Hillary (should you wish to compare former First Ladies), modestly took the opportunity to quote Eleanor Roosevelt. I thought it would be nice to expand on it.

“Women are like teabags — we don’t know our true strength until we are in hot water.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

“Women are like teabags — after about three times you need a fresh one.” — William Jefferson Clinton

“Women are like teabags — but I prefer teabagging.” — Sen. Larry Craig

47 tornadoes tear through the American heartland. This is God’s wrath at a people who engage in heterosexuality and mindless churchgoing.

1. Hospital gowns caught up in wheelchair brakes.
2. Dietician/zealot replaces V-8 with sodium-free V-8.
3. “Never Trust Anybody Under Eighty” oxygen-tank stickers.
4. Snack trays filled with peanut brittle, beef jerky, and chew toys.
5. “Satanic Verses” study group made mandatory.
6. Judge Judy locked off TVs.

My right foot is cold, which is bothersome because I don’t have a right foot. Phantom chill. I always picture my foot in a dumpster out behind the hospital, jumping up and down, trying to keep warm.

Actually, I don’t know what the hospital did with my leg. I would imagine they incinerated it or dissolved it in acid.

I feel optimistic about this country. Because on January 20th, 2009, we get to cut off the part that’s infected. After that we’ll have to put up with a huge amount of pain — Iraq, foreclosures, foreign debt, add to this list all the ills that come to mind. If something’s fucked up, the Bush administration fucked it up.

Slowly, things will improve for us.

I like to think of those pricks in the dumpster out back behind the World Court in the Hague, jumping up and down to stay warm as they await sentencing.

And I think of incineration, acid.

What will emergency insurance cost in a market-driven economy? We’re about to find out. The California 1st District Court of Appeals made sure of that. They ruled that local governments can no longer add a tax of $2.75 to our phone bills to fund the 911 service. Since this constitutes 85% of emergency funding, heart attack victims are SOL.

Oh, so are mugging victims, shooting victims, stroke victims, hit-and-run victims — well, victims, period.

And that’s what the anti-tax people hate. Victims. All the self-pitying, liberal-coddled victims are what’s fucking things up so bad.

The story was page one news in San Francisco’s free paper, The Examiner, but not in the more respectable Chronicle. Readers of free papers care about such things, I guess. This blog is free, so there you have it.

“Americans buy twenty million packs of dental floss every summer,” says presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. “Picnic foods are notorious for catching in the places between the teeth, and summer days showcase these chunks for many long hours.”

Sales tax on floss averages 6%. At $2 a pack, that’s $2.4 million dollars. Ms. Clinton’s plan is to ask the floss manufacturers to pick up the tab. That’s a far cry from John McCain’s proposal to cut all taxes on penis enlargement products WITH NO PROVISION to compensate state treasuries for the tax losses. Penis enlargement sales in Texas and Arizona alone accounts for more money than dental floss sales in all fifty states.

Both Clinton and McCain realize there is no chance of any of their proposals being enacted, but both feel it is crucial that the television networks have these stories to report. “Given the declining stock market,” said the two candidates in chorus, “investors need our help.”

Fifty alternative fuels under development and potus makes ethanol the crown jewel of his energy program. $ubsidies were calculated and proposed. The oil companies nodded yes and jumped on board. And another round of looting the treasury was begun.

Millions of acres of wheat and other grains have been given over to the production of corn. But it won’t suffice. Time reported the amount of corn necessary for the production of enough ethanol to fill an SUV’s gas tank would feed a grown man for a year.

How can we waste our resources more unproductively?

The Humburner.

Imagine a Hummer outfitted with a thresher/husker apparatus bolted to its front. It would be only slightly more cumbersome than the cowcatchers many Hummer owners install to maximize deaths (to others) in highway accidents. Call it the Arnold Scissorhands.

On the roofrack is the hopper/burner. A belt within an eighteen-inch stovepipe conveys the corn into the hopper, from which it feeds into an old Stroh’s Beer tank where it is fire-brewed at 2000 degrees into high-grade ethanol. A standard issue gas hose, with nozzle, snakes to the filler pipe, into which the fuel constantly flows.

Who would drive the Humburners up and down those endless rows of corn? Blackwater employees, of course. Think about it — we need to find domestic employment for these worthies. What if our Iraq commitment should fall short of the hundred years our contract workers bargained for?

10,000 Humburners, manned in shifts by 40,000 of Blackwater’s finest (we’re asking for 42 hour workweeks, fellas) could harvest, burn, and waste all of America’s corn, as fast as it could be grown.

General Motors could build and outfit these Humburners for less than $3 million apiece. Talk about a stimulus package.

The 10,000 Blackwater employees, earning $175,000 a year (before overtime) are certain to buy flatscreens aplenty at the nearest WalMarts.

Now this next thing is only a dream, but imagine huge barges devoted to the growing of corn and production of ethanol, powering the freighters by which they are towed, and these freighters carry toys, paint, and electronics to our markets from China.

I have to admit, all of the forgoing has been inspired by one of nature’s miracles. The Dung Beetle, which pushes, eats, and is powered by a simple ball of shit.

In March I learned to transport food from the kitchen and into the living room where I watch TV. I put the plate on the floor and nudged it along with the crutch tip — taking special care over the moulding between kitchen and dining room. The crutches could be better designed for this work, though. The rubber tips are okay for grabbing the floor, but slide along the side of the plate too much.

My friend, Russ Johnson, suggests this plate-skidding could be a competitive event — similar to, but probably more exciting than, curling.

But that was one of my easier tricks.

In improv a few weeks ago, the suggestion was “ballet.” From most accounts, I was impressive. Not because I was brilliant, but because I was (for a recent amputee on crutches) amazingly active — galumphing, vaulting, pogoing.

Except for some underarm redness, I didn’t pay for it that time.

Last weekend, my showing off cost me. For the first time, outside of physical therapy, I wore my training prosthetic. It’s a bulky affair — a shoe attached to a chrome piston fitted to a pvc tube encasing my thigh — all of it suspended from a velcro garter belt (it’s not as erotic as it sounds). The training prosthesis, in itself, is not sufficient to walk on. You still need crutches. But allowing your leg to take half your body weight takes a lot of work off your arms.

I wore this thing morning, noon, and night. Naturally, at improv workshop, I was overdoing it. And afterwards, I did too much walking in the neighborhood. I had a ride to the bar where we hung out, but I didn’t bother to ask to be dropped off at the corner. That would’ve been weak. And because my crutches were hurting both my rib cage and the arthritis at the base of my thumbs, I ended up putting way to much weight on the prosthesis. And that caused chafing.

I woke up on Sunday with a red stump. On Monday there was a big cracked blister that, when the doctors examined and expressed it, oozed blood and pus which, as we all knew would be the case, tested positive for MRSA. Drug-resistant staph.

Why should this infection be any different than the previous four?

I look at my crutches at this minute. They rest against the wall — one upright, the other slightly splayed out, like the legs of an arrogant teenager having a smoke. Fuck you, crutches. Two months from now I’ll have you hanging from a hook in the farthest corner of my biggest, dustiest, most cluttered up closet.

In the meantime, finish your cigarette, my wheelchair’s across the room and I got to take a piss.

Two million dusky-skinned types
loll in prison griping their gripes.
Well, your taxes weren’t done.
That makes two million-and-one.
Were you thinking you’re white, Mr. Snipes?

My right leg was swollen twice the size of the left. I was hooked up to a machine called the Wound-Vac — a boombox sized high-tech drainage vacuum. Two rubber tubes were attached to the fasciotomy incisions on my calf. I was sitting in my room talking with Stella, my nurse, when Mitt Romney rushed by in the hallway wearing only a towel and flip-flops. He was followed by semi-nude lackeys.

I knew only that it had to do with the revolutionary council meeting taking place in the sauna. Romney was the new Robespierre. I had to get there. Now.

I stood up and deliberately pissed myself. It made sense. Then I headed after them, pulling out one of the Wound-Vac tubes in the process.

Stella brought me around. I don’t know how, she just did. I’d been getting three oxycodones every four hours as well as patient-controlled morphine infusions from the IV. I simply pushed a button every six minutes.

This was the first of numerous drug-induced hallucinations in my four-and-a-half months here at the VA hospital. Some people say, “wow, cool.” But not me.

The worst one was while I was in the Transitional Care Unit, a few days after my amputation. The set-up of the room was four beds, two on either side of a wide aisle. Only one other man occupied a bed — he was across the aisle.

At a certain point, on one of the vital-sign monitors across the room, I could make out two lines of helvetica type. They were from one of the songs my son had written for his band, Shanghai Surprise. They were being pirated by an English producer. The man in the bed opposite had sold them. I watched as he haggled over incredible sums with a man and a beautiful woman. They argued the value of the U.S. dollar in some wretched regional British dialect. It made me sick.

I don’t know what I said to the man, but apparently it was offensive. I came to, sitting up in bed. The clock said five, which I took to be p.m., although turned out to be a.m. A young female doctor was saying, “do you know where you are, Mr. Wickham.” She looked like the woman in the music-pirating meeting — only not as beautiful.

I won’t subject you to more of these fantasies. Like dreams, they are interesting mostly to the dreamer. I will say only that at least two others featured pissing myself.

I wanted this stuff to end, but I was in terrible pain. That night, family members took turns sitting with me. After that, the hospital provided sitters. I was utterly afraid to go to sleep without one in the room.

I’m an alcoholic — been off drinking for nearly thirty years — but this was the first time I got into painkillers for more than a day or two in a row. I was desperately afraid I’d get hooked. Fortunately, as the pain subsided over the past two months (the amputation was of February 20th), the need for painkillers went away.

I’ve had nothing for a week. And I don’t feel the need.

It always strikes me as corny at AA meetings when the topic of gratitude comes up. But the gratitude is real. I know it. I feel it.

And about that first hallucination. There was no revolutionary council. Or any sauna. And Mitt Romney’s gone.

Whew.

There’s a minuscule open-here tab on Smucker’s snack size peanut butter. At 8:00 this evening, I broke it off attempting to open the cup. Let me put this in context: dinner was served at 5:30, this packet was the last peanut butter snack at the nurse’s station, there was nothing other than green apples left in the snack basket, and a three-pack of Keebler’s grahams is no good without peanut butter. Breakfast is a long way off.

Between 7 and 8 p.m., I watched an A&E show about people who survived certain death. One of the survivors, a young man, spent fourteen days snowed in in his jeep in the wilderness of Washington state. He recalled how he was able to keep his cool as the blizzard hit. Day by day he assessed his situation. Worst of all was the dehydration — on day 9 he was able to leave the Jeep. He crawled through the snow until he heard trickling. It was a rivulet from which he filled his jug. The water allowed him to eat his rice cakes and dried banana chips. A man on a snowmobile found him on day 14.

Back to me. I’m 66, have long white hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Picture me, my head full-frame against black seamless. It’s how A&E does interviews –

ME: At one minute after eight, with the aluminum tab still pinched between my thumbnail and index fingertip, I try to peel away the bible-paper thin aluminum cover with my front teeth. I suffer a small cut in my upper mid-gum.

I think about the guy in the snow. How he never gave up. I begin bending the protrusion on the peanut butter package that the tab is sealed to. I work until 8:03, when I see blood on my finger. I use the last of my sample of astringent mouthwash (I forget the brand — it was green) to stanch the flow. It works.

8:06. After three minutes more of bending the package, I feel it’s going to give. I speed up the process and aggravate my arthritis. I take a short break.

8:08. I begin again. But within twenty seconds I know my hands won’t last. Charlton Heston flashes before my eyes. He gives me a “don’t quit now look.” Why Charlton Heston and not the snowbound guy, I don’t know. The guy would be the natural, but you take what life hands out. Anyhow, Charlton Heston’s dead, so I quit. I toss the Smuckers in the waste bag at the end of my tray table.

8:09. I head up to the floor above. The two floors of the nursing home have the same layout — including a snack basket at the nursing station. I’d been caught by them before. Guys from one floor are not allowed to take snacks from the other floor. Normally, I’d be reluctant to put myself in the humiliating position of snack filching recidivist, but, again, Keebler’s grahams need something, and I don’t have it. If I don’t get it I’m going to think a whole lot less of myself — on top of my snack hunger.

8:11. Off the elevator. I have a BMW of a wheelchair and my theft is quick. The charge nurse doesn’t even look up. I grab two snack-paks of Fig Newtons (packaged, thankfully, in a strangely quiet yellow foil) and I’m back on the elevator and down to the ground floor by –

8:13. A thirty second sprint to my room.

8:14. I toss the Keebler grahams in the waste bag and peel the silent foil back on the longest, goodest two fig bars ever baked for institutional clients.

8:15 A&E is playing something I have no interest in, so I switch to CNN.

8:16. Hilary is talking about how she would never give up. Yeah? Listen, Madame Senator, sometimes shifting your strategy isn’t giving up.

1. Squeeze a tongue-dampened pinky into the quarter inch space between the serrated teeth and the over-large roll — attempt to rotate it until the corner of the end tissue comes free.
2. Insert a soda straw into the dispenser and suck until the corner of the tissue can be grasped.
3. Have small intelligent child with tiny fingers accompany you during bowel movements.
4. Call Georgia-Pacific paper company (designer of this particular double-roll toilet paper dispenser) on your cell phone — ask them to rush a service representative to your bathroom.
5. Using a claw hammer, bust loose and/or pry the attractive plastic and sheet-metal dispenser from its moorings, then kick TP rolls off the facing wall, so one or the other bounces within reach.
6. Wipe your butt with your hospital gown and continue to do so each day until the institution agrees to install simple wooden-dowel TP holders.

That hairstyle worn by the ladies of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints — the pompadour, tacked down in back by double braids on either side — I’ve seen it before. On the horses of Pakistani tribesmen on festival days. (Note to haristylists: if it catches on, call it “The Show Horse.”)

Probably the ladies have their own name for their super-big hair. Nobody in the media has even asked them about it. Maybe if Larry King had an extra half hour with them, he would have gotten to the FLDS grooming commandments.

And would it be indelicate to suggest to these women that since they exist entirely for the delectation of older men, they might wear stockings, garter belts, llipstick, eye shadow, push-up bras, and the like? Could they at least cinch their waists?

Ever since Chloe Sevigny appeared as the pouty wife #2 in the polygamy soap opera, Big Love, it’s been impossiible not to undress her with my eyes. Particularly having seen her in the role of the fellatrix in the otherwise depressing Vincent Gallo movie, The Brown Bunny. Not so the women of the Texas compound. There’s a difference between seductive pout and bitter pout.

But the sins of bad hair and uninspiring frocks pale in comparison to the child abuse which has been taking place at the hands of the men and is tolerated by the women. None of them, mothers all — on any of the interviews I’ve seen — had a believable answer when asked how old they or their daughters were when they were, so to speak, married.

Nor would they speak to the Lost Boys — the adolescent FLDS males who were used as slave labor for the ruling bosses, but were forced out of their living quarters because the old studs didn’t want competition for the fillies.

It would be swell if we could put the blame for all of this on the Mormons, or the FLDS, or cell phone radiation, but it would be wrong. Men, unfettered by civil law, will do what they want. Women and children, under duress, willingly subject themselves to appalling treatment. Most see it as their lot and will defend it to the death. Hit me! Hit my child! Whisper angry threats in my ear!

Is that an outrageous claim? Read the Bible. Or reflect on the lives of women in the middle east. In America, domestic abuse centers are filled with women, not men. Duh, men are stronger. That’s true. But they pull the trigger more often, too. Hardly a test of strength.

Recognizing these horrid facts is no solution. Sweep them aside. Because, as usual, a divided America is the problem.

Once we were a nation of voters and non-voters. Two constitutional amendments solved that. Once we were a nation strictly of white and black. It took the Civil Rights movement to chip away at that. We are beginning to face that we are a nation of gay and straight people. Only gay rights will solve that.

We are also a nation of monogamy and polygamy. It’s time to change that. Polygamy itself causes no problems, but driving it into remote, fortified compounds does.

After all, most of us don’t have to commit polygamy to get a little extra action. Adultery does us just fine.

AMP: Doctor, will I ever play the piano again?
DOC: Of course, you still have all your fingers.
AMP: No, the pedaling.

AMP: Doctor, can I get one of those springy prostheses like I see in the commercials? I want to compete in the Olympics.
DOC: You’re a single amputee. You’ll just go around in circles.
AMP: Yeah, I want to do the shotput.

AMP: My wife wants it missionary only, which hurts my stump. My girlfriend loves doggie-style, but I keep falling over. Now my sex life is blowjobs from hookers in my car.
DOC: I think we can solve this with drugs. With your wife, Percoset’s great for stump pain. As for your girlfriend, we now have some marvelous pharmaceuticals that mediate the inner ear and balance.
AMP: What about the hookers?
DOC: It’s tricky. The VA covers hookers only if you’re in an ambulance. I’ll take a look at the paperwork, but I really think you’ll do better with Medicare Part B.

DOC: What’s the matter? The prosthesis hurt?
AMP: No, it’s fine, doctor. I take long walks every day.
DOC: Great.
AMP: I don’t know. Something else is going on. I’m obsessed. I think my child’s deathly ill, my business is kaput, my wife’s fucking off on me. But I know, objectively, none of that is true.
DOC: You’re suffering from phantom grief, phantom despair, and phantom jealousy.
AMP: Shit.
DOC: Let’s try a little visualization. When you step on a crack, what happens?
AMP: I haven’t noticed.
DOC: Okay. Imagine it breaks your mother’s back. Can you see that?
AMP: Yes.
DOC: And when you step on a line — what?
AMP: it breaks my father’s spine?
DOC: Exactly. It’s a way of remapping the brain. You put the emotional pain outside yourself.
AMP: Won’t it hurt my parents?
DOC: Have they ever come to visit you?
AMP: No.
DOC : There you go. Try some more. Step on the grass.
AMP: Kick my father’s ass?
DOC: I think our work is done.

“This is how I test my faith,” says the president. “Remove not the husk alone, but the corn silk as well. Ephesians 2, 5. That is if you want to eat the corn, if you get old man Ephesus’s meaning.”

Secretary Rice compresses her lips. Makes an effort at smiling, but drops it altogether as the President shifts to black english –

“I unnerstans you got you a twin sister who kin describe da bible inna new yoke minnit. Condoqueeg or somenthin?”

“Condoqueesha,” she corrects in a chirp. Can’t not forgive the President’s vulgar mimicry — his winking crinkliness is, as usual, just too winning.

“Git ‘er on the horn.”

“Oh, gee, all right.”

“You don’t want to hook up with your older and wiser sister? I hear she hit the bedspread a whole ten minutes before you did.”

Condi punches Condoqueesha’s number. The President hoists himself off the bed with an elbow, reaches over the red satiny form of Condi, and hits the speakerphone button.

A few seconds of Vivaldi on the accordion, then, “This is Queesh. Say what you weesh.” Click. Pop. More classical acccordion and out.

“Oh, I like that,” the president says. “Got to use that one. At the ranch,” he hastens to add, “but not on this here Lincoln bedroom machine.”

He bellows over Condi: “Hey there, Queesh, this is POTUS. If you don’t get acragroms, that’s –”

Queesh picks up: “President of the United States. About time Condi put us in di-reck contact. How that girl doin’?”

Condi shakes her head urgently, vigorously no.

“Hain’t seen her in a week.” He winks at the shrinking body next to him, “Think she’s in Talibanstan, heh heh.”

“How can I be of help, Mr. President?”

“Been having a debate with this well-meaning aide, and Condi, she tells me how you got the Bible down cold — how to interpret it, and like that. So I got this theory: to me, to torture is to test my faith.”

Such an absolute claim, but Condoqueesha senses the doubt in his silence. She figures the President wants a yassuh/nossuh followed by chapter and verse. But that’s a no go… “You gonna have to splain that some more Mr. POTUS.”

“Ephesians 2, 5. You know, how you husk the corn but you got to remove the silk before you eat it. Gonna make a metaphor here, you got to flay the man before you get to what’s inside.”

“Some aide bullshittin’ you. Lemme bring up Ephesians — damn this G4 Mac is gettin’ slow… here we go — ‘2,5. Even when we were dead in trespasses, we were made alive together with Christ.’ Then, in parens: by grace you have been saved. Don’t know why King James would use a parenthetical, but maybe that’s why he’s a King and you and me ain’t.’”

Presidential gloom. “Yeah, maybe.” Then the cloud lifts. “You think you could make some kind of biblical case for torture outta that thing you just read me?”

“Sure I could.”

Confidence like that, POTUS admires to all hell. “Well, you’re on board, lady.”

“Fitty K sound doable, Mr. President?”

His face is a cartoon of confusion. From deep in her pillow, Condi mouths the words “fifty thousand.”

Relief. “I’ll call a Ranger. We can swing it. Get to work Miss…”

“It’s Rice. Just like your Secretary.”

Condi waits, knowing, of course, her older sister will never utter the words “of State.”

The President sits up straight and massages his package.

“Thanks, Condoqueesha. Just send me your invoice.” He cuts the call. Then to Condoleezza, “That ‘corn silk’ bullshit pisses me off.”

“I told you to stop taking Reverend Haggard’s calls.”

He clicks off the bed light. “I should listen to you more, Condi.” The President’s voice is sweet. So sweet she tugs the satiny red teddy right up to her armpits.

(For the Condoqueesha calls preceeding this, click here, here, here, and here).

Strident, dissonant chords played by a string quartet. They grow in intensity and the tempo increases.

A twenty year-old boy enters the practice room. He beholds the signs of a mighty struggle — sheet music, rosin, broken cellos, violas, and violins litter the floor.

String quartet music stops abruptly.

His gaze falls beneath the 1934 Welte-Mignon studio grand piano. There lies his sweetheart, strangled by the hairs of her violin bow.

Does he rush to her, kneel, and take her head in his hands? Does he rair back and curse the gods through the skylight?. Does he rend his clothes? Does he even break down in tears? No, he rushes into the hallway and vomits.

The vomit take — or Vomit Take, as I call it — is to movie cliche as tooth loss is to meth. (My use of an unlikely and probably inept simile underlines my hatred of cliches).

My own research on vomit inducers reveals these, in descending order: overdrinking, flu, and food poisoning. It goes no deeper.

I knew a guy named Tony who died skydiving in Florida. It was a night jump. He’s drunk and he just doesn’t pull. The pins are still in place in his backpack. A likely suicide.

Tony’s body isn’t discovered until next morning. The news gets around the drop zone early and a bunch of us make the trek trhough low dry brush to check out the scene. Not a soul vomits. Not even the girls. This is forty years ago and Hollywood obviously hasn’t produced enough Vomit Takes to shape our behavior.

The morgue people arrive and take the body away. The depression becomes know as Tony’s Hole. A darkly humorous response to death. Not so nice, but realer than any upchuck.

I wouldn’t be so fired up about this issue except that early in the wonderful book, “Water for Elephants”, the hero, Jacob, as a young man, has to identify his parents who die when their car is forced off a bridge.

The undertaker pulls the sheet away and Jacob vomits.

Okay, now I have to reevaluate. Sara Gruen is a terrific writer. If she thinks a 23 year-old boy is going to turn away and vomit into a tin kidney dish, she’s probably got a great reason.

But dammit, again on page 320, near the otherwise satisfying ending, Jacob witnesses the circus roustabouts as they unroll a tarp. The body of the universally hated circus owner flops into view. He’s been garroted with his whip. Why do they not jump for joy? Because their delicate guts can’t take it. Not just one, but many of these dirt and beast-hardened workers blow lunch.

It didn’t really mar the book, but it’’s a convention, like the 555 phone numbers in movies, that can peel back a brilliantly crafted reality and show you the writer or director behind it.

Possibly my real-life research has been haphazard, irresponsible, and just plain stupid. If you have a different take on the vomit take, please let me know. Spare nothing.

Make me feel bad enough to spew.

The three pieces appearing above were written over the past week on a borrowed Mac laptop in my room at the VA nursing home. (Thank you Rick Kerr for the loan).

My room, at Land’s End in San Francisco, is high above Ocean Beach, looking south. It has a view that perhaps could be matched at an $800 a night Pebble Beach hotel. So if any of the writing in this batch (April 12th) strikes you as inspired, some credit goes to the sand, the waves, the brave guys and girls kiting along the beach, and the warm (yes, it’s hard to believe, but warm) breeze riffling through my thinning white hair.

My physical progress: I am getting my training prosthetic this coming week. I was recently hospitalized for a week with yet another of the drug-resistant staph infections that have visited me since I came into the hospital on December 14th, 2007. Yes, with the exception of a few days in early February, I have been in the hospital for four months. The good news is that for the first time in all these months, I have no open wounds on my leg. They have all healed. If a new infection doesn’t well up from deep within my stump in a couple weeks, I’m probably home free.

Right now, I’m home for a few hours. I probably wouldn’t have taken a day pass today except I felt it was time to get something up on the blog again. I haven’t been able to access the putative wireless network at the VA. Not yet anyway. So I bummed a ride home just to do this.

And I did it because I’m a blogger, dammit. I owe it to the hundred million other bloggers in the world to carry my share of the load.

So much is written about phantom pain. Yes, it is annoying, but there is a bright side to being an amputee.

1. Sock inventory is doubled.
2. Athlete’s foot reduced by 50%.
3. Nobody asks you to run six miles for emphysema.
4. Fewer toenail parings on kitchen linoleum.
5. “Busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest” no longer a joke, but a truth to be pondered.
6. Lifelong question What is phantom pain like? is answered.

My sincerest thanks to all who commented under the last posting. Sorry these blog pieces are so few and far between. I am on a weekend pass from the hospital and must be back Sunday night. So maybe one more.

Please continue to post under this or any of the subsequent postings — they will all be taken seriously and forwarded to the proper agencies.

And to Fred’s Titanium Knee, I will discover your true identity. I will, I swear I will.