On Thursday, July 3, I was supposed to work from home, but didn’t. I went to the doctor about my knee then spend the rest of the day with ice and heat on it. More on that later. On Friday, I drove around and took some pictures with a friend’s camera. It’s been a long time since I used a quality SLR camera, and I was having a blast… even though I knew I would pay for it later (again, more on that later).

The camera was a Nikon D80 digital single lens reflex camera, and it works exactly like the Old Time SLRs I used to used back in the Before Time, but better. Total control of the aperture and shutter equals full manual mode. A reflex mirror and real viewfinder! OMG, what fun! I could take long exposures with a small aperture for a greater depth of field which means everything is in focus. Nothing like the point and shoot cameras you can get at the Wal-Marche, with their tiny useless flashes and shitty LCD displays.

After a rude filter-shopping encounter with an old shrew (read: shriveled cunt) at the Oak Harbor Ritz Camera, I decided to download a PDF of the Nikon’s owners manual. I started playing with the settings, and put it in black and white mode with a red filter effect. This would allow me to take black and white photos where reds were lighter and the blues darker — like Ansel Adams photographs. For my first attempt with a borrowed camera, I don’t think the pictures turned out too bad. Take a look at the gallery.

When I got home from shooting black and white, it was dinner time. After dinner, I re-adjusted the camera back to color images with no filtering in order to take pictures of the town’s fireworks display.

Speaking of fireworks, my neighbors are complete fucking retards. They were having a barbecue, and had about 700 people jammed in their house. I may be two or three people off on that estimate, but let’s say there were a lot of people next door. Christ, one of their waterhead kids had a fanned mohawk haircut. Really, a mohawk? Mr. T from the 1980s called; he says he pities your drunk ass for shaving your kid’s head that way! Be a parent and tell the kid no at least once before he grows up into a total cocksucker!

Anyway, including the two front yards and gravel driveway, the door-to-door distance between the front of my house and the front of one of my neighbors is about seventy feet. The gravel driveway is slightly wider than three cars widths. Think of a one way street with cars on both sides, the remaining space is about a car width and a half. There’s basically the width of a car left in the driveway, and the vehicles parks along the edges of the yards are newer, no more than 5 year old cars. So what do my retarded fucking neighbors do? Before the sun goes down, they drag a hunk of plywood into the middle of the driveway and light off Class B fucking fireworks! The so-called “safe and sane” fireworks you buy at the stands in town weren’t good enough for these fuckstains. No. They had to have the biggest, loudest fireworks available at the Swinomish indian reservation. For those of you not familiar with the area, those are casino indians, not Slurpee indians.

I knew, just fucking knew, that my new truck was being showered in burning embers of black powder, and I couldn’t have that. At 8:45pm — with the sun still shining — I grabbed the camera and my tripod, and I peeled out of the driveway, which was the best white boy show of disgust I could muster. I drove up to Barrington Drive west of the Wal-Marche, where it was an all-out block party.

The streets were lines with cars, and people had set up lawn chairs on any semi-level plot of land they could find. One group of people even had a bonfire going, which I thought was highly illegal. The police had better things to do, I guess… seatbelt quotas must be low. People had their dogs with them, kids were screaming and running around with sparklers, moms were snapping pictures with cell phones (!), and dads were showing off their testicular size with fire and explosives. God Bless America, dammit!

I found a grassy knoll and set up the tripod — hanging my backpack o’ socket wrench set from the stabilizing weight hook — and placed the camera atop it. It was still quite bright outside, but at least I was ready for the show… albeit more than an hour early. When the show finally started around 10:15pm, I started taking pictures with the remote trigger. The pictures, most at 6 second exposers, turned out better than I thought they would. Check ‘em out in the gallery.

It was 11:00pm when I got home, and my jackass neighbors were still huddled about their plywood pyrotechnic platform swilling beer. They acted like Geordi LaForge from the Star Trek TNG episode “Identity Crisis” in all the foot-candles my fog and headlights threw at them. Drunk fuckers. Tina had turned on the floodlights out front in hopes they would give up, but no such luck. They continued to light off fireworks until 12:30am, when I finally got fed up and told them to knock it off. Washington state law was on my side after midnight; next step would have been to call the sheriff. Luckily they went inside to sleep off their stupor.

I mentioned my knee. I have no idea what the fuck is going on with my right knee, but I know it hurts. The amount of time I spend at my desk and the long 200-mile round trip commute from hell has often left my leg stiff and sore. But after a few steps and an hour or so of being straightened, things were basically back to normal.

However, in early June it really started to bug me. I got up from my desk to go home, and could barely walk. I couldn’t put any weight on my right knee. I finally stretched it out and was able to hobble to the car to get home. Once home, I slapped a heating pad on my knee and gobbled Tylenol like they were potato chips for the pain. Nothing helped… until I made an appointment to see my doctor. Days before I was supposed to go in, I was walking around like I was Michael Johnson, only whiter… and slower… and fatter… and breathing a whole lot more. I was upright, at least!

I canceled my doctor’s appointment, and when my knee got that confirmation, it started hurting again. Getting old sucks a fat one, so I made another appointment and finally saw the doc on the 3rd. He twisted my foot, pulled my leg, and pressed down on my knee cap while telling me to tighten thigh muscles. When he was done, my knee hurt more than it did going in, but he said that was good. He said that there’s probably no physical damage, that the cartilage is bruised, and my knee is “pissed off at me.” He used those words, “pissed off at me.” The official problem is Patello-femoral Pain Syndrome (but I think it’s more like Retropatellar Pain Syndrome). They’re both very similar.

The doc showed my a cool model of the knee, and explained my thigh muscles (quadriceps) aren’t pulling my knee cap (patella) evenly through the groove (trochlear groove) of my thigh bone (femur) when I walk or straighten my leg. It’s that uneven pull that is causing my knee cap to inflame my knee. He sent me home with instructions to exercise my quads, and take 400mg of Advil and 1000mg of Tylenol — at the same time — for pain and anti-inflamation. That’s not working. It’s been more than 10 days since I saw the doc, and I’m still in the same amount of pain I was when I saw him. The next time I see him, he’ll probably stab me with a large needle full of cortisone… or send me somewhere for an MRI. Fucking excellent.

Well, that’s all for now. I’ll keep ya up to date on my knee, ’cause I know how everyone loves other peoples’ pain. You bastards.