Pap Pap Takes A Fall

 

I just returned from a trip to Florida, hands down my least favorite place to visit in the USA.  If given the choice between a weekend in Miami or a weekend in Buffalo, I am choosing Buffalo 99 times out of 100.  The contrived soullessness of Florida with its paper mache strip plaza landscape is a cultural desert with full blast air conditioning.  I am always happy to leave it.  After picking up the bassets at the dog boarder, they were all jacked up with separation anxiety/back to home joy.  As a result, they both drank a gallon of water shortly before bedtime.  I suspected that this would be an issue, and indeed it was.  At 4am Marvin started crying.  It was one of those "I'm not kidding.  I REALLY gotta pee!" cries that I recognized.  I got up in a fog and took the bassets outside where they both had marathon pisses.  

I am not a great sleeper.  I don't have one solid 8 hour sleep, but rather string together a series of multi hour naps.  As I stood there waiting for the dogs to come back inside I knew I'd probably have a challenge to fall back asleep.  I decided my best move would be to go to the couch and see if I could fall asleep streaming some video as white noise.  I didn't turn on any lights as that would have made it impossible for me to fall back asleep, so I walked over to the couch using the laptop as a flashlight.  The bassets, thinking that this just might be a chance at an early breakfast, excitedly circled me as I headed across the room.  This was when I made my mistake...

I would love to see video of how I did it, because even now I'm not sure of the mechanics.  All I can tell you is that as I fell after tripping over the coffee table.  I held the laptop aloft to make sure it was safe therefore guaranteeing I would take the full blow to my head.  I fell straight forward, snapped my head backwards when I hit the couch frame, and then tried to catch myself with my right arm which immediately seized up my tricep.  I hit so fucking hard I thought "you just broke your neck and died.  What a stupid way to die.  You fucking idiot.".  My head snapped back like if someone had hit your forehead with an aluminum baseball bat as hard as they could.  It was unbelievable. 

I sat up and took a quick inventory.  I moved my various body parts.  I couldn't believe that I was still functioning.  The dogs licked my face.  Holy shit did my arm and head hurt.  I was on my hands and knees like when you see a QB take a monster hit in an NFL game.  Ok.  Ok.  Ok.  I got up and sat on the couch.  That's when I could feel the swelling start.  Within minutes a huge index card sized lump started to form on my forehead and my right upper arm swelled up tight like a sausage.  It felt like my skin was going to pop open.  It's 4am and I'm trying to figure out how I am going to ice this down and maybe control it.  I wasn't dizzy.  I wasn't nauseous.  Maybe this wasn't so bad?  (Honestly, I had just gone though a near death experience but I wouldn't think about that until later.  Eight inches to the right and I would have hit the brick hearth.  Dead.  Four inches left and it would have been the couch corner.  Dead.)  Now I had to figure out how to get a couple frozen bags of peas to balance on my head and back of my arm simultaneously.  The bassets went to their bed and immediately fell back asleep.  The house was quiet.  Should I go to the ER?  Fuck.  

I didn't have any of the signs that suggested skull fracture but I'm sure I had some level of concussion.  There was no bleeding, barfing, or dizziness.  I decided just to ice it.  Two days later the lump is down and all that blood started to drain into my skull giving me a raccoon eyes like I was an early member of KISS.  The arm had turned a brilliant shade of violet.  I looked terrible but all things considered didn't feel that bad.  That's when I went to my 6 month follow up to the cardio guy.  When he walked in the room, he had what I would call a strong reaction.  I believe his first words were "JESUS CHRIST!!!!".  He was so freaked out he couldn't even look at me when he was talking.  He was insisting I get a CT scan and wanted to put me in a wheelchair to make sure I could make it down there.  I had walked the dogs for an hour that morning, and had even worked out the day before.  I thought I was on the mend, but he was really freaking out.  This is when I thought that maybe I had fucked up on my decision making.    

After a series of X-rays and scans it turned out I didn't fracture my skull.  I did get a hairline fracture by my elbow, but they can't really do anything about that so it didn't matter.  I have now entered my "old guy with weird face injury" phase, similar to guys you see at Home Depot or the grocery store with flaking open sores or loosely taped gauze.  I knew this phase was coming for me sooner or later, but I didn't expect to go from the pit at a Viagra Boys show last Monday to "Yes, as a matter of fact, I have had a recent fall" in 8 days.  It's this type of whirlwind series of events that only confirms my suspicion that I am on borrowed time.  I'll tell you this, I'm not planning a skydiving trip or mountain climbing expedition anytime soon.  Extreme sports for me have moved out of that realm to "mowing the lawn on a hot afternoon".  It's grim.

My focus is now on this lingering headache and NFL futures.  It's so difficult to find value on these because of the over analysis from every dime store dickhead like myself trying to find any edge.  I try to look at franchises with meager fanbases that are sitting in the "sorta crappy" zone.  Here's a team you never think about... the Atlanta Falcons.  The Falcons are coming off an 8-9 season where Cousins gave them most of their juice.  They fired their coach, brought in Kevin "That's on me.  We gotta clean that up." Stefanski and quickly signed my concussion buddy Tua to augment the always injured Michael Penix at QB.  This does not fill me with confidence.  Stefanski on the surface is a good head coach with his two Coach Of The Year trophies, but I never bought in.  He had the worst against the spread record of any veteran coach, meaning that he won most of the games he was supposed to but by less points and he almost always lost the games where his team was an underdog.  On top of that, with the Falcons Stefanski is taking over a team with bad QBs that can't get the ball downfield.  Sound familiar?  He should give the ball to Robinson 400 times a game, but he won't. He'll try to win with four yard dump passes.  

The Falcons went 3-6 with Penix last year.  Nobody wanted Tua because of a suspect arm and the potential that he will die on the field with another big hit.  Where are the wins going to come from?  The NFC South is sorta shitty with all the teams being more or less equal on paper.  For them to improve on last year they need to fix their defensive line (they haven't), get better QB play (Tua looks awful and Penix isn't healthy enough to play), and hope no one else in the division has gotten better.  I think the Saints are on the rise, and the Panthers/Bucs are better than the Flacons.  They start with three 2025 Playoff teams, go on the road to New Orleans, and then Balt/Chi/SF.  At best they are looking at 2-5 unless Stefanski is better than he has been historically.  At that point, is this a team that's looking to "build for the future" to get into draft position for a QB?  No one will hold the new staff responsible for going 5-12 and getting a new potential QB in the draft.  Atlanta UNDER 7.5 wins.