Soon to be 47

Every time I go to stand up or lift something and I feel all creaky and broken, I think back to all this, and remember how much I prefer groany creaks and leftover breaks to stitches and recovery and PT:

I keep these handy/on my phone, so that I won’t get lured into a pickup game of ball, or a hackysack circle—What can go wrong, right?—and so I won’t lift furniture or jump off this ledge because it’ll all probably work out somehow. And I also don’t trust ladders near as much as I used to. Or jacks / truck stands / trailer cranks / come-alongs / winches either. Which is to say: I used to heal Wolverine-fast, it felt like. But then I stopped being twenty-two, somehow.

Guess I’ve got a snapshot of just after my skull fracture, too, but I must have named it something unfindable. Or, can’t find it now, anyway. Probably for the best. Those, above, are on the road to happy, anyway. The skull fracture face is just blood and blood and blood, and then three days in a dark-and-getting-darker motel room sucking on great heaping handfuls of aspirin, which, it turns out, aren’t exactly coagulants. But why would I have known that in 1991?

Anyway, posting this so I can remember not to be stupid. Anymore. Or, not in these ways. I even, some days, use my brakes on a steep downhill on my mountain bike. I’m a complete stranger to the person I used to be. But I keep my blood mostly on the inside, too. Well, except for skin stuff—road rash and scrapes and all that. You’ve got to live, though.