The problem with knowing your mother reads your blog is that it limits the amount of wild and crazy incidents from your youth you can recount.  I can’t write about anything involving alcohol lest it shatter her image of me as a clean cut mama’s boy.  (Of course, she already knows the worst story– the family picture with a ridiculously hungover me in her living room for a good fifteen years, to shame me, no doubt, which it might well have done had I ever been able to bring myself to look at the thing.) Fortunately, that sort of nonsense belongs to my distant past, and my misspent youth.

Nor can I write about frequent, perilous encounters with a wide assortment of drugs — because there WEREN’T any.

No, instead I am forced to write about the time I inadvertently cut my –

Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for interrupting this post. But we began writing it several months ago and inexplicably stopped halfway through the previous sentence. Sadly, we no longer remember what it was we cut.

Perusing the possibilities, we immediately dismiss the obvious: hair. How could one inadvertently cut one’s hair? Likewise toenails and fingernails; difficult to cut unintentionally. Lawn? “Honey I’m sorry, I inadvertently cut the lawn this afternoon.” I think not.

The most likely explanation is some kind of wound. “I inadvertently cut my (insert body part here).”

But what? What body part have I cut significantly enough in the last few months that it would make me want to blog about it? There was the loss of my left foot recently in that unfortunate lawnmower accident. And the time I accidentally lopped off my head shaving. But neither of those warranted wasting either your time or mine blogging about it.

Truth is, I think the only thing cut was the post itself, cut short, the victim of my lovely wife returning home, or one of the cats vomiting violently on the carpet, or yet another piece of space debris clipping the roof and scaring the bejeezus out of the children (“Daddy what was that?” “Just another piece of the Hubble, girls, go back to bed”).

If I ever remember differently I’ll be sure to let you know.