Since I don't have any good recent stories (though I
did just buy a Fender accoustic guitar!), I've decided to fall back on the ever-trusty OLD story. Some of you may have heard it already, but fuck you. Here goes anyway.
When there's something that I want to remember, I've got this little trick. I put something in a weird place. Kind of like a variation on the string-around-the-finger thing. Like -- say --- I'd tie toilet paper around a doorknob, or leave a trophy on top of the toilet seat. (Ok, I lied. I have no trophies. But you get the idea.) One night after coming back from catering, I was getting ready for bed in the bathroom when I remembered that there was something that I had to do the next morning. We have these little vanity lights running along the top of the mirror in my bathroom downstairs at home so, deciding to use my patented technique, I shut off the lights and threw the tie that I'd been wearing over one of the lights. That way, when the tie was blocking the mirror in the morning, I'd recall whatever it was that I was supposed to recall.
So the next morning I stumbled groggily and barefooted into the bathroom to put on my contacts, half blind since I had left my glasses at my bedside. I walked in, saw the tie, remembered what I was supposed to do, then pulled it off the lightbulb.
Now let me tell you something about ties and the clothing industry in general. A long time ago when the loom was all the rage, there were factories just brimming with low-paid workers whose job it was to make cloth. For the most part, they used all-natural fibres derived from sheep's wool. Sheep were raised for months, then farmers sheared them, then the wool was cleaned and sent to the aforementioned factories. This was all very expensive, so somewhere along the line, synthetic fibres were intoduced as a cheaper alternative. Synthetic fibres are basically made of plastic. Plastic melts. Lightbulbs are hot. Is this all coming together for you?
Back to my story. Since I'd flicked off the light just before I threw my cheap synthetic Wal-Mart tie over top of it, the tie had fused to the hot lightbulb overnight. Now, being morning, this newly created and cooled lightbulb-tie hybrid did not want to be separated. So when I unknowingly tried to pull the tie off, the motherfucking lightbulb-tie hybrid decided to explode into little pieces. These little pieces landed all over every surface in the bathroom.
So there I was -- tired, stunned, half-blind, barefooted and surrounded by tiny fragments of jagged glass. The only way this could have been worse was if there had only been one bulb, so that I would have also now been in the dark... but I guess either way, I still couldn't see, so it wouldn't have made that much difference.
At this point, I had to somehow make it out of the bathroom to get my glasses and clean this shit up. But how, you ask? You see -- drastic situations call for drastic measures... so I gathered my wits. I had to be hard core. I drew in a breath and tensed my hopping muscles. And then I pulled a John McClane (à la
Die Hard), leaping across the floor and through the glass in my bare feet. Needless to say, my feet bled.
Speaking of Die Hard, did you know that Bruce Willis wasn't the first in line for the John McClane role? Guess who was? Actaully there were a few ahead of him. It was offered to (in order) Arnold Schwarzenegger, then Sylvester Stallone, then Burt Reynolds, and then -- Get this! -- Richard Gere! Richard "I was in
Pretty Women and
Runaway Bride" Gere!!! I mean -- What!?! If you don't believe me, look it up; it's in the trivia at
IMDB.com. This guy is known for for lines such as "If I don't ask you to be mine, I'll regret it for the rest of my life, because I know, in my heart, you're the only one for me." Can you
really picture Richard freaking Gere yelling out "Take *this* under advisement, jerkweed", or "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker"? I think not.
Props to Bert for finding that little tid-bit. If you wonder why he's so good at trivia, this is what he does: reads it from IMDB for fun.
