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| My best friend Bob piloting the Porta-Bote on Lake Erie |
Yesterday, I melted my sandals. Yes, I melted my sandals. I didn’t mean to,
and I was very upset to have done so. Those sandals and I have traveled the
country over the years. It was just one of those days.
Did you ever have one of those days, when you could swear some little gremlin was behind the
curtain screwing with you? Yesterday was like that for me. I’d set something
down, and when I looked away, it simply disappeared. I’d drop something and it
would fall into the one place where it was unrecoverable. There were at least ten
or fifteen annoying little things that happened in a short time which suggested
to me that I was out of sync with the universe. Upon reflection, it’s funny, but
I wasn’t laughing at the time.
Yesterday, the weather was fantastic, and after doing
all the bungled projects I needed to do, each which took twice as long as it should have, I decided to reward myself with the first lap of the season around
the lake in my Porta-Bote (my little folding dinghy). Yes, I’d spent most of
the day breaking things, looking for things that went missing under my nose,
cleaning up things I’d spilled, etc., but now it was time for some good old-fashioned
fun in the sun. There are few things I enjoy more than putting around in a boat,
any boat.
I pulled the little outboard out of storage, mounted
it on the boat, and put the gas can in the boat. I had to go up to the house for
a minute, and when I came back, I stepped into the boat before I realized that
there was liquid in the bilge. I thought it strange that water had suddenly leaked
into the boat. As it washed over my feet, I realized that it wasn’t water but
gasoline, about a half a gallon of it. Somehow, the gas can that I had placed
in the boat, which had held gas without leaking for the last three weeks, emptied
into the bilge making a big mess. I decanted most of the spilled fuel into
another gas can, and mopped up the bilge with a rag, grudgingly accepting that this was just one of those Murphy’s Law kind of days. What did not occur to me was that the rubber
(or plastic) soles of my sandals might decompose in gasoline. As I got back on
the dock and looked down on the dinghy, I could see multiple black footprints on the floor
of the boat, made out of melted plastic from the bottom of my beloved sandals.
For some inexplicable reason, that became the tipping point. I wish someone had been there to film
me losing it on that dock, jumping up and down screaming FUCK! FUCK!! FUCK!!!
FUCK!!!! FUUUUUUCK! That would have been Facebook gold for sure.
Sometimes karma’s a bitch, and every so often, life throws
me a little curve ball to remind me of my place in the cosmic food chain. Maybe
it was that raccoon I hit with my car in 2003, or the time I tried to steal that
box of crayons when I was five, or the morbid fascination I have with the
natural disasters that befall other people, or the fact that I stopped giving
to certain charities, or that I sometimes over-stuff garbage bags that I take to
the dump. Hell, I don’t know, maybe it was the accumulation of thousands of
other little crimes against humanity of which I am guilty. Sometimes life
throws a day like yesterday at me to remind me not to take my good fortune for
granted. I lose my perspective from time to time. Lesson
learned; thank you. There, I have purged my dysfunction (for a few days).
Shauna never liked those sandals anyway.
Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2017 ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
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