I seem to have broken a finger

I seem to have broken a finger riding my bike past Bruce Springsteen's house. I can only assume this is what I was doing since nobody would actually tell us which house he lived in. But we did the best we could.

And under the category of truth in blogging, the finger was mangled not in the actual midst of Sunday's Twin Lights Charity Ride (as one might have gathered from the above), but, rather, early the morning of, in front of Bagel World, 6:45 a.m., when yours truly, choosing to save the life of a child who ran in front of my bicycle at the risk of losing my own, slammed on the clampers but, in the heat of the matter, failed to unclip my feet from the pedals. In that nanosecond of awareness one has in the middle of something unpleasant, I reflected on the general condition of my shoulder and thought, mid-plummet, "This is really going to hurt."

Truer words are rarely spoken.



This man, by the way, was one of my riding mates. The painting of him (which does make him look at bit as if savages had peeled his skin off and left him to die of exposure in the desert) is a classic early GVR drip work--long before I evolved that loosy-goosey (but gloriously so) style into what is now universally termed the obscured box technique--and resides in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Susswein of Brooklyn, NY.

The good news? Well...the way I paint, you don't really need precise use of your digits. You just kind of grab the stick and flail away. It's more like tennis than painting, really. So the finger's not such a consideration, given the givens.

And, I would additionally ask, what really is pain when you pause to behold the final version of Big Maria I (Plane Too Many)? Which would, of course, be this:



Tomorrow--into the breach (whatever that means) with the damned thing.