My left thumb is swollen with a cartoonish blue glow.

My car is a mile away at Graceland Automotive, the driver's side window torn from the moorings.

And, as I type, a truck from the Citywide Garage Door Co. in Carrick is parked in the alley behind our house, and a man named Frank is working in a light rain to replace a garage-door track hopelessly bent out of shape when my thumb came between it and that car door.

God is clearly trying to tell me something. This is the third time my left hand has been maimed in a freak accident in the past seven years. I wish I had gotten a punch card on my first visit to the Allegheny General Hospital emergency room. My left hand has now been X-rayed so many times I should have gotten the last batch free.

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PG STORE

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Brian O'Neill's book, "The Paris of Appalachia: Pittsburgh in the Twenty-first Century," is available in the PG store.

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My hands are now the odd couple: the left one gnarled, scarred and misshapen, and the right one virtually unmarked.

This latest accident follows my comic pratfall during a rousing game of kick-the-can this past spring that busted my left ring finger's metacarpal and busted the gut of everyone watching. That, in turn, follows the near severing of my left thumb when, at the start of a party in 2002, a corkscrew snapped the neck off the bottle and sent my thumb across the jagged edges and me to AGH.

Which, come to think of it, I've been saying a lot lately. Only it's more like "AAAGGGHHH!!!!"

Here's my latest mishap:

We had a garage built about a year and a half ago. I've never had a garage before. You might not think that matters, but I once made the station wagon battery go dead by leaving the driver's door ajar overnight after carrying stuff out.

It happened a second time Thursday morning, and so I walked down to a neighbor's house to see if she could give my car a jump.

She said she would and I told her to meet me in the alley. Rather than wait for her arrival, I decided to speed things by pulling the car out of the garage into the alley in neutral. When it began moving more quickly than I liked, I reached in with my right hand to grab the hand brake and, well, you might guess the rest: My left hand, on the car door, got sandwiched between the slow-rolling car and the garage door track.

The thin metal track gave a little and I also began giving: blood.

My neighbor arrived and I got the car out the rest of the way, attached the jumper cables, made a successful jump and -- after we began moving bicycles into our side yard because the garage door would no longer close and had become an invitation to steal -- backed the car into the garage. Then my neighbor drove me to AGH, where I reintroduced myself.

Soon enough I had a tetanus shot, a splint for my thumb -- the bone split between the last knuckle and the tip -- and three stitches in my index finger.

I filled the prescription for antibiotics at our local pharmacy on my half-mile walk home. I called in maimed to the office, canceled a working lunch, and then spent the rest of the day talking with insurance people, mechanics and rental car agents (we're a one-car family) as my thumb changed colors.

I was left with no story to tell but this one. Why do I keep slicing and dicing the same digits? When I asked my wife, she said with a wink that a book, "You Can Heal Your Life," by Louise L. Hay, would offer a theory.

I opened it and read, "I believe we create every so-called illness in our body. The body, like everything else in life, is a mirror of our inner thoughts and beliefs." (Now, I was starting to feel woozy.) The thumb, Ms. Hay says, "represents intellect and worry," the index finger "ego and fear" and the left side of the body "receptivity, taking in, feminine energy, women, the mother."

Sheesh. Can't a man slice his thumb artery with a wine bottle, break the same hand playing an advanced game of tag and then make a sandwich with the same thumb, his car and garage doorway -- without all this psychoanalysis? I mean, come on.