OLD BONES

To all five of you readers of my blog I apologize for the extended hiatus. I've wanted to keep in touch, believe me, but there has been a myriad of external forces restraining me from the at-times-challenging endeavor of "updating."

All excuses aside, I missed you all. Not being able to talk to you has been like the episode of Small Wonder when Jamie Lawson goes on a summer camp trip and gets claustrophobic because he has no way of communicating with his family.

Amongst the things that have paralyzed my writing is a black and slightly broken pinky. I never realized the demand for accuracy a QWERTY board entailed until I was suddenly left with only nine sausage links; not to mention many other daily, and perhaps even hourly tasks that hinged on the use of my fingers, that were temporarily halted due to this unanticipated injury. Example: that pinky, being my right pinky, was specifically designated for a special mission. If my hands were Navy SEALS, my right pinky would have been the sniper. It was fortified with more refined artillery, designed and specially trained to seek out its enemy and attack with precision and vigor. In some ways, even, I can stretch the shit out of this analogy like I stretch out my boxer briefs from two years ago when I was four waist sizes smaller, and say my pinky was, rather than a Navy SEAL sniper, a CIA operative planted in the bowels of a South American drug cartel.

Armed and at ease my pinky, people would say, looked like a coke-head's pinky. Basically, I would grow out the nail to about an eighth to a quarter of an inch length, and maintain it at that extension perpetually. Many thought it was a yayo-scooper or a tweak-mincer. Some just thought it was dirty. In actuality, behind the menacing guise, my pinky was in fact simply a picker, an orifice maintenance specialist, so to speak. The nail was grown to its obnoxious length so as to reach those hard-to-reach nooks and crannies. Noses, eyes, ears, teeth, belly-buttons, and other bodily grottos devoid of light, there wasn't a hole my right pinky couldn't excavate. Until now.

What happened?! So our group of Swayzians, some of you reading included, have recently been playing softball every weekend in the ungodly San Fernando Valley. In fact, we just came back from a fun but draining game played at Northridge Park under a blazing sun and 97 degree heat blanket. It's great to be out with good friends, all engaged in friendly competition, absorbing the physical and metaphysical nutrients an active day in the sun can offer. Preceding the softball series, however, a group of us guys started by playing football every Sunday. The first game, which of course was flag football, was a blast.....until I got home and looked at my hand. It was purple and pretty much looked exactly like in the picture. I dunno how, but I managed to put a hairline fracture in the tip of my pinky playing FLAG football. Luckily it wasn't a bigger bone that I busted, but at least it would have been somewhat respectable. A broken pinky from flag football: that's not much to brag about, there's not a whole lot of story-tellin' there.

Keeping tab, just on my right hand alone now, I've split my middle knuckle in two, broken my ring finger, ripped the nail off my middle finger, and now, fractured my pinky, all somehow involved with sports. I know I don't look athletic. Maybe sometimes looks aren't that deceiving, and now my pinky looks like Rihanna's left cheek. Maybe I should lay off the balls.