Terrible Analogies

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I seriously hope they were on the first floor…

As I enter the weekend, I do so with a new fear.

According to the radio there’s a new spider invading California, and the news media is making it out to be a natural born killer. The spider in question is the much-maligned Brown Widow spider, and according to the voices coming out of my car radio, their venom is twice as deadly as their cousin the Black Widow.

According to several sites on the Intertubes, these are spiders that you’re not going to want to get bit by.  Although not as nasty as the Brown Recluse spider, they can still pack a punch and are apparently on the march in Southern California, staking out territories, shoring up borders, and dealing crack to younger spiders who don’t know any better:

So…sleep tight, California. Make sure to check under the covers for creepy-crawlies before slipping between the sheets tonight. Shudder! Pleasant dreams…

Last night I placed three Motrin’s in the palm of my hand and nonchalantly popped them into my mouth.  The instant those tiny orange pills flew into my gaping maw I felt something strange, as if one of the pills stuck to the side of my throat.  ”No biggie,” I thought as I took a swig of water and swallowed thinking that water would dislodge the offending pill, but that strange feeling was still there.

When I finally took a breath I felt an odd sensation, one I had never felt before.  Something was rattling around in my windpipe, bouncing off the walls of my trachea like a pebble bouncing wildly inside an empty tin can.

And that’s when my body took over with a commanding and possessive “get the frak out of my way!” mentality, doubling me over and expelling air in a desperate effort to remove this unwanted foreign object from my throat.

At first nothing came up.  Then again, and with even more force, I tried to jettison this unwanted hitchhiker, but that stubborn pill nestled in an inconvenient way a few inches below my jaw line.  By now I’m panicking, wondering what would happen to me if I’m unable to exude this object from my throat.  What if it settles into my lungs?  Will an operation be required?  The mind was reeling a mile a minute with the bizarre and the unsettling.

With a third and mighty effort that orange invader miraculously shot out of my mouth and bounced off of the floor, eventually coming to a wet, sliding stop under the bed.  My chest and shoulder muscles felt oddly pained with the effort of ejecting that cursed pill.  I slumped against the nearest wall and slid to the ground, exhausted from the previous harrowing moments.  For the next 30 minutes I forcefully exhaled air with a deep and disturbing dry-heaving coughing sound as I tried to expel water that had managed to follow that pill into my windpipe.

I’m sure I could come up with a snarky joke here, but after having experienced what it’s like to choke on something as stupid and innocuous as a pill I can’t imagine making light of such a serious subject.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make a ham sandwich for tomorrow’s lunch…

I had a friend who used to live in an apartment which was situated above a concert hall. Nearly every night the walls of his place would vibrate to the sound of whatever activity was taking place in that cavernous entertainment complex below, and no amount of sound dampening material could muffle the noise.

Depending on the night you could sit in his living room and listen (quite clearly) to either a rock concert, comedy tour, self-help seminar, business convention or a play. My friend used to say that if life is a stage then his apartment is the dressing room.

This friend of mine wasn’t the highest achiever in the world. He had a low paying job down at the Jiffy Lube. He was one of those guys who would skulk about in the little room under the pavement waiting for cars to stop above so he could remove the oil pan screw to drain the oil, but he really didn’t mind that hot, cramped room because his job afforded him the opportunity to occasionally take a toke from a small pocket inhaler he used to carry around with him at all times.

To say that my friend was a stoner would be like saying Ronald McDonald “sorta liked” hamburgers; a blatant understatement. If there ever was a moment when he wasn’t baked I never saw it.

Luckily for my friend he was one of those “lucid” stoners who could talk about any subject in depth and keep you entertained for hours, unlike this guy who I can’t, for the life of me, understand one bit:

Man, I miss my friend. He eventually quit smoking, moved up to Oregon and became a lawyer. He now works as a public defender, which both does and does not surprise me one bit…

Pop quiz, hotshot.  Can you tell me what this is?

If you guessed jelly beans, a Muppet under construction, LED lights or a broken container which used to hold my hallowed dreams of a joyous future then you’d be incorrect.  This is, in actuality, the coating to a Tylenol-type asprin.

This bad boy was found sitting on the bottom of our washing machine.  It had gone through an entire washing cycle and emerged intact.

But wait a minute.  I was under the assumption that these coatings were supposed to break down when used.  Instead this thing survived a full permanent press wash, puffed up to twice its initial size (I’m assuming in a primitive fight/flight response to the threat of the spin cycle), and surfaced unscathed.

I wonder if these things actually survive a trip through the body as well, but I’m not too keen on really finding out…