan through his organization, The Phoenix of New Orleans, four years ago when we first brought a crew to New Orleans to work. He’s a great guy, very generous. The last time I was able to get together with him was two years ago when we were able to get together for a beer down in the French Quarter one night.
Ryan’s recovery has obviously been rough, given that it’s almost a year since his accident and he’s in a Neurological Rehab Center.
The accident was in April, and it wasn’t until June that he was able to put sentences together. Pneumonia in July put him back into a medically-induced coma. By August he was able to sound out the names of his friends and family. By September doctors were able to replace the pieces of his skull they had to remove initially to relieve pressure. He’s had painful leg spasms throughout the whole process, too, with a pain pump implanted to try to handle those.
It’s been a blow to me, and some part of it has been how it happened. When I first heard that he’d suffered a serious head injury, I wondered if it had been on a job site. When I found out that it was while doing something else that I also do–biking–it wasn’t any easier. I don’t know the details, and I don’t know if he was wearing a helmet, but I suspect not. And I wonder how he would be doing if he had been.
So now a vibrant, friendly, active young guy, MBA and dog-owner and non-profit activist, is in a rehab center struggling to talk. It’s a punch in the gut.
I know none of you know him, but the link to his Recovery Blog, run by his friend and fellow PNOLA leader Jim (also a great guy) is here.
February 1, 2012
Day 7 of my incarceration at Camp Canine.
My cellmate is hairy. Belches a lot. Licks his nethers.
The first 4 days were all right…we had another inmate in our cell with us. He’s also hairy and belches a lot.
But that guy got a work release. It’s just me and inmate K-9.
My diet for the last 3 days has been mainly breakfast cereal, a bag of croutons, and boxed wine. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
My cellmate and I can only use the exercise yard for a few minutes at a time. He just had an old war wound patched up by the docs.
I have to the help the old guy up and down the stairs. The wardens barricade him into his bunk.
He’s got this strange hair thing going on. He says he’s one-quarter Akita (is that some type of gang?), but from the looks of him he’s one-quarter Mexican Hairless.
That’s gotta be chilly.
I’m up for a parole hearing tomorow. With any luck I’ll be outta this place. I don’t know how much more I can take.
I am watching a commercial for ‘male enhancement’.
Quite literally. Fifteen feet from me, there is a gray-haired guy in a suit who pulled up to the coffee shop in a Cadillac Escalade, and he’s on a blind date with a much younger pretty blond Russian girl.
I can’t see his face to see if he looks like a lizard, like the guys from the commercials do. And at least they both seem nice.
James Arthur Ray…self-made millionaire, author, business guru, and self-described “practical mystic”. He has tried to teach the secrets of success in all of life, learned through his ‘deeply spiritual’ studies, to anyone who would listen…and would pay him enough money to make him those millions.
He is a disciple of Rhonda Byrne, the equally crooked author of Oprah’s beloved The Secret, a book which instructs readers that we can get what we want by ‘being in harmony with the universe’, and just thinking positively about what we want. Bad things that happen in life are the result of negative thinking, including natural disasters. The Tsunami in 06 could have been prevented by the victims thinking more positively about their lives, you see. If you are overweight, just think about being thinner. Oh, and avoid looking at overweight people, as that will make your thoughts negative. I do not make this up.
Ray is, among other books, the author of The Million Dollar Mindset: How to Harness Your Internal Force to Live the Lifestyle You Deserve.
In short, he is the master of using our own thinking and spiritual forces to live the lives “we deserve”. Ray is the master of living the life he deserves.
James Arthur Ray was sentenced to prison this week for three counts of negligent homicide for running an overcrowded, overly hot and terribly careless ’sweat lodge’ ceremony in 09 in which three people died.
As I understand the ‘Secret’, I think we can only assume justice has been done, if justice means ‘people getting what they deserve’. He is the master, after all.
Buddy you’re a boy make a big noise
Playin’ in the street gonna be a big man some day
You got mud on yo’ face
You big disgrace
Kickin’ your can all over the place
We will we will rock you
We will we will rock you
Here is something else Brian May wrote:
A necessary constraint on any method used to estimate the wavelength of the absorption feature is that it use the information from ALL the points in the optimum way, bearing in mind their various probable errors. It is also essential that the measure be identifiable with a physical quantity calculable from models of the dust cloud. In practice this quantity is the ‘mean shift’
where [delta-lambda] is the shift due to an element of brightness dB, and the integral is along a line of sight (Bandermann and Wolstencroft, 1969; Reay, 1969).
That would be from A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud…his doctoral dissertation in astrophysics.
That would be what he does when he’s here:
I suspect far fewer people stomp and clap madly when reading about zodiacal dust clouds. But it’s still cool.
It’s Howl-o-ween…that means it’s Hogan’s 9th birthday! We celebrated with our customary birthday omelette.
He can’t run around very well right now because he ruptured his right ACL (knee ligament) 8 weeks ago. So to help him maintain his excellent weight, his omelette had just 1 strip of bacon and no cheese. The indignities of old age. At least he still got to have his green peppers.
You’d think a feast like this would satisfy him for the night, but no. He was still johnny-on-the-spot when I set my fork down after eating. He knows when mom is done, he gets plate lickins’. His greed knows no bounds.
We’re facing a decision point about what to do for his knee. It’s hard to watch him getting older. He was climbing up the basement steps tonight when his knee gave out…his legs slipped through the spaces between the risers and he tumbled backward right down to the basement floor. I tried to catch him but I couldn’t really help. Fortunately he’s still agile enough that he twisted in midair and landed on his feet, getting just a little scrape on his paw. He shook it off in seconds and was smiling and bouncing around again, but I was a kind of rattled. It’s the first time I’ve seen him fail at stairs. I’ve spent a quarter of my life in this dog’s company, and I’m starting to sense his mortality. However, it’s one of God’s great mercies that he doesn’t sense it at all. As far as he’s concerned, every day is a new opportunity to crash around and get a good sniff of his territory, chase some rabbits, and get a late-night rubdown. He has fun every single day and he takes his job as Director of Farmland Security very seriously. He follows me upstairs when I go to bed at night, and he pauses at the door until I say “are you ready for bed, buddy?” Then he trots over to his bed, circles a half dozen times, and collapses with an immensely satisfied sigh. Each night I fall asleep to the sound of his quiet breathing…he’s my shadow and my protector. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a better friend.
Congratulations to our neighbors Jami and Dave on gettin’ hitched yesterday! They had a fantastic reception with bar-none the best reception food I’ve ever had: smoked ham. The fellow that runs the catering company lives in our town and used to be a hog buyer, and he did the smoking himself. It was tender and salty and had an intensely smoky crust, and all conversation at our table stopped when we dug into our meals. After 2 slices I was stuffed to the gills but felt like I should go back for more just on the principle of it. You don’t get meat like that very often. I thought of you, Brandon and Logan. You would’ve eaten enormous stacks of it.
You don’t get eggs like this very often either, unless you have neighbors with chickens:
In exchange for taking care of Jami and Dave’s critters, they told me to take home a dozen eggs from their (large) flock of feathered friends. I found the tiny egg in one of the nest boxes this morning. I have to think it was laid by their bantam (miniature) hen, Mary Lou. (Mary Lou Retton…get it?) Once I got home I made a pile of the most delicious, brightly-yellow colored scrambled eggs…farm-raised eggs beat store-bought, hands down.
So thanks, Jami and Dave, for dinner and for breakfast. There were no chicken, duck, or dog-related mishaps, and if you should ever decide to raise hogs, I’m all for it so long as the ham is nice and smoky.
