Injury

Humans are such frighteningly fragile, warlike creatures.

The average person, it seems, has never actually been deliberately harmed by another human being, which is comforting, to realize, in its way. But no one is immune to the hardship of injury.

From a child's skinned knees to my Mom's fabulously bruised hands (she got special boffer-sword fighting training this last Saturday, I gather), everyone has been hurt at least a little bit, on occasion. In fact, not feeling pain is treated as a grave medical condition: if you don't feel pain, you don't realize when you're grinding your poor, fragile body into dust.

The games I play tend to treat injury and even death as nothing particularly noteworthy. Of course, having your hit points fall to 0 is generally treated as being "knocked out," rather than dead. But still. I had a character get turned to stone in my last D&D campaign, and she pretty much just dusted herself off, no worse for the wear. A shiny red potion later, and most injuries are rather suddenly nonissues ... then again, the point is to have fun. It's very, very hard to have fun if you're too busy contemplating how much pain your character is going to be in, or how even a minor head wound can lead to a major concussion or lifetime debilitation if not cared for properly.

I've got a scar on my leg from running carelessly through a friend's house. There was a radio with a busted antenna just lying on the floor. It cut through skin and muscle, so that there was "white stuff" showing underneath all of the blood.

Oh, dammit - I'm bleeding again.

I keep picking at scabs, without really thinking about it.

Really wasn't going anywhere with that, though - just realized I needed to post something.

AFK, NuSkin.