Non sequitur

There is a little white plastic fork sitting on my welcome mat. It's been there for about 3 weeks now. At first it was just there and I never got around to picking it up and throwing it away. Somewhere around day 13 I came home and it had been knocked off the mat and was a couple of feet away. I grabbed it and was getting ready to trash it, when for unknown reasons I put it back where it was before.

It looks weird sitting there, but I can't bring myself to move it. I hope this is just a quirk and not symptomatic of something insidious in my brain. I imagine it's good luck by now, moving would just be tempting fate.

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I made a red velvet cake tonight. They're pretty good, but I don't make them very often. Mostly because you can't lick the bowl with your fingers on a red velvet cake - the food coloring is too bright and you end up with red-stained hands. It being a holiday and all, I broke that rule and cleaned out the bowl anyways. It was some really good batter.

After I finished it off and was waiting for the cake to finish baking, I went outside and did my weekly maintenance on the truck of malfunction's air conditioner. Usually I just hop in the cab for the duration (20 minutes) and hunker down with a book. Tonight, though, the air conditioner was super effective and too cold for me. Instead, I hopped in the bed and got down to the business of reading. It was a very pretty evening.

As people would come by, walking their dogs or jogging about, they would wave hello or stop for some idle chit-chat, depending on how well I knew them. There was the occasional odd look, but I shrugged that off as due to my general holiday appearance (pajamas, old ratty shirt, and a complete lack of shaving), along with the fact that I was sitting in the back of a truck in a parking lot on Memorial Day. Whatever, I can take some flack on that end, I refuse to get made up on my one day off.

The truck finishes its business, I pack it up and go back in to check on the cake. As I'm pulling the thing out of the oven, I catch my reflection in the door. I have two huge streaks of cake batter on either side of my mouth. Which is bad enough. But this is red velvet cake, so these streaks are deep, dark, maroon red.

Cannibal sheik - it's totally in, y'all.

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This story will be outside the realm of experience of many (particularly to anyone who is not (a.) male, and (b.) cheap), but I'm here to educate as well as entertain.

While I am a great supporter of boxer-briefs for both their function and look, for a long time I dealt soley in boxers. Which is nothing to be ashamed of, different strokes and all that jazz. But I tend to now prefer the hybrid to the originals, and although I still own many a pair of boxers, they don't see much use unless I'm deep into my rotation and it's been a while since I've visited the laundry room.

This story deals with a very specific type of boxers, however, which can politely be referred to as Very Cheap Boxers. These are generally unforgiving all-cotton affairs with very little...give...in terms of freedom of movement and lack effective closing equipment in the fly-region.

These guys are my one true enemy in fashion, if you discount leg warmers. Because the combination of non-stretching, unforgiving fabric and an unclosable and trap-like hole near a sensitive region of my...landscape makes possible a truly unfortunate series of events.

I was indeed at the end of my clean-clothes rope as last week closed out, and needed to employ a set of these aforementioned guys for my last workday before the holiday. Normally, this would not be a problem, as one generally does not need a lot of freedom of movement while sitting at a desk for huge stretches of time.

Right after lunch, however, I received a call that necessitated me getting to the diametrically opposite end of my office complex in under three minutes. As such, I was booking it at a high speed down the central corridor of the building, between the two main sets of elevators, when my boxers decided the time was right to exert their iron will upon me.

Now I don't know if you've spent a lot of time in office buildings in your life, but it is something of a rare occurrence to see some guy half-running down a hallway suddenly make a sound much like "EEEPPPurghhh!", only higher pitched, and then collapse into a small pile of former-man-bits.

And yet, here we are.