Wednesday, May. 05, 2004 - 3:17 pm
Um... I'm sorry.
This relationship just isn't working for me.
I'm at www.dailypreciousness.org now. So change that bookmark.
What did it feel like when the 4-inch steel nails scattered, sewing themselves amongst sinew and bone? Was there a sound to accompany the sensation? Was it an organic thud or a metallic clink? (It's like a pun of the koan: What is the sound of one head cracking?)
Sounds in my headspace... I can hear the sound of my hair being brushed… the high-pitched whisper of a comb through my hair. It's more than tactile. There's a sound to it. Listen.
Thinking back to childhood, I hit my head once at age 12. I can recall the echoing clamor and internal earthquake of when I slammed my head against the trampoline stand. It was a brutal kiss of flesh and metal. Thick scarlet flowed like syrup in summer. It was messy, but ultimately harmless. (The goose egg on my forehead stayed there for days!)
Another moment of personal head trauma was in the summer of my 13th year. I was performing a forward flip on the springboard of the pool when I hit the very back of my head (where the visual receptors nest quietly at the back of the skull) with the still-bouncing sandpapery rough edge of the diving board. Reinforced metal and non-skid surface grazed my wet hair as heavy as bluntly as a car hitting a rabbit. When I splashed into the pool, there was so much blood that a pink halo of blood formed around me... a baptism of blood.
So I can imagine what it may have felt like to have a handful of nails showered into my headspace. But what must it have done to him? What kind of sensation checklist would he fill out? What words of poetry and prose could enumerate the experience?
I mean, the steel shot like arrows and found their way into the soft tissue, the bone, the tender tomato skin shell that is the skull.
Isidro Mejia had four nails buried in his skull. Another found its way into his spinal column, where the nail narrowly missed severing the delicate string of nerves that controls motor movement.
Isidoro, a 39-year-old construction worker in the San Fernando Valley, uses a nail gun that has an automatic and manual setting. The real poetry here is that there are nail guns that can be set to automatic. I guess that automatic firing nail guns are made to overcome the mind-numbing tedium of hitting a trigger button… I mean, who really has the time for manually firing every single nail into the mountains of drywall? Speaking for myself, I know I don’t!
