Coma Show – Wool Warehouse

The Coma Recovery played tonight at a venue I’ve never been to before called the Wool Warehouse. I expected it to be a real warehouse with a bunch of wholesale stock wool, but it was much more like a hotel ballroom.

The headliner was Earth Crisis. I think around 10 bands played. This show had a clever theme; half of the bands were deemed as “Good” and the other half, “Evil”. Basically every band was placed in the “Good” category unless it was a hardcore band.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a show like this. The kids still hardcore dance. They still swing the arms. They still punch the ground. They still kick the air. It’s all fun and games until a security guard gets punched in the face and bleeds, which of course really happened.

Tom’s Wrist Slash

Coma was supposed to have band practice today. For whatever reason, practice was canceled, so Tommy and I talked about meeting up to jam anyway. Soon after the conversation, the outside temperature dropped 10 degrees, and it starting raining. So I said “Maybe we be jammin’ another day”.

Later, I got a call from Tommy urgently needing assistance because he slipped while chopping open some coconuts at his house. I collected gauze and other bandage material and drove over to his house.

The wound looked like a mouth had formed where his thumb meets his wrist, carrying a lazy expression of slightly parted lips. The mouth drooled red fluid, and by the time I got there it was mostly done drooling and spitting, so long as Tommy kept the mouth closed.

The whole thing was quite the bummer considering that if we had band practice or if I decided to jam, the coconut knife-slip never would have happened. Plus Tommy could have comfortably gone to yoga without any fears of wounds opening up during down-dogs and side-planks.

The story is that after 3 hours in the waiting room, the doctor finally began to look at the wound, tied a mask on to take a closer look, and blood shot straight out.

While Tommy was semi-irritated about the incident for short-term reasons, I’ve been thinking about the unfortunate location of the wound, and the eyes that will draw conclusions when seeing Tommy’s scar for the first time.

Work hurts.

Today, I smashed my finger within 5 minutes of arriving to work via carelessly spanking the concrete tub with a shovel. And, remember our friend who fell off the scaffold? Well, he showed up to work today, drunk, and fell off again. So he got fired.

I write about work a lot. You know, work can become your life. I’ve tried to avoid work becoming my life by doing something non-work-related every night. Something productive. Something that makes one put their balls on the line.

Or I’m just curling up next to the fire in my L.L. Bean sweater, sipping tea with my acoustic guitar in hand.

Remember, Safety Second.

We are working a few locations at once, because that’s just how the brick-laying business goes I guess.

One particular location seems to be cursed, however, as Friday presented a situation that proved to be semi-catastrophic, yet slightly comedic perhaps, in certain contexts…

The word is, that one of the construction dudes at the job site bent over near a propane heater, causing his pants to catch fire. He was loaded into the ambulance with his pants completely burned off, screaming in pain, skin hanging from his rear-end. While I thought it sounded tragic and disturbing, a couple of our guys seemed pretty entertained by the story.

Anyway, I was selected to work at the same cursed location today. We were working among a 6-foot scaffold set-up to complete a 12-foot wall. I naturally feel like I’m going to fall off of anything above the height of 4-feet, but our brick-layers seem to be completely invincible to heights-related fears.

So today, one of our dudes was finishing the top row of bricks, and needed a little boost, via cinder block, as you can see in the following cellphone photo:

I heard a loud thud (him falling off the brick onto the scaffold), and looked up in time to see him gracefully roll off the planks, and float down to the ground in a slow-motion spin, landing on his side with a calm surrendering splendor.

Long silence. Then all I could say was:

“Dude. Are you okay?”

As if woken from a nap, he looks around to process why the bricks are up there, and why he’s way down here.

We were all a little weirded out for a second, thinking of worst-case scenarios and all that. But when he got on the phone to tell one of his buddies what had happened, I had to try really hard not to laugh, for context reasons.