Or, why I'll be offline a little while longer:

I once read that the majority by weight of living matter on Earth is bacteria, and probably has been and will be for millions of years.  In a sense, this is really their planet, and we're just an interesting (and still possibly unsuccessful, if you follow the news) evolutionary sideshow.

I mention this because I once knew a man who slammed his pinky in a sliding door months before I met him.  On that occasion, he seemed to recover perfectly, but what no one realized was that some particularly hostile bacteria got in his system, quietly bided their time, saw the sights among his innards, picked out a good spot, and then suddenly made themselves at home in large number.  And so one day, this seemingly-completely-healthy fellow wound up in the hospital, near death. 

And I mention this because things have been going ridiculously well for me lately, and so naturally when I've talked about it all with old friends, wondering how so much good luck can come so fast, I've often played down my good fortune with dark little remarks about how yes, well, I'm sure there's some horrible tiny disease lurking within me, waiting to explode without warning.

And I mention that because the other day I took a bunch of folks out for pizza, enjoying a nice Ohio summer day... and suddenly noticed that one of my arms was, um... growing.

Within a few hours, I had a golf-ball sized lump near the left elbow.  And it was still growing, spreading outward, possibly gathering momentum.

Did I see a doctor right away?  Of course not, because a) I'm usually pretty healthy, and most of my unexpected boogers have a tendency to just wander off, and b) I am an idiot.  These two factors led me to theorize I had some sort of exotic insect or spider bite, perhaps, and it was just a minor allergic reaction, and anyway, who did I know who ever just suddenly manifested a bizarre illness when they were otherwise obviously healthy?

Besides the sliding-door guy.

Those around me augmented my rationalizations by inventing their own with remarkable speed, soon debating willy-nilly just how many spider bites we probably have that we don't even notice, as if somehow this made my throbbing blob less alarming.  One even suggested that, heck, it's a fact, you know, that we swallow spiders in our sleep.  All the time.  Like, three, four, maybe half a dozen a year.  Reassuring, yes?  Doing the math, we all somehow consume over 100 spiders before even graduating high school, and somehow never even notice.  Gosh.  I feel better already.

I think natural selection must have greatly rewarded the ability to reassure oneself in a crisis with complete bullshit.  It's not hard to see how: if two early hominids are both fleeing a large, faster predator from which there is no escape, and one of them is sincerely thinking "I'm gonna be OK, I'm gonna be OK, the gods are watching over me, I'm gonna be OK" and the other is thinking "AAIEE!  I'm dinner!  I'm an entree!  AAIEE!  I'M GONNA DIE!" it's not hard to guess which one will give up first and wind up getting dragged around by his entrails.  Indeed, inventing reassuring bullshit may be humankind's keenest survival skill.  And now that we are our own greatest predator, it will probably kill us all.

If bacteria had any appreciation for irony, we'd hear an awful lot of tiny giggling.

But then came a fever knocking up around 102, and an angry red swelling that seemed intent on colonizing my entire arm.  So, um, yes, urgent care facility, please.

And it turns out that, yes, I was carrying around some horrible little bug inside of me, although we'll never know the source, and god only knows how long it has been in there.  (The best guess we have is about a month, for a series of reasons.  And we don't think there was ever an actual bite from anything involved.  But these are guesses.  We'll never know.)

But since I live in a developed country and my injury occurred during the eeny burp of human history in which we've had antibiotics which can usually fight the little beasties, it's no big. 

The labcoats just unloaded a six-pack of magic goo in my ass, gave me several bottles of white pills to gradually swallow, and I'm supposed to keep the arm compressed, warmed, elevated, and relatively immobile until it's all shiny again, meanwhile monitoring myself for chills, sweats, fever spikes, or other signs that the bacteria have remembered again whose frikkin' planet this actually is.

Trivial, really.

But that's why I'm not posting much or answering a lot of email in the next few days.

Bottom line: no worries, I stopped being an idiot in time, and I'll be just fine.  Totally, completely fine.

Probably.

Which is exactly true for you, too.

But if you suddenly break out in giant red throbbing golf balls, get to the doctor faster than I did.

And if you wake up in the middle of the night with a mouthful of half-eaten spiders... don't say my friends didn't warn you.