I have always been a bit accident prone, probably because I sometimes do things too quickly and/or impulsively, but this tendency has improved markedly in recent years — and then came roaring back with a vengeance two nights ago. Thus, my absence over the past 48 hours from this site.

Looking back at it now, it seems so unlikely, so ridiculous and funny, but while it was going on it was anything but funny. And I am still in a lot of pain today.

Wednesday night started like any other. It’s still cold at night here, so I wear flannel pajamas to bed and keep a big steel space heater a few feet away. I was sleeping soundly when, at about 3 in the morning, I awoke from uneasy dreams into a full-fledged nightmare.

Have you ever been asleep when the telephone started to ring and the ringing actually played a part in your dream before you realized the ringing was real? That’s similar to the way my calamity started. I was dreaming and a character in the dream began shouting, “I have a terrible cramp in my foot,” and suddenly that’s what the other characters in the dream were talking about. Suddenly, I bolted upright and realized I really did have an excruciating cramp in my left foot, which obviously my dream was trying to tell me. The pain was intense, and I immediately tried to jump out of bed so I could press down on it.

But something went wrong — my feet got caught in the bedding, and I slipped, totally losing my balance in the pitch-blackness. I came crashing down; the back of my head smashed into the steel heater, and the cramp was still there. But that was nothing. I had crashed at the perfect angle to do maximum damage to my right shoulder, which struck the hardwood floor with a vengeance. This was one of those moments where you really know what pain is. It shot through me with such a ferocity that I had to keep saying to myself, “Pain is only in the mind, it can only hurt as much as you allow it to.” Honestly, that didn’t help much, and I was generally quite miserable as I lay there wondering what I had done to myself.

I tried to stay calm. I realized that the slightest movement of my right arm caused pain to come shooting out of my shoulder, so I just tried to keep the arm utterly motionless. With the other hand I managed at least to get the cramped foot under control. And I knew the bump on my head from the radiator would stop hurting soon enough. I inched back onto the bed and tried to convince myself it was nothing, but soon enough I realized the pain was more than I could bear. I got dressed, which must have been a hilarious scene had their been an onlooker — just try putting your socks on with one hand, and you will forever empathize with the handicapped. (I kept thinking of the movie My Left Foot.) This took quite a long time; my right arm was basically dangling useless. I took a taxi to the only 24-hour Western-style hospital in Beijing where I was told I had a ruptured tendon. (As I mentioned once before, I have had a problem with tendonitis of the right shoulder for a long time.) I still need to see whether it requires surgery; for now I have my arm in a sling and can only use my left hand.

The pain all day yesterday was as close to unbearable as pain can be. I could not eat, I could not move. Then, just as the doctor told me, it began to ease up this moring and now I can at least slowly put my shirt on. But it’s going to take a few weeks and physical therapy, the doctor says, before I am in one piece again.

There’s never a “good time” for shit like this to happen. Still, better now than in three weeks, when my friend from Arizona will be visiting me and we take a trip down to Yunnan (if SARS is considerate enough to keep out of Southwest China). Okay, back to bed and my painkillers and bags of ice. Nightmare.

I’ve read some hair-raising stories about the Bush administration’s obsession with secrecy, and this one confirms my worst fears. The article documents one instance after another of the Bush administration’s “document scrubbing.” This is highly reminiscent of those famous photos of the old Bolshevik gang, which Stalin would have painstakingly altered as, one by one, those in the photographs were murdered. It’s a great article.

I just got some very good news from the company in Singapore I am talking with, and they have made it clear the offer will come by Friday. I’ve been racked with second thoughts, pangs of guilt for letting down my current employer, incredible bouts of heartsickness over being so far from my friend, and depression over the extremely grim outlook of the US economy. I spoke on the phone with the bf today and told him how much I want to go home, but he was blunt about it — things are shaky over there and to have a job right now is to be considered lucky. His own company is in the process of cutting his department by 25 percent.

Today I also communicated with my old colleagues in Hong Kong. It seems that SARS is all that Hong Kong is now about. My own company here in Beijing sent out an email offering free surgical masks to anyone who wants one (and I was shocked to see so many passengers aboard my recent flights to/from Singapore wearing them). My old company in HK is instructing all executives from overseas to cancel their visits to the island. Tourism, of course, is in tatters.

If you knew what HK was looking like when I left last summer, you would know just how agonizing this must be. I still remember all the taxis standing in huge lines, with no passengers to be had. Left and right people were burning charcoal (the favored way to take one’s life in HK, suffocating on the carbon monoxide fumes) and the general spirit of misery was palpable. So in the midst of this anguish, yet another bombshell blasts the not-so-long-ago thriving and invincible business hub of Asia. It seems HK has fallen and it can’t get up. I believe they’ll recover, to a large extent, but I don’t see how they can return to anything close to the glory days of pre-1997. There’s been a tectonic shift, and at times it looks as though HK might be swallowed up altogether….

Being an insatiable media junkie, I love the way this site picks apart the mendacities and extravagances of today’s most cherished pundits, be they on the left or the right. Today it offers some sharp observations about Andrew Sullivan and Ann Coulter you won’t want to miss.