Apparently, March is not my month for grace.

I was walking to my apartment around midnight last night when I decided to take my normal shortcut behind the Halfway House.  I don’t live in the guh-het-toh necessarily. I just live next to a house of 2938473 recovering drug addicts, of which 29384260 are outside smoking at any given time. [Except, amazingly, last night.] There’s an open paved lot behind this Halfway House. No one is allowed to park in it, because this long, thick, suspended Chain tells you you can’t.  [I have jumped over said Chain more times than I can count.]  Apparently happy to be done with my twelve-hour work day, I began to make my huge leap…

…and, you know how, in equestrian events, the horse is jumping over those post things, but sometimes, in particularly tragic situations, the horse is clotheslined by the fence and falls down?

Yeah.  That was me.  I was the horse.

I never finshed the leap.  Instead, my ankle caught The Chain while the rest of my body continued to hurl forward ridiculously through the air.  Here’s how my body parts came down, in descending order by force and weight!
1) KNEE
2) LEFT HAND
3) FACE

And here’s what Soundtrack to a Face-Plant sounds like:  “OOF!”

Trying to get my breath back, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to get up.  SCREAMING PAIN, people! I managed to hobble into my apartment, where it took me ten minutes just to pull off my jeans because my knee hurt so bad.  I will spare you the details, but if I had to sum it up it would be: BLOOD! Or perhaps, SWELLING TO VOLLEYBALL-LIKE PROPORTIONS!  I haven’t been in that much pain since my appendicitis. (Okay, that one time I thought I had appendicitis.)

After continously wailing in pain, I decided maybe I had to go to a PromptCare (Michiganders Read: “MedCenter”). I called Damon! Surely he would be my knight in shining Monte Carlo!  …No answer…Dammit.

So I executed my own self-administered first aid plan:  I cleaned out the gravel from all [some inexplicable] surfaces, dressed my knee gash, and applied a frozen Boca burger to the swelling.  I proceeded to down some ibuprofen, which I washed down with a healthy helping of Tootsie Rolls and Red Vines.  Unfortunately, the burning, excruciating pain didn’t really help me sleep, which was great, because I had to be up at six am.  I hobbled drowsily through most of the day, much to the amusement of my co-workers.

Since then, I have flipped off The Chain the few times I have limped past it.
But I can still hear it sayin’, “You will never break, never break the Chain.”