Secret Pop

Jul 9, 2004

Blood is yuck.

I hurt myself today. Pretty badly. I shaved off a piece of my finger. And when I say "shaved," I mean as in "with a razor." The kind meant for smoothening the gams of lovely ladies. Curiously, they are as deft at removing a piece of knuckle as they are at decimating leg hair. I was in a hurry and rifling through my overnight bag for my toothbrush, and I forced my hand downward too quickly and found the triple-blade of my Venus shaver. Of course, I began cursing immediately. And then I began to panic. I was in a hurry because my orchestra call time was 6:30, and now all of a sudden I'm wrapping wads of toilet paper around a throbbing wound that won't stop welling up red. Krissy made a wad of paper towel into a sort of absorbent doughnut around my finger and taped it in place with scotch tape. And then I drove to the theater, where I could be seen squatting down beside the first aid kit, fumbling with the bandages and antiseptic wipes and making those sharp sucking in "s" sounds you make when something really stings. Because it did.

It was my bow hand, so it wasn't as painful as it could have been to play tonight. But it sure did get cold out, and that didn't make things any better. My bandage is soaked through and my finger is sore to the touch. Who am I kidding. It's sore to the thought. And all I keep doing is running the scenario through my head and thinking of all the ways I could have avoided the injury in the first place. It's a thing I do. When I told my friend Joe about it, he said that habit was very Run, Lola, Run of me. I liked that.

I stole a few bandages from the first aid kit. Krissy doesn't keep them. That's why the paper towel doughnut. In my house, all the bandages have pictures on them. Hello Kitty. Star Wars. Disney Princesses. I'm glad that the bandage manufacturers of the world recognized this opportunity to make wounds more fun. I know, at least for my part, that stopping the bleeding with Jar Jar Binks is better than stopping it with plain. The only case where I don't think a character version is better is with pancakes. If you get suckered into ordering the Mickey Mouse-shaped pancakes, just realize that the places where his ears and face have to be defined are the places where you got robbed of pancake. In terms of value, round is the only way to go. With pancakes anyway.

I used to prefer plain wound dressing. Particularly that time I woke up in the fourth grade with a neck so stiff that I couldn't raise my ear from my shoulder. My mom took me to the infirmary, and the doctor put one of those spongy beige neck braces on me. The kind that fits with velcro. And -- as a favor to me -- he didn't send me back to school before using a black magic marker to draw a bow tie on the cloth, right where an actual bow tie would have been, had I been wearing one. Well let me just tell you, that was one of the worst days in my fourth grade life. Not only did I not get any sympathy for my troubles when I got back to school, at lunch, this one bullyish older boy named Bill Roberts (a very pale-headed blond fellow who liked to wear an orange windbreaker and talk a lot of shit) ridiculed me relentlessly. He wasn't so clever as to link my look to Vaudeville or anything, but his audience wasn't so very discerning. I was just lucky it was super taco day in the lunch room, or my shame might have held their attention for more than twelve or thirteen seconds. When I got home, my mother and I figured out that the brace was reversible, and I was spared the shame of having to wear the clumsy trompe l'oeil a second time, but the damage was done. We never did find out what was wrong with my neck. But it went away, so we forgot about it.

No one made fun of my finger tonight. But I didn't draw a picture on the bandage, so who knows.

Anyway, ouch. And good night.

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