Up at 5:30 this morning for tai chi practice before I head off to chi kung practice. As hard as it can be to get out of bed this early, there is always something to make it worthwhile. Today it was the sunrise.

I did a little work on the Flash photo album. The newest feature is to allow the user to set variables like text and background color using the index XML file. Next will be to allow optional setting of those same variables for each page of photos, along with the option to set either a random or a specified background photo. Perhaps by this weekend.

If only work didn’t take so much time away from my work.

Well, I promised you-all the story of my most favorite work-related injury, and here it is:

The Date: Late July of 1998.
The Time: Early Morning.
The Place: The Bookstore.

My day began at 8:00am, opening mail while sitting at the bottom of a huge cup of coffee. Mornings were usually quiet; just the sound of hangovers echoing from the employee bathroom and the constant hum of writerly angst. the bookstore got mail in from all over the world; from five of the six continents, dozens of countries, and in all kinds of conditions. Not all of it was clean. Not all of it was pleasant to touch. And the mailman was rather frightening.

So opening mail was an adventure. There was always something unexpected and exciting. On this day I was opening mail with such wild abandon that I gave myself a papercut on the cuticle of my right ring finger. It was a tiny papercut. It didn’t even bleed. And I had mail from Deepest Darkest Jenison to open. Therefore, though injured, I stayed at work.

Given subsequent events, I can only assume that somewhere in here I did something stupendously vile with my right hand. Like hand-feeding a buzzard. Or unclogging the customer bathroom toilets. Or chewing my fingernails after eating at McDonald’s.

Round about 9:30 the papercut sting began to turn into a hit-it-with-a-hammer throb. I didn’t pay it much attention. What was a little finger pain, next to the horror of writing a review of Chicken Soup for the Pet-Lover’s Soul ?

After another hour, I began to feel sick. Headache, nausea, disorientation. I attributed it to the Danielle Steele novel I had just unpacked. No problem. A little Hunter Thompson, a little Howard Zinn, maybe some Allen Ginsberg, and I should feel right as rain. Right?

Wrong.

At noon, finger swollen and head pounding, I went home. As soon as ass touched couch I fell asleep.

Tracy the roommate got home from work at 5:30. I woke up feeling awful. Head pounding, vision blurry, disoriented. I hadn’t felt like this since the most recent local Slam Poetry evening (back in the day, Grand Rapids had the worst slam poets in the state). My finger was a nameless beast gibbering mindlessly at the end of my hand.

And there, on the inside of my forearm… wrinkles from the pillow? No… hallucination? No… hot, swollen skin over infected blood vessels? YES! Like a relief map of the rivers of Hell, lines of infection rooted in my hand were pointing their way up my veins to my heart.

“Tracy?”

“Yeah?”

“If you have time tonight, could you drive me to the emergency room?”

“Are you serious?”

At this point Bob the Wonder Cat came over and sniffed my finger. He ran spitting nad hissing from the room.

“If you need to go to the emergency room we’re going RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!!”

At the hospital my hand was so stiff Tracy had to fill out all of my paperwork. Also, I was so disoriented I couldn’t understand what the receptionist was saying to me.

An hour went by. Then two hours. The other people in the emergency room looked much worse than I. There was a guy with a broken nose. Some people obviously in for VD shots. A big skinny pale guy with a scythe. Crows. Flies. Some of this might have just been in my head.

All this time I could feel myself getting worse. When I checked in my temperature was 101 degrees. After over two hours, it was much higher.

A day passed. Two days. The lines of red had reached my shoulder and stopped. Well, not stopped, exactly; more like dove under the surface and shot like torpedoes into my chest cavity. My temperature continued to rise. A bratty little kid was screaming. I pointed The Finger at him and he burst into flames.

Tracy told the nurse “He’s getting worse.” Bob the Wonder Cat wandered in. He sniffed me, then tried to bury me.

Finally the doctor came out and said “Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fthaghn!” “YO!” said I, and in we went.

One syringe of penicillin to the ass, and I was on my way. Tracy’s boyfriend Russ – a God among Men – showed up with a tub of icecream and some spoons.

The next day at work, arm still sore but red streaks diminishing, my co-workers were quite sympathetic.

“Hi John. How do you feel? OH! Ouch! A paper cut! Oooohhhh.. Tammi? Is that you? Everything is so dark… Mom?…” and the like.

So there it is. I recovered. My arm was sore for a couple of days and I learned to set fire to the mail before opening it. So if one of you sent correspondence to the bookstore between July 1998 and August 1999, sorry, but your mail was sacrificed for the greater good.

Because she feels intimidated by the people who think she is waaaaaay out of line for suing her school for $2,700,000, Blair Hornstine will not be attending the graduation ceremony .

I suppose, eventually, I will start feeling sorry for her. After, that is, she has learned her lesson: Just Deal With It .

I promised a couple of weeks ago that I would post the story of my other job-related injury. It will appear in my next entry.

Internet Explorer 5 sucks.

Yesterday’s Kung Fu demonstration (pics and story soon at sifulee.com) was flawless, and the crowd appreciative.

I am sunburned. My scalp is pink like cotton candy.

Today, I think I will work on my Flash adventure game. It is still in the nebulous stage, but I can tell you this: It will be isometric-view, square tiles, the game engine in Flash and all of the configuration information and game variables in XML. Eventually it will be something like Winkelman’s Infinitely Extensible Universal Adventure Game Platform. But you know, at least half the fun in is figuring out how to build the thing. After that, actually building it seems like kind of a let-down.

Back in the bookstore days I was the Special Orders manager. It was my job to hunt down and procure all of the books which weren’t on the shelves when the customers needed them. Given the generally dismal state of published books, and the generally banal tastes of the majority of the readers, it was seldom a particularly exciting job.

In every retail job there are, for better and for worse, regular customers. I like to think ours were a cut above the usual, simply because all of them could read. The majority were decent people, although some were quirky to the point of being unable to function well in public.

One in particular, who I will refer to hereafter as Cat Lady, was a thorn in my side for several years, and finally I pushed her off onto my replacement when I left the retail world.

Cat Lady was a Wiccan. She was in her (I think) forties and had the most tenuous grasp of reality I had encountered outside of my college philosophy classes. Judging from what and how often she ordered she must have had the largest Occult library in West Michigan. She liked to cast spells. She had friends who liked to cast spells. They would get together on Thursdays.

I like to imagine that they were trying to destroy the world.

There was one book which I was never able to procure for her: the Witches Bible Compleat; a tome which supposedly contained all the Majickal Wisdome of the Worlde. She must have ordered the thing ten times. The Publisher, Magical Childe, was difficult in the extreme to contact, and as often as not my inquiries were returned, unopened.

In between attempts at the WBC Cat Lady snapped up pretty much every other book on majic, magic, magick, majyq and madjich. She avoided the Satanic goofballs like Anton LaVey, and had no real interest in the Necronomicon. She dug Crowley. She was all about numerology.

But for all the trying, I was never able to get my/her hands on the Witches Bible Compleat.

Finally I just told her it was out of print, and to stop ordering it. She responded by sending a check to a local liquor establishment instead of to the bookstore, then yelling at me for a half hour because I didn’t have it in my hands the day she put it in the mail.

A great deal of stress caused by a book which may never have existed.

Earlier today I was browsing around on Fark and I came across this story which, in the process of debunking the existence of the Necronomicon, solved the mystery of What Happened to Magical Childe.

So then, there is a sort of symmetry in the universe.

Cat Lady, I hope this helps. For the rest of you, the article is a great read.