On Good Decisions

I believe I have shielded the necessary parties in this. I'm failry certain anyone who could read this and know them were already there when this happened, but I just wanted to be safe. (You are all retarded, by the way. And not that cool, socially acceptable kind of retarded that makes you good at math. The bad kind where it's just your own fault.)


This past Friday I found my brain wracked with thoughts until I finally fell asleep some time around 6:30 in the morning.

Around 12:30 I awoke to an uncharacteristically polite text message from my friend Jay:

"Wake up please."

"Awake," I replied. "Thank you for being so polite."

"Alright mite need u at hudson valley hospital at ur earliest convience [sic]"

"Aww pick-up?" I texted back. "From the ER, I assume?"


This was only moderately alarming. Jay has a predisposition to the shattering of hands on things. Walls, water, other people's jaws, pretty much anything.

"Yeap but its not for me just dont want leave a man behind [sic]"


Now that was interesting. I immediately flashed to our friend Murray somehow battered, bruised and stomach-pumped.

I promised to be at the hospital in twenty minutes or so, depending on parking. For this I was rewarded with the promise of a breakfast sandwich. Awesome.


Upon arrival I actually found the closest parking space that wasn't for an ambulance or the already handicapped. I was asked via Jay to hang around the ER walk-in area for a while, maybe ten minutes in total during which I checked my email and subscriptions for the day on my phone.

Jay exited the "AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY" doors and motioned me outside so he could have a cigarette and explain.

Apparently, in preparation for the snowstorm that decimated the lower East Coast this past weekend, my friends started drinking on Friday night and continued straight through noon the next day as more and more people cycled in after work.

One of our friends, we'll call him "Snappy," sober, started talking some at our friend Jimmy, and the general consensus was that they should have a somewhat relaxed fight. Just some moderate roughhousing, nothing serious.

Now the interesting thing was that last week Jay found himself idly musing on who would win in such a fight, because he was positive Snappy could take him down and he was pretty sure he could take Jimmy, but he believed if Jimmy realized his reach and larger mass could outmatch Snappy's quickness and footwork, any fight would be over fairly quickly.


Well once again Jay can accurately size up any fight. Snappy's footwork was fancy, his light jabs quick, but Jimmy just reached out, grabbed Snappy and basically fell on top of him. If you listen carefully to the video, which exists in fairly good quality, you can actually hear the moment Snappy's tibia and fibula pop apart as his foot rolls inward on itself and his ankle turns into a throbbing purple baseball.

But if anyone asks, he fell down some stairs.