I am quickly becoming a menace to myself.  Let’s look at the latest two incidents that I’ve encountered.  First, dreams are quickly becoming very dangerous for my body.  I had an odd dream last week where I was in a food court in Chicago.  Set aside the fact that were this real life I would obviously be in a brewpub or deep dish pizza place were I visiting Chicago, so this was obviously a dream sequence.  True to form, I actually was ordering a slice of pizza, and for whatever reason I set the slice and the plate it was on on top of the cash register to dig out money from my pockets.  When I did this, a guy reached in front of me, took the slice and started running away.  I chased him for quite some time in my dream but don’t recall if I ever got him.  The dream might have ended before that.

What I do know is that when I woke up, the muscle that is located where the front of the leg connects with the foot felt as though it were completely pulled.  Any movement I placed on it was quite painful.  Now, whether my high stakes chase through a dreamlike food court was the cause of this, I’ll never know, but this is now the second incident in two months that I at least partially attribute to overactive dream sequences.  I can accept middle-aged bodily trauma that actually happens in my waking hours.  That is simply a case where age starts to creep up on you.  But this whole REM-induced muscle pulls is starting to be quite frustrating, albeit amusing.

My second incident happened on Saturday at the park with my daughter.  We were throwing pinecones over the fence at the empty baseball field, something we periodically do that Ally really enjoys.  As I was picking up some pinecones for her to throw, she threw one that didn’t quite make it over.  All of a sudden this projectile becomes a homing device programmed to strike my chin.  Most of you are aware of how prickly pinecones can be, so when you add velocity to such an object and then have it strike a softer object such as human flesh, blood is destined to be shed.

Thankfully we had some hand wipes I normally use to wash Ally’s hands before she has a snack at the park.  Now I know they’re also relatively good in absorbing blood from open wounds.  I don’t relish making small talk with strangers at the park but I did have to approach a mom and ask her “I know this is an unusual question, but has the bleeding on my face stopped?”

The beauty of being a victim of a “pinecone drive-by” is that my chin now has three distinct wound lines and one that was temporarily on my bottom lip.  It’s as if I escaped an encounter with Wolverine from X-Men.

I think it’s time I start wearing my hockey helmet out in public.