Last week one of my blogging buddies, Carl D’Agostino, posted this cartoon. I commented, “Ow, ow, ow! Sewed through my own finger once, long ago. My sympathies are entirely with Ed.”

To which Carl replied, “Hey, that would make a great post.”

This just proves my theory that cartoonists are fundamentally cruel people who delight in the suffering of others (which probably explains a lot about my recent foray into cartooning, come to think of it).

So, in the spirit of suffering = amusement, here are a few of the many ways I’ve managed to injure myself over the years. This one’s for you, Carl.

Yes, I did sew my own finger.  My beloved 50-year-old Singer doesn’t have a braking system that stops the needle immediately like modern machines, and several decades ago I took my foot off the control pedal but didn’t move my fingers quite fast enough.  Thunk, the needle went right through the middle of my fingernail. Fortunately it stopped when it hit bone. A bit of blood, some violent profanity, and a couple of weeks to heal, and I was all better.

Construction and automotive projects cost me knuckle-skin on a regular basis, and I consider that the price of admission. But there’s one type of knuckle injury that always fills me with a colossal sense of insult: My kitchen shelves bite me. Regularly.

The edges are sharp as hell, and the shelves are close together. When reaching for something in a hurry it’s far too easy to slam a knuckle into one of them, removing a neat and startlingly painful wedge of knuckle skin. That’s usually followed by a bellow of outrage and sometimes a savage kick at the nearest object, which is, of course, the lower cabinet. There’s a reason why I have good carpentry skills.  I’ve had lots of practice…

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you probably remember how I punched myself in the eye while kickboxing. That was actually pretty funny, once I recovered from the fear of a detached retina.

But probably the funniest injury I’ve ever sustained was the time I went barrelling out onto our smooth concrete front steps wearing snowy boots. The incident played out in agonizing slow motion:

• My feet rocketing forward as if the porch was greased.
• My boots flying up to approximately head-height.
• My momentum carrying me past the top three steps, just to ensure maximum dropping distance before impact.
• My mind uttering the most frequently-spoken last words on the planet: “Oh, shit!”
• My butt crashing down on the edge of the bottom step.

But it didn’t end there. I’m in good shape. And every muscle was tensed to its utmost. You know the expression, ‘You could bounce a quarter off those abs’? Well, apparently you can bounce an entire human being off my ass.

Yes, I bounced. Off my left butt cheek. And landed sitting upright on the sidewalk, legs stretched neatly in front of me.

It’s good to know my core muscles are strong enough to maintain a perfect pike position even through catastrophic impact. So the up side was that I didn’t hit my head or my back on the stairs.

But it totally sucked to have a single spectacular bruise that I couldn’t display when I told the story…

Anybody else have an America’s Funniest Home Videos moment?