i can do fun

Fun. Yeah, I can do fun.

So, fun. Monday, 11 p.m.-ish, just before turning in, I put the dogs out, the final time, in anticipation of then sitting up the night just trying to sleep, propped against a bank of pillows, with my just-refreshed, taped-on, blood-catch gauze mustache.

You see: Midafternoon that same day, a surgeon had, in his minimally invasive surgical way, jackhammered out my four closed sinuses, to insist they re-open for business alongside the other two, while also jolting my badly deviated septum back a few notches toward normalcy.

None of those defects, by the way, were the upshot of anything remotely interesting, no protracted binge of nose-candy indulgence a la Stevie Nicks nor any bygone hard-fought Golden Gloves victory or glorious street-brawler defeat. No, it was just me poorly aging.

Meanwhile, there in my kitchen that post-surgery night, my nose had effectively become a periodic blood spigot, the tap dripping freely pretty much any time I did anything besides sit still with my head slightly raised.

Which was how I awkwardly had been attempting some final kitchen cleanup for the day, with my head tilted slightly back, to keep the blood from dripping down anew into the upper-lip gauze strip I seemed to be changing constantly.

Which was also when I heard the sudden uproar outside, the howling and barking and little-dog squawking that almost certainly foretold a young opossum attempting to navigate along the narrow top of my back wood fence as my two dogs likewise attempted to somehow bring it down, to maul it, and probably kill it.

Which turns out to have been exactly the case.

Late-night opossum visits happen only rarely in our yard. So of course one ocurred the same night I was not yet even eight hours out from ugly sinus surgery.

I had slow-hurried outside with a flashlight and the spray bottle of water I keep on hand for routine dog-resistance to the idea of coming inside when called, but upon seeing the expected scene in full chaotic expression – my large pittie-mix, Mal, howling and hurtling upward, nipping the air just shy of the terrified marsupial, and my Jack Russell, Marley, tumbling around Mal’s feet in full frantic chorus – I forgot in that instant that I’d just had significant pruning and bludgeoning way up inside my goddamn face.

So what did I then do? I sprinted my fat ass across the yard to corral the dogs, to try to keep from having a dead or severely wounded young opossum on my hands, and on my conscience.

I sprayed my wild puppy girls full in the face and, finally getting a bit of their attention, managed to more or less drag big Mal back toward the house while Marley moped along beside her, with me shouting constantly, and menacingly re-pointing the spray bottle, to keep the little goofball from inching back toward the hapless yard intruder still making its way along the fence.

I had also tried spraying the opossum, by the way, to maybe motivate it into speeding up its escape – dude, save your own life, pick up the pace here, come one, let’s go! It simply stopped to look at me, blinded by the flashlight, no doubt, and badly confused.

Note to self: You have no future in wildlife rescue.

I finally kind of trundled both dogs back inside. I was breathing heavily, being utterly dragged-out from the earlier anesthesia, and trying to draw air through newly expanded sinuses that were right then nothing but raw, angry meat.

Back in my kitchen immediately after, about to shut off the light, I caught a glimpse of myself in the microwave window glass, and noticed that my once-white gauze mustache now had a disturbingly Hitleresque dark middle, which actually seemed to be expanding as I stood there.

By the time I got into our downstairs bathroom to view the situation in an actual mirror, blood was flowing freely from beneath the gauze, down into my mustache and across my lips, like the ruby-stained tears of an unfunny circus clown pelted in the face with handfuls of sand and sharp gravel by an angry audience.

Don’t do anything too vigorous or strenuous for a few days, surgical staff had said. Just take it really easy, OK? Yet, clown that I invariably am …