The Last Leaf

There's a pretty good O. Henry story about a convalescent woman. Granted, she was on her deathbed and I'm not. But I tell you now the honest truth...it's a better writer than I who can make the tale of laying around in pain an interesting one. Because I'm not hanging on by a thread, waiting for a tiny leaf to fall. I'm just watching a whole lot of television, reading a whole lot of books and drinking a whole lot of water.

I'm also kicking myself because there hasn't really been anything to write about for weeks, unless you really care about Mel "I NEVER said I liked the Jews" Gibson or the three-way yawn of a death march for the Tennessee Republican party. And then I go get myself taken offline right when some jokers try to blow up some planes using a method pulled from the yellowing, water-stained pages of a paperback thriller. Exploding liquid in contact cleansing bottles? Who would have thought of that, besides about seventeen thousand pulp novelists qwertying their way to a payday.

The terror thing happened the morning I was going through the pre-op mess, and it followed me from waiting room to waiting room. I'd sit there, with progressively more paperwork in my hand and band-aids on my arms, watching news people try to find a way to make "nothing" sound exciting. Man, does 24-hour News just blow or what? The thing happened. They caught the guys, and it messed up air travel for everyone else. It's a big story, but it still has a beginning, middle and an end. Yet the various stations piped into Summit Same-Day Surgery all tried to make it drag on. A brief note for you fellas and females: invest in a dictionary and/or a thesaurus. Massive crows of people standing around waiting for planes at Heathrow and Atlanta are not "chaos". I don't care what CNN says. "Chaos" is people trampling each other. Chaos is small fires and rioting and yelling and looting. "Crowded" and "Chaos" are not inherently the same thing. Oh, and "amazing" is when dogs rescue babies from burning buildings and third-party candidates actually win elections. It is not "amazing" to see people boarding their flight without carry-on luggage.

Whew. I feel better. My one rant, mostly trapped inside of me for a week. Now I'm free!

I'm going to go back to my "doing nothing" mode of business.

And I'd also like to say a brief thank you to people who will be thanked more in-depth later. But you all who have been so kind and concerned for me have really made this whole ordeal a lot less chaotic than it could have been. And that's amazing to me. Seriously.