a capture of 2 seconds in my head

okay, so i'm doing my best Steve impression right here. considering how this came to me, and not knowing how it will turn out is very Martinesque in my opinion. john's son's trippy 14-yr-old style of carrying things out to gross extremes also was a heavy influence. this week, john and i have had some great guffaws about the idea of a hook in place of my left hand. this is not random, but has to do with my injury and what could've happened but didn't. while i was waxing on about the could'ves john interrupted me with a swift display of his hand making a hook shape, which sent me rolling after i'd had a pretty rough emotional day. people john is a really funny man. tonight, we were debriefing (no, not taking off our underwear) and i was discussing my post-opp checkup i'm going to in Pensacola tomorrow and hoping the good Dr. could do something about the terrible swelling in my hand & fingers. "i really hope it's not infected," i said. "yeah gangrene is bad," he said. "you may end up with a hook after all." we then began discussing the myriad inconveniences of a hook (of which i will courteously not post all). i mean, you get something in your eye and follow the natural reflex to get it out with your formerly-known-as-a-hand and RIP--you're looking more and more like a pirate these days, what with the eye-patch and hook and all. thus began the next two seconds in my head which entailed the process of slowly transforming yourself into a pirate because let's face it, at this point I wouldn't give two gold schillings about personal upkeep anymore. so there goes the hygiene. as your teeth rot out, you find it less and less possible to hold a conversation or even pronounce things so you resign to uttering wistful, one-syllable noises like "arrrrrrhhhhh!" in this state of things you can no longer remain a normal, socialized being (the only people who will associate with you are the kind of folk who have no more self-respect than to go through life being called something like "Smee"). so you are exiled to the Isle of Elba where you have to make a raft to float out and commandeer a ship to get back but by this point, buddy, you've turned the corner. you know the saying: once you go pirate, you never go.....birate. and all this because of one nasty wound to the wrist. so where am I going with this? we all know that on John's blog, things must resolve. well I'm going back to the very first of the summer when I talked to teens from across the coast about Jesus being an infective person. yes, I made up the word infective and used it several times before I realized it but it made my point. i want to be infected with Jesus. i want to continue in the slow process of being made a son. C. S. Lewis points out that this process is where we go from the created to the begotten, following after the Firstborn, the prototype of this new kind of man. this "good infection" is what starts changing us slowly. once it sets in, it is still easy to ignore or deny but it becomes increasingly hard to. we must accommodate it somehow and it shows more and more. Until the line between acting the part and what is really us is forever obscured.