Of Broken Ribs, A Jello Horse, and YouTube

by Brian Allen Carr

We have a broken rib. This is the most unfortunate of wounds. Doctors can do nothing for you. Luckily there’s alcohol. Thankfully there is YouTube. We are at our most powerful while watching strangers get wounded.

Check out this sucker.

That poor sonofabitch. Our pain lessens every time he winces. Our wound was sustained in far less dramatic fashion. We rolled out of our bed and landed on a table. At first it wasn’t bad. We coughed. Something shifted that shouldn’t have. Now we cannot move. This would be okay, we suppose, but unfortunately we are on vacation. It’s no fun to ache through your free time. We’d prefer the condition kept us from things we’d rather not do. We don’t like to work. We don’t like to shovel snow.

The agony is mesmerizing. We tried reading, but it hurts to hold the book. We will try a smaller book. We may re-read A Jello Horse. It’s the most beautiful small book we’ve read in a long time. Matthew Simmons’ prose is supple. His words lay like buttons made from bruises on the page.

Watch this wipeout.

We don’t wish hurt upon anybody, however, we are happy that others are suffering along with us.

Here are five randomly selected sentences culled from various books:

But the laughter, the whiff of the hospital smell, and the boy’s nearness combined to put him into a trance that held his mind and his senses hopelessly captive. After the cows have warmed under the sun, they roam the pasture eating its grasses and drinking from the trough. The dogs do not get up,  and their tails don’t wag. Ordinarily, however, a subject requires division into topics, each of which should be dealt with in a paragraph. We drove to the lava field.

Can you spot the Matthew Simmons’ sentence. If you can, and you are the first to post it in the comment box, we will send you a copy of A Jello Horse.

Here’s a video of a monkey sniffing his finger.