So I’ve been using X-acto knives since I was about fourteen or so. My Dad got me into balsa wood airplanes by giving me a Spad biplane kit, his fifties vintage X-acto set and a stern lecture on how to handle knives—this was not long after slicing my thumb open with a dull Swiss Army knife attempting to earn a merit badge for the Cub Scouts. I’ve cut thousands of sheets of paper, probably been through at least five 100-count boxes of replacement blades, and made four airplanes since that hot July afternoon in 1985. So you would think I’d know not to stick myself with a number 10 blade as deeply and as quickly as I did this morning. Apply pressure, jump in the car, sign in to the ER and wait. After a few shots of Lidocaine, the young attending sewed up the wide gash with five deft stitches, gave me a pressure bandage, and stuck me with a tetanus shot in the arm.

If I think real hard, I can count a few recent stitches for a crooked laceration on my knee, some in the back of my head when I was six and fell on the big rock in the backyard, and some for a deep cut on my elbow. I don’t count all the times I should have been stitched up—the wide gash under my eye from crashing into my friend Steve playing volleyball (we were seventeen, sucking down beers at my friend Jon’s house on the back lawn, his mom was in Israel, and we had three days of co-ed summer bliss ahead—there was NO way I was screwing that up); the long, deep gash on my forearm from sliding my bike down a wet crosswalk on the way to work in ’95; and several puncture wounds during the long summer years of contracting after college. Tetanus? Feh.

Huh. I just realized that I posted the same picture twice. Sorry folks.

Date posted: April 22, 2003 | Filed under history | Leave a Comment »

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