July 3rd - July 10th

Playing Frisbee on Tuesday night (July 1^st), I successfully put the masses to shame with my courage and ambidexterity. Diving for an errant throw, I planted my right arm on the ground, felt my shoulder shake loose of its socket and break for the exits, and landed on my stomach. When I rolled over to get up, my shoulder came back and sat back down in its fleshy hollow. I held my arm at my right side for the rest of the game, throwing accurately but without much pizzazz. To finish the game I made a diving catch in the end zone with my left hand, and everyone celebrated except for the other team and the neuronal pathways that carry pain messages from my limbs to my brain.

On Wednesday night I drove Greg to the Detroit Metro airport so he could flee the state of Michigan and gain asylum under the waiting breast of California. When he was getting out of the car to leave, he tried to give me a hug, and I had to remind him that he was going to be gone for only three days. He wasn’t going to war. He wasn’t even going to the zoo, where he could potentially be mauled by a wily animal. Because of all this, and the fact that I cringe at the slightest human touch, I kicked him with my steel-toed boots when he extended his arms. No one was going to check his carry-on bag if he was crying and acting as if he had just had upper thigh surgery, so I feel safe assuming I did him a favor.

While it is untrue that Greg has ever had thigh-work done, there was a quietly sinister medical melodrama playing out in our apartment on Tuesday night, two nights prior to his departure, which ended up involving some microsurgery. Right before the Frisbee game was to start, Greg and I were bouncing a volleyball back and forth to each other, practicing our soccer skills. The ball rolled under our glass table, and Greg, for some reason lost on me, tried to crawl over the table to get the ball. Instead of gliding over it like the fairy he thinks he is, his knee smashed through the glass. His knee produced a laceration approximately 1 inch in length, and Greg jetted off to the nearest medical clinic.

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The weekend pounced upon me with a patriotic viciousness. I knew that we had Friday off of work but it didn’t dawn on me until late Thursday evening that it was going to be Independence Day. On the 4^th, I ended up sitting on the edge of a dock with Bert, gazing across the river at colorful explosions of phosphate and some other chemicals I learned about when such things pretended to matter. At some point during the show two drunken gentlemen floated up to us in a canoe, docked the boat as if it was their spot, and proceeded to take 15 minutes to stumble onto land. One offered us an oil-spotted can of beer. We declined. They walked the length of the weather-beaten boardwalk, shoulder to shoulder, and disappeared into the night. When the fireworks ended, I heard one of them shout something that had more of an idiotic than patriotic bent. Something like “Merry Intern Pendants Day.” Sometimes my ears hear what they want to hear.

On Saturday night, I watched a kid's Pixar movie about a debonair rodent chef. I’ve seen the movie twice, but for some reason I can’t remember the rat’s name. The movie was well-attended, having been set up in Bert’s backyard with a bed sheet and my projector. On Sunday, I watched my sister play volleyball for 4 hours. I ate the better part of a bag of sunflower seeds and pondered how God decides who among a family is going receive a full dose of athleticism. For example, how come He decided to give George Bush a rock-strewn set of abs and the reflexes of a harpoonist, but Jeb got the shafted end of the stick? At some point during my pondering, I must’ve crept too far into the sun’s deadly rays, because when I awoke on Monday morning my lower lip looked like it had been put through the business end of a meat grinder. See Below…

…I have a history of having very odd reactions to the sun. Four years ago, at a Michigan football game in late October, I melted. I did not realize at the game, or even on the way home, that I had ingested some foreign poison which was to change the way I lived the next four day. The next morning my face felt weird, collapsed and exploded at the same time, so I glanced at the mirror. I then locked the door and dove under the covers of my high-school bed and vowed never to come out. My face! The sweet, previously unblemished love of my life. It looked accursed. You could barely see my eyes. My cheeks appeared to be stuffed with slices of pizza. My skin, from the neck up, looked victim to some exotic jungle virus; Ebola, perhaps, or face-AIDS.

Forward, to the present. The sun had baked to life a crustacean claw where my mouth used to be, but what made the injury notable was the salt from the seeds had that seeped into the cracks. White scabs, not dissimilar to what you might expect a Yeti's knuckles to look like, became prominent on my lip. Only now, four days later, does it appear to be healing.

Work is very quiet this week, but I learned at a very young age that silence can throw a tarp over the worst of life’s problems and then release them when you least expect it. These next two weeks mark Chrysler’s mandatory two-week vacation time, where 70% of the workforce is forced to take vacation. I’m very used to the rules not applying to me, but this time it is to my disadvantage. No boss creeps nearby, both a blessing and a curse. Just when I start to stretch out and wonder if I am going deaf, an order roars out from somebeast two cubicle rows over, telling me to get some work done.

I really wish one of my slacking co-workers looked more like a druggie so that I could make a joke about which was more fulfilling: free-riding the waves of a slumping company and collecting ridiculous wages for doing nothing, or free-basing off a cafeteria spoon in the unisex bathroom at the headquarters of one of the biggest companies in the state? Immediately after wondering about this, I realize how much time I really have on my hands. And then I wonder: how could time be on my hands?