A curve in the bone

Sometimes you just look at a part of your body and it makes you realize that you're not all that bright. For me there are more than a few things that I can look at that make me upset about myself and some of the decisions that I've made to this point in my life. One of those things is a small bone in my right hand.

Throughout my life, I've been a very competitive person. I like to think that I can best just about anyone at anything. One of the my problems, in that aspect, is that it can, and does, apply to things that I've never even attempted before. You can hand me a Jai-alai cesta and within a few minutes I'll think that I can dominate the game.

How does this apply to my hand? Well, as I've covered before in earlier stories, I've played a bit of basketball. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'm very good at it though. Being 5'11" (and a half) doesn't really allow for you to be a dominant player, especially if you can't dribble or shoot well. Oh, but that has never stopped me from believing that I couldn't beat just about anyone I would play against.

About 12 years ago, I was playing a pickup game against a few guys from my local high school in our gym. It was a standard pickup game. Nothing on the line. No money that would exchange hands if either team lost. Just a few guys out on the court playing hoops for exercise. Well, that's probably what they thought it was. I on the other hand had to beat these guys. Had to.

You see, at some point in my upbringing I developed an ultra competitve spirit, but I never developed the coordination or the talent to apply it to any particular sport. Those kinds of things can really slow you down when you're out playing against other people, so if you notice these things about yourself or anyone else please notify the proper sporting authorities.

Back to the game. I really couldn't begin to tell you anything about that particular pickup game, except for the fact that I believe I was playing against Richard Horton. Don't ask me why I think he was playing. He wasn't a person that I really knew in school. He wasn't a person that I played games with often, and in fact, I can't even rememeber if he played on any of our high school teams or not. To me, this is very odd, as I have very little recollection of my school days. For whatever reason though, I think he was there.

Well, to make a short story very long, I ended up losing the game. I probably missed a shot, or the other team made a shot, that part of the event is quite fuzzy. What I do remember was running towards the padded wall of the gym and pulling back with my right hand, and punching the "padded" concrete wall with all of the force that I could muster.

It took me about 4 or 5 weeks to realize that I had broken my hand, and by the time that I had figured out that something was wrong and had gone to the doctor to have them X-ray it, it was already too late. The bones had begun to heal into a new curved bone and there was nothing that could have been done, short of re-breaking the bones and putting my hand into a cast, to fix it. I decided that I needed a reminder of what I had done, so I didn't let the doctor try to do anything to attempt to repair the damage.

Since then I've tried very hard to break, no pun intended, my competitive drive and, to a certain extent, I have gotten some of it under control. But there are still times where I will make a complete ass of myself because I think that I should have been able to do something, that quite honestly, there is no way I could do without months or years of practice.

Each day, I've struggled for a way to work with this problem. Each day, I look for something that will force me to get all of this misdirected emotion under control.

Sarah felt her first kick today. I don't need to do it for me now. I have to do it for someone else.