There you have it

I promised you the story that clearly outlines while I write humor. Because my life is a bumbling hodgepodge of humiliations. All I can say is, thank Zeus I find it all funny or I’d never stop crying.

I have been very paranoid about my face breaking out during the Tucson Festival of Books. For some reason I cannot fathom, now that I’m in my 40’s my face has started breaking out way worse than it ever did while I was a teenager. There is nothing fair about it, but there’s also nothing that can really be done except wash it and use Retin-A – which I did like a maniac for the week leading up to the festival. I did not want a giant, swollen zit on my chin just in time for me to spend a weekend with famous authors I respect, nor did I want a pimple winking at the audience of my workshop panel on Sunday.

I took the last two days off from the Bank of No Forks last week to get everything ready for the Festival. Wednesday night I was up until about midnight stuffing 500 give-away bags and finally went to bed because I started feeling ill.  It turns out Kelli and I and our good friend Leigh all got sick when we took Leigh to lunch for her birthday. Ava escaped the Italian Death Sentence by going to Albuquerque. So that meant I was up all night, in and out of the bathroom, expressing misery and a will to die.

Around 5:00am I heard My Honey make his lunch and leave the house for work. Immediately after the front door closed I heard rustling in the kitchen – a sure sign Roscoe the Idiot Dog was stealing the bread My Honey must have left out on the counter. I cursed soundly and whipped the covers off the bed, determined to catch the little bastard in the act.

Remember it was only 5am so the house was dark as I snuck down the hall in stocking feet. I could see Roscoe’s shape in the living room, hunched over the bread bag, the plastic crinkling in the darkness. I slunk right up behind him and yelled, “Hey!” really loud.

The moral of this story is that you can, indeed, sneak up on and scare the bejesus out of a bloodhound – especially if said hound is concentrating really hard on something naughty. One wouldn’t think so, what with the ridiculously powerful sense of smell they possess, but I assure you it is possible.

Roscoe jumped straight up in the air, whirled around snarling at the obvious intruder, and bit me. On the nose.

I am not proud to say my first reaction was to whop him on the head with the closest thing at hand – a pink Hello Kitty lap desk of my daughter’s. The minute Roscoe realized it was me, he was mortified but by then I was already in the bathroom mopping up the blood of which there was a lot. Did you know your face bleeds a lot? It does. I’m here to tell you.

I called My Honey on his cell phone, “This is not your fault, but I’m totally blaming you!”

So I entered into the long weekend with crystal clear skin, not a blemish in sight. However, my nose has two gashes, a bruise and a bit of swelling.

That my friends, is why I write comedy.