No Composite, No Return

I took some time away recently to get some things in order. Sometimes, even the most enjoyable things in life, such as trimming ingrown toenails, explosive diarrhea, and competitive back-zit popping lose all of their organic romance. You have to step away, toss out the old soy sauce packets in the fridge from the local Chinese delivery shop, finally stack those nickels on the dresser and finally put the toilet paper roll on the spool.

The truth is, I had to reload. Sure, there are always things to write about if you're interested in writing about whether to put the salt shaker to the left of the pepper shaker, how best to do battle with a large spider while showering, or how I lost over 11,000 Roll-Over minutes when I changed my wireless phone plan. That's right, 11,000 frigging minutes! Actually, doing battle with the spider would have made a fun story.

See, our lives are composites of all we see, smell, think, blah, blah, blah and how we burn that fuel towards making our psychic engines sputter along. I simply had nothing in the tank. Oh, I could have thrown some sub-standard bone to my reading audience (both of you), but that would have been as welcome as a beer-fart during an afternoon tea at a Red Hat Society meeting. It's not that there is a dearth of topics to write about. Hell, I could write an ordinary story of walking across a river of lava on the charred corpses of festival mimes and probably even make THAT funny. That's part of the triumvirate of comedy jello: Mime jokes, the outrageous Southern preacher voice, and complaining about the opposite sex. There's always room in one's routine for any and all of those.

I've been having to give blood a lot lately. Apparently, it's a delicacy in some parts of Eastern Europe (I'm looking at you, Transylvania). I've had roughly 10 bath tubs full of blood drawn from me in the past month with needles about as thick as Arby's straws. Apparently, "You might feel a little pinch" is Transylvanian for "You didn't by chance have any garlic recently?" as a smooth-domed, walrus-mustachioed, barrel-chested man in a leopard-skin singlet crashes down on my arm with a 500-lb. mallet so hard that he leaves his feet upon the descent. I have so many holes in my arm that it looks like I had a whole army of drafting compasses River Dancing on my forearms.

First of all, walking into one of those labs holds about as much joy and whimsy as seeing your grandfather naked in the shower - with your grandmother. You walk in with what amounts to other pathetic bastards like yourself, all coughing, sniffling, and playing the "I wonder what disease SHE has" game amongst themselves. The thoroughly uninterested desk clerk hurls the sign-in clipboard at me and tells me to sign in while asking if I had been there before. I say, "Lady, I've been here longer than you have over the past month, don't you recognize me?" She probably doesn't because when I walk into the lab, I'm all pink and rosy and when I leave I look like a cigarette-ash sculpture of Keith Richards.

You might be wondering, "What's the deal with all these tests? Are you dying?" Of course I am. We all are, but, not for a while. To make a long story short, the blood work has detected what was wrong and I'm hunky-dory now. However, when you are being shuttled between this doctor and that lab and this specialist and that pharmacist, you kind of just want to stay home, turn on the National Geographic channel and watch animals kill each other rather than sit perpendicular and slap humorous thoughts out of my head and onto my computer. When something keeps you so focused that you practically ignore all that swirls around you, you lose your composite self and become a singular, iconic slab of meat. Now that I've been able to move my DEFCON to a safer level, I am ready to return to the multi-level idiocy for which I am loved and loathed.

So, put on your Tony Orlando and Dawn records, take down my ribbon, and give me a kiss, a hug, a smile, a handshake, high-five, ceremonial bow, salute, pinch, punch, slap, kick, or set me on fire...

I'm home again.