Bloodbath~ Take II

• I went to visit my friend Amy yesterday at her cafe in Stowe. She was in the kitchen with all her staff.... picking chicken off the bone for her chicken curry salad, mixing up the dough for scones, and mixing up some kind of dressing in the processor. All at the same time. She showed me her hand at one point. Her one finger looked old and arthritic.... all swollen and black and blue at the knuckle. She broke it the day before. I can't remember how.

• Jared, a regular here at the shop.... like, seven hours a day kind of regular.....the one whose heart may someday explode from the amount of chai he drinks........his finger is all busted up from jamming it between two heavy logs while taking down a big old cedar tree for his landlord.
  

• Old Bob, another regular at the shop....like, three times a day kind of regular.... the one who drinks the half coffee/half hot water and eats prison toast each morning.... he came in this afternoon and showed me his left hand. His thirteen year old grandson, playing around, poked the end of a broom handle at him and when Old Bob grabbed hold of the broom handle his grandson gave it a tug. Turned out the end of the broom handle was riddled with nails and tore up Bob's hand pretty bad.
  

• Holly, my fairly full time employee at the shop (could hardly manage the place without her, really) grew up on a dairy farm.... hence, the work ethic of an ox. They have a herd, still, of about sixty Holstein and her dad is running the place with her three brothers. Last night while trying to hitch a wagon to the back of his tractor, he got his finger caught between the pull and the wagon and lost half of his pinky finger. . He went in today to have the skin sewed up around what bone remains and will have a half of a pinky on his one hand forevermore.
  

• I've been operating this 12" deli slicer for about two and a half months now and always say a little prayer of gratitude every time I finish a round with it and still have all of my own fingers. I don't know if there is some kind of cosmic universal curse on fingers this week or what but........... I have to have the blade rotating to really get the thing clean. It spins. I spray.... bleaching while wiping it down (carefully) with a rag. Today though, in lieu with that cosmic universal curse on fingers, the blade got the better half of the tip of my ring finger. Went in deep and left a fat chunk of skin dangling from the cut... I pulled the skin off since it was just too much to realistically adhere back to the finger at any point and when people suggested I go in for stitches I had to explain that there really wasn't anything to stitch back together... it's just kind of a hole in my finger now. Bled like a mo-fo. Heavy bled like a mo-fo for two and a half hours. Like... bleeding like a mo-fo through heavy gauze and band-aid every few minutes for a solid two and a half hours. I considered closing up shop to avoid bleeding in people's pastries but I was able to duck away into the back room every few minutes to swap out a new bandage. Regular customers and good friends jumped behind the counter to get their own drinks so that I could keep my hand above my head with good pressure right on the cut.

That was at 2pm. It's five minutes to eight now and the band-aid/gauze set up I've had on
now for a few hours is starting to seep through again. I closed up the shop with a big fat yellow glove on that hand... avoiding getting the cut wet. I'm now going to go into the back kitchen and prime the old wooden staircase and beams because I can't put it off any longer and I've been telling myself all day that it was going to get done tonight. So it will. I'll keep the glove on.

But maybe I should dip the glove in Elmers glue first, sprinkle a little glitter onto it so that
I can at least look like Michael Jackson while I do my painting. If anyone still has their old
Thriller coat, or maybe the shiny socks, send them up or drop them off at the shop. I could
start a whole new trend.