Tangent.

Step on the scale, please.

click clickclickclick
clickclick click
click
what the fucking fuck click
c lick cl ic k

There we go, the nurse's aide said proudly, as if she had solved a Rubik's Cube and shit.

According to the scale at - the Westside Family Health Clinic of Santa Monica - I weighed as much as a fledgling manatee at seven months. According to this scale, I might weigh only 13 kilograms - on the moon. I found myself getting irritated. It was short-lived, however, because they ended up throwing me in a room, where I waited. And waited. Then proceeded with being irritated some more.

I waited for them to knock politely, open the door and give me two giant pieces of Kleenex to put on. That didn't happen so I waited for someone to come in and hand me a pee-cup. Nothing. I waited and found myself staring at signs scotch-taped on bins marked BIOWASTE: Do not dispose of diapers in this bin. Please ask medical staff for alternate receptacles.

It was at that exact moment I realized I should really get the fuck up out of there. Too late.

Dr. Lady opened the door. She was an older woman, wearing red, no-nonsense Italian frames and a bunch of gold. She had a nice smile, though, which totally disarmed one from the fact that she's probably seen over sixty-thousand sets of genitals in her line of work.
Doctors, I think. What weird people.

She asked me what I was doing there, and I told her that I got hit by a car while riding my bike.
Does she ask where I got hit, or to show her the cuts or bruises? No. She looks at me for three seconds, and says that if I take some ibuprofen I'll be fine. Ibuprofen? A pissant Advil? Write me a prescription for fucking Vikes, woman. I think all of this. Almost very loudly.

I shrug. I guess that's all there was. I get up to leave and all of a sudden, as if she has some sort of a-ha moment, Dr. Lady's face lights up and she suggests:
Pap smear?

As if things just needed to be that much fucking weirder.
It was like she was offering me a cocktail shrimp, or a stuffed mushroom. She asked again.
Pap smear. Would you like one?
Um, no. I think I'm ok. Maybe if you asked me an hour ago.

I leave feeling extremely unfulfilled.

What is it with people that are supposed to help you? First Bob the Firefuck and now her. Maybe I've watched too much General Hospital but, when you have an appointment with a doctor, aren't they supposed to at least make you think they care?

I mean granted, at this writing, it's been a couple weeks but still. Eerily enough, you couldn't tell that I'd been jacked up at all. I usually bruise quite easily and for long periods of time. The oven-mitt sized welt on my left thigh had almost lost its purple. In fact, the cut on my hand had miraculously scabbed up in two days and the scrape on my neck was also in a nifty healing state, considering I took a fucking car door off its bottom hinge around fourteen days prior. My right hand still has a slight twinge in some of the fingers, but I figure that should go away given another week or so. My friends had started making Unbreakable jokes, the-lost-X-Man jokes. Yeah. That's me, except I'd be the X-Shmuck who has to do all the bookkeeping, stuck in Xavier's library, not allowed to go on dangerous missions: If I was a superhero, I was the equivalent of Baby Plas.

I can't front, though. The days immediately following The Clobbering were kind of hectic. I ended up not being able to go to work for the rest of that week. They say the next day after an accident is always the worst, and I found out how very true that statement is: I was so fucking indigo I looked like one of the Fruit of the Loom grapes. Although I hadn't broken anything OR even bumped my noggin, surprisingly, something about the impact rattled my brain, and the left side of my jaw felt like it was a balloon, I guess from soft-tissue inflammation. Days two through four, I went from not being able to talk for long periods of time to not being able to talk at all. I looked like the beat-up stepchild of Frankenstein. This is the part where the Vicodin would have been hailed like a giant bottle of Jesus. However, since I couldn't get a doctor's appointment until that Monday - i do so love a good HMO, don't you? - I had to improvise at home.

For five days, I didn't leave my flat and existed on a steady diet of Orajel and a bottle of Laphroaig. Couple that with occassional cups of Breyer's vanilla ice cream topped with Magic Shell, sprinkles of maximum strength Alleve, and finished with copious amounts of both indica and sativa. Scoff all you want. Obviously the shit worked.

Once I get back to the office, I call YooJin and tell her I've seen a doctor, and I'll be fine. She asks me where I'll be tomorrow evening, and says she'll actually be close to the Westside when I get out of work. She tells me to meet her at her church.

The next day, at exactly 6:45pm, I pull into the parking lot of the Los Angeles Friendship Center and see that it's GINORMOUS - I realized I'd had a hard time visualizing it when she told me the address because I'd driven past it a thousand times and had always thought it was an office park, it's that fucking huge.

I get out of my truck and she's there like, instantly - like...creepy...instantly, and she has her four- year-old son and mother in tow. He's holding a stuffy of a teddy bear and waving so much that I am initially blinded by his cuteness. YooJin's mother is equally as adorable. A Holy Trinity so perfect, they looked like they should have been glued onto a billboard, promoting the daily consumption of several servings of fruits and vegetables. Or something.

Mother gestures and we walk inside the church into a lounge-type area decked out with coffee tables and overstuffed chairs. There are many extremely content looking Buddhists of different walks entering for a service that obviously starts soon. I don't want to keep them. YooJin hands me a check and pulls out a sheet of paper for me to sign, that I'm not going to sue them, blah blah blah. I immediately sign it and hand it back.

YooJin looks at me and says

Okay, just so you know, it says that you just went to the doctor and that you are fine and we are settling for---

Sure. Whatever you need to confirm that we're handling this outside of your car insurance. It's totally fine.

The mother and daughter blink and glance at each other.

YooJin continues. Well, I told all of our friends what we were doing and that you seemed like a very nice person but they said to be careful, you know, because we don't know you and we don't know what you might be up to....

I hear myself saying

You kind of met one of the nicest people you could ever hit. Don't believe everything you hear about the majority of people in Los Angeles - there are still decent and fair folks around. You just have to believe that. And. Well. You know...

They're staring at me. I look around.
There are now a hundred people piling through the entrance to the inner church.

...as someone who comes here regularly, wouldn't you WANT to believe in some of them?

I turn around and start walking in the direction of the door.
I can still hear them reeling from my profundity.

I exit the church and for some reason, it feels like I can see Jake Ryan across the street, leaning on his Porsche 911 with Lloyd Dobler wearing a trenchcoat and holding up a boombox, standing next to Blaine and Ducky holding hands while starring in a play Max Fischer is directing.

Giving a Buddhist life-lessons? Priceless.