On the way to screenwriting group on Tuesday, I twisted my right ankle. I was wearing my oh so comfy dankso clogs and mindlessly walking down the sidewalk to my car, fantasizing about something or other, when I felt my ankle buckle and then sharp pains shooting through my ankle. I do this all the time, so I didn't think anything of it. I even did a 45 minute workout later that night in guilt for eating like a pig vacation.

On Wednesday while getting out of the shower, I look down at my right ankle and I notice it's a little swollen but still I shrug it off, thinking the swelling will go down during the day. I even went on my usual two mile walk at work during my morning and afternoon breaks.

On Wednesday night I'm at my chiropractor and he starts freaking out because my ankle is really swollen and he tells me I need to ice it. He keeps asking me if it hurts and I say no, it only hurts when I bend it or stretch forward. Still, he freaks out some more and begs me to ice my ankle.

I spent the rest of the night watching my Ken Burns' Jazz series which I taped last year with my ankle elevated and an ice pack on it. Still no pain.

Not today. Today my right ankle is killing me so I have a brace on it that I remembered I had. My left leg and knee are now also hurting because I'm walking funny and not putting that much weight on my right leg, so my left leg is taking all my weight and it's protesting in a serious way.

I can't believe this! I've never had my ankle swell like this before. So weird. I feel old and like a total invalid. Is this what I'll have to look forward to when I grow old? If it is, I'm definitely going to find a way to die before my god gets totally messed up.

Then this morning, I had a dream about Nazis. I don't think I've had a dream about Nazis since high school and college, when I was into my Holocaust phase. In my previous dreams, I was always running from the Nazis and they were always chasing me. They never caught me though and in some of the dreams, I even joined the resistance.

In this new dream, I'm in some kind of prison or concentration camp and we're putting on some kind of play or circus for the prisoners and the Nazis are watching, but it's really just a front for some big escape we're planning. How strange to have a Nazi dream after all these years and to be caught and in a prison camp? I wonder if this means something. At least I was trying to escape and I looked pretty healthy.

Maybe I had this dream because I finally watched that italian movie "A Beautiful Life" a few weeks ago. I had no idea it was about a Nazi concentration camp. Or maybe it's all those years of watching Hogan's Heroes as a child coming back to haunt me. I'm not sure.

So today I'm not walking and I'm bummed, so I'm eating my new comfort food, lentils and rice and tabouleh. I love this dish and it's part of new kosher levitical diet so I can eat as much of it as I want.

I'm bored at work today. I'm supposed to be working on some project that's due next week, but it's very hard to do and I don't feel like doing it. Instead, I'm surfing the net trying to find a video store that carries Ken Burns' Civil War and Baseball series.

A friend of mind recommended I read "Confederates in the Attic" while I was on vacation in West Virginia and I did and I loved it. The book made me want to watch Ken Burns' Civil War series. I think I am slowly getting into a civil war kick. I even bought a civial war book at a library book sale in West Viriginia. The name of the book is "A Stillness at Appomattox" by Bruce Catton. I definitely want to read all of Shelby Foote's books too. In fact, I want to read all the Civil War books, the good ones at least.

I've been thinking I will use the Confederacy as a model for my Elf Kingdom series . The Confederacy was basically a rural/aggrarian region making war with the industrialized north. Unlike the confederacy, the Elf Kingdom people were enslaved after they lost the war and I can use the black slave stories of the south as a model for the elf people enslavement. I'll use my knowledge of Holocaust history too, so I'll probably combine both the black slave south stories with the jewish concentration camp stories and come up with a totally new enslavement story for my elf people. I have a feeling that enslavement of human beings by other human beings is the same, no mattter what the time and culture.

In Confederates in the Attic, Shelby Foote said something like the worst thing, the tragedy of the civil war was the North freeing the black slaves. The idea of freeing the black slaves was a grand one and a right idea, but then the north didn't have a plan for what to do with black slaves and left them on their own. We're still suffering the effects of this failure. This point was reinforced in the first episode of Ken Burns' Jazz series. The narrator of episode 1 said that after reconstruction, the northern republicans and the southern democrats made a deal and out of that deal came Jim Crow laws and segregation. The narrator then went on to say that segragation would rule the south for the next 50 years and with segregation came regular lynchings of black people and the emergence of the Klu Klux Klan.

This fact made me sad, very sad. It made me think that the Civil War was all for nothing. So many people died in that war. In the north 1 out of 10 northern soldiers died in the Civil War. But for the south, the death toll was worse. 1 out of every 4 southern men died during the civil war. And all for nothing because about 20 years later, Jim Crow laws took slavery's place.

Interestingly enough the deal was brokered by Northern republicans since Lincoln was a republican too. Didn't that movie "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" make a point about the betrayal of the south by the southern democrats?

And when the Jim Crow laws were finally dismantled in the south and integration took place, the public school system went from okay to really, really bad. History is very complicated isn't it? When you do one good thing, along comes another bad thing that is sometimes even worse.