A Sunday Post

The "s" in my keyboard is sticking due to a tiny accident with yogurt (pear-flavored). I have to avoid it if I can, hence problems with sstyle.

Did you march for freedom and women's lives? I hope that you did.

I didn't. Because I was in Novocaine-induced sleep for the last 24 hours, and my hand is very much improved by it.

What happened was this: I was meditating, as usual in a dark room. I had been standing motionless for a couple of hours, when I got the brilliant idea of becoming a whirling dervish. No brilliant idea should be wasted; so I immediately started whirling. The stars were whirling, the room was whirling, the emptiness was whirling. And the Last Final Question suddenly appeared at the end of a long tunnel of light! Yes! I screamed, Yes! I whispered, I'm coming! The Consciousness looked down and spotted me...

AND WHAM. The answer to the Last Final Question: the final communion of my right hand and the corner of some very sharp window glass. I think that Rumi would have laughed at this. I certainly did, despite also feeling slightly queazy when I turned on the lights and saw what the room looked like. I couldn't stem the bleeding so off to the emergency room I went.

Emergency rooms are weird places at four a.m.. The television is on at full blast: you can learn how to lose twenty pounds in one day, though they don't mean by bleeding to death. Maintenance people hover around, not maintaining much except the vending machines for fifty-year old coffee. And on the benches lie pain, curled up, vomiting, hoping for some answers. As I wasn't very high in the pecking order of horrors I had time to listen and observe. One woman had a headache that never went away. She had been installing wall-to-wall carpeting for years, and feared that the glues she had used had caused this ache in her head. Her employer had fired her for taking too many days off from work. She had finally too much pain this Saturday morning at four o'clock, and she was waiting for some relief. I so hope she found it.

Another woman had brought a toddler in, because he had fallen on some toy the previous night and was now bleeding in the mouth. Except that the bleeding had stopped, and the toddler was happily making the rounds in the waiting room. His mother tried to jump the queue by appealing to higher powers: that she was a patient of someone important in the hospital, that she (unlike the rest of us dregs of humanity waiting there) actually paid for health insurance, that the people coming in on stretchers from traffic accidents surely shouldn't be admitted before her toddler and so on. I understand the fear of a parent with a small child that might be badly hurt, but it was not nice to observe this human pecking order instinct at full swing in an emergency room. After all, some people there were very ill indeed.

Anyway, finally I was admitted and had my finger nicely stitched. Though I suggested to the physician that he should take a course in embroidery. He wanted to know all about the blanket stitch, but I couldn't show him with one hand. He couldn't understand why I felt no pain, and I didn't really want to explain about the goddess thing; my explanation about the meditation and so on was already what they were all talking about, inbetween giggles. I do think that I gave them all a small moment of joy in that place, though maybe at some cost to my reputation as a sane and responsible member of the community. I was also wearing my "Bitch" t-shirt...

I'm feeling much better now, thank you all well-wishers, and the "S" seems to be working better, too. And I only got six stitches, though they're all on one finger. What does that count in bragging rights?