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So yes, it's true; last night, for the first time ever, I had a mishap on my bicycle in Chicago, pretty much my worst nightmare because I'm 38 and have no health insurance. It's a boring story -- I hit a pothole, at night when I didn't see it, which brought the bike to an immediate stop but not me, and ended up launching me over the handlebars and onto the pavement with an unceremonious thud. Thank God, thank GOD, I was only going two miles per hour when I flipped; can you even imagine what kind of shape I'd currently be in if I hit that pothole at 10 or 20 mph? Now, that said...

--I currently have a bruised rib.
--I currently have a bruised thigh muscle.
--I currently have two sprained wrists, one bad enough that it needs a wrap.
--I currently have six or seven abrasion wounds covering the entire right side of my body (which is what I landed on during my accident, and skidded a little bit), from my knee to my shoulder.

And this, needless to say, is...ouch, fucking ouch, fucking ooh man am I in a lot of whiny 38-year-old no-health-insurance kind of pain. And it was right in the middle of having these thoughts that my friend Kate texted me; and we ended up getting together and smoking up, and trading humorous stories like always, and watching the latest episode of The IT Crowd, as well as a bunch of trailers and opening credits for a bunch of Joe Swanberg video projects, because I'm doing a feature on him right now at my arts center, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, and I figured he's the kind of moviemaker that Kate would be into. And sure enough, she is.

Okay, enough for me tonight; time to lay down and nurse my wounds. Man, oh fucking MAN, am I in a lot of whiny achy pain these days, and of course with no doctor around to give me a prescription for the good shit (i.e. Vicodin). That's probably the worst thing about this all; not the pain itself, which is manageable, but the knowledge that I'll be literally dealing with this pain for the next two months straight, with barely any days off that entire time. When I injured my knee this summer, after all, that took an entire month to get over; and that was a much less intense injury than the bike crash I had last night.

Sigh. Sigh, sigh, sigh. Well, you accept the good with the bad, right? That's what it's all about; understanding where you are in life, of what freedoms in your particular life are important to you, and what kinds of things you're willing to give up for that, like regular health insurance. The pain of an entire half of a body full of bruises is an ordeal; I just keep trying to keep in mind how glad I am that it wasn't worse, that I didn't end up in the hospital against my will, by (God forbid) breaking one of these fragile bones in my body. Always try to look at the bright side of things,  that's what I always say. Or, actually, I never fucking say that; I always urge people to embrace the most pessimistic option possible. Oy vey, my wrists! I gotta go fuckin' lay down now and give 'em a rest!  

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So I was at one of those uber-bookstores the other day, reading books for free, since the uber-bookstores make it so damn easy to do so, when I walked by what I now refer to in my head as "The Big Box of Friends:"

Bigboxoffriends

Yes, every episode of "Friends" ever made, all in one big box, which can be yours for only US$300 (150 pounds, 225 euros). Which of course got me immediately thinking...

Who in their right mind would ever watch all 240 episodes or whatever of "Friends" on DVD? Especially when the show can still be caught multiple times a day on television?

The only people who watch 240 episodes of a television show on DVD are people like me -- complete fucking science-fiction losers. And we weren't the ones religiously watching "Friends" when it was originally on the air; it was the slightly daffy meatsacks of the world who were doing that.

You know, the ones who insisted that a show about sassy urban singles end with almost all of them married off and with children, and with half of them on their way to the suburbs. Those meatsacks.

And who, for the love of all that is good, is going to spend $300 for the privilege on top of everything else?

No one, that's who. This Big Box of Friends was in fact designed for one purpose and one purpose only: For those with too much discretionary income to purchase as a gift for others with too much discretionary income.

When the Big Box of Friends was first put together and released, not a single human being expected a single other human being to actually use this product from beginning to end. It is instead a $300 excuse for one person to say to another person, "I was thinking of you recently," for the other person to stick on a back shelf in an already overcrowded den, and to promptly never think about again for the rest of their life.

And then I thought, Wow, has it really gotten that expensive to maintain the consumerist status quo? Has it really come to this?

Yeah, I guess so. Out there in the hazy white-collar suburbs of the world, these sort of dim clouds for me now that I can never quite seem to understand anymore (even after spending my childhood in one), this is what people are doing -- they're working their asses to the bone, 14 hours a day sometimes, throwing their married lives into havoc, missing their offsprings' entire childhoods, getting road rage from those endless hours sitting on a vehicular tarmac, huffing gas fumes as they wait for the endless tie-up of terrorist-supporting ecohorrors to all move up another inch, so that they can all exchange $300 Big Boxes of Friends with each other at every wedding reception and birthday party, and promptly all throw their Big Boxes of Friends on a back shelf in a den and never touch them nor even think of them again.

Is this really what all you people out there in the white-collar sections of the world are doing? I can scarcely believe it. But yet there's the Big Box of Friends in the uber-bookstore to prove it.

Okay, I'm getting off my high horse now; it's time for me to bike over to my friend Tom's Memorial Day party. Price of a bike ride, by the way, after purchase of my $60 bike: free. And a lot more fun than 240 episodes of fucking "Friends."

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