there will be blood

It takes a certain kind of stupid to view certain awful things as funny. Awful, stupid things, to be clear. So let me introduce myself to any of you who might not know me well, and who thus might not know where this is going.

My name is Frank, and I am, y’know.

I took a recent Monday off from my job to tackle some personal stuff, a luxury I can at times afford myself, even last minute, by virtue of working largely from home and having gone part time last year.

I’d been on a mad tear lately to finish some longstanding projects in my yard. Among them, breaking out my electric hedge trimmers to whack back our wildly overgrown bushes, the staid boxwoods and flashy loropetalums that flank our house. My goal has been to complete all of this before my wife Lisa and I go on vacation shortly, so it looks more like someone actually, y’know, lives here.

The more pressing issue, though, is that birds have already taken up residence in a couple of our birdhouses, and soon will be nesting all around our yard, including the chipping and song sparrows that favor lower perches. I’m a sucker for songbirds, and I don’t want to risk hacking some feathery someone’s new house down, especially at the outset of breeding season.

So there I was, dragging my left leg around our front yard on account of some recent unknown and painful internal trauma to my knee (Lisa’s diagnoses: You’re old, Frank). I was progressing about as quickly as a creaky gimp might, to knock out as much trimming as possible before the day’s projected late-afternoon rain. The sky itself had been taking an increasingly emphatic position on the subject.

I’d been flaying away at greenery and branches and twigs for a couple of hours when I realized it had grown a good deal darker out, the clouds that much denser. So instead of sensibly bagging it all for the time being, I instead elected to go even faster, tugging off the cumbersome work gloves impeding easier use of the trimmers, even though it made the rattling in my knotty fingers that much more unpleasant.

It’s times like this that I say, usually to myself, since certain spouses don’t find the comment all that funny, that it’s perhaps time to lop off these progressively useless digits and snap on a set of new ones.

Now here’s a little something I know far too well from personal experience, at least right up until I don’t anymore: After a certain point, working ever more quickly becomes markedly less efficient; your spastic ass invariably starts fucking up. Meanwhile, your beat-the-clock-blinded brain typically chooses, against all evidence, to flatly deny this. Because hell, faster’s just faster, right?

Right about when I was taking my first pass at the biggest boxwoods to the left side of our house, the air began cooling noticeably and the wind picked up. Within no time, the first fat raindrop pelted me, decisively announcing the deluge the sky had been going on about.

I instantly lost every bit of my mad focus, and promptly bounced the whirring trimmers onto – well, more into, really – some very accommodating flesh, attempting to cut off the top part of my left ring finger. I recoiled as, y’know, you do, and glancing down, assumed the absolute worst. As you do.

Then, immediately before the inevitable flood of blood came the other flood, an instant, blinding downpour, followed immediately by my phone going off in one of my pockets, some banshee weather-app alarm helpfully announcing thunderstorms in my area.

That’s when the wide crescent moon of flapping finger flesh said fuck it, fuck all y’all, we’re just gonna go on ahead and get to bleeding now.

And for a few seconds, under dark and swirling skies spilling hammering sheets of rain, with me already soaked to the skin both attached and newly not, and the quieted trimmers dangling harmless from my other hand, I began to laugh, and goddammit, really laugh, over the utter absurdity of this stupid scene.

That is, until I remembered I might have done myself permanent damage, something I could not yet clearly discern through the blood and rain. So as the wild rush of pain finally began overtaking my body’s initial shock, I dragged myself inside to trail runoff, and to puddle fat drops of vivid red, all over our pet-worn hardwood floors. I was headed to the cabinet where Lisa keeps the Band-Aids and bandages.

In the process, I had to block our dingbat Jack Russell with my better leg, as the idea of her possibly licking my fresh blood off the floor was just more than I could right then abide. I crammed my spurting finger into my soaked shirt long enough to dab up the bright blotches on the floor with some paper towels.

Soon after, while washing my bleeding hand with Dawn and rubbing alcohol just prior to tightly wrapping my trimmer-flayed finger to stanch the steady flow, it occurred to me I’d left a bunch of rust-ready tools, several of them electrical, scattered around my flooding yard.

I had, by the by, sliced myself in pretty good fashion, just a hair shy of cracking the nail; any further and I would have had much less finger going forward. (I’ve actually taken off a whole thumbnail before with those same trimmers, along with that same fuck-these-bothersome-gloves mentality; unsolicited advice: don’t do this). I still wasn’t clear if I was going to need stitches (thankfully, I didn’t, or at least chose not to, anyway).

So only a true paragon of stupid would make the tools outside the bigger issue of the moment.

Anyway, with bloody medical tape trailing down my aggrieved finger, which I was bluntly pressing into a closed fist to create heightened pressure, I limped back out into the shallow sea of my front lawn to clean up the mess I had made. Of the yard.

The trimmers, still plugged in, were resting in standing water. And I admit to nearly indulging the idiot impulse to see, right then and here, if the damn things still worked, a thought followed instantly by the notion that if I was consequently electrocuted on the spot, I would surely die laughing.