Listen, you told me I couldn’t be a chef. I didn’t believe you. I thought I could pizzazz my way around a kitchen on pure instinct and charm. Turns out there’s more to making pizza than smiling and slinging dough. I got down and dirty with it and then in the midst of putting my pizza stone in the oven, I slammed the door on my hand. Now I’m playing the fool! Now I’m the laughing matter!

Please get the bandages from the pantry.

I should have trusted you. After all, you’re my wife, and you have a BGS. I have degree-equivalent credit hours from Street Smarts Academy, though. I’ve done it all. I thought surely my skills as a professional dogcatcher would transfer over, and you said that made no sense and that I was blocking the television. You know that I only defy you because I think it will be funny, except that nobody ends up laughing except me, last. And you, at me, when I get hurt. Actually, I guess everyone is laughing, but for the wrong reasons. Blood is getting everywhere.

I’m more concerned about the huge catering order that’s now going to go unfinished because of my folly. Of course, it’s their fault for hiring a caterer sight unseen, but it’s my fault for lying so wildly in the advertisement I posted on that professional catering board. If I don’t get three hundred more pizzas out in the next two hours, the wedding reception of Ruby and Clifford Martinez is going to be a real snooze. What do you mean it’s daylight savings time right now? That cuts my pizza time almost in half. I charmed my way into this, now I need to charm my way back out!

Broken bones shouldn’t bleed as profusely as this hand is right now, which concerns me. Remember that one time I got bit by that Welsh Terrier I almost caught? I vowed right then and there to invest myself in something creative, not destructive. Yet my creativity has now destroyed the very hands that served it. It’s like if Shakespeare shot himself with a gun loaded with quill pens. I’m seeing triple of everything but the area right in front of me, where I can only see a growing red splotch.

I think we’re going to have to give in and call my brother. When he bought that Pizza Hut, we all teased him for being the worst, but now he’s going to come to my aid in my darkest hour and I’ll never be able to make fun of him again. He’ll make me wear some T-shirt with an arrow pointing that says REAL CHEF TO THE RIGHT, and I’ll have to stand next to him all the time for people to understand it. That’s two things I don’t want to do, combined into one. I guess this is what they mean when they say, “fake pizza till you make pizza.” It’s from that book of quotations I wrote and self-published.

You really don’t see this huge red splotch floating directly in front of my eyeballs and tinting my entire view? I may just sit down for a minute on the floor, in a lying down position. If I fall asleep, know that that was planned and you shouldn’t worry. Just make sure that we get the order correct. They wanted three hundred… wait, I think I read this wrong. This says “taco bar.” I don’t know how I got “three hundred pizzas” from “taco bar.” I really shouldn’t write important things with my left hand. Except now I may not have a choice! Because of my right hand! That’s now injured!

Don’t call my brother. He can’t help us now. Nobody can help us. Come sit with me down here in this pool of my own blood. We’ll be fine, I’ll go back to catching dogs for money, now that this horrifc injury has officially scared me away from ever following anything resembling a dream.

I’m just relieved that, if not for that one bad decision early on, I probably would have nailed this whole thing. It’d take a real idiot to botch a taco bar! That’s just ground beef and jalapeños and sawr crem and onyans and ay boy I’d really still like to see if we can get to that hospital pretty sewn because my mawth doesun seem to wanna bloop.