Red Thumb

I must needs get ready for Bible Kickboxing right fast, but first, another entry in March's recounting of visual transformations.

For those less intimate with my noggin, transformation's a big theme for me, and oftimes (especially across the last five years), it's physical transformation that fascinates (nay, obsesses) most.

I'm tickled by the way injuries, scars, and other manner of sudden bodily damage (or less abrupt change, enacted by that mutual, eternal, and inescapable assailant, time) imprint and preserve memory on our person, as if this mortal coil - transient and temporal though it may be - becomes a record during our lifetime, as in cellular amber, of those most violent events that shaped our histories as bodies.

Even the skin, sloughed every seven days or whatever, will work to retain the curvature and indentation of healed wounds, as if they are now an indelible part of our makeup and so must be inCORPorated into all subsequent renewals of the suit we wear over our insides. And of course, everything within the interior transformed invisibly too: bones broken only to be reset, stomachs enlarged then shrunken, livers exhausted and eventually spent.

My Red Thumb was proof for me (and remains so) that I was officially a construction worker at last. Chadwick had made clear to me on more than one occasion that it was only a matter of time before I instigated my first steel cut, and it was just as sudden, deep, and bleedy as he'd described in advance.

Amusingly, there wasn't a first-aid kit on-site when I pulled off the feat, so Trevley put a roll of toilet paper and a few strips of the ubiquitous Tuck Tape to the task of casting me until the disrupted flesh began its clumsy (and ultimately, sloppy) job of resealing and patching over the violation of "me" caused by the intrusion of that sharp "other" from the outside world.

I could go on about this stuff for hours, and explore way too many other metaphors for the simple act of pushing too hard with my wire snips (as I'm usually wont to push with all other tools, real and imagined, at my disposal) and slashing open my hand on the exposed edge of sheared metal - but instead I'll shut my trap and let a photograph, devoid of poetry but heavy, as always, with authority, end my thought.

Weak stomach? Don't worry.

The Red is my protective tape, not my gore.