Not surprisingly, I've done some stupid things in my life. The vast majority of which I can admit without too much anguish. Hiding out from the entire summer day-care class under a bean-bag for hours because I didn't want to go swimming comes to mind. 1. Why the hell didn't I want to go swimming on a hot summer day? 2. I managed to ruin the day for everyone: the teachers, all the other kids who were lined up waiting to go swimming, even my parents who got called when they couldn't find me. Without getting too deep into my childhood psychosis, you see the potential for stupidity. Countless bad driving decisions, social faux pas, etc. With certainty I can pinpoint to my own misfirings and lay the blame firmly on myself.
Every once in a while one of these stupid acts can be attributed to pure chance. It's kind of relaxing, to know I've done something supremely inane and really couldn't have done something to prevent it. Takes most of the cudda/shudda/wudda headspinnig out of the equation, and frees my to ponder the sheer chance by which the stupid thing occurred.
So, last weekend -being the first weekend we've been home in months, I decide it's time to clean out the shed and haul everything to the dump. This has been a long time coming. Plies of Styrofoam -big presents from my son's birthday (6 months ago), old vaccum cleaner (replaced 4 months ago), the metal realty signpost that the sellers of my house apparently did not want to keep (almost 2 years now), and even junk from the previous home owners all gets loaded in the trunk and driven away.
All right, so aside from being incredibly lazy, I hadn't done anything stupid.
Yet.
On the last throw of trash out the back (a fungusy piece of particleboard) my wedding ring slips of my finger and follows behind. It moved slow, not like bad movie slow-mo, but I had time to watch the symbol of my undying love fling from my hand and and clink down into Transfer Station Never-Never Land. I take a few moments to ponder. My "what the hell do I do now" train goes like this: I think I saw where it lands, I could almost just jump down there with all the rusty things and look for it. Should I just forget about it? Id better make some calls. Uh... In the end I flagged down a sympathetic worker name Joe. Joe took my name and number and had his guys spend the rest of the day scraping off piles and sifting through the rubble looking for one stupid guys wedding ring. They never found it, but were nice enough to look and give me a call at the end of the day.
The good news: 1. My wife took it well, she's not super-attached to material things. 2. It wasn't a really expensive ring.
The bad news: My wife has informed me that a flat-screen TV is not an acceptable symbol of undying love, so we need to buy a ring instead.
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Heh...that wasn't stupid, that was the world. Since it's been proved that there actually ISN'T any such thing as gravity, the only solidly defendable hypothosis is that the world sucks.
ReplyDeleteThe world sucked your wedding ring right off your finger and ate it.
Stupid world.
Now....you wanna know about stupid things, I've got a big list with a hell of a capper.
You my friend are to fucking good and cool to be associated with anything stupid. Tell Molls that if she really loved you she'd love that flat screen too........hehe.