Did y’all know that sometimes, organs just, like, explode?

You could be sitting at your computer on a Sunday, trying to dream up chapters and story arcs, and then all of the sudden, BOOM! You wake up in the ICU with multiple IVs in your throat and both arms, and strange people have done strange things to your body. Your blood pressure keeps tanking and med students keep talking about you and not to you in a language that can barely be decipherable, while saying “hmm” a lot and jotting things down on iPads. Then, you eventually get home, only to realize your body has been wracked with change and it’s probably never going to be the same, even after a couple of follow up surgeries. You become -decent- at wound care. You have to learn to accept the massive, healing scars as part of who you are now. And although you survived— much to the surprise of your delicious ICU nurse who did their upmost to pity-laugh at all your horrible jokes— sometimes you wonder if maybe it would have been better to not have come out of anesthesia at all.

Most of my texts these days consist of updating people that I survived and a frowny emoji.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Got dark there a little bit. Sorry.

Anyhoo, I’m (sadly) not medicated to the gills anymore (gods, why are opioids and such so delicious?), so my eyes can focus on words and my brain can understand them. I’m hoping to hew my new Big Sad into a Hemingway depression (hopefully less abusive to my family members and with waaaay less whiskey) and crank out a Maxterpeice (Troy, you delicious nurse with your flowing locs, you were wrong when you rolled those eyes to the heavens continuously so late at night in that ICU chamber. I’m fucking hilarious.)

So, you know what that means? It means I get to crawl my way into my office and continue doing what I was doing before the spaceship I use to interact with the universe decided to malfunction.

It means new chapters!

Maybe — fingers crossed— we will get lucky and my doctors won’t release me back to work for the full leave period and we will get four solid weeks of me posting my lil scribbles.

We’ll see.

I doubt I’ll get that lucky, as the capitalistic corpse grinding machine desires blood and flesh sacrifices to keep itself gorged on all of our suffering.

Sorry. I took it dark again. That just, like, randomly happens these days. Ahem.

So, how is y’all’s summer going?