I'm Free!!!

It has been a harrowing few months laid up in a lumpy hospital bed at the Center for Indigent Care in Halifax. I want to thank Steakbellie for wiring me the money to pay my cable bill and finally freeing me from that Nova Scotian prison.

Tetanus is not something to joke about, and lockjaw is not something one wants to experience in the throes of passion. But this is what happened: a hooker is dead, a good pair classic Pro-Keds have been torn to shreds, and I have paid the price by losing four months of my life, which I will never get back.

I can't say this has been an entirely awful experience. Thanks to my Haitian orderly, the man whose name I never learned but whose counsel I will never forget, I have come to understand that life does not exist for the purpose of gluttonous eating, a prideful need to self-promote, or a lustful zeal for attention. No, I have come to reject my slothful best buddy whose envy of my blog has unleashed his wrath and has opened me up to ad hominem attacks. Without sounding overly bitter, I must tell you how betrayed I feel by this friend. We will call him "EDL NAMBLA--charter member" for the purposes of clarity.

While my Haitian friend sponged my lower back sending a steady stream of warm soapy water down the contours of my ass and thighs to its terminus—a gentle pool of liquid on the center of my threadbare gray sheets just below my relaxed and dangling balls, he said something unintelligible yet at the same time uplifting. Since I don't speak Creole, his actual words meant nothing to me. What I heard, though, was prophetic.

“Mister Artie, if you can come to accept your own failings, you will begin to understand that right or wrong, good or bad, have no relative importance. The human life is as frail as a gosling’s feather. Now bend over so I can thoroughly clean your bud cheese.”

I did as he said to do and then cried the cry of Hemingway and Thoreau before me, a manly cry that signified neither sensitivity nor sadness, it was merely a literary device to spice up a rather mundane plot line.

I am too hardened to go on with my story. Perhaps I will continue at a latter day. I am back. I am well. And I look forward to hearing from you, my literary friends.

I am attaching a photo of my last day in the hospital, taken by one of Nova Scotia’s greatest photographers, groundzeroprodukt. Isn’t he the best!!!

I am still bed-ridden in the pic, my Haitian friend is in the white coat on the right.