So here’s a little story from my weekend. It’s hard to tell it. Or at least it’s hard to type it…

Saturday afternoon… baby shower… we’d just arrived, earlier than most… in the kitchen, I see a virgin arrangement of cheeses… I am the first to discover it… I go to cut myself a li’l slice o’ cheese… little cute cheese knife…

The thing sort of exploded in my hand, the ceramic handle shattering as the cheese knife came apart. At first I thought it was just a little cut, but I subsequently noticed that all three cheeses, the table, and some of the floor had a spattering of blood. My blood.

Yes, the pad of my index finger, which had been pressing down upon the knife, had been sliced, probably a little more than halfway through.

People began to come into the kitchen as I stood at the sink clutching a paper towel to my finger and contemplating my next move. Jeanne’s reaction to my suggestion that we might consider a quick jaunt down to the hospital was to get some antibiotic cream and offer to put it on my finger.

I looked at her and said, “Tut tut, dear wife, I assure you that the damage to my appendage is far beyond a home remedy, and we should proceed to the emergency room with all due haste, thus sparing you the grisly sight of my mutilated flesh. Come, let us away.”

I wish I’d said that, actually. But it didn’t occur to me. Instead I lifted the paper towel and allowed her a peek, which accomplished the same thing that those words would have but also threw in a little permanent mental scarring for good measure. Because I’m a giver. Fifteen seconds later we were making the kinds of polite excuses that one makes when leaving a very pregnant host with a kitchen full of blood-soaked cheeses, and headed for the car.

I have to insert a quick side note here. As we drove to the emergency room, I distinctly tasted the remnants of cheese in my mouth. This can only mean one thing. Some time between shattering the knife and flipping my hand over to assess the gory damage, before I’d looked around to see the splashes of blood upon the plate, the table, the floor, even upon the other, still untouched cheeses (including a delicious-looking brie), before any of that, I must have taken the little hunk of cheese that the now-ruined knife had (sort of) cut and popped it into my mouth.

For some reason, I find that the most disturbing part of all this.

The emergency room was depressing, partly because despite the large number of patients, almost none of them seemed to be there for actual emergencies. For instance, when I was finally brought in, it was alongside a little girl who had a sore throat. This sucks for two reasons: 1) Clearly, too many people have to resort to ERs as their primary health care provider, and 2) It took more than two hours to get my finger stitched up (and I was “fast-tracked”). I immediately began constructing moralistic revenge fantasies in which some greedy plutocrat or shiftless insurance company lobbyist finishes another day of killing any hope of an American universal healthcare plan, loses his balance while high-fiving his equally shiftless cohort, impales himself on his own cellphone, and then bleeds to death in the emergency room while watching a family of five having their tonsils looked at. Not an especially creative way to channel my rage, I admit, and a pretty obvious ending, yes. In my defense, I had lost a bit of blood.

I was about at the point where I was mentally casting Willem Dafoe as the shiftless plutocrat and Jennifer Connelly as the overworked-but-dedicated ER doctor when the actual and not-completely-unlike-Jennifer-Connelly ER doctor turned her attention to my finger. I myself got the chance to examine it thoroughly at that time. It was deep. Without going into too much detail, I think I can describe the cut pretty accurately: It was a horizontal wound that went completely across the pad of my index finger. And there was not a single angle that I could look at my finger from in which the cut was not visible. But the fact that I could still move the finger, and that I could definitely still feel it, these were good signs.

X-rays showed no ceramic, steel, or dairy still lodged in my finger, anesthetics were injected into my wound in a horribly painful way, numbness set in, stitches were stitched, and I was released on my own recognizance. It’s going to be fine, I think. I’m told the baby shower went fine too, though we can assume there was a conspicuous supply of crackers left over.

And no, I don’t have insurance. Ironically, I will by summertime. So yes, the bill is going to put me back in the hospital. Therefore, I would ask you to please wait until June before inviting me to any parties involving adorably clever little pieces of cutlery. But I digress.

Anyway, about an hour later, I was onstage at IO West, doing a musical improv show. Let me explain. I’d been scheduled to do a show and didn’t feel like sitting at home waiting for the anesthetic to wear off. So… I just tried to not use my hand, which is a little like trying not to visualize a purple dog (go ahead, I’ll wait). I admit that I was more than a little excited to pull that “show must go on” crap in a dramatic but relatively low-risk fashion. If you forget for the moment that it was really just a glorified paper cut and focus instead on the fact of me, bravely performing, with a hospital bracelet still on my wrist… well, it’s pretty damn sexy, isn’t it?

I originally set out to tell you this story in a couple of sentences. As a way of explaining why I’m not blogging today. Clearly, my cover has been blown, though, and I’ve found that nine-fingered typing is not only not all that arduous, it seems to involve three or four more fingers than I’d previously been using. So what’s my point, then? I guess my first point is that everyone ought to feel very, very bad for me, buy me “get well” presents, email me kind thoughts, click on the “Donate” link and send me a li’l something, resolve to treat me better now that you’ve almost lost me and you understand what a precious gift it is to get to spend this time with me, and etc. Of course. But as long as I’m here, also -

As overworked as the phrase may sound, we really need to fix this country’s health care system. Shiftless plutocrats and their lobbyist lackeys will tell you that a plan that covers everyone will cost more, but a trip down to your local ER on a Saturday afternoon will show you that you are, in fact, already paying top dollar for a very poor form of universal healthcare. AND paying for your own on top of that. They will tell you that a socialized program will be inefficient or insubstantial, but as a guy who once blew out his knee on a Canadian stage, I can tell you that this is not the case.

My dad was a doctor. By the end of his life he could no longer afford to run the little private practice he’d nurtured for his entire career. The insurance premiums were too high, the reimbursement checks from Medicare and related programs far too low (for fun, he kept a drawer full of checks that were made out for less than the cost of the stamps it took to mail them, usually meant as payment for expensive procedures). He’d once viewed socialized healthcare as a threat, but by the mid-90’s he said he thought it was inevitable, and that he thought this was a good thing. The only questions, he thought, were how long it was going to take before Americans woke up to that fact and did something about it, and how rich the people profiting off the current system would get before that happened.

It’s definitely something I’ll be thinking about as November approaches. As much as candidates would prefer me to be thinking about scary Muslims, I’m going to be thinking about a little girl with a sore throat. As much as they’d like me to focus my fear on nuclear weapons that might get made, I’m going to be quivering for fear of the cheese knives that are already out there. Because make no mistake: They are out there. And they’re waiting.