
Originally published on October 17, 1996
Just when one thinks that it would be easier to drain all the seven oceans of salty fish nip than to squeeze another drop of self-pity from the rather mundane story of my life, then boom, another couple of notches later, I find feeling as if downing a jar of extra large crunchy Greek olives and sardines is the highest compliment I can pay myself for the failure of another unpersuasive idea...
This morning while taking out an armful of corrugated cardboard recycleables, I broke my left foot, again! I'm beginning to feel like a sad parody of Tim and his annual collarbone. The foot snapped lengthwise with characteristic audible clarity. I was stepping from the house to the front porch and my unfastened sandles slipped to trigger the occasion. Ten minutes later, wincing on the sofa, with vigor and gruff I jump up at Sue's notice that a man is foraging through our big blue plastic, metal, and glass curbside recycle bags. Once at the door I yell that rather than plunder the dozen or so smaller bags neatly packed inside the big blue ones he should just take off with the whole shebang.
Nausea. Sartre. Simpletons and Simon Magus. Surely I am blessed among men...
Oh course soon after writing this note I receive another nasty reply from my next door neighbor Blumstein, who types, (obviously from his workstation on the job, a job he wished upon me as often as the spirit moved him:
Gah Bree Elle,
Why is it that I have to guess at you breaking
a limb. Why make me assume such nonsense
rather than just say it out straight 'I broke my
GD left femur!' Don't assume anyone in your
audience knows all the details so you can
discuss such as old news.
But the reality is that if you did break your
leg, whichever left and/or right, you should
get it professionally set before it heals in
an obnoxious way and must be broken again
to correct it thus fucking it up even more.
God I hate martyrs...
Blum
It was interesting to discover he cared, even if it took the form of a Blumfisted flame.
Well Bob, it wasn't my left femur, but some bone, perhaps the cuboid, in my left foot. You're right. What I thought was obviousI stepped on my foot wrong, I suppose some folks, yourself included, might presume that I had stumbled so hard and so recklessly that I would have been hurled forward, broken my leg, or even my neck, such is the beastly public image, brimming creative minds like your own have deployed as the real Gabriel Thy. My apologies.
GT