Just a few months after reaching the mid-twenties, I’m feeling closer to thirty. Which, we can all agree, is OLD! To illustrate my point, I’ll outline my minor ailments with exaggerated metaphors, analogies and descriptions that will maybe leave your mind as cloudy and muffled as mine. enjoy!
Neck up:
My brain seems to have packed a small weekending bag with a change of clothes and some essential supplies in the wee hours of the morning, leaving before I woke with no emergency contact and his cell laying on the dresser. I can’t put ideas together and feel like the zombies from Shaun of the Dead look.
I have a slight sinus headache that has me groggy and uninterested. That’s not an issue. I get them all the time. But then I bit my tongue. Not in the sense that I have a hole in it or there’s a large part of it spit onto the ground somewhere near Lake Minnetonka or anything, but I must have bitten down on about half of it. There’s a marble of pain lodged on the right side of my mouth. It hurts to swallow and talk. which I do. a. LOT.
Neck to Waist:
I was home sick yesterday. I didn’t do much of anything, but wandered to the deck to read and get some fresh air. My shoulders are sun burnt and my backpack like some sort of smart bomb of hate rests directly on the worst of it. I know most of you have had sunburns before because your absent minded and just want a little color so I’ll just say it feels like being massaged by Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands and leave it at that.
I went tubing a couple times on Sunday. This is incredibly enjoyable don’t have to stand or balance or focus; just hold on and pray, but there are a few effects brought on by that cause I could live without.
First, I’m pretty sure I did 3,000 push-ups in my sleep Sunday night odd, I don’t remember taking Ambien… because it can’t just be that I was pulled at 30mph on a barely-friction-affected inflatable device. It obviously could and certainly is.
Second, when my arms were getting tired and I adjusted grip, I dug my elbows into the textured pads of the tube. This scraped the flesh down to the bone and, considering the cleanliness of the water, almost assuredly infected me with something science has yet to discover, much less cure.
Waist down:
My left knee is burnt. My right knee is slightly pink. That is all. The rest of the flesh on my legs is the familiar near-translucent pale that is the usual. It looks as strange as it sounds, trust me. The tubing or more specifically the water rushing at 18-36mph across them bruised the inside of both my knees.
I took a dive off a wave-runner on Sunday, too. I know; fun day at the lake right? totally. Using “dive” there makes it seem slightly intentional so let me stop to reassure you that it was completely unexpected and horrifically disorienting like a kindergartner lost in a meat packing plant or a sexually indescriminent barely-legal lost in the woods around a cabin retreat.
I took a turn at roughly… given the wind speed, calmness of the water below me and the strength of the motor… 82.7mph give or take 60mph. Centrifical force kneed me in the groin and I was immediately upside-down in the water with my feet still on the seat of the wave-runner above me and the motor idling. I don’t know how I did it either.
From what I’ve been able to gather after the incident through exhaustive research, eye-witness reports and a careful examination to the damage, here’s what happened:
I was thrown thirty feet in the air, a monster of a man named Charity, dressed in sleeveless flannel and chaps laid waste to my left shin with an iron pipe and then I fell sixty feet at terminal velocity. I landed left shin first on the handle bars of the wave-runner before falling backward, head first, into the water beside it. All without snapping the safety cord from the clip.
To sum up, I’m burnt in a number of odd places to a painful degree, have a headache that is leaving me as intellectually clear as a puddle at the lowest point of a Wal-Mart parking lot after a light rain and can’t touch my left leg without screeching like a provoked bird of prey or 4-year-old in dire need of a nap. I can’t kneel, swallow, stand straight or sit comfortably. It’s not good, people, is all I’m saying.
Things are looking up, though. The day at the lake was actually quit awesome and I finally made it to Sea Salt for some dinner after it’s ridiculous delicious. I’ve a half day Friday for a trip to Door County and then a short week with a trip back to the hometown for the holiday weekend. I’m laying low this week in recovery. Please send condolences in the form of cash to the lakehouse, not to the office; it would spark too many questions; much thanks.