I have a website? What?

Egad, it’s been a week and a half. Since my last post, we had a grueling journey - not as bad as it could be, but far from a thrill. I finished Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. We were reunited with friends and family. I began Iain M. Bank’s Against a Dark Background. I built a new computer. We drove throughout our hometown, shaking our heads in resignation. We had a wild homecoming party that wasn’t actually meant to be as wild as me, Joel, and Ben made it. We played drunken badminton and somehow I cut my feet quite badly.

Let me tell you about that. I have no memory of it occurring, nor did I notice the wound the day of, but the next morning I saw that on my heel a quarter-sized flap of thick skin had been peeled back, and all sorts of black gunk had collected under that flap. I put a bandaid over it and thought about other things for a day, but, to my dismay, it had not gone away this morning. I took a pair of narrow surgical (I guess) scissors and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and went to work.

First I cut away as much of the dead skin as possible. It didn’t hurt; it was dead. However, I did have ample opportunity to observe and remark upon the amazing toughness of my heel-skin. I go barefoot quite a bit. I have cut through leather boots more easily. I considered saving the skin, but couldn’t think of a use.

Then I scraped away what gunk was now exposed. It was a mucilaginous decoction of mud, rotten leaves, sticks, and insect fragments. I carefully removed it from the raw red skin with Randi’s toothbrush. A good bit remained, packed tightly under fresh, living, tough skin that I hesitated to cut away, so I probed under the fleshy overhang with the narrow scissors-point, removing the bio-slurry speck by painful speck, flicking the bloody mud solution into Randi’s contact lens case. Finally, the foreign slime gone, I flooded the whole bloody gash with hydrogen peroxide, watched it foam, grinned at the lance of pain jabbing my heel, thinking, “I am a sinner, and this is my punishment.”

But you don’t come here to read about crude home surgery, dear reader, or at least I hope not, or you’d be disappointed more often than not. (Do you? I can try. I’ve got something stuck in my other foot that I’m looking forward to excavating, and if I know you’re interested, I’ll take notes.) You come here for my meanders on writing and politics and junk.

Ah, writing. I remember when I used to do that. These days, I’ve been concentrating on increasing my physical muscles; indeed, the effort has been productive, and I now resemble one of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical sketches. But my mental muscles have atrophied. One must write every day, you know. The simple act of putting words on page becomes easier with practice. You are able to get into the zone more quickly and be more fruitful once you get there. However, as I am lazy by nature - no, wait, I mean “laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazy” - I am only able to write when I arrange my entire life around it. I must have a routine, I must have the same designated time every dang day, or I will find excuses to put it off and do other stuff, other more quickly rewarding stuff. So, about three weeks ago, when life got difficult, I put the book on hold. And there it’s been. Now I’m out of excuses - reasons, rather, there are always plenty of excuses - reasons not to work. Dammit. Tomorrow. We’ve unpacked, jet lag is gone, I’m doing it.

Now I would like to tell you a bit about cheese. The day after our return to the states, we went to Kroger, not a store renowned for its cheese selection. And yet we managed to buy no fewer than six cheeses: cheddar, pepperjack, goat cheese, parmesan, fresh mozzarella, gorgonzola. A few days later we returned to buy cheese for the party: havarti, emmental, and more pepperjack.

It’s good to be home.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2010 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Anomalous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.