Published Wednesday, August 05, 2009 11:47 AM
Updated Wednesday, August 05, 2009 11:48 AM
“Hey ya’ll, wartch this!”
As I just shamelessly cribbed an old joke, I’ll continue the trend by taking a line from Al Gore.
“I invented the Darwin Awards.”
Okay, not really. But hey, I’m astonished I’m still around considering the extraordinarily dumb things I’ve done over the years.
Oh, what are the Darwin Awards, you may ask? They’re honorable mentions given to people, posthumously of course, who have died while doing bizarrely stupid things, thus taking themselves out of the gene pool and improving our overall species.
I guess we start gunning for the Darwins early in life.
Ever since I was a little kid, I have really enjoyed engaging in behaviors that normally get people killed, maimed, arrested, or deported. From playing with matches to bottle rocket wars, if it was incredibly dumb, I’ve probably done it.
Some people would call it living on the edge. Those people are dead.
My first brush with the Darwins came when I was about two. For some reason, I decided it would be interesting to see what the wallpaper inside my grandmother’s baking pan cabinet looked like. As my mother and grandmother were in the other room entertaining a flock of old hens from the Methodist Church, my exploration went largely unhindered, which suited me fine, at least until I gave myself too close an inspection.
You must understand that I had a rather large head for such a little kid. I wasn’t quite hydro encephalitic, but conceivably, I could have had small asteroids orbiting my ears.
Combine this head with a narrow cabinet -- one that can hold only those flat biscuit pans, and you soon have a recipe for disaster. In this case, I had attempted to turn my head; my ears had folded in on themselves, and soon, like a mastodon in a tarp, I was helplessly trapped.
I think my first shriek sent the Methodist ladies screaming into the streets -- they undoubtedly believed someone was ritually sacrificing bantam roosters in the kitchen. Shortly after that, my mother and grandmother thundered into the room, only to see my tiny pamper-encased butt and two fat legs pedaling helplessly in the air from the bottom of the oven.
My mom complicated matters by attempting to drag me out by my feet, which resulted in more shrieking and an even tighter obstruction.
Ultimately, they had to call a contractor to come in and disassemble the cabinets.
Six months later, I would nearly decapitate myself trying to retrieve a set of cymbals for my drum set from the top of a tall bookshelf. Fortunately, I was a fat kid with a fat head, and the cymbal that impacted into my neck had to plow through several inches of double chin before coming close to severing a vital artery.
A few years later, my cousins and I came up with a new sport. I forgot what we called it, but it involved riding a Big Wheel at breakneck speed around their family swimming pool. The concrete coping, complete with sharp curves at the deep end, made a great racetrack.
The idea was to take them as fast as possible without taking a spill into the drink. This was an activity usually reserved for mid-winter, when the pool had gone from aqua blue pristine paradise to frigid, fetid, green-slimed, dead bug-covered lagoon. The real trick was to talk some idiot -- a younger sibling or annoying kid we had to play with -- into taking the real sharp curve at the deep end at top speed. The way to successfully do that, we would tell the newbies, was to get up full steam, hit the turn as hard as possible, and when the Big Wheel tilts to one side, pull that handbrake as hard as you can.
“It’ll look cool -- just like something Evel Knievel would do,” we’d promise. And just like something Evel Knievel would do, the stunt would malfunction spectacularly and the rider would take a plunge, wooly sweater, galoshes and all, into the cold and slimy depths.
The day I pulled the handbrake, it was about 45 degrees outside and the pool was covered with a filthy, crud encrusted vinyl tarp.
“Don’t worry about it,” my cousin, the Lying Avenger, said. “It’s just like a trampoline. You’ll bounce right back out. You won't even get wet. Trust me.”
I’m sure that’s what Evel Knievel’s cousin told him right before he tried to jump the Snake River Canyon. Needless to say, me and ol’ Evel both got mighty wet.
Right now, my wife is pretty good about making sure I don’t do incredibly dumb things, In fact, just a few minutes ago she informed me that I left the stove on with a pan full of bacon grease sitting on the eye. Come to think of it, I was wondering what that smell was.
This weekend I'm going to experiment with a new high-end fuel mix of my own invention for the weed whacker.
Hey ya’ll … wartch this!