One year checkup

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I HAVE BEEN OFFICIALLY BLOGGING FOR ONE YEAR. Bloggiversary? Am I allowed to say that word? It feels like a gross portmanteau… like synergy, or mayochup, or chillax, or meatplosion.

What a crazy year. I’ve learned so much. Even in the past week, I’ve learned so much. Can I even begin to quantify the learning I’ve learned in a year?

Ah, no, I can’t. Unfortunately I can’t remember what I learned. But I know it’s a lot.

Here’s some of what I’ve learned in just the past week:

  1. Listen to the red flags in every situation. Don’t do stupid things out of laziness. Cut carefully with knives. Use the pusher with the food processor. Do NOT do stupid things.
  2. Get your chronic cough checked out and fixed. You might get pneumonia and die.
  3. Don’t be a sedentary office worker; move. Or you might get pneumonia and die.
  4. Diet brain is a fucking menace. Eat your fats and proteins along with vegetables. I don’t know, you’ll figure it out. Do not ignore diet brain. You’ll end up chopping off digits.
  5. One cat will always be fat. What weight one loses, the other finds. This is an unassailable fact of life.
  6. Fingers heal like Wolverine. They refill and replace tissue with minimal scarring.
  7. Argue with your sister a little more when you don’t want something to happen. You can be just as stubborn as she is. Do it. Your fingers are your own and being tractable is not worth getting gauze stuck in the wound for days.
  8. People get gauze stuck in their wounds on purpose, then rip it out along with healing new tissue all the time. This called debriding the wound. I don’t understand why nice doctors would make people do this.
  9. David Tennant’s peculiar brand of crazy and rubber face feels like home. Watch more of his stuff. Something has got to fill the Doctor Who void…
  10. Dostoyevsky still blows your mind. Write like him. Except, with more lovable characters. …It could happen.
  11. You have too many sketchbooks. And only six good drawings?
  12. Breathe, relax. If you stress out about things like gauze in your wound, you’ll give yourself a hive.

 

So… thanks for a year of blogging.  You’re all nuts. I love you so much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I knew a man

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I knew a man,
though not very well.
A nice man
now dead
from pneumonia.

We were all looking sideways at S——
with her regrowing cancer hair
but death came at us
from an unexpected direction.
I wasn’t even aware he was sick
until Friday.

On Saturday
I cut off the tip of my finger.
It’s not often I am afraid
but I was
truly
afraid.
I pressed my finger into my palm to stem the bleeding.
It felt deformed. Too short, too flat.
I didn’t want to know what it looked like.

A reminder of my mortality
too close
too close.

On Monday
we get the office email.
He has died. We grieve his passing.
The office is quiet
with heavy atmosphere.

Somebody has set
a vase of flowers
outside his office door.
They have been placed there
very gently
by honoring hands,
sad hands.

We need
to honor the dead.
We decorate their haunts.
We create ceremonies.
We save mementos.
We tell stories.

I only knew this man by sight.
Another office worker
someone who helped grease the cogs
of our mutual machine.
We might wave or nod.
He had a habit
of muttering to himself
funny, quirky things.
I would pick up snatches of his internal dialog
when I walked by.
How well did he know me?

My finger is stiff with scab.
I worry at it, clean it, unwrap it, rewrap it.
It will have to last me
a few years longer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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