SCHOOL'S BACK IN SESSION
Weblog Readership at an All-Time Low
10 a.m. Manila, P.I. ... As students stream back to schools this late summer day, like salmon to their spawning grounds, weblog authorship and writing drop precipitously and a resounding silence envelops cyberspace. Purple prose erupts in certain lonely corners of weblogdom, not to mention purplish backgrounded weblogs themselves. Or bluish, like the fur of a certain cute rodent who has endeared himself to a group of university folk blablabla, yadda yadda and yadda.

SILENCE SHROUDS IMSPACE
Buddy Lists Unusually Short at Mid-Day
12:00 p.m. Reston, VA ... Today, uncommonly empty buddy lists on AOL's acclaimed Instant Messnger pop up on the terminals of bereft University employees as students and weblog writers return to their respective schools. On the other hand, productivity begins to creep up and the wheels of academic discourse creak once more, as the insistent dings and boings of IMlandia disappear into an untypical hush. The imaginative anime-like smileys and emoticons vanish into the void, and the weird epileptic seizures of hahahas and hehehes devolve into nothingness, replaced by hideous metaphors and turns of speech, not to mention silly newspaper blurbage.

BOY FALLS OFF LONGBOARD
Hurtling Downhill, Loses Balance, Lands on Elbow
4:45 p.m. Berkeley, CA ... In other news, one David Hunter, visiting Lloyd in Berkeley for a last summer fling before school begins, tried to show off his newly acquired longboard skills, but the hill next to the Chancellor's mansion proved too crafty. Steepness and curvature were the main factors contributing to his precipitous fall from grace, er, his longboard, and he tumbled along the tarmac, bashing his left elbow several times. The offending ride hurtled off into the verge, stopped by a low hedge of brambleberry bushes from scooting down into Strawberry Creek.

A stunned Lloyd looked on in horror, as images of the hideous collarbone incident of late TIC assailed him, like a bad-LSD flashback. Uh no, Trev, this is NOT open to wild speculation. Merely tame speculation will do. ;-) Meanwhile, little brother LittleTrev (a.k.a. Daniel) Hunter was in Lloyd's office playing with Nikolai The Writing Rodent, oblivious to the searing pain his brother was in at the moment. Was 911 involved? Italian mothers? Stay tuned to the 11 o'clock news. Uhm, update.

LIVERMORE BOY BREAKS ELBOW IN BERKELEY
Surgery Necessary, Needles Too, Which He Loathes
8:30 p.m. Nighttime, TH ... Just got off the phone with David in the Alta Bates (Berkeley) ER, and he sounded really shaky. He had just gotten shots for morphine, and his voice was none too cool. :-( Had never heard David like that before. Good thing is, I'm sure he's feeling no pain right now, and in fact might be floating on a radiant, multi-colored cloud, kinda like the ones I used to see at Grateful Dead concerts oh whoops, more fodder for Trev. Anyway, the diagnosis was a long medical term which I don't remember, as Angela, his mom, uttered it really quickly over the phone. Basically, it's a major fracture, with some 'pieces' needing to be put back in place surgically. ACK! Surgery is tomorrow, quite likely with his own physician in Livermore.

When it happened, he took a while getting up, and I was fearing the worst. But he did after a few long moments, and I helped him stagger back to Tolman Hall, where he had a drink of cold water at that 2nd floor lobby fountain, sat down on a chair, laid his head on his lap and seemed to pass out for a few seconds. He was groaning quietly all this while, and was clearly in pain. I felt his upper arm and elbow and there didn't appear to be a break (unlike when I felt Giancarlo's broken collarbone that one time). Ran to my office to call his gramma's home and fortunately his Aunt Nina was there, who sent Uncle Bob to Tolman Hall to pick the boys up. By the time his uncle arrived, there was a little swelling on the outside of David's left elbow, and a lot of pain on the inside part of the joint. He couldn't straighten it out either, which worried me the most.

A rather inauspicious start to his schoolyear, I must say. And for me, this was such an injury-riddled summer! First Sophia and her ankle, then GP and his collarbone, now David. And it might be 3.5 injuries if you count LittleTrev's incident that one time during touch football. ugh. Send healing vibes over towards Livermore, folks. And encourage the walking wounded among us to heal.

{ net.casting }
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