Sixty-Nine Pound Heavyweight
I think I broke some of the knuckles on both my hands awhile back. I am mostly interested in getting the word knuckles on paper because I don't think the average person considers knuckles to be a subject worthy of their interest and my mission is to change that. Consider the knuckle. Being a handful of inches shy of six foot nine in height and weighing not much more than sixty-nine pounds it is not like this knuckle thing is the single most important factor in whether or not I pursue a career as a heavy weight boxer. That is really the only time I notice the knuckles, when I clench my fists. As a man who has given up on heavy weight boxing I'm not even sure why I clench my fists unless it is to get in touch with my knuckles. On top of one of the recently broken knuckles is a comma of a white scar that I just now noticed. I have a double-jointed thumb on that same hand. On top of its knuckle is an extra crease that is the result of slicing up a flap of flesh while playing with a knife, when I was a young boy left to my whims at the State Fair of Texas. I was at the freak show on the midway. I guess in those days playing the draglines (where I scooped up the knife) and going to the freak show were pretty much my favorite things to do. This was back in the days when parents gave their kids a fair amount of autonomy. On the underside of that thumb, just above that fleshy part that is supposed to approximate the various degrees of doneness in cooked meat, I have another white comma scar that is from having a bottle thrown at me while I was driving a tractor alongside the highway outside a small town in the vicinity of Houston, when I was twenty. Twenty is an interesting word too if you look at it hard. I stare sometimes a the backs of my hands when I pause from writing or when trying to achieve higher states of unconsciousness while dreaming. They are, and always have been, a lot older than the rest of me, but lately I realize the rest of me is catching up. The other hand has also been damaged, by baseballs and lawn mowers and another cheap knife. In little league they used to put me in right field because I sucked. I got a game ball once for throwing a kid out at home plate and then another ball the next year for hitting a game winning triple to win a championship game between third and fourth place teams. In between those two events though, I sucked. I didn't go to the championship party so actually I never got that second game ball. During one game, I was maybe eleven or twelve, I tried to bring in with my un-gloved hand a blooper that bad hopped into right field and it split the webbing between my index and middle finger. A couple of weeks later I did the same thing at practice and broke the stitches. I had a run of good luck and didn't do anymore damage to my hands until I was fifteen and to clear a bit of wet grass stuck my index finger into the chute of a running lawn mower, which caused a minor bit of mutilation to the tip of that finger. A few weeks later I tried to get my pen knife away from a classmate and I grabbed for it thinking he would let go but he didn't and I dropped blood all the way to the nurses office one floor below. My mom came and picked me up and I remember her being uncharacteristically un-sympathetic. I was using up too much of the family budget with my careless accidents. And she had had just about enough of my Leave it to Beaver antics.
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