I haven’t written much this week because I cut my ankle shaving.  I cut it deep.  Blood was gushing out, thin and hot, mixing into the sudsy shower water and draining in a downward spiral like I was Janet Leigh in Psycho or something.  It was the kind of cut you don’t even feel for another five minutes, or until a minuscule drop of soap falls onto the open wound.  I may or may not have been using a hunting knife instead of a disposable razor, and I may or may not have had the lights out to conserve electricity because I showered during peak time. 

   Long story short, I developed a ferocious staph infection and had to be hospitalized three states away from here, where they have excellent doctors.  More excellent than ours, they say.  But they don’t have Internet there, or coffee, so I could do no writing.  None whatsoever.

   Instead, I sat there and pondered the universe while my slashed-open ankle healed.  You know how at hospitals they never leave you alone?  Every few hours, here comes another nurse to change my band-aid and refill my little plastic yellow mug with diluted sweet iced tea.  And every time, I was reminded of all the incredible, insightful, significant things other people were reading and writing, all the ideas and truths that were being passed around without me.  Sigh.

   So in the middle of the night I crept out of the blue and white hospital room, wrapped in a papery gown and shod in those rubber-flecked booties.  So comfy.  I stole exactly two extra band-aids for my journey home (just in case) and guzzled one last throat full of weak, diluted sweet tea that was sitting at the empty nurse’s station. 

   I walked home without delay.  It was no biggie since I was all tanked up on great writing ideas, all motivated to rejoin the conversations.  My staph infection had burned out purely from literary frustration, and my ankle was almost fully healed too.  The only real obstacle that night was not getting skunked on the dark roads after exiting the Interstate.

   So here I am, brimming with incomplete sentences and anxious to read what has been written during my historic grooming incident-slash- recovery.

   What didn’t kill me has made me, well, sillier.