OK, I have officially had it. I am through, absolutely through. Here we are, something like four months out from the next presidential election and I just can’t take it any more. It’s not the candidates that have me going coo-coo. That whole song and dance is at least entertaining. What I’m talking about are the polls — the endless, non-stop, daily, earth-shuttering, hurry-up-and-read-it-‘cus-a-new-one’s-coming-in-five-minutes polls. They’re everywhere. You take a shower — there’s a poll in there. You try to eat your breakfast cereal — there’s a poll in there. Anywhere you look, there’s a new poll. Look, I understand wanting to take the pulse of the nation, but aren’t we going a little overboard here? This isn’t taking the pulse — this is a 24-hour MRI. We don’t need this much information. Take a few polls every couple of months and be done with it. I think we can afford a little suspense in our lives. Just a little. But if regular polls aren’t bad enough, I’m noticing a new trend: stupid polls. At least with regular polls, there’s relevant information that doesn’t knock the collective IQ of the nation down a notch or two. They basically just ask potential voters which candidate will get their hanging chad, and questions like that.

Boy, add a little water to a Florida yard and in no time you have what looks like an Amazonian rain forest. The kind of place that you fear to venture to far out as the weeds and the critters might just carry you away. Mostly the weeds. My yard is in full bloom, and most of it is quite pretty. The firecracker plants in the front are little red refueling stations for two neighborhood hummingbirds, and the butterfly bushes are attracting their fair share of butterflies. I have pineapples on the pineapple plants, lemons on the lemon tree and the herbs in my daughter’s backyard garden (planted in an old timey, four-footed bathtub) smelling herby. Much of it is paradise, but the rest was turning to jungle. A natural yard is both beautiful and bedeviling, especially when it rains. Prolonged droughts can leave all-but the hardiest plants wilted and wounded. Ours are very hardy, and that just makes them more jumpy when the rains come. Steady and frequent rains make little plants, and other bits of green, stretch their spindly legs and venture out like bears after a long winter slumber. They start out slow, just testing the land, before rip-roaring out of the gate and swallowing up all in sight.

It seemed like a winning proposition: Head down with my brother to my mother’s house in Tampa and lay more than 700-square-feet of hardwood floors in her upstairs. She was paying us a substantial fee and promised to order us carry-out food until our intestines resembled manatees. Yet, somehow it sounded too good to be true. Too simple. Too easy. Too lacking in major complications the kind that are either life-threatening or get you sent to a special hospital where you try to work out why you’ve suddenly taken up eating wallpaper. Two little details had seemed to escape us (or maybe we had blocked them out): 1) the only way upstairs was a narrow spiral staircase; 2) the upstairs, like the downstairs, was un-air conditioned. And because heat rises, the second floor sucks up heat like a vacuum, collecting it in scalding corners that every so once in a while erupt in jets of scorching flames. As my brother and I stood there surveying the scene that first morning — the temperature already hovering around the boiling point of iron — one of his shoes caught fire. We watched as the sweat emerged on our skin and then instantly evaporated, forming thunderstorms in the appropriately named “sun room.”

Did anyone read about a new assault on Florida’s official state footwear — the flip-flop? That’s right. You heard me, the flip-flop. It stems from an American College of Sports Medicine study, which found that the quiet, unassuming flip-flop can actually lead to lower leg pain and a change in stride if worn too often. The college was careful how they worded their press release, and I appreciate that. No condemnation of the footwear, or calling for its outright ban. No, they understand the hornet’s nest they would have walked into. The picketing, the angry phone calls and maybe even riots. You can take away our guns, our voting rights and maybe even processed cheese snacks, but I’ll be damned if you’re going to take away our flip-flops. Not here. Not in Florida. You’ll have to pry them from our cold, dead hands.

I saw this commercial on TV the other night, and nearly gave myself whiplash shaking my head in disbelief. In fact, I had to go online to check it out, just to convince myself I hadn’t dreamt the whole thing up. And it turns out it was real. It’s called the Wii Fit, a new product from Nintendo that is more or less a video game combined with a fitness routine. It looks a white pad — a super-fancy bathroom scale — that can read your movements and translate them onto the TV screen where you see yourself doing anything from yoga and snowboarding to strength training and, I don’t know, strutting around with your virtual muscles. I assume you can say things to virtual exercise babes like, “Hey, pretty mama, want see my serratus magnus?” (I have no idea what muscle that is, but if I had a virtual self with virtual exercise babes, I would definitely say it.) The Wii Fit essentially brings the world of video games together with exercise, which is kind of scary considering that video games have more or less killed exercise for so many kids. Now, let me stop for a minute: Some of it is kind of cool. The technology is pretty far out — this little device, with the help of your Nintendo, can help improve your posture while you exercise or keep track of your progress. It knows what you’re doing, and can help you do it better. That’s amazing, […]

I don’t know why it caught my eye, or captured my attention. Maybe because it gave insight into the psyches of our three presidential candidates. Or maybe because my own signature is so horrid and erratic — comparable to what an electrocuted chicken might scratch out if given a pen. It was a news story I saw online that analyzed the signatures of McCain, Obama and Clinton in an attempt to mine a wealth of new information about the candidates, especially after the Magic 8-Ball revealed so little. I read the piece, fascinated. It told about how Clinton’s signature was written as if she were dodging sniper fire, how McCain’s when decoded said, “Age is 95 percent mental, and 5 percent how high you wear your pants,” and Obama’s stressed his main campaign theme by changing styles from one letter to the next.

Physical therapy … The final frontier. These are the voyages of a man’s punctured thigh as it explores strange new sensations and grueling trips on the stationary bike Oh, and don’t forget electro-shock therapy! Shoot, this is a science fiction movie waiting to happen. After six long weeks, physical therapy means I can walk, I’m almost healed and I can all-but put this long saga to bed. Unfortunately, I’m still left with a rather nasty scar from a surfboard fin that smiles at me and snickers. (It is great for show-and-tell, though.) I’ve been seeing a physical therapist I know, Joe Webb, and I figured since we were friends he would cut me some slack, throw me some bones and write me get-out-of-work notes so I could play hookie. I think my first words to him were, “Just show me some stretches I can do with a beer in one hand and a remote control in the other.” I think his first words to me were, “Come on back to my torture chamber.” I should have run right then, but well I couldn’t. They would have hog-tied me and carried me in.

By the time you read this, it will have been six weeks since a fin on my surfboard punched a whole in my thigh, coming precariously close to the femoral artery and pretty much making April a blur of doctor’s visits, stumbles on crutches and trying to figure out how to pull medical tape off of legs that are hairier than a clan of grizzly bears. As I can see the end of this long episode now that I’m off of crutches, on to physical therapy, and finally able to look at my leg without spitting out words that my 2-year-old daughter is surely storing away to reuse at school there are some thanks than I need to share that haven’t been shared enough. People often come up to ask how I’ve been, how I’m doing, and to tell me how sorry they are to hear that, well, essentially my stupidity finally caught up with me. They say it much nicer, and with much more sincerity. I’m always appreciative, and it’s nice that people care. But the thanks goes to the person who really deserves most of the credit. The person who had no say in this whole matter. I injured myself, and I had to suffer through it. Maybe one day they will invent the equivalent of carbon credits for injuries where you can pay someone else to trudge through it for you. Until then, you make the mistake, you pay the price.