High Noon & Broken Pinkey Productions

Denzel Washington and I have a lot in common. Famous, good-looking, wealthy. Perhaps the greatest thing we have in common though is a busted pinkey on our right hands. Pinkey-in-Arms. He busted his in a basketball mishap. I busted mine on my brother's brick-hard head in a teenage fight about something stupid no doubt. Basketball was involved before and after the scrap. When my brother came to, he cackled that my right hand hand had crumbled like a stomped-on aluminum can. I felt like punching him again but I didn't pack a lot of power with my left hook. So, I took it like a near-man and sulked and stewed.

I had some combo of 3-2 (two broken fingers and three broken knuckles, or three broken fingers and two knuckles). I tried to keep playing BBall after my hand shattered and I couldn't even hold the ball. I should have gone to the hospital immediately. Instead I waited about a week and when went I to the Emergency Room with my weary Mom, where I was a semi-regular, my right pinkey hand already started to set and the fine Physician decided to cast my hand in a fist which has caused this deformity to be permanent. I was so accident prone as a kid that I would wait a week to see if the damage needed medical attention. Medically a bad move with the hand in retrospect...

I have a Asperger's kid at school who, when he first registered, asked my about my broken pinkey. Have to love these cut straight to the bone no hold's barred dispensing of social graces autistic kids. Truth-tellers. I have worked with thousands of kids in my career and rarely get queried about the pinkey. Every so often at school, a student punches a locker or a cinder-block wall in anger over some adolescent Sturm Und Drang (usually boyfriend-girlfriend). They then complain that their hand hurts and I provide expert counseling on the inadvisability of punching hard inanimate objects. Yes, my training as a counselor provides especially poignant insights.

My buddy from California sent me the link about Denzel so I snapped this picture and emailed it back to him. I had shown him my pinkey before in person and told the associated tale. About a decade and a half-ago I composed  a compendium of 40 poems titled 40 Days and 40 Nights: Dysfunctional Poetry for Men and created a publishing company and called it Broken Pinkey Productions. It was just a xeroxed deal and I have toyed around with officially compiling these poems into a book. I would really like to sell ten books first of my already created book On The Edge: Transitioning Imaginatively to College. To make that milestone more epic-looking, I will symbolize it with a Roman Numeral X--like the movies and Superbowl.

Ah yes, the fickle finger of fate. Some get a thumbs-up, others get the bird. Some get a broken pinkey. I am fairly convinced that there is a cabal of established writers, book publishers, and bookstores, that keep newcomers out to lessen the competition. Sort of like the gauntlet, one has to run through the line of indifference that deliver smacks to the head and body blows. If you are still standing at the end, then maybe you have what it takes to get noticed. I am not bitter, just jaded a bit. I have been through the Ph.D. process, so I am well aware that one way to keep one's achievements rarer is to create a series of exercises and activities like those sick tasks on American Ninja which weed out the less-persistent. The tasks themselves seem designed not on logic but mere menace.

I use the pinkey at school to illustrate that if one lives by the punch, one will die by it...or at least have a permanent consequence for embracing violence for every conflict. My brother and I had few skirmishes after the hand-breaking and knuckle-shattering fight. It wasn't that we no longer disagreed or hated each others' guts anymore at times, it just seemed a stupid way to handle conflict. I wonder if Dick Cheney will ever learn the lesson. Some right-wing local State Rep who fought as a soldier in Iraq continues to tweet how Obama has failed to follow-through on Iraq. It is pretty disingenuous because we should have never gone into Iraq in the first place. He posted a link from the Weekly Standard where the writer of the article actually premised ex post-facto that we were right to go into Iraq because Saddam was a bad dude. I responded to the tweet that this was the same Saddam that we were allied to when he took on the Iranians with our tacit approval as a payback to the Ayatollah. Friend, enemy, just give it a couple of years.

Neo-Cons are in love with violence and believe in bombs. Plus, dear State Rep, the Iraqi government refused to protect our soldiers from prosecution in their legal system, a necessary condition if we were going to continue to get in the middle of a fight where we had best stay clear of. I have stopped following the State Rep on Twittter. He has his story and he is sticking to it. Most of the Conservatives around here are the unthinking reactionary-type. Perfectly suited to be served by a Fox News parroting State Rep who is not used to having to defend his edicts. Oh, the sheer arrogance that I would even dispute his pronouncements.

The sad truth is that our Iraq campaign was a terrible and tragic waste and rather than re-engage a fight we cannot win, best to let the Shiites and the Sunnis fight to the death if they insist. The awful destruction of World War I and II finally slaked the warrior thirst for blood on the Continent. Say what you will about Europe, it has developed a strong distaste for war that is healthy. There is a lot of bifurcation with the use of force to fight enemies and I think both the pacifists and the militarists are wrong. It is easy to go into one corner or the other. Watch High Noon if you need a primer on the judicious use of violence to end violence. That is not an oxymoron. We used to understand that. Do not forsake my oh my darling....