Took a tumble earlier today.

Not a particularly bad one, but not a gentle bouncing on my king sized bed either.

I was coming out of the bathroom with my full water glass in my hand when I stumbled over my smaller wastepaper basket and fell to my knees.

My knees are fine, thank God. Knock on wood. I think the only lasting effect on them is a tiny bit of mild carpet burn. Big whoop. I can handle that.

But imagine my shock when, around ten minutes after the incident, I discovered I was bleeding, and had bled a fair bit already.

There was a line of red streaming down the outer side of my left leg and at first I could not figure out where the hell it was coming from.

Bleeding is upsetting enough but bleeding from apparently nowhere is appalling.

Luckily, I am fairly good at keeping my head in emergencies such as these. So I set to mopping up the blood with Kleenex, and when it became clear that this was not getting the job done, I went to the bathroom and wetted a towel.

That worked. Once I had cleaned the area up some, I could at least see where the blood was coming from, but not from what.

The where is this spot three inches or so above the outside edge of my left knee, but I still have no idea what the heck happened because I have no idea how falling to my knees could create a wound above them.

I have a little acne in that area. Maybe a zit popped? I have no idea.

It’s stopped bleeding now and there’s a nasty looking gash there. Again, I have no idea how that got there.

But somehow the fall also shattered one side of my larger wastepaper basket, and so that might be a clue.

I could have gotten gashed by a sharp of plastic from the wastepaper basket. That would explain it, I guess.

I am looking forward to getting a shower soon, though I kind of messed that up too.

I ordered this thing called a cast cover that can protect the bandages on my feet from the water when I take a shower.

And for some reason, I assumed they would come in pairs. But I am pretty sure they do not. I am pretty sure when I finally open the package, there’s only going to be one of those things in there and I will have to pick which foot to protect.

The left one. It will be the left one. It’s the one with the much more serious wound that requires much more complicated bandaging because it’s right on the heel.

Terrible place for a wound. I would pretty much have to stay off my feet for like a month for it to have any chance of healing because every step I take rips it open again.

Not worth it.

Still, I feel kinda dumb about the cast cover issue. Of course they’re not sold in pairs. How often do people have two casts to cover?

Oh well. I am still adjusting to the realization that I am not a sensible person. I am always going to have to learn things the hard way, by making mistakes. There is zero chance that I can ever be so prudent and cautious that I stop screwing up.

So I might as well get used to an error prone existence. The best that I can hope for is to learn from my mistakes and not make the same ones again.

And my errors tend to come from either my exuberance or my tendency to be lost in my own thoughts, and both of those have their strong points.

So whatever. I’m a weirdo and a klutz and a spaz.

I guess I can live with that.

More after the break.

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The world inside my head

It’s too big.

But what can I say? It’s where I live, for better and for definitely worse.

That’s another layer of the pervasive, suffocating cloak of fear I live under. When I was being raped I fled into my mind to escape and ever since then I have only emerged into the real world the absolute minimum amount I could get away with.

In fact, if it wasn’t for my massive need for mental stimulation, I might well have slipped all the way into catatonia.

On that level, at least, all my media consumption of TV, video games, and books might have actually saved me by giving me a reason to stay in the real world.

It makes sense, then, that one of my deepest and most terrible fears is that I will lose that last slender connection to reality and fall into my mind forever.

I have no lucid dreamer delusions that the world inside my head would be a happy place where I can do whatever I want and make it into whatever I want it to be.

To me, not only would that means catatonia, it would mean my demons would finally have me all to themselves and they would eat me alive.

So logically, I should be moving in the opposite direction by doing what I can to make myself more grounded in the world outside my head, the world of the senses, the world of objective reality.

But then there’s that fear. I still need to soothe that savage beast within me that has been running and screaming and hiding since that terrible day when I was four and being raped, the part of me that has been permanently freaked out ever since then, the part of me that I walled off from the rest of my mind so I could function but that didn’t exactly make it any saner.

It’s not been asleep. It’s been going crazy trying to be heard.

Maybe I need to learn to listen, even though I don’t want to.

Time to let the crazy relative we keep in the basement out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.