Blogagaard As Gimp

Softball season started last Monday night and I was all a-twitter to start playing, like an eager puppy with a severed arm in his mouth. This optimistic feeling lasted until approximately the third inning, when I misplayed a wicked line drive and took it off my knee. The softball, which is totally not soft at all, connected with my knee with an audible THUMP that drew gasps of horror from players on both teams and dropped me like a sack of flour tipped off a kitchen counter. As the pain engulfed me, filling me with adrenaline, I saw a flash of medical bills flying before my eyes and prayed nothing was shattered-I got up from the ground in due course and played out the rest of the game, sitting in a chair between innings and drinking my face off while rubbing my rapidly swelling knee with cooler ice.

But I could feel the Wound growing. The Wound swelling, swelling and swelling like a 2nd kneecap grown up beside my first. After the game I was awarded the Game Beer for my valor (or at least getting in the way of the ball) and I even went to the bar afterward, already limping badly. At the bar, the waitress was nice enough to get me a sack of ice in a plastic bag and that felt like heaven, fucking heaven, until the bag started leaking water all over my pants and suddenly I was a drunken, gimpy dude in a softball T-shirt jersey with a wet crotch.

Not my sexiest moment.

Part Two!

I took me swollen knee home with me that night and iced it again and again and drank water, praying I would live out the night, and I slept with my leg elevated on a pillow. Your body is always giving off some heat, but Lordy I could feel double or triple the heat coming off my swollen knee and it was as if a new visitor had come to live in my apartment. Me, Frenchie, and and my hot gimpy knee! The day after our game would be the hardest-a gimpy Blogagaard trying to shower, trying to put his pants on, trying to get in and out of his car, trying to gimp across campus to get to work. It was as if I'd aged forty years all in one night and all for the sake, let us recall, of a 50 min beer league softball game.

Over the next few days, I made friends with my swollen knee (we've started watching Madmen together, which I've delayed seeing until a crisis such as this) and now, as the Wound recedes slowly into a crater-like bruise, I feel I might even miss it a little when it's gone. It is a badge well understood by third basemen everywhere and has been a constant reminder that my life is not all safe, not all dull.