A little something to break the blought (that's "blog drought")...
Have you ever broken a bone?
Fortunately, no...but not for lack of trying. Although I never was one for bone-breaking sports - I never played organized football, hockey, rugby or Aussie-rules football - I did do the typical stuff that little boys do. Stuff that would make their mothers' hair curl AND stand on end (which is a hard feat to pull off).
I've got my share of scars, though - the biggest one is a six-stitcher on my forehead, which I got from bashing my head on our fireplace when I was three or four years old. It wasn't intentional, mind you, but it sure freaked my parents out to find their oldest son crying on the floor, face absolutely bathed in blood. Apparently the forehead has a large number of blood vessels in it and very little flesh to actually hold stitches, so things got messy very quickly. I have no recollection of the events but there are a number of pictures in my parents' photo collection of me with a big-ass bandage on my forehead. the thing was so big it looked like I was wearing a diaper wrapped around my noggin.
Other scars are from illness or surgery - I've got one on the left side of my chest from a particularly large chicken pox scab I just couldn't leave alone (the thing was the size of a cornflake) and another on my right biceps from having a mole removed on my arm (which, after careful analysis and biopsification, turned out to be...a mole, now removed from its host organism). And of course there's the three stitches I recently got in my hand, after it lost a fight with a broken soap dish.
I even managed to survive several spectacularly stupid ideas with nary a scratch - one in particular involved us building a bike ramp in our backyard out of scrap wood left over from the addition of a sun room onto the back of our house. Just about every boy our age in the neighborhood was in our backyard helping to put the thing together, and I'm quite sure my parents even glanced out the window once or twice to witness the Sears Tower of bike ramps materializing on their own side lawn. I vaguely remember us having watched "Rad" at some point that summer, which likely was our influence for wanting to become the next Cru Jones by way of Bob Vila. But miraculously, nobody got hurt in the whole episode...despite its gargantuan height, we never really got to do much more than ride straight at it, and then come straight down backwards. Not much of a trick. If we'd had judges, they'd have just abandoned their cards and thrown rotting vegetables at us.
But the nastiest injury I got - other than the sprained ankle resulting from my indecision about whether to slide into second base in a softball game a few years back - was probably the road rash incident that happened when I was biking home from my first job. I worked at the local library ($4.63 an hour, I still remember it) putting books back in the stacks. After work one day, I checked out a few books and tucked them under my arm for the ride home. The library happened to be at the top of a rather steep hill, while my house happened to be at the bottom of said incline...I'd put the steepness at about, oh, 80 degrees. Y'know, something more suitable for a goddamn parachute rather than the massacre waiting to happen that was my bike. Definitely not something you'd want to go down while steering with one hand.
So off I went, like I said, with my books tucked under my arm. Riding in the street. DOWN THE LEFT SIDE. At the bottom of the hill was a gap in the curb, maybe two feet wide, to allow runoff from the sidewalk into a storm drain. When riding with two hands, it was easy enough to steer right to the gap and hop up on the curb. About halfway down the hill, I realized that this had absolutely zero chance of ending well. I did manage to hit the gap, but the lack of stability on the handlebars caused my front wheel to turn sideways, T-boning the bike against the storm drain, and catapulting me up onto the sidewalk, a flurry of books, limbs and left-behind skin. Scraped the shit out of both hands, elbows and knees. I managed to pick up the books and limp home, but bringing the bike was out of the question - and of course that was the thing I was most concerned about when I finally burst through the front door, bleeding and wailing about my own idiotic misfortune. My mother went to pick up the bike - which was none the worse for wear despite my abuse - but not before tending to my battered joints and severely bruised ego.
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