When last we heard from Brian he had gotten work as a Xerox copier mechanic in his hometown of Rochester, New York. Robert Tumas’s latest conversation with his itinerant best friend finds Brian on the Island of San Clemente, off the coast of San Diego, where he is currently employed as a wildlife technician controlling the ballooning population of wild feral house cats with .22 rifles, traps, and ATVs.
Brian: Yaw, Bob.
Robert: Yaw, Brian. How are you?
Brian: I’m pretty good. I shot three deer while I was home in Rochester, and made some jerky, so that was cool. But now I’m back on the island.
Robert: Ah, yes. The island. How is it going?
Brian: Ok, ten days on the island in a trailer, four days in San Diego. That’s how it goes.
Robert: How’s your aim been?
Brian: Missed a dead on shot last night. The wind was secretly strong.
Robert: How you holding up?
Brian: Okay. My knee is killing me.
Robert: Why?
Brian: A couple of hours ago I got a cactus spine in my kneecap when it was bent. Then when I bent my knee the other way, the motion shoved the spine even further into my body, and so now my entire knee area aches.
Robert: Holy Jesus. Are those things poisonous?
Brian: Of course. They all are to an extent. Some, more than others. This one, not so much.
Robert: Damn. How long was it?
Brian: Half inch.
Robert: You should take a picture of it and write a caption under it that says, “This was stuck in my knee cap.”
Brian: I can’t.
Robert: Why not?
Brian: The little bastard is in my kneecap fluid now.
Robert: Oh, wow, it’s all the way in there? How the hell do you get it out?
Brian: You don’t.
Robert: Are you sure it’s actually in there? How do you know for sure?
Brian: I know because of the excruciating pain that engulfs my leg, that I feel when I bend my knee. I can also feel an object under my skin that should not be there, and is roughly a half-inch long.
Robert: What is going to happen now?
Brian: Hopefully the ph level is high enough inside of my body to dissolve the foreign object.
Robert: How did this happen?
Brian: I was hiking on the island. There is cactus everywhere. Not much more complicated than that.
Robert: So you’re just going to wait it out?
Brian: Yeah, what else am I to do?
Robert: I have no idea.
