Shirts are the Enemy

     The world hates me.

     I'm not depressed or suicidal at all, by the way.

     A couple days ago, a couple cousins and I went swimming at my uncle's parents house. Like I said, the cousins I'm staying with are young and autistic, so I basically spent a lot of my time watching them, making sure they didn't drown themselves.

     The oldest of the three decided to start a game of tag. I decided I could manage to watch the kids and play with them at the same time. I got away with this for a little while until the oldest (only four years old, mind you) decided to really make me play.

     I played along with her as she chased me out of the pool and to the diving board. She was it, and she wanted me to run away from her (she really did say that). As she got close, she said "Dive, Tylan, dive!"

     I complied. I dove into the water.

     It sucks being tall sometimes. This was one of those times.

     Very rarely do I actually dive correctly. Fate was with/against me, and I entered perfectly. Being tall, I went all the way down to the bottom very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that I didn't have time to adjust for the fact that the rough concrete was speeding towards my chest.

     I've never had road rash, but I think what happened was more or less the same thing.

     My whole chest scraped along the bottom of the pool, in this amorphous shape of redness to appear across my whole front side of my torso.

     Not to worry, it's healed a little bit, but it's still something to laugh at when you see it, because it looks like a gigantic hickey. No joke.

     So I got that battle scar first.

     The next day, I went to do some yard work early on in the day, around 11:30-ish. The sun was hot, I was wearing a black shirt, and I was going to be out there for another two hours.

     Because of the already present heat, my shirt began to stick to my body. With the aforementioned pool-induced hickey, this was an extremely uncomfortable and painful situation. My head was stuck in the moment, so I simply took off my shirt so I wouldn't have to deal with it.

     Two days later, I am still dealing with the consequence of that decision. My whole back, mostly my shoulders, looks as if I grafted skin from a freshly cooked lobster.

     With these major pains on both sides of my body, I have finally taken into account Green Day's song Know Your Enemy.

     Shirts.

     Shirts are the enemy.