Happy Friday the Thirteenth, kind of tardy.

Because this is how it is in 2015 we celebrated a happy Friday the Thirteenth. This is how you celebrate that fine holiday as in The last thing I remember is a tall, pasty skinned man with a long name in a flat paper hat putting the oxygen mask over my mouth with the chatty nurse holding me down and unexplained mutton chop guy staring at me. Hipster fella in scrubs kept telling me it would all be fine. All be fine. An oxygen mask coming in for landing in slow motion until it settled over my face and they are still insisting everything would be fine. Over and over. Like they were all in the same cult and inviting me to their party.

It'll be fine.

Don't freak out.

Then I woke up and a lady was shooting me up with pain killers and rattling on about that shit they pulled out of my knee was chunks of bone the size of big fat grapes. She didn't say it like that. I did.

Muthatruckin' knee surgery my friends. Welcome to the future. You pay up front and they send you home with a little bag of ice and complimentary socks that I'll never wear again except I paid a lot for those socks so I took 'em. Wore them right out the door. Where my Otterpop was waiting for me.

Say what you will about Otterpop. Not my shining glory of dog training. She does not want you to touch her and sure as hell doesnt want to say hi to yer goddamn labradoodle. But I will tell you this. We brought her along to knee surgery and she slept in the car during the procedure. I knew right where she was, just on the other side of the surgery wall where I was laying all humiliating hospital gown and cafeteria lady head piece on a skinny cot asking for more pain meds. She saw the nurse load me out of a wheelchair into the car seat in a floppy, slow moving pile. And that dog has not and will not leave my side since. There no walks for her. No hanging out anywhere other than exactly next to me so that we are always touching. I finally had to force her to to go outside to pee, otherwise she was planning on holding it forever. Every excrutiating, slow motion trip I make somewhere across my tiny house she moves along, too. That is one loyal companion sidekick thug for life. For a side of the road, sick joke of sub standard chihuahua and cattle dog genes with bad knees herself, I have one constant for better and for worse companion that I know is going to be there for me, twentyfourseven.

Now I float along in a foggy sunshine of painkillers and ice. I'm strapped on to a borrowed motorized icewater cooler with a blue rubber hose that velcros around my knee, propped up on to a dog haired couch pillow with holes in it exactly the size of Banksy's teeth.

Banksy has gone on holiday to Camp Auntie Wendy's house. She has taken over Kicks!'s little outdoor cot and I guess is pretty much playing nice except for a snarky incident with the boyfriend's lab and some howling. The howling is a thing. A little sad face text comes along with the news of howling Banksy who misses me. I may be an evil witch but she misses the evil witch enough to keep everybody awake at night with her very sad Joni Mitchell coyote song.

I have 2 little nurses that share the couch. Actually a loveseat. We all fit, arranged exactly so. One little dog on each side. Gustavo enjoys his pillows. Ruby is just Ruby. She already lives in a foggy mist most of her days, just doing her thing and announcing the next meal by running around in circles and bumping into things. She is like having a crazy nurse who whines. Gary is the best husband nurse ever and now takes care of all of us, feeding me kale juice and high end chocolates from a little box tied with red satin ribbon. And goddamn, my otterpop. Glued on to me just like my ice machine. And she never drips.

In the near future, crutches and the hope of some weight bearing in a few days. The far future, back to some running after months of painfully slow rehab. Much slow and careful and everything taking a long, long time, for a long time. Beyond that, more knee surgery as those big chunks of bone all came from my disintegrating knee cap. Not much of it left. Go figure. I would say to you, if your knee hurts now, bones can vanish within your skin, and this is something I don't wish on anybody.

It's an agility cliche. The older lady in the knee brace, pointing at stuff while the border collie runs around and does as much as she can without spinning out. Not who I thought I would ever be. Not my preferred way of handling but perhaps what's coming for me. Banksy will come home in a couple days when I'm ready for a speedy blur dashing through the house again. Forest walks and the beach and walking down to the pond remain elusive, we aren't quite sure how this is going to work. Work itself, running a business which involves 1100 lb animals, another problem. These are things not quite yet figured out, but there has to be a way. Right?

For now, it's me and Otterpop and a stack of pillows and the couch and my good friend ipad. I might not remember what I just said, but I have half a bottle of tiny white pills and a raymond pettibon sonic youth and nirvana show flyer that make everything seem a-ok.