AUGUST 17, 2007
DO YOU HAVE ANY WEAPONS ON YOU?

"Do you have any weapons on you, any needles, anything that's going to stick me?" This is one of the first things I say to the new people in my life. Nice. It's the price of doing business. Always alert. Always on. It's the price I pay to stay alive.

I got very lucky recently. I had a momentary lapse of 'Frostiness' and the Piper showed up with his hand out. I don't want to go into too much detail here. I never know who's reading this nonsense and I don't want to give away any weak spots in the armor. Suffice it to say payment was made in the form of a rather painful injury to my upper left torso. It only hurts when I breathe. And the woman I married wonders why I'm so intense.

"Why can't you just relax? Why do you always have to be on guard? Why can't you just have a banana daiquiri and zone out?" Why? I'll tell you why, because I've learned the hard way that the when I zone out bad things happen. People get hurt; I get hurt, or worse. Plus, there's the fact that I hate bananas.

Ten years the woman has known me and never once seen me consume a banana or banana-based product. Yet twice a week she has to push a banana daiquiri on me and whine at me to 'zone out'. What does she think I am, some mid-to-upper level corporate executive who gets to run off to a bimonthly shipping convention in San Diego and get hammered with all the other Men's Wearhouse suited drones? Please.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that I wouldn't love to empty my Ramada Inn's Jr. Suite mini bar, wrap myself in a cocoon of Jim Beam and sleep through all meaningless morning seminars. But I prefer to work for a living.

The Doc's say I'm on the mend and should be back to fighting form in no time. Typing with one hand's a bit of a bitch. And I've had to completely change my shooting form to a side draw modified cowboy. But it's all fine. Switching things up from time to time keeps you sharp. I just don't know how I'll ever recover from riding shotgun for O'Hara.