FOOSH.

"One never knows, do one?" 

I have, I've been told by my orthopedist, a FOOSH injury, an injury so common they've given it its own acronym.

FOOSH is not, as I suggested, a contraction of Foolish and Shithead. It stands for Fall On Out- Stretched Hand.

This makes eminent sense since that's what I did. I fell on my out-stretched hand and damaged my rotator cuff. Hopefully the pain will be alleviated through nothing more invasive than physical therapy. Though I'm sure I will never pitch again, perhaps one day I will have again a catch with a son-in-law or a grandson or grand-daughter. Perhaps not. As Fats Waller used to sing, "One never knows, do one?"

FOOSH injuries are endemic, I think, to the world we live in. We suffer minor hurts while protecting ourselves from major ones. Surely falling on my out-stretched hand was preferable to falling on my out-stretched nose.

The world has been a pretty shitty place of late. Planes have been shot out of the sky in eastern Europe, rockets rain indiscriminately, it seems, over the Earth's open-wound, the Middle East. Of course hardly a day goes by without a car bomb killing 16 in one of the -Stans or their neighbors. This morning there was a report on the radio about our latest botched lethal injection with quotations from the murder victim's sister saying that the murderer deserved the suffering he suffered.

Things have been awful enough in the world who knows they might even have pushed an American mass-shooting or two off the airwaves. I guess school's out. There hasn't been a school shooting for over a fortnight.

All that said, as a planet, we keep going. People still worry about their tans, leave early for the beach, post photos of their latest blue drink or barbecue. Foolish Shit.

I think that quotidian stuff is our FOOSH. It's our way of breaking our fall.

It's how we bear the larger pain of life on Earth.