Thursday, November 17, 2011

Testing Your Patients

That when in the hospital for some tests, the nurses who tend to you - while very attractive - all seem to have a pact to keep their hands cold so that every time they take your temperature or blood pressure, the chill is so bad that it elevates your heart rate. This in turn makes the doctors think you need to be secreted away to a plastic bubble on a hidden ward somewhere in the hospital where the food is worse than regular hospital food (if that’s possible) and the temperatures are taken via the other end of your body.

Based on the high heart rate, you suddenly find yourself whisked away to a dungeon somewhere in Mississippi where the rats and bugs don't have a problem with your beating heart. Or your screaming tongue. Or any other fleshy part of you they decide to eat. And the last thing you remember is the feeling of teeth clinking against your teeth while they got a grip on your head and ripped it from your body.

Sunday, October 09, 2011

Laptop Strap Sucker

That when you are traveling on business and trying to keep your bags to a minimum, you stuff everything into a tiny laptop bag...including toiletries, underwear and so forth. The trouble emerges when you forget to secure the laptop straps and because the bag is so heavy, it hangs low in one arm whilst you mount escalators and other in-building conveyances.

Then, when you're about to emerge from Amtrak or some escalator to heaven outside the Atlanta airport, the straps get sucked into the teeth of the stairs and pull your weary soul with them. Struggling to shake your arms loose, you fail and are suddenly just a pile of shredded human plasma thumping against the top step at the airport exit.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Bedbuggy

That when you finally relent to go see a movie with your betrothed, you visit a movie theater that has been frequented by transients and college students from Allston, MA. Therefore, the seats at the theater - except for the ones in the neck-craning front row - are all infested with bed bugs. While you might enjoy the film, these little buggers will enjoy you and will infest your body, clothes and home until you have to move to the moon to be rid of them.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Zombie Encounter - The Pool Version

That when you are watching the pool for some friends away on pleasure, you walk into the pump house to adjust the water settings and - like in the campfire stories we all dread - there's a dead body propped up in the corner of the wooden shed. Scrambling to get away, you allow your feet to become tangled in hose and you fall backward on the concrete. But no, you don't bang your head or even injure yourself and you smile wryly as you hop up and start to sprint away.

Then it happens, you miss a step and plunk your foot squarely into the filter hole which by this time is filled with eyeballs and other body parts because - as you notice - the pool is full of bodies and the one body you thought you were sure of, is now ambling out of the shed with a machete in its hand. As your end comes quickly and painfully - you are sure of two things: zombies are real; you aren't really a fan of swimming pool maintenance.

Sunday, August 07, 2011

Snarky Spark

That while you make fun of others who are not fortunate enough - or forward-thinking enough - to get their own iPhone charger, you simultaneously step in a puddle, twist your ankle and stumble forward just enough to upset your entire balance. In one hand you have the aforementioned charger and in the other is your pristine iPhone (thanks to Otterbox and their great cases).

But as you stumble you plunk the charger down in the puddle and somehow twist and shout, jutting your tongue out enough so that it sticks in the dock connector on the iPhone. You then get a shock going up your left arm from the charger and down into your esophagus from the phone.

The resulting shock is enough to damage both your pride and your body. As you lie in the puddle getting a series of mini shocks from both devices, you think that you might stop making fun of the less gadget-fortunate in the world. And you wonder if the tongue shock might be just enough to cure your slight lisp.

Saturday, July 09, 2011

Spitting Spider

That when you are napping on the couch on a lazy Saturday during the Tour de France, you spy a movement out of the corner of your eye. But you have left your eyeglasses on the table so you move physically near the movement - and it looks like a bug of some sort. To see the creature more clearly, you open your eyes wide and move in even closer - now a mere seven inches away.

Then suddenly, and horrifically, the bug - a slithering, spitting spider - shoots venom into your eyes, nose and mouth while you fall off the couch to your elbows. Since you spend so much time on the couch you have some girth. The weight on your elbows breaks them and you gasp from the pain, sucking the venom deep into your torso.

The poison courses through your veins, even while the cyclists pedal on oblivious to your trauma. And the last thing you see is a view of the beautiful French Pyrenees on Versus TV.

Saturday, July 02, 2011

Mole Sauce

That when your cat comes home from a tough day at the office - errr field - she will bring with her a plump, yet dead mole. You won't notice this mole in the cat's mouth as she proudly trots into the house and deposits the dead creature in the middle of the floor.

Your efforts to save energy have resulted in keeping the house quite dark, so you don't see the mole at all during the day and it's only when you get up in the middle of the night to pee that your path takes you squarely over the mole. You barely brush it on the path to the bathroom, so nothing happens. But then...as you exit the bathroom and wend your way back to bed you stomp directly on the squishy rodent. You yelp loudly, lose your balance and tumble headlong into a poorly constructed IKEA bookcase (that's another worry), which then topples over and pins you - with your head next to the mole body - under scads of social media books and nametags from various conferences and Tweetups.

Finally, the cat hears you screaming and comes over to you and bites your face because she was trying to sleep.

Sunday, June 05, 2011

Lawn Lacerations and Limb Loss

While you ride your scooter or bicycle on the highways and byways of this great land, you'll notice good folks mowing their lawns and keeping their yards manicured and pristine. With these little two-stroke engines, people chop grass and sometimes fling detritus in the air. It is this detritus with which we are concerned.

You see, as you pedal along (or buzz by), rocks are fired at you with tremendous speed because the mower has neglected to realize that parallel mowing can impact passersby. You - a passerby - are subsequently struck by a sharp rock that slices cleanly through your elbow joint and arm, leaving you without any control over the handlbar of your vehicle.

Then, as you veer toward the municipal bus - speeding as usual toward you while the driver text messages her order for a lunch cake - you understand the fear early pilots had when walking around prop planes. And, just before the impact that takes your life, you think about your own lawn and how brown and dead it will get without you around to tend to it. To the very last, worried too much about what others might think of your outward appearance and too little about your inner beauty.

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Escalating One's Fears

That the escalator on which you’re riding has a too-big gap between the plates forming its stairs. And the shoelaces on the shoes you chose to impress your audience (at the latest Inbound Marketing Summit session on how social media can actually cure sick kittens and make food appear in homeless shelters all over the globe) are destined to be sucked into the escalator causing not only a horrible grated human mess, but underscoring the fact that not even Zappos can deliver happiness if a contraption invented in 1891 hasn’t been refined enough to keep people from dying atop it.

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

It's a Crock...Pot

Whilst napping peacefully on the couch, you hear a slight clank. A sound like metal on glass. Similar to the cats’ tag banging against the food dish - but different and more sinister. The sound continues at regular intervals, just frequently enough to bother you, yet not so often that you are compelled to get up and investigate.

After 11 tortuous minutes of this noise, your brain starts to fill in the unknown. You imagine a rat is hidden in amongst the clean dishes and will bite off your hand when you open the cabinet. Then you think it’s probably a snake that has come from the sewers of New York City - because that’s what they do. And finally, you think it’s a person who was buried in the walls of your house ten or more years ago. This person has finally snapped out of their suspended animation and is knocking on the wall with their hook hand in a quest to get out and find the evil people who imprisoned them.

Alas, the movie producers and dark-novel writers like Steven King have triumphed again as you get up and find out the sound is just something bubbling quietly - mostly - in the crock pot on the counter.

Sunday, May 01, 2011

Just Buggin'

That when the bug in the shower gets washed away with your shampoo and other suds, it emits a scream that only other bugs can hear as it enters the drain and then a sewer’s worth of bugs from all the pipes in all the homes and drains all over town start crawling back up toward your shower.

And, as you rinse the vestiges of soap from your body and squeeze the water from your golden locks, an entire battalion of creepy, crawly, icky, slimy and disgusting bugs emerge from the drain and immediately block your exit from the shower. You know in an instant that your moments are numbered as the millions of tiny feet grip your clean, glistening skin and crawl up your body to enter your soon-to-be corpse through your screaming mouth.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Manicure Mania

That while you're getting your first manicure - a treat for your birthday or even Valentine's Day - you relax a little and let down your guard. Next thing you know, your hands that were so comfy and resting in a hot-wax bath are now zip-tied together and you're being ushered into a nondescript van. Also, a hood has been placed over your head.

When you finally come to a stop, you hear seagulls and waves. You're unceremoniously pushed into a metal box that you can identify as a shipping container once you pull off your hood (hands still restrained by zipties) and you bang on the wall to no avail.

When you finally land in Marseille, France, you are taken to a farmhouse in Provence where you're put to work picking grapes for Angelina and Brad Pitt. You don't die, but you are extremely miserable and don't have any hope of inheriting their fortune because unlike the other children they've purchased, your purpose was to work on their farm and not look cute during photo shoots.