Normal Coffee at the Head Wound Café
ISBN 13: 978-1-63396-005-3
ISBN 10: 1-63396-005-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014946135
Waking up in bright lights is always very startling to me. Waking up in bright lights with a bunch of tubes coming out of every orifice of my body is downright disconcerting. “Coming to” is the oddest of all experiences which I seem to have on a more or less frequent basis. It appears as though there is some genetic map that runs in my family, which makes our heads attractors for blunt objects of various sizes and shapes. The small objects come to us, while it seems we’re drawn to the larger ones like some sort of acquired aphasia magnet. The other thing to which we seem to be genetically predisposed is falling. When you think of it, it is that attraction thing all over again.
It seems my ancestors had basically two occupations: circus performers and village idiots. Given the gene for falling and being hit in the head with things, a high wire performer or ropewalker and the ground were destined to meet. After hitting the ground at 32 feet per second, midlife career changes to “village idiot” were perfunctory. My ancestors on my grandfather’s side were gypsies, circus performers and village idiots by trade. (See above.) Family legend has it that they traveled around most of Hungary, falling and saying stupid things until my grandfather, who ostensibly didn’t relish the job prospects in his homeland, migrated to Detroit, MI to work at the Dodge motor works plant. (Dodge-haaaaaaa). Two weeks after he arrived to begin working as a frame riveter he was hit in the head with a pan of red hot rivets. Shortly after, he moved and took a position as the village idiot of a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania. It is really there, in the small town of Ridgewayvilleburg that my story actually begins, I think. However, right now it seems as though the bedpan is being oddly attracted to my ass… And I am still very sleepy. Tomorrow is another day, and providing that there is not sufficient enough attraction between my head and some god-awful heavy piece of hospital diagnostic imaging equipment device, I will write more.
Today is a better day. It would really be a “good day”, all things considered, if it weren’t for the constant thumping in my head. It has often struck me that there are these little BUILDING MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR guys in my head that go to work attempting to put things back into some sense of order after one of my episodes.
Every time I see one of those bumper stickers that says, “Today is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life”, I almost laugh out loud…. They have no idea how true that is for folks like me.
I really think that some undertaker should use that slogan as well… I think that it really adds a nice semantic touch to the whole death thing. The “Rest” of my life…. Oh neat. The coffins are all lined with Serta Sleeper® mattresses.
You may think it odd that I haven’t as of yet introduced myself. It really isn’t all that odd due to the fact that when I started writing this my name was one of the many things that escaped me.
My given name is DePaul Lewitz… Well, I’m pretty sure it is because that’s what the name plate above the bed says. I don’t really rely on those mnemonic devices anymore because since, after being smacked with a flying beer bottle at a Who concert, I woke up in a hospital somewhere in Boston (which later was a shock in itself, because the concert was in Pittsburgh, PA) and for days I kept insisting that my name was “Ring for Assistance” because that’s what the sign above the bed said. In retrospect, it seems that a beer bottle wallop to the occipital region will cause your eyes to do some funny things, and that, coupled with diffuse trauma from being dropped off the gurney (this I found out later as well), will pretty much give you a real fuzzy view of things. In any event, I didn’t associate the sign with the nurses’ bell call.
