How do you like your ribs?

Remember Carl Weathers? Perhaps you remember him as Tobias Fünke's "acting mentor" on Arrested Development. Or as Rocky's nemesis-turned-ally-turned-victim-of-evil-Soviet-boxer (it was quite a ride, wasn't it Apollo?). I'd like to remember him as the eponymous hero of Action Jackson, an action movie vehicle that supplied the one-liner I used as the title of this post. To put it into context, our protagonist Action is about to do away with a bad guy with a flame-thrower when he asks "how do you like your ribs?" I'm sure the bad guy would have said something along the lines of "not charred with a flame-thrower, since you're asking," but clearly it was a rhetorical question.

Why this trip down bad-80's-action-movie lane? Because my own ribs have been in a bad state as of late. Wet clipless shoes + slick stairs = slapstick slip-n-slide. I landed flat on my back against the stairs, and had I not been wearing my backpack (filled with such cushy items as two books, bike pump and a clipboard) I would probably be dictating this message to my nurse. This was Friday morning. I felt like I dodged a bullet (and, with how quick everything happened, maybe I did). Then comes Sunday morning...

I should preface Sunday morning by saying that Saturday night I attended the Bike Jerks sponsored All City Championship award ceremony. It was a blast. These guys won it:



That's pretty blurry picture, but I was pretty blurry myself. On the left was the Male Second Place wiener Trevor Clayton and on the right was the overall champ, Michael Brauer. I can't think of two nicer guys to have won it. And Hurl wanted to share he feelings on the proceedings:



We all know you're number one, Hurl.

We proceeded to drink in a fitting place for a couple of messenger champions, beneath a highway overpass. All was going fine until this guy dropped the whiskey:



That's Blake. He's a bike engineer. He also can't hold onto a half-pint of whiskey to save his life.

So that was my Friday night. Drunk and disorderly, full of all the pomp and grandeur one would expect from the degenerate likes of the Minneapolis bike scene.

Then Sunday morning happened. I woke up with a sharp pain on the right side of my rib cage. It kind of felt like I crashed the night before (which would have been fitting), but my beautiful girlfriend Carrie assured me that I didn't crash (she wisely stopped after two beers). I thought about my fall on Friday, but why the hell would the front of my rib cage hurt?

Enter Dr. Moses S. Smith. Mo for short. I feel I ought to point out that Mo is a lady, contrary to her rather butch name. I mean, like, she just had a baby. You don't get much more lady-like than that. Mo is a chiropractor, and she told me that what I did was pop a rib out of my rib-cage. Sounds nasty, right? And that if I let it heal on its own, I would probably have chronic pain radiating from it for the rest of my life.

Well, Mo is going to pop that rib back into place. I can't wait to take a deep breath again without sharp pain. And the moral of the story? Don't trust Blake with the whiskey. And Carl Weathers peaked early. And Mo rocks.

Lotsa morals, indeed.