Since people rarely read my entire blog posts I’ll start this one with a one sentence summary: while stealing a broken music keyboard from my neighbor’s trash pile I wrecked our eBike so badly I ended up at the doctor’s office and getting referred to leg wound care.

The longer version is slightly funnier.

Our story begins last weekend — aka “big trash weekend.”

Once a month our neighborhood has a “big trash” pickup. Everyone sets their big trash out by the curb and on the first Monday of the month the city comes by and picks it up. What this means to me is that the weekend before is basically a neighborhood-wide “free garage sale” — a garage sale where everything is free and everything is so valuable that someone else set it out for the trash.

The picture above is what we put out, for example — the old mattress from my van that mold was forming on and a pop cooler I paid $2.50 for that I managed to break and make worth even less. Treasures!

Here are the types of things I usually find on big trash weekend:

Look, it’s a probably/maybe undamaged workbench!

Of course I don’t bring any of this stuff home. Usually. The best two things I’ve found were a flatscreen television with a broken screen that was also being rained on, and a dog house that only needed minor repairs. I did drag the dog house home. I do not have a dog, but my neighbor has outside cats that visit us at night and I thought it would be a good place for them to stay. I spent a couple days and a couple of bucks fixing it up. The cats never stayed in it, not once. A few months later I put it back out for big trash.

One concession I made with Susan is that if I took the e-bike out it would limit the amount of trash I could drag back to our home. On Sunday I headed out on the e-bike and had covered nearly all of the neighborhood when I finally spotted treasure!

A music keyboard! Now, do I need a music keyboard? No. But do I want a music keyboard? Also, no. But would I take a large keyboard from someone’s trash pile? Apparently, yes.

What happened next unfolded so quickly that I had to unpack it a couple of times.

I picked the keyboard up and found it was heavier than I thought it would be. After tucking it under my left arm, I hit the accelerator with my right before straightening out the handlebars — I think. Whatever happened happened quickly. The next thing I saw was the ground coming at me. Very quickly I found myself sprawled out in the middle of the road. The e-bike was on top of me and the keyboard was on top of it.

You know that moment when you trip and fall and leap back to your feet quickly because you don’t want people to thing you got hurt? Yeah, I didn’t do that. My hands, knee, and shin hurt to badly that I just laid there in the middle of the road, under the e-bike, under the keyboard, just whimpering for a minute or two. Fortunately I was near the end of a dead end — no traffic, at least.

If you’re thinking I left the keyboard behind, you’re crazy. After straightening the handlebars I picked the keyboard up off the road and made my way back to the house. I was wearing a pair of white compression socks on my legs and what I first thought were black smudges from the road turned out to be blood seeping through the socks.

When I got the keyboard home, it didn’t work. I tried two different compatible power supplies and even installed fresh batteries. In retrospect, I assume that’s why it was in someone’s trash pile.

Approximately 30 minutes later, Susan got home and asked me why I was walking funny.

I showed her this. (Not for the squeamish.)

Susan did her best to patch things up but this time I did more than she could fix with Band-aids. After multiple days of “not healing,” we were able to get to a doctor’s appointment today (Friday). I got some new bandaging (which to be honest wasn’t any better than what Susan had done), an antibiotic (was hoping for some morphine), and referred me to a wound care specialist. After waiting around for the appointment, we finally got a call and they can’t get me in for 10 days — at which point I’m 99% sure this’ll all be healed up and that trip’ll be unnecessary.

The older I get the more I’m starting to realize that some of these misadventures have lessons attached to them. The lesson here, obviously, is to take the car out next time on big trash day.