Every year, I make the same mistake. I bring a bunch of camera gear to the International Motorcycle Show at the Javitz Center and wind up taking two pictures before remembering how impossible it is for me to take a good one there.

Apparently, all of my previous Christmases were shams because this year I found out that it just isn’t Christmas without the liquid fruitcake known as Jannamico Super Punch. I discovered a half-empty bottle of the stuff in my parents’ cabinet. Mesmerized by the label, I pulled it off the shelf and tried to open it, but the sugar-sealed cap was way beyond my broken arm’s ability to crack, so I handed it to Deborah and asked her to unscrew it for me. Even with her two good arms, it was a struggle, but in a hailstorm of crusty sugar, she finally got it loose.

My broken arm continues to improve, hurting less and less each day; however, I still feel vulnerable when I venture on the buses and subways, or tackle the crowds of Christmas-crazed shoppers on the street. Nevertheless, for the sake of my sanity, I need to get out from time to time.

Would it surprise anyone to know that I’ve been depressed lately? Although I can usually do a passable job of shaking the holiday blues, being flat broke with a broken arm makes it more challenging. I just want to sleep.

Although Deborah’s ghetto health insurance plan includes bare-bones dental coverage, there is a very short list of providers for her to choose from. One of them is a dental school where young student dentists tentatively wiggle novocain needles into her gums before crudely scratching and scraping her teeth with all the precision of cavemen exploring newly discovered uses for chipped slate.

I didn’t recognize the number on my phone’s caller ID, and when I picked up, I didn’t recognize the voice, either. But when he cleared his throat and gave me a long, drawn-out, “Duuuude,” I knew it must be Brian.

After jumping through all the necessary hoops to get cleared for surgery, I was granted a last-minute stay: A new set of X-rays taken this morning revealed that the alignment of my bone has improved enough on its own that surgery at this point isn’t worth the trouble.

When I called to schedule my CT scan, the guy on the phone told me I could come right away. “I’m in Brooklyn,” I said, “so it might take me a little while to get there.”

I felt defenseless being shoulder-to-shoulder with cavalier strangers on the subway. Heading down a crowded staircase filled my mind with images of a rag doll skier tumbling down a rocky ledge, with each commuter representing a granite boulder that would either bruise me as I passed, or roll down and crush me from behind.

The invitation for the party consisted of exactly one line: “Suzanne and Mike invite you to a party at our home on Sunday, December 20th at 7 pm!” Since we’d never been to a party at their home before, we had some concerns about what, if any, food there would be.

“You’d be surprised what you can do with your left hand.”

I got the idea of enrolling in American Supercamp over the summer while sitting on my ass with a broken foot from a street riding collision.

In free fall, having been violently ejected from the exploding fuselage of a dysfunctional relationship, plummeting through blck smoke towards foreign terrain at terminal velocity with no reasonable expectation of survival, I started this blog.

My sister’s boyfriend, Dan, makes sculptures out of mechanical detritus, transforming old lamps, rusty farm equipment, turn-of-the-century drills, bicycle bits, and whatever else he can get his hands on, into all kinds of fantastical, pseudo-functional retro-futuristic art. Today, he and my sister, Laura, were in town from Pennsylvania, trying to sell some of it at a Manhattan flea market.

I was excited when Signe invited me to tag along with her to a Halloween party — especially interested to see what Signe’s “space ninja” costume looked like. But as I spent the afternoon working on my motorcycle, tinkering myself into a greasy mess on the cement floor of Jason’s garage, my enthusiasm began to wane. I hadn’t bothered to work out a costume anyway and didn’t feel like going to a costume party dressed as nothing more than an even dirtier version of the same old me. If Deborah had been around, I’m sure she would’ve cajoled me into going. After all, she was in Halloween high-gear. But she was in Kentucky, nearly 1000 miles away.

It was a sunny day, and we were already in the car so we decided to hit up Coney Island for a (final?) peek into the gaping maw of its faded glory before the Coney Island Development Corporation's strategic plan for rezoning and revitalization kicks into high gear, steamrolling the funk into a sanitized recreation and entertainment mecca.

had a meeting in the afternoon which didn’t leave me time to run home before the artists preview so I killed time at another recently refurbished New York institution, Washington Square Park, where I nearly got me feet doused with dingy hotdog water when the vendor near the bench I was relaxing in dumped a bin of lukewarm gray slop onto the ground and watched it rush toward my feet like a broken dam.

Deborah and I made the mistake of driving at rush hour in the rain to Dieu Donne in Midtown Manhattan for an art opening by our friend EV Day. After driving around in circles for what seemed like hours, cursing the traffic, arguing about where to park, we finally settled on a lot near the gallery that charged $20 for two hours.

As you probably know, my wife Deborah was adopted by Pentecostal parents and raised in the hinterlands of western PA, where she was dragged to church to see people speak in tongues and witness the power of baby Jesus make people walk. A melodramatic and paranoid world where everything unknown is evil and anything fun is a sin.

My recent vacation marked the longest run of consecutive days without blogging since I started this thing way back in 2002.

I think.

I didn’t check.