Where did that come from?

Guest Blog: Hard to believe that our quest blogger once umpired one out in McCook and may or not have had the call right.

I’m in my sixties now. And while my master strategy of how to not grow old, simply to never leave adolescence, has proved to be pretty successful, some interesting consequences from my accumulated years of operation have proven to be unavoidable. Like an oak I have grown thicker while my leafy cover has grown thinner. I’ve decided that this is a good thing, being more substantial, and have developed an attitude that those skinny kids are like saplings yet to prove their staying power. But something that is really bugging me are all these mystery aches and pains. Where did they come from, anyway?

In my youth, which I define from birth till last year, I was pretty much free from the appearance of unattributed boo boos. If something hurt I knew why. I hit my thumb hanging a picture, sliced my finger trying to cook, elbow hurt when thrown from a damn big horse. Whatever, I could trace it to a cause. But now these intrusions seem to come from the ether, effects free of the associated cause.

I’m soaping up in the shower yesterday and discover a tender spot on my shoulder, like it was bruised but I haven’t bumped it – that I can recall – in weeks. A mystery bump could be attributed to an alien intrusion that I have been programmed to forget. Although I hate to lay the blame for my mystery injuries on a species of what must be highly intelligent and obviously curious inter-galactic tourists, I have read Whitley Strieber and I know what they are capable of.

I would be prepared to believe the little green men did it theory but I am a child of the Watergate era and as such have difficulty accepting the obvious explanations. And why is it always little green men? Don’t they have little green women or are the green girls too busy in the galley to be spotted messing with us kidnapped and confused earthlings? So aliens did it just doesn’t work for me and still the mystery bumps, aches and pains continue.

Maybe it’s that I am being struck by sub-atomic particles, those quirky quorky projectiles that apparently zip around the universe flashing through matter without leaving a trace. I’m thinking that after sixty years of accumulated without-a-trace smashes they start to hurt. Kind of like that marriage seven or so years in that was once so great then was so ok and now is so unlivable. I know that gravity has had an accumulated effect on me, why not sub-atomic particles? I mean jumping now gets me all of three of four inches off the ground which is maybe a third of what my younger, pre-gravity build-up jumping could accomplish.

Several years back I went to a sports medicine guy – who must have been good because he was associated with Stanford University and their sports teams had dudes like Tiger Woods and John Elway. Anyway I’m at his offices because my right ankle was sorta always in pain. He snaps a few x-rays and manipulates my foot around a bit and tells me I have the ankle of an eighty year old and I can start chewing anti-inflammatory drugs or he can just fuse it. I didn’t like the look in his eye when he spoke of fusing half of all my ankles so I started a long relationship with ibuprofen. Thinking back I’m pretty sure he didn’t say I had the ankle of a sixty year old. I interpret this to mean that my mystery injuries will not be attributable to excessive accumulated hours of operation for another 130,000 hours, give or take 50,000 or so.

When all rational scientific explanations – like aliens, sub-atomic bombardments or normal operational parameters -fail to fit I am left with only the mystical realm to explain my condition. While these bumps, bruises, aches, and pains rarely involve bleeding and can hardly be called strategically located, they do have resemblance to injuries of the stigmata category.

I admit I am only assuming that stigmata related injuries have categories as my religious education much like my Spanish education ended before it really took. But working from these-are-of-a-religious nature perspective, the sudden appearance of unexplained boo boos sounds like stigmata to me. I even remember one scene in the Rupert Wainwright classic, Stigmata, when Patricia Arquette was in the bath tub and discovered her new unexplained injuries. I think that is pretty much the same as me in the shower, minus the strange little bit with the bird and its feather. I’ve decided to go with this stigmata thread because the only other mystical explanation I can conjure up involves someone with a doll and pins and that’s just not right.

So while I still have no idea where that came from, I am only left with god did it. You know sometimes Thor speaks to me, especially when the weather is threatening, so I guess he could send me little annoyances just for a laugh or two. Or maybe it’s that Loki dude. Would be just like him. Or maybe you know another explanation, something other than alien examinations, sub-atomic particle collisions, exceeded operational parameters, or divine interventions. I’m obviously at a loss but open to suggestion.