This one's for Jimbo...

I wake up in the morning and my legs are a little more wooden than usual. My biceps are painfully bruised and my shoulders unnaturally sore. My neck is aching; every blind spot check as I drive to work is a chore. I have another bruise, a dent in my back, between my shoulder blade and my spine, that's in just the wrong spot, that I feel and don't feel. Maybe it's just the right spot. The skin stretches tightly across my left cheekbone from the elbow that landed there. I turn down the stereo. My ear is still ringing and I recall the sharp whack from my skull connecting with someone else's. I have a skinned knee. And a purple elbow on the same side from falling to the concrete. I'm more aware of every small movement of my hands on the steering wheel, the meat of my fingers has thickened and the joints have become inelastic from hundreds of pushes and pulls and bracings and balances. I am clean and fresh and dry and new now. I was wet and dirty and sweaty and stinky and we were wet and dirty and sweaty and stinky. And angry and joyful and raging and elated and intoxicated. And drunk and sober. And Old and new. And we were different and we were the same. At the same time. Spinning and twisting. And churning.

And I did then and I do now

feel

so

alive.