Last night I was determined to cook an actual dinner, rather than just grab the brick of cheese and box of crackers that have served me so well over these last 4 days. I have been slowly expanding my cooking repertoire over the last few months and have three available dishes that I can do for dinner at a moments notice. I can tell, you are impressed, no?
So I get the skillet out, turn on the stove, and collect all my ingredients into a nice healthy pile. I go to grab a fork out of the flatware drawer.
Here, that story ends, and an entirely new one begins.
The whole drawer collapses into roughly 7 different pieces in my hand and plummets to the ground as chunks of wood and flailing sharp utensils. I live in a house of crap.
The central piece of the drawer is the front cover, weighing an estimated 4,000 pounds and is made of actual wood. The rest in flimsy, already cracked and /or disintegrated particle board. So, of course, the piece that slams down on top of my left foot is the front cover. And not only does it manage to hit right on the very top where the one bone sort of protrudes, it does so in such a way that one of the fitted staples that formerly held the thing together impales itself into my foot. The flatware misses me entirely, in my one complete victory of the night.
There is a certain level of pain that I just cannot deal with. It's not necessarily the worst pain I've ever felt, but it's that level of pain that is just an inch more than the pain of stubbing your toe really badly, or slamming your hand in a car door. It's that tiny, tiny extra bit of pain that exceeds your normal threshold of what you consider...well "acceptable pain" sounds made up, but that's what sort of what I'm going for here. I just can't wrap my head around this level of pain - excruciating I can deal with, and minor pain I'm okay with, but I'm helpless to react rationally to the midpoint.
That moment that I stood there, with the top of my foot impaled on a huge chunk of former drawer was a level of pain that I could not deal with. The only other equivalent time I can think of to relate it to was the moment that I broke my leg when I was 14, which was also the first time I ever said the word fuck, and when I use the word "said" I actually mean "yelled, in the middle of a field, so loud that people came out from the house 100 yards away to see what was up."
And again at this juncture, I did the same thing, only I was not in a field. And LaSister is discreet enough to just poke her head out of her door to make sure I'm still alive, and then goes back to what she was doing. Then, I kicked out my foot in rage, and managed to lodge a fork under a toenail.
Rage, man.
Later, once The Hulk had retreated, and with the help of LaSister, I managed to rebuild the drawer using my mad Shop Class skills, a hammer, and three wire nails I had in my closet. I am the master of manly endeavors.
No doubt the drawer will collapse again one day, as it now lies in wait, just looking for that one moment when I let down my guard and innocently pull it open. But for now I have won the battle, if not the war. Although I can't say losses were not to be had, as my foot swelled up ridiculously over the night, and I couldn't really tie my shoe in the morning.
This is a story with no point, only it feels very cathartic to let it all out in a stream of furious typing.
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Also, in an unrelated story, yesterday the power went out at my office building. At that particular moment in time I had been reaching up on a high shelf to get a big box of envelopes. When the darkness enveloped (ha) me, I managed to knock the box off its perch and it proceeded to slam into my temple.
My days of clumsy free living are at an end.
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