Fire in the Hole! Some Light Posting The Rest of the Week

My adult son (43!) is a somewhat unwilling guest of the burn center at Harborview Hospital in Seattle since Friday, the result of a an extremely bad and deep burn he received on his left butt cheek.They had to get a skin graft from his thigh and move it around onto his butt, where it's sewn on like a pocket. I told them to leave the top open and he can actually use is as a pocket. But guess what? Dermatologists really don't have much of a sense of practical humor. They're almost as bad as Neurologists, who are not a funny lot at all. Last year when I had my stroke, and I had a fully fleshed-out slurry of stoke-boy jokes, all of them funny (to me!), some that I'd even worked on for several minutes, and still got nothing. It was like telling a joke at a nursing home. Don't do it, they can't hear you (they have earls lie wet canvas) and you'll fall flat while some administration type will start creepily checking at you with rolling $ Dollar Signs in their eyes: A new victim!

Back to the story -- I told him that it's usually the other way around and they take skin off your butt to transplant elsewhere. That's why I refused the transplant route when I got my thumb cut off -- I was a state employee and didn't need a thumb that smelled like ass... But says he's a Farnsworth, and we always do stuff backwards. He's going to tell his future female companions that he got bit by a land shark. Hey, might work. Better that than what the truth will ultimately turn out to be.

So anyway, he got a bad burn on his butt cheek (he's been kind of duplicitous about the real reason he got it -- he works occasionally as a hot-tar roofer, but I don't think that was the cause of it -- I discussed it with my lunch posse last week and so I passed on to him the group consensus that the next time he feels like flaming a fart, be sure to shave the hair off his ass first since it acts like kindling) that had to be patched with replacement skin, so now I have to worry about him along with the other things I'm doing. Why parents get gray...

So he'll be in there a few days more, chasing nurses like Chico Marks and playing bedpan boogie on his fellow roommates' heads. Please send him some good thoughts his way, and I'll post when and if I can. I do want to do one Saturday night after we get home from the Democratic Party Fundraising Kennedy Dinner, if only so I can crow "Told ya so!" to the disappointed Armageddonists who are still around. "Gee Reverend Dickie, you mean I can't have your Mercedes? That's not what you told Little Lancie. You said he could have it because he was an altar boy. That's not fair. Reverend Dickie? ...Reverend Dickie??!!" Jeez, where did he go?"

--The F Man