This has gotta be the opportunity of a lifetime! Well that's what I was saying before the summer started back in may. I was all amped up to see the premiers of Chrismas On Mars at the summer rock festivals, and this ruined everything. I am such a big FLAMING LIPS fan! I discovered the Flaming Lips when i was going to school for architecture. Late nights designing and drawing- pouring my soul out to professors who couldnt give a damn. Then i picked up THE SOFT BULLETIN, and life was good I blasted that on my headphones everyday and night. Then i started buying everything you guys ever did. I raided ameoba music store in Hollywood and picked up ep's, singles.. I couldnt get enough! ebay, random music stores online! my obscure favorite is from on of your ep's where you cover that smog song "Chosen One"! aww man I would sit and listen to that song everynight before i went to sleep. Really I started having a real connection to your band. You guys all started up in '83, i was born in '83. I found every reason to like your music. AND CHRISTMAS ON MARS! you were all promoting that when i first discovered you guys. I looked every day for when that was coming, the winter, the summer, but it never did! and now in 2008 its here but it was not to be!

I had gotten SHINGLES IN MY EAR! They call it "Ramsay Hunt Syndrome" it was a hellish experience. It was like the aftermath of bad weed and horrible acid trip. Well let me explain! It was like a great darkness in my body. The darkness in my body that attacked me turned out to be a wonderfully rare disease- Ramsay Hunt Syndrome - 1 in 100,000 people on the planet get it. Lucky me.

Ramsay Hunt Syndrome is Shingles, which simply, is chicken pox when it comes back to attack your nerves and cause you unbearable pain. However, unlike your normal garden-variety shingles Ramsay Hunt attacks your ear and as it turns out cuts off the connection to your facial nerves down to the throat. So the right-side of my face got paralyzed, a classic bells palsy so this meant chewing was unbearable, swallowing was next to impossible, and i had electric blasts pulsing through every nerve on the right side of my head and face and neck- even the inside of my mouth was in pain. The right side of my tounge was this dried piece of leather in my mouth and my saliva a foul tasting amorphous alien being. And that was just the first month, the symptoms that followed were akin to being on boat in rough seas and being tied to a giant spinning top, i was dizzy and throwing up for a solid month and in the mean time discovered many treatments to supress such feelings- the next time you feel nauseous fill a small bowl with sugar and cut limes into small slices next dip the slice into the sugar and put in the back of your mouth and whammo a cure!- All of this lead up to my drastic loss of 40 lbs.

The days that followed and the ones that preceded were characterized by noise sensitivity- i couldnt watch tv, or talk on the phone, the sound was unbearably painful. i couldnt even listen to music! it was really a dark time. Up until twenty days ago reading and working on the computer was next to impossible because of the nausea. The result is that i have a damaged kidney and liver from a prior misdiagnoses and large doses of antibiotics, on top of that the doctors say i have a year or more to fully recover from this whole thing- no alcohol for at least a year to let my organs repair themselves. So now i was comfortably recovering and ever so slowly getting my weight back. To make my luck even more rare and inexplicably bad during my at-home therapy to get my weight and strength back i was too vigorous in my stretching and exercises and tore my calf muscle! and At the moment i am nursing that back to health.......

so now i find myself at the tail end of this disease limping and with a major hit to my immune system and all i want is to reunite with the lips and see Christmas on Mars a little early!!