What I'm about to say about blood begins with bagels. Here I was trying to fit a bagel gracefully into an electric toaster. Impossible. Oh sure, there are those "Bigger Toasters" made specifically for your early morning required bagel. I am stubborn. I will make it fit, I think as I'm shoving the two UNEQUALLY PRECUT BAGEL SIDES into the toaster. Thats something else that altogether miffs me. One side goes in nice and easy, usually the top part. The other side is twice as big and you have to shove it in, meaning the damn thing isn't going to come out without the help of a screwdriver....or if your really pissed, a butter knife. That will teach it.Once you get jolted a couple of times, you concede and go get a bigger toaster. This is a standoff you can not afford to mess around with. If you get shocked more than three times...you don't really need that toaster after all, ...it is potentially lethal.
   Solution to problem: Try and cut the bagel yourself, in half, horizonally---the hard way. This also cannot be achieved gracefully. A very sharp butcher knife and a pair of pliers helps. But not very much. If oyu want to slice off a piece of your finger, this is an ideal setup. This I know from experience.
   The normal tendancy when you cut your finger half off is you wanna call a medic. Blood equals emergency. But if you can somehow stave your panic, an existential moment may come to you if you stand still and bleed a little into the sink. You will not die of this cut---you've cut your finger before. ( And there are no band-aids in the house because you used them up the last time you tried to make a bagel.) Calm down. Go ahead and breathe. And bleed.
   See, you won't bleed long. Your own interior Medic One taes care of the problem in an amazing way. In the meanwhile, there's the most beautiful color in the sink. A scarlet red you can't buy in a tube at an art supply store. And it's homemade. The closest thing to it outside  your body is seawater. When we came up out of the sea we internalized it.There's about five quarts of the stuff inside us, and if you take a pint out and give it away, you make a replacement pint in no time at all---without even thinking about it.You just cook up some more blood.
   Like a lot of other things about us, the more we study blood, the more fantastic and mysterious and wonderous it becomes. It's 55 percent liquid and 45 percent solids---red cells and white cells and platelets. This blood moves through isxty-thousand miles of vessels in your body, regulates your temperature, and moves energy and minerals, hormones and chemicalsto the right place with an efficiency envied by all public utilities, especially waste management.

   You've stopped bleeding now. A sixteen-step protien cascade effect has built a dam and shut off the flow.At the point of injury, white blood cells have gathered to fight infection, other blood elements have already brought repair materials, and healing has begun. Endorphins have been supplied to curtail the pain---it doesn't really hurt.
    If you'll just stand there pateintly for five minutes these things wil happen. Without your thinking or planning or organizing or trying.
    It;s very beautiful, this blood of yours.
    It's very powerful and efficient.
    It's worthy of respect.
    It is life.
    Confirmed.

( I should point out that if, in the midst of this epiphany, some member of your family should walk in and see the bloody knife, bloody bagel, and general mess and shambles in the kitchen, and the toaster plugged with smoking bread dough, and you staring glassy eyed into the sink, you may have some explaining to do.)