6 Things You Didn't Know About Vaginas

The corners of the rooms were in all the right places.

It was perfect, and perfect in more than just a sort of feng shui kind of way. It was home from the very first moment we laid eyes on it, which just so happens to have been ten years ago this very day.

Home. Like the place came with our memories already inside it. A familiar scent we’d never smelled before.

The perfect number of rooms. The correct amount of closet space. Close proximity to all the right schools. The proper distance from Dana’s work. And with newly installed energy-efficient appliances, to boot.

There was only one problem.

The price.

It was too low.

Enemies List

Omaha. January. Under a gray gauze winter sky. Antony Anders steps out of a gas station near 42^nd and Harrison.

He is wearing blue jeans, leather boots, a hooded sweat shirt much too thin for the weather, and a Catcher in the Rye winter hat – the kind with those ear flaps, you know? In his left hand is a 12-pack of Coors. In his right hand is a plastic grocery bag with some potato chips, a roll of paper towels, and a frozen burrito inside.

He walks through the slush of the parking lot. Unlocks the door of a black 1991 Ford Ranger. Tosses in the things he bought and then climbs in after them.

He gets the truck started on his fourth try.

This Way to the Anders Museum!

Twenty years have passed since the glory days of the Anders Museum.

Back then, it was really a labor of love for the three of us: me, my brother, and some kid named Eric who lived down the street. Anders wasn’t actually Eric’s last name, but he’d given up his museum naming rights in exchange for the official title of “Lead Snake Wrangler,”  which was an irresistibly impressive title to a nine-year old.

And over the door of my parents’ garage, we put up a sign that read, “Museo de Anders,” which we thought was Latin but turned out to be Spanish. We charged the neighbors four bits to come inside.

Now, what that four bits bought you was a chance to have a peek at some of the coolest animals native to the Texas Gulf coast region.  We had snakes! We had toads! We had turtles of every kind: big red ear sliders and little red ear sliders, alligator snapping turtles, three-toed box turtles, and soft shells. You could also see a lizard, some garden spiders, Eric’s pet gerbil, and the bones of a cat we’d accidentally dug up in our back yard.

A Story of Faith

She was always a believer.

A believer in God, I mean. And not just in God as Mystery, or in God as a shared dream or a cosmic game of hide-and-seek with every one of us as its players. Not God as some non-spatial, non-linear connectivity wherein time is curved light or light is frozen time.

No, Dana was always a believer in THE God. THE very left-brained, very male God of Western history. The God who put everything-but-everything that anyone ever needed to know or ever could know about himself down inside the snug confines of a single book. The God who worried a great deal over specific things like where humans stuck their bits and pieces and how many cubits wide a temple ought to be.

Clear-cut. Simple. Well-defined.

I Left Her for a Concrete Garden Gnome

Dogs or a gnat. Three dimes, Tuesday, or the space where an old lamppost used to stand. Your Uncle Charlie’s left pinky finger. Dust motes or the long, raspy guitar solo from the studio version of “Free Bird.” Or myoclonic jerks. Or the declining entertainment value of the television program, “Homeland.”  

Tell me: Are our loves less worthy than your own? Less deserving of respect somehow? Can you look me in the eyes and say they’re any less central to our being?

Less sacred?

He caught my eye from the other side of the yard of a neighbor of mine. It could have been the hat. It could have been the ants that ran across the surface of his poorly-painted beard. We made love under the full harvest moon and by morning, I knew this was what I’d been born for.

It was who I was. It is who I am. I was born this way, don’t you see?

Acid Gravy

“And is the guvment payin’ for that?”

“Now, jus’ who you figger is payin’ for THAT, I wonder?”

“I s’pose we all know where the money for THAT is comin’ from…”

Talking with my Grams, you know exactly where the conversation is headed. It’s headed to the same place where it’s always been headed. The path it has taken every last time it has taken a path.

I give Doctor Belloq the heads-up before the two of us visit my Grams’ place for dinner.

I say to her, “My Grams is like ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,’ only instead of Kevin Bacon, it’s Grams’ money paid out in taxes, and instead of six degrees of separation, it’s probably only one or two.”

Why, most anything you can name in this big wide world, it’s the guvment taking Grams’ money in taxes that done paid for it to be. That woman walking down the street blabbing on a cell phone. The renovations done to the house around the way. Those new Nike sneakers the neighbor kid’s wearing. And everybody down at the grocery store and every soul down at the used car lot and – would you believe it? – even my very own brother’s recent wedding.

“Miss Belloq,”  my Grams says confidentially, “you know our Antony married that Negress.”

“That Negress…”  Doctor Belloq echoes without comment.

“Oh!” Grams pokes dramatically at her orange bouffant, hairsprayed up into the exact same tangle into which it’s been hairsprayed up the entire twenty-eight years I have known her, and – unless photographs lie – some time before that as well. “That likely idn’t the… politically correct term nowadays, is it?”

“I always say ‘Negratrix’,” Doctor Belloq bellows in her finest Foghorn Leghorn imitation, so it comes out sounding like, “Aaaaaah aaaaalways sayeee…”

At this, I come damn near to spitting my iced mint julip sweet tea all over my platter of chicken fried chicken.  But soon enough, we have departed the topic of my (Hispanic) ex’s race and gotten right back onto the topic of the guvment’s continued use and misuse of my Grams’ hard-earned retirement money.

Familiar territory at last! For you see, the feds are stealing my Grams’ Social Security checks  – robbing sweet little ole Grams at gunpoint, no less! – each and every month of her life to purchase 7-11 stores for the Asians, to build mosques for the Mohammedans, to send canines up into orbit.

Dogs… in… outer… space!

“Now, jus’ who you figger is payin’ for THAT, I wonder?”

And then the there’s free flavored prophylactics for the wetbacks, and the guvmint whisky for the alcoholics, and the bathhouses like palaces for the queers (“…and when I say ‘queers,’ I am speaking of them disgusting fairies, not you two fine ladies, you understand…”).

Doctor Belloq, never one to mince words or to pull her punches for long, eventually breaks an eternal, unspoken family rule and questions my Grams about all that tax money the guvment’s been so busy stealing. “So Grams,”  Doctor Belloq says, “what would you do with that money if they didn’t steal it from you?”

My Grams freezes mid-swallow, mashed potatoes halfway down her throat. Just stops right where she is. “Pardon me?”

“All that money you’ve been robbed of all these years,”  Doctor Belloq says. “C’mon. Tell us. What would you have spent it on?”

For that single frozen moment in time, I consider faking a stroke.

My Grams – bless her heart, as they say – she gazes off at one of her awful paintings of horses galloping into sunsets and she says something that sounds an awful lot like, “Well, I s’pose I’d use the money to work on my time machine.”

That is what it sounds like she says. But those words would not make any sense coming from my Grams, so it cannot possibly be what she says. Right?

“Your time machine…”  Doctor Belloq echoes without comment.

“You never told me you were building a time machine, Grams,”  I say.

My Grams turns to look at me, slowly, stone-faced, as though I have just interrupted a most important private conversation between her and the good Doctor Belloq. She takes another bite of her food, still glaring. Then, after some more time has passed, she says to me, “You’ve never asked, dear.”

*           *           *           *           *

The time machine itself is set up between piles of dog-eared Louis L’Amour paperbacks, back in the room we all still call “Nancy’s bedroom” even though Aunt Nancy moved away years before I was even born.

And Doctor Belloq, she is now sitting in what looks to be the driver’s seat of a ’65 Mustang that has been attached to a circular track with wires and lights attached to it.

You might say the evening has taken a bit of a strange turn.

“Forward in time, backwards in time, or both?”  Doctor Belloq says.

“I aim to go to the past,”my Grams says as she flips a switch which starts Doctor Belloq’s seat humming around the track. “And before you say it, yes, I am well aware of what Mister Einstein says about the impossibility of THAT.”

My Grams says, “What Mister Einstein didn’t see is… well, all you’ve really gotta do is stay right where you are while everything else runs off into the future around you. Then you can stroll on into the past just as leisurely as you like.”

“Of course,”  my Grams adds, “whenever you’re talkin’ about them old Jew scientists, ‘member their experiments were all paid for at the guvment teat.”

I start flapping my hands around frantically. I say (maybe even out loud), “Did we drop acid or something before we came over here?”

No one answers me.

Still, I do not believe we dropped acid before we went to my Grams’ house for dinner, so I now find myself in the uncomfortable position of needing to amend the statement I made at the start of this blog post: Talking to my Grams, you don’t always know where the conversation is headed, after all.

Usually you do.

Most of the time, even.

The vast majority of the time, perhaps.

But despite all of that, there will always be the night my Grams told us about her time machine.

(And the next time I tell you my Grams is living in the nineteen fifties, I might mean it literally.)

[NOTE: No taxpayer funding was used in the production of this blog post. However, I did get the pictures from over HERE.]

The Naked Truth

“And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together to make clothes for themselves.”      – Genesis 3:7

“God said, ‘Who told thee that thou wast naked?’”   – Genesis 3:11

---------------------------

Is the little church dilapidated because the congregants can’t tell it’s dilapidated? Or is the little church dilapidated because there is just no way to work outdoors under the Houston summer sun while naked?

The Legend of the Kuzins

Oh Lord, you know I’ve been good! Six weeks, seven weeks… Why, it might’a been nearly so much as eight.

I’ve been brushing my teeth. Flossing. Sometimes every day and once in a blue moon twice on Sunday. Washing behind my ears. No unladylike scratching in public.

No gloating over the misfortunes of my enemies, tempting as that might be. No obscenities across t-shirts that could cause a minor scandal down at the school PTA. No smoke entering these lungs cepting the smoke you, my Lord, hath put in the Houston sky by means of your most holy corporations.

And Lord, I know you’ve seen me around, now. You can admit this, just between Great Big You and Little Old Me.  I’ve been bright-eyed and bushytailed. A mother. A wife. A role model to children. A helper of old ladies across streets. A retriever for dwarves of the last box of Cap’n Crunch from the top shelf at Kroger. A giver of the properly calculated amount of change to customers – even to those customers who cannot or will not ever count it later on anyways.

That’s all over now, though, Lord. Katy turned over a new leaf, but the new leaf upped and died on the vine. You see, I have learned my lesson about new leaves. This here is the Story of How.

This here’s the story of a monster most terrible that was known as the Kuzins. And it was the Kuzins that killed my new leaf.

Moondance Pie

Alright. C’mon. Let’s get started, shall we?

Take your seats, please. We are trying something new tonight. It is a first tonight for “Lesbians in My Soup.”

We’re experimenting with heterosexual men tonight. Specifically, with a fellow who goes by the name of Mooner Johnson. He is our GUEST. We are honored to have him!

Please give him your undivided attention. There will be a quiz at the end of the blog, and counselors will be available if you should feel you need to talk to one.

So with that, I give you our Guest Blogger, Mooner Johnson…

___________________________________________

So.  Whenever I pay a visit to a buddy blogger's place of business, like what I'm doing here, I don't ever know how to start things off.  You guys don't know me, I don't know you, so I have no credibility whatsoever.  Not that knowing me would grant credibilities, but as a full disclosure kind of guy I want you to always have everything you need to judge the truths and accuracies contained in my words.  I owe it to Katy to not fuck things up too badly. 

It's like with my good buddy BJ, who loaned his chain saw to a neighbor for a few hours' use.  Being a thoughtful and appreciative sort, the neighbor decided to perform some routine maintenance on BJ's chainsaw before returning the saw as a gift for its use.  He got on the INTERNET and found a volume of maintenance instructions posted by the saw's manufacturer with pictures and graphs, and even some videos for instruction.  Long story short, the nice neighbor totally fucked the chainsaw all the way up. 

Like BJ's neighbor, my native habit is to use my good intentions as tools of destruction.  I wrote some stories for this one buddy when he went to vacation last year, and The US Department of Defense shut his site down.  It wasn't my fault, mind you, but it was my doings.  So, your having a frame of reference through which to process what follows is vital.

Having said all of that, my name is Butcher Einstein “Mooner” Johnson, I'm an environmentalist who leans quite far to the left, I think Texas Governor Rick “The Pompadoured Prick” Perry is an asshole, and I am returning a favor to my beloved Katy wherein I will provide her with content for her website.  Katy's said favor was to produce a Public Service Announcement that she made for me when evil right-wing Christian conservative religious fuckballs spread rumors that I was having a big “open bar” party out to my place, and everyone was invited.

Everyone on the entire worldwide web.

Not that I don't like parties, it's just that I like to limit the percentages of evil right-wing Christian conservative religious fuckballs allowed entry out to my ranch.  I find that it takes but a small number of those assholes to reach critical mass and create circumstances under which I end up in jail.  Not that I mind jail all that much, but if I get jailed one more time before Halloween, my psycho therapist has promised to lock me up over to the Loony Bin and forget me.

I hate that fucking Loony Bin.

Every party I throw begins its guest list with at least one evil right-wing Christian conservative fuckball attending on a pre-confirmed RSVP.  That reservation would be made in the name of Mother Johnson, my mother, and mother likewise to my lesbian sister, Sister.  Which brings up a point.  Mother is my mother, Sister my sister, my grandmother is Gram, my father was Daddy and his father was Granddad.

Whythefuck am I Mooner?  I mean other than the fact that I'll drop my pants to my ankles and show you my ass for no apparent reason.  Then again, Brother would be a name that I wouldn't like and Sonny simply doesn't fit.  I'm many things, but I'm not your fucking Sonny.

Did I tell you I have a serious case of the dreaded ADHD and that fuck is my favorite word?  That little fact is likely the second thing I should have told you up there when I started.  I should have said, “My name is Mooner Johnson and I have the ADHD and blah, blah, and blah.” 

You could buy my silly fucking book, Full Rising Mooner, to get a full low-down on my world, or you could go over to my bloggie site and get confused for free.  The linkster stuff for the book is on the Bloggie Roller dealie.  I don't really give a shit either way because this isn't about me.  This is about social justice. 

Or is it about social injustice?  See what I mean about perspectives?

Probably not Mooner's house.
But how Katy pictures Mooner's house.

Since I've already introduced you to Mother and Sister, I'll use those two of the many strong women in my family to demonstrate my points.  When my sister exited my mother's womb, she came out feet first and shopping for Birkenstocks.  Sister was born lesbian and never had a closet to shed.  She was accepted as such by our entire family, including Mother, and she grew into a highly productive adult—even a model citizen.

Me, while I was always ready to defend her against any attackers, it was usually Sister who came to my defense.  Now, Sister is married to my third ex-wife, Anna the Amazon.  At six foot one, Anna is but three inches my junior and I'm stopping myself from telling you all sorts of stuff that you don't need to hear about my brief marriage to the blond goddess.  Let me summarize for you by saying that my sister is a typical American woman in every way except that her chosen life mate is another, mostly typical, woman.  I love them both and admire them as well.

My mother is likewise a typical American woman in every way, just so long as you like your typicals to be prejudiced, bigoted, and filled with the dogmatic religious idiocy of the Southern Baptist Convention.  I'm certain that my mother loves both my sister and me, but I'm just as certain that she doesn't like or approve of us. 

The certainty of her love is assumed.  Knowing that she dislikes and disapproves of us is rock-solid first-hand knowledge.

“I don't know what I have done to deserve having such an ungrateful heathen for a son and a homo-sex-u-al for a daughter.  God must think I've the shoulders of Atlas,” was Mother's martyred lament at breakfast a couple hours ago.  She always says the word homosexual like that, as if she's saying the word around a mouthful of dog shit.

Sister and Anna were out to the ranch this morning because today is “Pig Day” in my kitchen.  Every meal will feature fresh pork products carved from the carcass of a hog named Sweet Willie who was raised on a neighbor's farm.  As I am a terrific cooker of all things pork, Pig Day draws a crowd.  If I was to actually have a party this weekend, I would serve pig meat.

“What you have done to deserve us, dear Mother, is you've grown to become a bigoted, close-minded asshole who has forgotten how to think for herself,” I answered.  “You've gone from being a loving, gracious woman and turned into something unpleasant.  You and your Tea Bagger buddies have steeped your brew too long.  You're a bitter old bag with no love in your heart, and I think a major disappointment to Jesus.  You want some more bacon?  Smoked pig face?”

Smoked pig face is my favorite part of freshly cooked fresh hog.  I love the crunchy skin and ears and snout.  Most people turn all squeamish and shit just hearing about it.  And before you start on me about disrespecting my mother, stop.  Our current relationship is the result of decades of me bashing my head on the good son wall.  My mother is mean and vindictive and self centered.  And she lives in my home and eats my food, and she shits all over me and the people/things I love.  It has been only in the last month that I have allowed abrasiveness to enter my side of our relationship.  And I must tell you that it feels really fucking good!

OK, wait.  Maybe it feels really fucking well.  Hell, it feels good and well too.

“Answer me this, dear Mother, if you will.  If you Tea Baggers are all about small government and staying out of peoples' lives, why do you keep attacking homosexual people on every front?”

A germane question in these prickly times for American politics if I do say so myself.

“What part of 'God hates homosexuals' is so very difficult for you to understand, Mooner?  Are you so heretical a heathen that you deny God's word?”  Mother asked.

Now here my mother had set a trap for me and stepped into it her very ownself.  God has been making routine visits to see me and to tell me shit. “Well, Mommy Dearest, God came to visit me out to the dock just a few days ago and the Big Guy/Girl/Thing told me that you are full of shit.  His precise words were, 'Those silly assholes are full of shit.  Some of the best among you are homosexual.'  Then God and I discussed some of those gay people, like Lloyd and Katy and John Travolta.”

And don't you Katy readers even start on me about Johnny T.  That dog's done shed its hair.

“John Travolta is not a homo-sex-u-al, dummy, he's married and has a pilot's license and all of those big jet airplanes.”  My mother has interesting logic—the same logic used in many cases by right-wing bigots nationwide.

“But he is a devil worshiper, so you might have a point,” Mother added.  “Anybody who believes that some guy from outer space is God is a coo-coo if you ask me.”

Exactly.

“Well, Mother, my God is better than your God.  My Big He/She/It is loving and inclusive and only wishes that we earthlings learn to appreciate and care about one and another.  Your God is, in all truth and actuality, a narrow minded, bigoted asshole.”

Have you ever been around a narrow minded and bigoted fine Christian lady when somebody calls their God a narrow minded, bigoted asshole?

Anyway, I had a point when I started this but I don't even know what it was.  That's one of the frustrating things about the ADHD, you know, getting off track and then tracking off into the wilderness.  Oh, did I tell you about the three-way sex dream I had with Hilary Clinton and the Governor of New Mexico?  I love sex dreams.  I've met some incredible women in my dreams.

OK, I just hit 1,750 words and I haven't said squat.  So let me give you something to think about.  Whenever God comes to see me, we drink a few icy-cold Carta Blanca beers and shoot the shit awhile.  He calls me “Dude” sometimes, and sometimes He lets me ask Him questions.  I asked God this one question on his last visit, but he would neither confirm nor deny the veracity of my hypothesis. 

Here's what I presented to God.  I think that the Pope is Queen Elizabeth's maternal twin and they were separated at birth.  What do you think? 

Manana, y'all.

__________________________________________

QUIZ:

1. If Mooner’s sister, Sister, were to have a daughter, what would that daughter’s name be?

2. What was the symbolic significance of John Travolta in this blog post?

3. How would you describe the level of vulgar language in this blog post?

            a. Too much

            b. Too little

            c. Just about right

            d. What was vulgar about it?

4. What effect has reading this blog had on your likeliness to buy Mooner’s book?

            a. More likely to buy

            b. Less likely to buy

            c. No difference

            d. Been hearing good things about Finnegans Wake

Children & Priests & Lesbians... Oh My!

The re-Catholicization of Dana continues.

I don’t know how much I’ve already told you about this, but I am telling you now. There is a Bible on our nightstand. There is a Crucifix in the den. Not a Cross, mind you. No, a Crucifix, which is like the Cross that you would expect Christians to place in prominent locations in their homes, in their courts, and in their classrooms, except that a Crucifix comes with a little something extra.

A Crucifix comes with a tiny dying man-god nailed to it.

He might already be dead. It is sort of difficult to tell.

The Skinned Knee Blues

Now, Rachel, she walked on up to us, moping along with skinned knees. Stiff-leg staggering like a Frankenstein, flapping her hands to stay balanced or else stay away the pain, I can’t tell. I don’t know.

And she said moms, I can’t wear pants today and moms, I can’t wear jeans ‘cos… skinned knees.

From where I was sitting, there was not a single drop of blood… or at least none that I could see. Maybe two little matching shiny spots, you know, like where the skin kinda got rubbed away?  Maybe, if I turned my head just so, maybe… Well, it was nothing to call the paramedics over.

But still she was holding back the tears and none too well. And then the color, it drained right out of Dana’s face, and I could see what way things were headed, so I swept up the girl in my arms and I rushed her into the bathroom like she’d come to us with her arm severed or with a sucking chest wound and massive head trauma, instead of just with these… skinned knees.

And I fell back on what I knew. I reached on back into my own past and I brought out what I had seen when it comes to skinned knees. And what I’d seen was that Neosporin and a Band-Aid can cure pretty damn much anything. It can yank a body right back from the very precipice of certain death, hanging on by the fingernails, breaths shallow, whimpering low or screaming out in pain if they’ve still got it in them by then.

But if you’ve got yourself some Neosporin and a Band-Aid or two or maybe three, you slap ‘em on there and then give the tyke some attention and they just might be as right as rain and as good as new to go.

It is something that’s always worked when it comes to skinned knees.

Thing is, it only sort of worked with Rachel.

I said Rachel, have you never skinned your knees before? And she stared on down at the Band-Aids – one on each knee – standing there vacant like she couldn’t walk out and was going to need crutches or hell, I don’t know, a full-body cast or something, and she shrugged.

That’s right, shrugged! This nine-year old girl… Precocious. Boundless energy. Athletic, even. Yet she did not know… she could not recall… she was unsure whether she’d ever before suffered from that old ubiquitous childhood affliction known the whole world over as the skinned knee.  

I spent all my early years running around with skinned knees. Half my life, and every time they’d almost heal to where I’d have those dark, horizontal scab lines coming in, I’d pick them off and let the healing start all over again.

It was the circle of life.

I said as much to Dana, and then Dana said Katy, what the hell were you doing as a kid that you were always getting hurt?

And I thought it over a little and well, I hadn’t really been injured per se. They were only skinned knees. But looking back it seems now like back then it was a whole lot of skinned knees.

What in the world had I been doing?

How does one, in the normal course of one’s daily activities, so to speak, happen to come by quite so many skinned knees? D’I have some kind of balance problem? An equilibrium thing that was never properly diagnosed?

And to be honest, that started haunting me – for a day, for two days, for three days – I’d lie there at night and try to reconstruct in my mind the circumstances leading to those skinned knees of my childhood.

And then, wouldn’t you know it? Roundabout the fourth day of this, they all started coming back to me. All those knees. The skinned knees. I recognized some of them. You were summer of ’91, weren’t you? Or Hey, June of 1994, how ya been?

They’re all kind of like snowflakes, I suppose. No two skinned knees quite the same.

Like there’s I-thought-that-branch-was-strong-enough-to-hold-me skinned knees.

Lookin’-back-to-see-if-that-dog-is-still-chasing-me-while-I’m-running skinned knees.

There’s climbed-up-one-side-of-the-fence-no-problem-but-had-some-trouble-getting-down-the-other-side skinned knees.

And who-the-heck-loosened-my-bike-seat? skinned knees.

No-no-the-side-of-the-bayou’s-not-too-steep-for-me-to-run-down skinned knees.

There’s the my-brother-unexpectedly-launches-a-basketball-at-the-back-of-my-head skinned knees.

Can’t forget the at least fifteen variations on your classic treehouse skinned knees, which I would be glad to chart out for you someday by sub-class, height and time of day incurred.

And then there’s the skateboard skinned knees. All told, I probably I left a pound of flesh and three quarts of blood on various Houston-area half pipes before the day that I turned fourteen. And you know, skateboarding was probably just a bad idea for someone like me. We oughta take some time and compare scars when we get a chance…

But there’s also got-shoved, got-kicked, got-pushed-down-the-stairs skinned knees, and fell-while-doing-various-blatantly-stupid-things skinned knees, not to mention the unicycle, pogo stick, dirt bike, big wheel, and trying-to-ride-the-dog-but-the-dog-doesn’t-want-to-be-rode-today skinned knees.

Why, after a few days of all this recollecting, it was starting to seem like there were more ways for a knee to get itself skinned than there were for a knee to remain unskinned. Like unless you were living some kind of boy-in-the-bubble, padded hallways, Little Lord Fontleroy existence, there was just no way for your knees not to look like the remains of some eighteenth century battlefield by the time you hit puberty and started giving some serious thought to wearing skirts.

Like if you were doing anything at all that was worth the doing, it was practically an inevitability that your knees were going to bear the brunt of it.

And this led me, in turn, when I followed the bouncing ball, to two distressing questions: One was with skinned knees being what they were, how was it my own daughter missed out on them altogether? Two was what had happened to me that I’d now gone so long without skinned knees?

Don’t we take chances? Don’t we do anything outside our comfort zone?

Don’t we ever try and ride the dog?

So here’s a little something, I guess… A little tribute or maybe a toast of sorts in honor of skinned knees and the knowledge that tomorrow, my daughter and I are taking a sheet of cardboard down to Buffalo Bayou so we can sled down its banks.  

Our knees don’t stand a chance.

I have stocked up on the Neosporin and Band-Aids.