If you have seen me in the last month you know that I am healing from a sizable cut just over my right eye. You may be among the many who have asked me about it, and I gave you a cock-and-bull story about colliding with my dog. Well, I thought it best to finally come out with the REAL STORY!

It happened on a hot Friday afternoon. I know they're rare in January, but this is Texas, so their not unheard-of. I decided to go down to my favorite watering hole to slack my thirst and see if my collection of likeminded friends would show up to shoot the breeze. Sure enough, as I got settled at the bar they started to arrive. First One-Eyed Jack, then Pegleg Pete, and finally, Hook-handed Harry. Now Hook-handed Harry has a parrot that he must have stolen from a sailor, because it could swear a sailor under the bench, but only when it had had a few drinks. Harry liked to get it rolling, and so he would buy himself a tequila, and his bird one, too. The two of them would sit there hittin' shots until the bird started to get talkative. No exception that night. Soon the feathered fowl-mouthed fiend was filling the air with blue, and the ladies (if you can call 'em ladies in a joint like that) were beginning to blush a little.

I was wondering just how much I could take when suddenly the whole place shook. Now, Hook-handed Harry and his parrot were behind me and the door was in front of me, and I looked at the door. It opened, and all I saw was green skin. The owner of the skin was so big and tall and wide that he had to scrunch his head down and turn his shoulders sideways to get through without taking out the doorjam. He stood up tall when he got his hulk in and looked around. His shoulders were wider than your kitchen table. His chin looked like a Mack truck. His nose was like Half-dome in California, and you could have bungie-jumped off his eyebrows. He looked at me straight in the eye and said, "Who are you calling an SOB?" (He didn't really say the letters, "S" "O" "B," if you know what I mean.)

"Not me, sir," replied hastily, not wanting to get a man like that angry at me. "It's the parrot, I swear."

"Likely story," shouts the tall green man, "Wanna step outside and see about that?"

Now, the joint is not exactly a 5-star location. In fact, it was so low down on the pecking order that it was somewhat lacking in facilities. To be specific, it had only one unisex bathroom, and it was a one-holer. Now, you know what the ladies (if you can call 'em ladies in a joint like that) are like with the bathroom? There was ALWAYS a line. So us men had taken instead to helping out the establishment by making sure that the shrubbery outside never went thirsty. Just about then the overwhelming urge to take care of the shrubbery overtook me, and I decided, big hulking green man or not, that I needed to step outside to relieve some of my anxiety. He followed me, presumably to relieve his anxiety as well, but his plans seemed to have something to do with me.

When he got outside (it took him long enough that I did my anxiety-relieving first) he began swinging his enormous fists at me. They were the size of cookstoves! He was swinging those big cookstove sized fists at me left and right, and, not really wanting to get into a fight with him, I started ducking and weaving, dodging the blows. I found it kind of easy, and I got a bit cocky. As I stood up he brought his fist down hard right where I was standing. I jumped to one side, not really wanting to have my body squeezed between my head and my feet. I dodged the blow, but I landed on his big toe. Now his toe was as big as a watermellon, but t was the color of a pea. When I landed on it the darndest thing happened. It went from the color of a pea to the color of a tomato. The man began to jump around and howl in pain, shaking the ground so hard the leaves began to fall from the trees like in the fall. He was thrashing around so hard he finally broke a big oak tree off at the base, and then, of all things, he stepped on it and tripped. He fell toward me, but I jumped out of the way. His elbow hit the ground right in front of me, right on a rock. A chip from the rock flew up and hit me just over my right eye and cut me.

Well, I clapped my hand over the cut to hide it, but the blood gushed out, running down my face. I figured that if he saw me he would know I was wounded and it would goad him to finish the job. He moaned and rolled over, looking up at me--and then the second darndest thing happened. He saw the blood and fainted dead away!

So I went home and stapled the cut together with a paper-stapler.