At the movies: The Heat.

A very pleasant surprise here. Feel free to take Mom to this one, even though it uses a lot of F words and people get shot in the head. I wish I could go see it with Alison Bechdel.

Long Live The New Flesh: or, What Exactly is Going On inside my Body as of late.

This is rumor control; here are the facts.

On Thursday of this week, I had some surgery to excise two cervical discs from my neck.

They were worn down, compressed, and in the early-to-middle stages of calcification due to a genetic defect called Klippel-Feil Syndrome. These messed-up discs were impinging on my spinal cord, which had been causing me a lot of various and sundry issues over the past few years (haptic asynchrony, nerve pain, numbness, moodswings, existential terror, pinched nerves, and microburst headaches). It wasn't until my primary physician, Dr. Barbara Rogowski-Kent, who is awesomely pragmatic, suggested that I get a cervical MRI that we realized all of these things were tied to the same root cause.

Anyway, as of Thursday, those discs are gone. They have been replaced by bone grafts donated by someone I don't know and metal brackets to help it all fuse together appropriately. For about a day after the surgery, I had an insane-looking neck drain that looked like an Ood brain (for those of you who are Whovians). When they removed the drain from me, it was definitely surreal and felt like an Upstream Color moments, iffen you know what I mean.

I'm recovering currently. There are an abundance of interesting brusises and such everywhere, and I'll confess to not looking at my main incision or the currently-healing drainhole because I am not of sufficient fortitude to do so, But I'm feeling - different. I'm feeling better.

At the movies: Stories We Tell.

For the time being, at least, this is the best movie of 2013. Go see it, and spend some time with real human issues that aren't about drink-throwing and dumb shit. I wish Oprah was still on the air, because it's totally in her wheelhouse and she could get an insane amount of publicity for a small film that absolutely deserves your support. I guess that's my pull-quote: "If you miss when Oprah would use her powers for good, Stories We Tell is the movie you need to see."

Some thoughts on Behind the Candelabra.

This is a film worth seeing. Fortunately, thanks to the way viewing works these days, HBO Go is carrying it at your leisure. I've tried to get at everything I could possibly want to see about the film and what all it covers, but there's still something uncanny about it that feels elusive. What are your thoughts on the matter?