Me (about 3:30 AM last Sunday night): What...what...what....what...whathwatwhatwhatwhatwhatwhat?
That's my groggy, "there's something happening that should not be happening at 3:30 in the morning" interior monologue. My pre-thought thought was the cat was scratching my downstairs leather chair really loudly. The cat, as mentioned in a previous blog, is my emergency contact, and I think she accepts payment for services rendered in the form of destroying all of my furniture.
The Cat: Next time, let’s pick up some brown leather. I like the way my claws dig into the brown leather especially. Oooh, microfiber! Score!
It wasn’t the cat.
My subsequent, still completely asleep thought, no more cogent than a typical dream I might have about Will Smith, his skin so taut and creamy, was that back a couple years ago when the pipe burst in my upstairs shower and I could hear the water leaking through the downstairs ceiling to the tile in cat beach, that it sounded a lot like this.
(Author’s note – In my kitchen, I keep the cat’s litter box inside a children’s plastic swimming pool; she’s always seemed to enjoy it and I call it cat beach and I’m hoping she’ll challenge Michael Phelps at the next Olympics. Perhaps dedicating her gold medal to the people of Tibet. That is all.
Oh…mosquitoes have 47 teeth and beavers were once the size of bears. That is all.)
I have no recollection of getting out of bed, only that I found myself, naked, still asleep, downstairs, staring at buckets full of water coming through my ceiling.
Fuck me. The pipe's burst again.
But I never made it to the shower to check - because now as I went back upstairs I could hear the death rattle of my hot water heater, which is in my spare bedroom's walk in closet along with my Wrestlemania XIII poster and class notes for the Reason and Value discussion sections I taught at Florida Atlantic University in 2003.
(Author’s note – I was talking some Bertrand Russell and did a bit…I had about a hundred students in an amphitheater type lecture hall, and was making the point about how fundamentally they didn’t care about human life as much as they thought they did…
….oh, oh…this reminds me, I want to talk about Michael Vick and Jimmy Dean pure pork sausage…don’t let me leave this blog without doing that run….maybe I'll do that in Part 2, hells yeah, Part 2.
…because all the students wanted to say that their highest value was human life, but when confronted with this hypothetical:
Me (not at 3:30 in the morning, but probably similarly groggy): Pretend for a second that you could enter an alternate universe where this happens – you come to the next class and I’m not here. Some substitute sadly says that Professor Jividen passed away over the past week…his head was sheared from his shoulders in a motorcycle accident…or he was murdered while making torrid man on man love with an oily 50 year old toupee wearing dude, burying his love juices inside toupee dude’s exposed chesthair…or he was eaten alive by a beaver who had escaped the ravages of evolution and was still the size of a bear…
And sure, some of you would be momentarily sad, because a person you kinda knew a little bit was dead.
But imagine the story value.
For years, for years you’d be able to say “I had a professor get eaten by a beaver.”
And people would be fascinated by that story.
Are you telling me it wouldn’t be worth it?
And then I walked around the room and asked each student to slap their desk if my dying would be worth it to him.
I’ve replicated this experiment at my current gig. Results are these: some go for it immediately, readily, perhaps even eagerly.
I failed them, of course.
Some needed more prodding…would there be a tangible benefit to them, say an automatic A in the course given the trauma associated with having a professor eaten by a beaver? More slapping of desks. What about tuition reimbursement? There have to be students whose psyches are sufficiently fragile that the occasion of their beloved Professor Jividen’s head being separated from his shoulders by wilding beavers would render them unable to fruitfully continue as students absent some type of set off…
By the end, I could see the frenzied looks in my students eyes. Florida hadn’t seen such beaver worship since (insert your own pornographic reference here, I can't do everything for you people).
And now I’m in this walk in closet and I’m still dead solid asleep, and the carpet around the water heater is soaked - I still haven't grasped what's happening, but I'm waking up now - I know it's the water heater. I know it's making a noise. I know there's water there and water downstairs and I know the cat is staring at me like she did just five hours earlier when I failed to notice the dead cockroach near her food dish.
The Cat: Fix it, asshole. Don't you have any responsibilities around this place? I’d do it myself but I t’aint got thumbs, son. I’m your emergency contact; if you want to “make it rain” go to the strip club, but keep that shit away from my house. I got scratching to do. Dig?
And I know something else, as I stood with my feet engulfed by the flooded carpet staring at the electric outlet in which the water heater was plugged.
It was really my first fully formed thought of the morning.
Water + electricity = bad.
That's my groggy, "there's something happening that should not be happening at 3:30 in the morning" interior monologue. My pre-thought thought was the cat was scratching my downstairs leather chair really loudly. The cat, as mentioned in a previous blog, is my emergency contact, and I think she accepts payment for services rendered in the form of destroying all of my furniture.
The Cat: Next time, let’s pick up some brown leather. I like the way my claws dig into the brown leather especially. Oooh, microfiber! Score!
It wasn’t the cat.
My subsequent, still completely asleep thought, no more cogent than a typical dream I might have about Will Smith, his skin so taut and creamy, was that back a couple years ago when the pipe burst in my upstairs shower and I could hear the water leaking through the downstairs ceiling to the tile in cat beach, that it sounded a lot like this.
(Author’s note – In my kitchen, I keep the cat’s litter box inside a children’s plastic swimming pool; she’s always seemed to enjoy it and I call it cat beach and I’m hoping she’ll challenge Michael Phelps at the next Olympics. Perhaps dedicating her gold medal to the people of Tibet. That is all.
Oh…mosquitoes have 47 teeth and beavers were once the size of bears. That is all.)
I have no recollection of getting out of bed, only that I found myself, naked, still asleep, downstairs, staring at buckets full of water coming through my ceiling.
Fuck me. The pipe's burst again.
But I never made it to the shower to check - because now as I went back upstairs I could hear the death rattle of my hot water heater, which is in my spare bedroom's walk in closet along with my Wrestlemania XIII poster and class notes for the Reason and Value discussion sections I taught at Florida Atlantic University in 2003.
(Author’s note – I was talking some Bertrand Russell and did a bit…I had about a hundred students in an amphitheater type lecture hall, and was making the point about how fundamentally they didn’t care about human life as much as they thought they did…
….oh, oh…this reminds me, I want to talk about Michael Vick and Jimmy Dean pure pork sausage…don’t let me leave this blog without doing that run….maybe I'll do that in Part 2, hells yeah, Part 2.
…because all the students wanted to say that their highest value was human life, but when confronted with this hypothetical:
Me (not at 3:30 in the morning, but probably similarly groggy): Pretend for a second that you could enter an alternate universe where this happens – you come to the next class and I’m not here. Some substitute sadly says that Professor Jividen passed away over the past week…his head was sheared from his shoulders in a motorcycle accident…or he was murdered while making torrid man on man love with an oily 50 year old toupee wearing dude, burying his love juices inside toupee dude’s exposed chesthair…or he was eaten alive by a beaver who had escaped the ravages of evolution and was still the size of a bear…
And sure, some of you would be momentarily sad, because a person you kinda knew a little bit was dead.
But imagine the story value.
For years, for years you’d be able to say “I had a professor get eaten by a beaver.”
And people would be fascinated by that story.
Are you telling me it wouldn’t be worth it?
And then I walked around the room and asked each student to slap their desk if my dying would be worth it to him.
I’ve replicated this experiment at my current gig. Results are these: some go for it immediately, readily, perhaps even eagerly.
I failed them, of course.
Some needed more prodding…would there be a tangible benefit to them, say an automatic A in the course given the trauma associated with having a professor eaten by a beaver? More slapping of desks. What about tuition reimbursement? There have to be students whose psyches are sufficiently fragile that the occasion of their beloved Professor Jividen’s head being separated from his shoulders by wilding beavers would render them unable to fruitfully continue as students absent some type of set off…
By the end, I could see the frenzied looks in my students eyes. Florida hadn’t seen such beaver worship since (insert your own pornographic reference here, I can't do everything for you people).
And now I’m in this walk in closet and I’m still dead solid asleep, and the carpet around the water heater is soaked - I still haven't grasped what's happening, but I'm waking up now - I know it's the water heater. I know it's making a noise. I know there's water there and water downstairs and I know the cat is staring at me like she did just five hours earlier when I failed to notice the dead cockroach near her food dish.
The Cat: Fix it, asshole. Don't you have any responsibilities around this place? I’d do it myself but I t’aint got thumbs, son. I’m your emergency contact; if you want to “make it rain” go to the strip club, but keep that shit away from my house. I got scratching to do. Dig?
And I know something else, as I stood with my feet engulfed by the flooded carpet staring at the electric outlet in which the water heater was plugged.
It was really my first fully formed thought of the morning.
Water + electricity = bad.
2 comments
I just read through that monstrosity of brilliance and I can't decide whether to applaud or mail you an Adderall.
(Like you weren't already up at 3:30am. Right.)
I would appreciate it if you would quit spreading this lie about the beaver.
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