Two Dog Night

-

Luke is having a slumber party. His bestest buddy Butch is here. Butch belongs to Jeff and Katie down the street. He and Luke can chase each other, wrassle, and otherwise convince the uninitiated that there's about to be bloodshed. If I open my front door, Luke tries to bolt to Butch's house. If Jeff and Katie open theirs, Butch bolts over here. I swear they have cell phones; it's as if they can hear the respective doors open three houses away.

I'm trying to decide whether the two knuckleheads can both sleep in the house tonight. They're alternately chilling and then remembering that they're nuts. Luke is nosing a chair across the dining room and Butch is trying to figure out why. It's like watching a cartoon, at least until one attempts to mount the other. Then it's more like Animal Planet.

It's good to get insight into your friends' lives. Unfortunately, I now have insight into Jeff's knee. Butch is here because Jeff and Katie are at the hospital. I was home this afternoon and heard Jeff shout. Then I heard him again. He's spending the summer adding on to his house, doing much of the work himself. When I got down the street, I asked if he was pissed off or hurt. Then he showed me his leg. Something happened with a saw. That's as graphic as I'm going to get. Katie was on the way, so I sat with him to try to keep him calm and make sure he didn't go into shock or pass out.

He's at the hospital, they've started the antibiotics, and at last report they were waiting to go into radiology to identify how much damage there is and what to do next.

I stayed calm when I was with him, with his in-laws, and with Katie. And then I came home and lost it. I've seen other injuries. I've seen a soccer teammate's head when it needed nearly 100 stitches to close. But three hours later, I'm still shaky.

Maybe it's because it was just him and me sitting on the porch.
Maybe it's because he and Katie are my friends.
Maybe it's because he talked about never playing volleyball again and I know what it's like to lose something like that (soccer).
Maybe it's because everything we went through with @ makes things like this so much more real.

But I also know I'm fortunate to have people who watch out for me. I called X, and because he lives near the hospital he went check on Jeff, then called me with details. I sent an "I gotta get this into words and outta my system" e-mail to a friend from school and he called to make sure I was OK and just talk to me for a bit (he knows I always say I'm OK, he knows that sometimes I'm completely full of sh**).

And now I have these two moronic canines slowly considering settling down, which gives me something to watch and to wish that, perhaps for a few hours, I could be as ignorant and happy as they are.

Here's to having good friends and dumb dogs.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cancer Is a Narcissist

-
I am angry. And I am sad. But at the moment, it's mostly anger. Keyboard and reader beware. That androgynous, faceless, scourge with too many names and ways of wreaking havoc.  That invisible stalker that sneaks in at the cellular level, latching on and demanding attention.  That predatory visitor that remains unseen until  it's too often too late.  It wins again. Today, cancer won again.  It won this morning, taking a young woman barely 30 from her world, her family's world, our world, this world. Quickly. Aggressively. Ruthlessly. I want to scream at cancer, cuss it out, kick it where it hurts, be heard. But cancer is a narcissist. It doesn't care that I'm angry. It knows nothing but itself and how to propagate until it wins.
Read more

The Consumerization of Popcorn... and IT

-
Image
Technology continues to change not only the tools we use  but the language we use to describe it. Wikipedia describes  consumerization  as: …an increasingly accepted term used to describe the growing tendency for new information technology to emerge first in the consumer market and then spread into business and government organizations. Consumerization absolutely affects technology, but confining the definition to information technology too narrowly defines it. The etymology pins the emergence of the term itself as early as 2001, which is a long time in  dog years  and at least a half century in technology. But the concept goes back far before Y2K. I could delve into Eli Whitney’s  cotton gin , but I’ll stick to less distant history. Before we get to IT, consider the impact of consumerization on time and choice. Consumerization & Time In some ways, our experiences with consumer technology have changed the very speed at which we live our lives. We ...
Read more

Raising a Son in a World of Brock Turners

-
Image
This whole Stanford Rapist Who Can Swim thing has been everywhere this week, and I haven't tried to escape it. I've read the letters, read the articles, and shared in the discussion. I found myself wandering between disbelief and outrage. It was strange to realize I've been in the courtroom of the judge who sentenced Turner to the prison equivalent of cleaning chalkboard erasers after elementary school. He annoyed me then. He infuriates me now. At first, I didn't talk about the Stanford case around my son. I didn't want to talk about rape. I didn't want to explain what Turner had done. I didn't want to talk about how a young man smart enough to go to a university as prestigious as Stanford could also be as vicious as to attack an unconscious girl behind a dumpster. But then, I did. I am raising a young man. I wanted him to see me angry, astounded, and affected by the case. My son can go toe-to-toe with me about how unfair it is that I limit his s...
Read more