This is new(ish).

You spend a long enough time filling yourself with pain killing drugs, and eventually, well, the pain is, like, killed.

I just got back from a week of travel. Seattle to San Francisco, San Francisco to Seattle, Seattle to Portland, Portland to Seattle, Seattle back to San Francisco, and then, finally, San Francisco back to Seattle. Seven days for all that.

It was nice to come home. I had a great time while out, but after having worked as an MSDN Events presenter, I learned to appreciate getting to sleep in my own bed, even though it kind of sucks, nobody comes in around noon to clean up after me, and I don't have a proper sheet/comforter setup. When it comes to bedding, I'm a savage.

For some reason, one of the very first things I did upon arriving at home was to slam my left pinkie toe into the metal frame of my awesome recumbent stationary bicycle. It hurt. It really fucking hurt.

I hopped around the room for a few minutes, choosing not to look at what was surely the bloody stump left over from what my toe used to be. I tried to prepare myself emotionally and psychologically for a future without a left pinkie toe. I consoled myself by reminding myself that the pinkie toe serves absolutely no purpose in modern human life, and that I could live without it. I might even chop the other one off so I could have matching stumps. This kind of worked to calm me down, but it did nothing for the pain.

In the old days, I probably wouldn't even have felt it. While things were at their worst, it wasn't uncommon for me to do something seriously stupid, and possibly life threatening, without even noticing. Just a few months back, I was engaging in my usual drug activities, and I must have gone overboard a bit because I passed out. Next thing I knew, several hours had passed. I was still in the same position I had been in when I passed out, and that's a bad, bad thing, as it turns out my right leg had been pressed up against a space heater that was turned on "High."

When I moved my leg away from the heater, a big patch of skin was, I kid you not, bubbled up, leaking some kind of clear fluid, bleeding, and altogether just plain gross. I have a scar now to remind me of what an ass I can be. It's not the only one, either. It seems that I excel at being an ass when working with the right tools. If I'm ever hanging out with you (hey - it could happen) and you want to see the scar, just ask. I'll happily put it on display. I'm guessing it'd be a little more effective than the stupid "This is your brain on drugs" campaign that emerged two decades ago. I was just a young girl at the time, and I couldn't figure out why these commercials about fried eggs kept coming on, accompanied by a sad - melancholy, even - narrative. What it taught me was that my brain was, apparently, a high cholesterol breakfast, and that I should feel guilty about it. While that's dangerous for a whole different set of reasons, the campaign just didn't speak to the eight year old in me.

Now that I'm all grown up (physically if not mentally), I finally understand what it was all about since I pretty much fried my leg on that stupid heater (humans always want someone to blame - when really, really desperate, they'll even place responsibility for an error on an inanimate object - like a heater, for instance).

Tonight, for the first time in ages, I felt real pain. I don't know what I did to the toe, but the nail is mangled, the toe is swollen, and every time it bumps up against, oh, a stray molecule of nitrogen (it makes up 78% of the Earth's atmosphere - CLIP 'N SAVE NEOPOLEON FUN FACT), I want to put my fist through the wall. Unfortunately, now that I own the wall, I can't indulge myself. Back when I was a renter, it was a totally different story. I could punch as many holes in the wall as I wanted, and nobody complained except for the building manager.

This is a big step for me. What was interesting about the experience was that my mind immediately brought morphine to the front of my thoughts. I had to beat it away, kind of like the way Leonardo DiCaprio had to beat people away so he wouldn't drown at the end of that one really sad documentary about that one boat that sank because, just as anyone else would have done, the captain, bored with just putting along through the ocean, aimed the thing directly at a mountain of ice that tore his ship into pieces and killed, like, almost everybody who was onboard except for the brave camera people who kept filming in the face of death and only managed to make it back home by building a raft out of corpses that they sailed to Hawaii or something. I don't know. I stopped watching because I really wanted to go to Safeway to get a corndog.

Without the king of all painkillers, I had to improvise. You might not know this, but there's a medication on the market called "aspirin," and it makes things hurt less. There's another called "Tylenol," and you can take the two together for increased analgesic effect. They don't take away all your worries, but they also don't turn you into a simulacrum of Golem, a strange lizard man played by an aging Kermit the Frog in this movie about hairy dope-smoking midgets with superpowers (YEAH - RIGHT).

Gonna go to bed now. If you didn't figure it out for yourself, I missed getting to write this week. I had more stuff planned, but I didn't have the time.

And again, not to sound all sappy or whatever, the support you've given me has been... yeah. I didn't expect it. Nor did I expect the number of emails, texts, or phone calls I got. People I hadn't heard from in months or years took a few minutes each to send me a note of encouragement.

I'm still amazed at how few of you were assholes about this. I was starting to believe that most people just wanted to make most other people feel like crap, but you're rapidly changing the way I feel about that.

OK. Sappy moment over.

Piss off :)