brokeface

it was two days ago, tuesday afternoon and i was having drinks with my art friend chris. shot and a beer for $5, and we were throwing them back fast. chris has been my best art friend since the beginning. a very crazy character to say the least, his lifestyle makes mine look like an accountants. he was having a helluva tough day as he was coming down from the acid he took the previous night. we talked about the things that we normally talked about over several drinks:work, art, and girls.

we end up making our way over to my girlfriend's apartment to meet up with her and one of her friends and continue having drinks and conversation. nothing out of the ordinary. chris has always tends to be a bit of a belligerent drunk, he has told me on several occasions that his own family has held several interventions for him, obviously to no avail.

out of no where, he starts play jabbing me, which is nothing out of the ordinary, but the next thing i know he gets me in a clinch behind my head and throws a knee at my face. my vision explodes in a flash of white and it feels like my right eyeball explodes. i drop to my knees and clutch my face in pain, tears welling up.

"what the fuck man."

"oh shit sorry dude."

"fuck"

"shit, i'm sorry man, you alright?"

"no fuck, you just kneed me in the fucking face."

i try to open my eyes, but everything is a blur. coupled with the vision loss is probably a minor concussion, but i am too drunk myself at this point to notice. he apologizes like mad, but i just tell him to forget about it and leave. my girlfriend is in a little bit of a frenzy and keeps wanting me to go to the hospital, but i reassure her that nothing seems to be broken and that i'll just wake up tomorrow morning with raccoon eyes.

i wake up in the morning with no black eye, but have a slight double vision, and a pounding headache. everytime i hack/cough up, there is blood in my mucus. i am not happy. i reassure myself and my girlfriend that i'm okay, but we both can tell the hesitancy in my voice. i drop her off at school and drive myself back home, feeling a bit nauseated. i call my primary doctor, but he isn't in. the receptionist says that she'll page him with my number.

i take a nap and wake up sometime in the early afternoon feeling a bit better. my only major concern is my vision, but that seems to be fine, it just feels like my eyeball has been hit with a hammer. my doctor finally calls back at some time around 4 and i explain the situation to him and he says that i should immediately go to the ER, one of my least favorite places in the world.

now don't get me wrong, i have always lived by the motto that boys will be boys, but i have never inflicted pain on someone who doesn't deserve it, especially my friends.

long story short, the doctor gives me a CAT scan and says that i fractured my right orbital socket. upon looking at the scan, he also tells me that the left side has also been fractured before and that my nose looks like it has been broken a couple of times, but there's nothing we can do about that now. i wait several hours for two more specialists to come in and look things over. they say what the first doctor says. i am not happy.

i sitting at the computer now after taking my fifth percocet of the day, and still hacking a bit of blood from my busted ass sinuses. i am not happy. i keep thinking about why chris would do something like that. it's not like i haven't told him on several occasions that friends don't fight friends, but the messages seemed to have been lost on him, just like his families interventions.

i have known him for quite some time. i consider him a friend, but do not see how things can ever be the same after something like this. maybe no matter how much of a friend you are to someone and how much you try to help, there is just no getting through to them, unless they want to help themselves.

long time no sea

i haven't posted since 10, sometimes love does crazy things to you. i was in taiwan for a few weeks. getting my drink on, seeing family, having a relatively good time. a few days after christmas i went to a local english pub in kaohsiung, taiwan after going out to dinner with my parents and some of their friends. i was buzzed, but hadn't spoken english in about 2 weeks and needed to banter. long story short, i pissed off an english fella who thought i was getting a little boisterous, so he tells me to step outside and make in fisiticuffs. i knock him on his old man ass (50-55) and him ask him if "that's that". His wife comes running out of the bar screaming for me to stop.

"stop, don't hit him anymore"

"he threw a punch at me first"

"please stop, i own the bar, he's is my husband."

oh shit. i don't know what to think so i apologize profusely, she apologizes back. she offers to buy me a drink. he apologizes again for her husband being so drunk. i apologize for knocking her husband on his monkey ass.

i don't really feel like going back to the bar in fear of some sort of retribution.

she apologizes and tells one of the bartenders to pour me a drink. i apologize to the old man and offer him my hand. he mutters something and takes my hand. she gives me a shot. i cheers the old man and take the shot. i black out.

i wake up in my bed. thank god. at least i still have my left hook.

besides that i got to visit my uncle who is the director of the national taiwan hospital of psychiatry. it was pretty surreal. i always knew my uncle was a pretty smart dude and was a psychiatrist and all, but this was some next level shit. i got to visit the entire hospital, from the minor crazies, to the crazy as shit crazy, all the while having them see me uncle and bow and say "good morning director". i kept on thinking of how crappy it was that all these crazies were locked up and couldn't go anywhere they wanted at their hearts desire and i told me uncle this and he said that the hospital was mostly voluntary, except for the violent ones and i felt a little better after that. but, my brain got started working again, and i got all paranoid that one of these sons of bitches would try to stab me with a pen, so i kept my wits about me.

happy to say the tour went without incident, except a lot of patients greeting my uncle. when we got to the freudian library, i asked my uncle if he knew that freud was a fan columbian sugar. he looked at me with a frantic concern, and seemed a little bit flustered, but it could just be that it is because he is so adverse to any sort of recreational drug.

after i came back from taiwan to beautiful rainy sf i had a show at goforaloop gallery. it went splendidly and i got to see a lot of beautiful faces. good thing came out of the show and i am happy to announce that i will be doing a two man show with one of the artists, hak lee, coming to you summer of 2011.

as of late i am spending many afternoons of ennui with my beautiful girlfriend, and making sweet sweet love to plenty of canvasses and vice versa. life is good, i am getting grind on and i will or update photos tomorrow, or next week. love love love daniel.