Backstory (pun intended)

In the following pair of photos, I am the subject instead of the photographer. Actually, the whole thing is fairly embarrassing, but I consider the public retelling of this story to be my partial penance for being such an idiot.

The first photo shows a cute blow-up dragon for little kids to jump inside of. Back when I was a kid, we called the spherical version of this thing a "moon walk". The dragon is much cooler than the moon walk, and has the added bonus that you enter through the mouth (ascending the tongue) and exit through the dragon's rear end.

Who, could pass that up? I, my wife, and one of my students entered the dragon and proceeded to jump around like lunatics. My schtick was to climb back on to the tongue, and do forward flips, over and over.

After a while, my wife and student grew bored, so I signaled to them that I was going to leave after one more monster flip. They exited the dragon right as I jumped. When they exited, the surface tension left the under-inflated dragon, so that when I landed I hit solid ground instead of a nice air cushion.

I somehow managed to squeeze out of the dragon's sphincter before I went into complete shock, but just barely. My wife helped me make it to the park bench, where I temporarily lost first my sight, then my hearing. Spooky. Nonetheless, I remained conscious and I was able to narrate the whole experience. The second photo show the aftermath. If you look closely on the left, you can faintly see that bastard dragon as well as my good buddy, David Pennock and his wife, both looking concerned for my ass.

Flash forward a few more hours to the emergency room, post ambulance ride... The bad news, delivered by the attending ER physician, was that I actually busted my ass. Well, technically it was a lower vertebra in the vicinity of my ass. The good news was that you can apparently quickly recover from certain back fractures if they are in the right place. Mine was such an injury.

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