After two days out I’m now back at work, with six new stitches right down the center of my chest (we’re going to pretend it’s a duelling scar, okay?) and a full bottle of generic Keflex, but without a chunk of flesh about the size of a 20¢ gumball. (I know there’s no such thing as a 20¢ gumball, but it was bigger than a 10¢ gumball and smaller than a 25¢ gumball.)

You know what I’m going to be thinking about while I’m watching the new “Merchant of Venice.”

For those of you following along at home, apparently what I’ve got isn’t staph but some sort of diphtheroid. Which summons up images of impoverished ex-Soviet republics or WWII Army hospitals (like my friend Andy said: Sulfa drugs? Diptheria? What did you do, spend Christmas on the Western Front?); but it turns out to be a pretty large family that includes a lot of common “skin flora,” down to and including the ones that cause acne. So whatever it is, it’s probably been there for twenty years, and just finally decided it needed more Lebensraum. Here’s hoping its national aspirations have finally been quashed with sufficient force.