I never thought I'd write two posts in a row with the word "blood" in the title. Maybe if I were writing a series of posts on The Wondrous World of Blood, but I'm not doing that, and neither are you. Put the pen down. Nobody cares.

Embarrassingly, I don't even know enough about blood to write a series of posts on it. I could prolly crank out one post and turn it into a series by posting one word at a time.

This represents the totality of my knowledge of blood (emphasis on "knowledge" - I've left out assumptions and outright fabrications - the following is 100% fact-inspired):

Blood is a red wet thing that is usually inside your body. Sometimes it gets out because sometimes people makes holes in your body and blood excapes out through them.

Blood is not to be confused with other wet things inside your body. Your lungs, for example, are wet, and they might even also be red. The difference is that, unless you have ebola, only blood will leak out through holes.

In olden times, blood was important because it just was. But in the modern day world, you don't need it as much. With the invention of hospital emergency rooms, you can leak blood all over the place, and, once it gets to be uncomfortable, a medical worker can put more blood into you. It's like when a car is really low on oil. You can keep driving the car for a long, long time, and it will work fine, and there's nothing wrong with it, but if you're a perfectionist you can buy oil that someone will put in your car (but you don't need it). The body is just like that.

There is approximately some blood in your body, plus or minus a little.

Blood is OK to drink. If you want to drink your friends' blood, you should boil it first. And Miss Manners would say that sharing the blood of your friends is polite, but not required.

Some people get "bloody noses," but they don't. It's a magic trick, likely performed with the help of a small concealed pump in the sinus cavity that's attached to a sack of blood stapled to the back of the person's throat. They do this both for attention and to deceive. The worst thing you can do is help these people.

One amazing thing about blood is that, despite being wet, it can go from a wet to a not-wet state if left outside the body long enough. This is a waste of blood. If you find yourself near a puddle of your own blood, you should, as quickly as possible, scoop it up and try to push it back in to the hole whence it came. I know I said earlier that you don't need blood, but blood research has changed since I wrote that paragraph, and it turns out that you do need it. Whatever plans you've drawn up for a revolutionary weight-loss program based on what I said before ought to be scrapped before you kill a bunch of people and get me sued.

The reason you need blood is that it carries your Life Force. According to the esteemed theoretical-psychophysicist Brian Greene, Quantum Yarn N-Theory Mechanics posits the existence of a particle called a "spiriton" that constitutes part of your soul. If you lose too many spiritons, you lose part of your soul. This loss makes it harder for you to join Dr. Greene's colleague - the disembodied energy essence of L. Ron Hubbard that's currently parked in a higher plane of existence in the center of the super-massive black hole at the heart of our galaxy - in the afterlife. For this reason, you must NEVER allow medical staff to take blood samples unless - and I stress this - they agree to put it back in later.

Be safe and plug all your holes. Insufficient spiritons == no L. Ron Hubbard for you.

Now you know everything there is to know about blood.

What I have to say about blood today is going to turn the world of the arachnidial sciences on its ear. Also, if you're anything like my friend Felix, you're going to whimper and beg for the sweet, blissful refuge of ignorance - to forget that you ever learned what I am about to learn at you. By then, the damage will have been done. You'll be frelled, and you're just going to have to deal with it.

But that's for later on.

The first item on the Agenda of Blood isn't the groundbreaking revelation I have planned, but something more pedestrian.

My testosterone level, lady and gentlemen, is closer to normal. Things are going back to normal. Normal is on its merry, normal little way. It's not back up to its normal levels, but I've been assured by people who get paid a lot to say such things that everything's going to be normal Real Soon Now.

Let us pray.

Join hands.

Our Father Who Art in Heaven

Hallowed be Thy name

Please make me a man again

Thanks a lot,

Rory

Amen

P.S.

Make that Amen a double

I feel better already.

You wouldn't guess this about me, but I attended chapel twice a week for six years, and I've said the Lord's Prayer, knees on pew, hundreds of times. Despite being an atheist - and I was at the time as well - I loved going to chapel. I actually miss it.

Just a little trivia for you.

This, right here, is the worst segue I've ever written.

The homeless. Brilliant tax-cheating entrepreneurs or casualties of a system that works pretty well for most people but can't be easily adjusted to accommodate the needs of the few square pegs left out of the round hole of society?

Doesn't matter. Nobody cares.

What's important is that I seen a homeless in my favorite cafe. He comes in often, spending money he's acquired unlawfully, denying Uncle Sam his fair share of the booty.

He buys half a cup of coffee, pocketing the rest of his easily-earned cash to spend on drugs later in the day. It's all he cares about, the homeless. He couldn't be like me and get stressful jobs, pay taxes, and only spend a small portion of income on drugs. No - he has to feed on the teat of Liberty, pausing only to mix his cocaine with a little baking soda and water in a spoon, heat the spoon with his lighter, let the resulting goop cool until it's a coagulated chip of a glass-like substance, remove the chip from the spoon, and go to town with it on the crack pipe, holding in the vapor until he achieves the characteristic rush and high that makes this particular recreation so appealing to so many people.

I believe that's how crack works. There's no way to know for sure.

It's just a guess.

Before heading off to hit the crack pipe, he must prepare his coffee.

I happened to have been standing near the cream/sugar/honey/etc. station the other day when he walked up.

I have a few OCD-like tendencies, and they come and go in intensity, but this guy clearly has serious Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder activity going on.

I watched as he selected a quantity of drink lids, lifted them from the pile, and threw them in the trash.

Next, he pulled napkins from the two napkin dispensers, one after the other, until, satisfied, he threw them in the trash to keep the lids company.

Then it was the sugar. Also, the "sugar".

He grabbed the blue packets, the white packets, the pink packets, and the yellow packets, wadded them up, and, you guessed it, threw it all in the trash.

There was a break of a few seconds before he went at it again, starting the process over, seeking balance between the condiments in and out of the trash.

Absolutely fascinating.

What he was doing made perfect sense to him. In his world, this is how it had to go down.

This, right here, rivals the worst segue I've ever written (see above). It might even be worse, as I'm repeating the basic structure of the last, making it stupid and unoriginal.

One of the many blood tests I've had this month came back with glucose levels in the red. They weren't yet diabetic, but they were well outside the normal range.

Since blood sugar is one of the few things I can monitor on my own, I bought a little glucose monitor thing. Of ten tests I've performed with it, only one was abnormal, but it was abnormal to the point of being borderline diabetic (yes - it had been at least two hours since my previous meal).

You don't care, though. I'm sure you'd help if you could, but aside from sending me tons of money, there's nothing for you to do.

What you care about is my great, grand, interspecies experiment.

It was 2:00 AM. I'd just gotten home and was feeling a little off. Decided to check my blood sugar to see if there was any possible connection (it was high, but I think it was just a coincidence).

When I went to check it, there was a spider sitting on my bottle of test strips. I picked up the canister and shook the little guy off. He (or she - whatever) fell to the counter and remained still. He was probably starving, as I don't remember my test strip bottle being a rich hunting ground for hungry spiders.

I did the test and reached for a paper towel to wipe off the blood. That was when I had my idea.

I tore off a strip of paper towel and squeezed a few drops of blood onto the end of it. I lowered the bloody end of the strip to the counter, about six inches from the spider. It didn't care.

I slowly moved the strip closer and closer. When it was a couple inches away, something happened inside the critter's head. It ran on its little spider legs toward the paper towel. It stopped when it was in the middle of the big red blotch, and it stayed there for a little while, sucking on the paper towel.

It eventually lost interest and walked away slowly. I don't think it was able to get much blood out of the towel, though it certainly tried.

As Felix observed, "They[spiders] would hurt us if they could."

Yes, Felix.

They would.

Looking back, I don't know what's creepier: that the spider tried to kill and eat my blood, or that I, alone in my kitchen in the middle of the night, was trying to feed my blood to a spider.

I'm sure da Vinci did stuff like this. The only difference between him and me is that he would have had a good reason for it, would have drawn it, and then spent the rest of the night designing, fabricating, and testing a flying machine that was powered by blood.

It's not fair to compare us, though, because I can't draw, and he's dead. Apples and oranges, as they say.

Brilliant, really good looking apples, and dead, show-off oranges.