My California trip so far: Chapter 2

A story about toilets, reading glasses and lost shoelaces...

When you start your day by dropping your reading glasses in the toilet I think it’s fair to question what Fate has in store for you in the near future.

Here’s how it happened:

I had the temple of my reading glasses between my teeth (and I know Temple of the Reading Glasses sounds like a place you’d go to worship ophthalmologists, but it’s not…it’s the part that goes over your ears) and I bent over to pick up a rubber bath mat to put in the hotel tub so I don’t slip and kill myself while I shower which now seems not only possible, but perhaps inevitable, and the tips of the temple (which sounds like the rules you should follow when entering the Holy Ophthalmologists Place of Worship, like cover your head and wash your feet and don’t look him or her in the eyes or they’ll make you do that screwed up test where they hit your eyeball with a puff of air) slipped out from between my teeth and having the reflexes of a cat…an old cat who’s just a bit hungover…I tried to catch them and of course missed, committed eyeglass goaltending and managed to bat my reading glasses into the open toilet bowl.

WHICH I HAD JUST FINISHED USING.

Fortunately, it was the No. 1 kind of using and not the No. 2 kind, so I employed the Dropped Food Rule (if you pick it up fast enough it’s not really dirty because the dirt molecules don’t have time to adhere which is a completely valid scientific theory) fished the glasses out and rinsed them off and since it’s about 5 AM I’m not going outside in the dark to buy new reading glasses and I think it makes a world of difference that my glasses soaked in my urine and not the urine of some of the homeless people I have seen on this trip; urine which I’m pretty sure could strip varnish off a wood table.

Also…

One of the benefits of short-term memory loss is a week from now I’ll totally forget my glasses went through the Urine Car Wash which is why whenever I drop a pill on the floor I pick it up, put it back in the pill bottle and shake it up because then it’s Dirty Pill Roulette and I never know which pill is the one that hit the bathroom floor and after a while I quit thinking about it.

(Feel free to use my Dirty Pill Roulette trick, but I do expect royalties.)

The Princess and the Pea-brain

And just in case you’re being generous and thinking, “Lee, everyone makes mistake occasionally” here’s a little more evidence for you to consider:

When you go on a trip you have to decide what to bring and what you’ll actually wear (haven’t put on one of my dress shirts yet) and I decided to bring a pair of black Vans, but change the white shoe laces so they looked a little more dressed up if I went someplace nice.

I thought I brought the black shoelaces, but couldn’t find them and went to at least three stores to buy a pair and apparently that’s like trying to buy some suspenders or sock garters or a hernia truss because nobody had shoelaces and everybody looked at me like I was out of my mind. So I said fuck it and have spent the last 12 days walking around with white shoelaces.

And now…time for A Fairy Tale Reminder:

There’s that story about the Prince who wanted to marry a Princess, but he was a ginormous dick and wouldn’t marry her unless she was a Real Princess because he wanted to get married to someone with Royal Blood and have a whole bunch of children that faintly resembled Kentucky Derby Contestants.

So he put like 40 mattresses on top of each other and a single pea under all those mattresses and since the Princess was a Real Princess she wound up with a bruised ass because it was so sensitive, so I think we can agree these two dipshits deserved each other.

She was willing to marry a snobbish jerk because he was a Prince and he was willing to marry a hemophiliac who was going to develop bruises every time she walked in a stiff wind because she was a Princess.

Anyway…

This morning I was going to do laundry and since I stuff socks in my shoes when I travel (it uses available space and helps the shoes keep their shape) I was digging the socks out of one of my shoes and found the black shoelaces I thought I left at home.

So I’ve been walking around for 12 days with a pair of shoelaces in the toe of my right shoe and wondering why it felt uncomfortable.

Clearly, I’m no Princess and apparently I could sleep on top of a 12-pound Brunswick bowling ball and get a decent 8 hours.   

All’s well that ends well…as long as you brush your teeth

So just to prove my theory about the benefits of short-term memory loss, a minute ago I had already forgotten I dropped my reading glasses in the toilet and out of habit put the temple back in my mouth.

Shit!

Or in this case…piss!

OK, I’m off to brush my teeth before somebody tells me my breath smells like a Greyhound Bus station and things should go OK today as long as I remember not have my car keys anywhere near an open toilet bowl.

Wish me luck.