Smashed my head on a support beam today. And it hurt quite a bit. I knew I should put something cold on it, but our icepack had gone missing, so I was left choosing between bags of frozen berries, frozen corn, and frozen edamame. I went with the edamame, although it does make me wonder if there’s a job as injury sommelier where you could pair frozen foods with injured body parts needing icing.

I was hoping this injury might get me writing my book, because my friend Tom had mentioned a neurological condition where people with head injuries start writing a lot. Alas, no such luck. But I suppose in a way I’m lucky it didn’t work out, otherwise there would be the temptation to give myself a concussion whenever I needed motivation. So I’m glad that my (still painful) head injury didn’t make me write anything.*

Previous to smashing my head, I wrote this column about marriage.

*Aside from this blogpost.**

**A discussion with Tom last week confirmed the opinion that my blogging last decade was more entertaining. I am going to try returning more to the form of random blather, and less self-promotion***, since the people who read my blog seem to prefer it.

***Buy my books!

As promised, here’s my column to chronicle my trip to Maine last weekend. But since you read this, you get an additional story. I save the best story for you because I care. Read the column first.

Back? Okay. So, when the car died and we got it towed back to the farm, we convinced our host to take his truck out and run a chain from the back of the truck to the front of the car. Tom sat in the driver’s seat of the car, our host sat in the driver’s seat of his truck, and I stood off to the side of the road to get a full view so I could warn people if disaster was imminent.

Tom was convinced disaster was imminent because his car was being towed forward but he had no brakes, so as soon as the truck stopped, he might rear-end the truck. Our host was not concerned about this, but given that our host was one of the most easy-going people I’ve ever met, that didn’t comfort Tom overmuch. In retrospect, my ability to avert disaster by shouting “Look out! Imminent disaster!” was probably fairly limited.

What happened, though, was that they started towing, and Tom started shouting out “I have no brakes!”, and our host yelled “Alright,” and just kept driving, and I was walking along to keep up with them, and then running along to keep up with them, and soon I was alone on a dark Maine road (read: no streetlights) in the middle of the night.

Thankfully, I knew the farm was only a two minute drive up the road, so I was able to walk back with no difficulty.