Oct. 05, 2013 - 8:06 a.m.

Some Knuckle In Your Eyeballs (and a joke)

First, the joke:

A rice cake and a crab are on a beach. A person says �What a cute rice cake! What an ugly crab!� The crab says nothing. A second person says �What a cute rice cake! What an ugly crab!� The crab is upset. He swears he will throw the rice cake in the ocean if another person says that. A third person says �What a cute crab! What an ugly rice cake!� The crab throws the rice cake into the ocean.

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I have a new love in my life. It's BMO (pronounced "Bee-mo"), the sentient hand-held video game player in the cartoon "Adventure Time". How could you not love anything that says "Stick it in my butt!" when asked what to do with an old VCR tape that's been found. If only NewWifey(tm) had that feature....

Imagine how squealy-girl overjoyed I was, then, to find someone posted my favorite BMO-centric episode, "BMO Noire" online. (Every now and then someone tosses it up on Vimeo, only to have the Cartoon Network goons swat it down again. Hopefully they won't find this cleverly disguised site before you click the link.)

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Gloria the Boneless Cat (the one I fucked with a Q-Tip all those episodes ago) shows not only no signs of aging (she's pushing 13) but also no signs of becoming tired of me as a mate. She runs down the street when she hears me pull up in Stanley the Mighty WRX, she sits on my lap when I'm playing video games and swats away NewWifey(tm)'s hand when she tries to cop a feel, and she still presents me with half dead woodland creatures on a semi-annual basis*.

She also still lies in wait for me every morning.

Every morning I get up at 3am for work, stumble out of our bedroom and head down the hall to the bathroom. And until I reach the bathroom light switch, it's pitch dark the entire way. It's not that far a distance, but along the route there are doorways to the basement, the computer room - with a desk just inside the door - and a closet. At the end of the hall, where it opens up to the living room, you turn right and go down a short hall to the bathroom. But right where it opens up there's a small desk on the right, a light-stand table on the left, and diagonally down to the left a few feet is the corner of the Fucking Recliner.

Every single one of those points is a perfect cat launch pad. So every morning Gloria the Boneless Cat is either crouched in one of those doorways, or on one of the desks/tables/couch. When I walk by, every single morning, she leaps onto my back as I pass. If she's on one of the tables as I go by she's pretty much dead sure to land on my shoulders and immediately curl up there. But if she started her leap from the floor she generally hits me mid-back, where she then claws her way to the top.

And it scares the shit out of me every. single. morning.

I don't know why, after almost 13 years of having this unfailingly happen, I still don't expect it. But I don't. Every morning I get hit in the back at 3am as I'm going to pee, and I scream like I just saw Jerry Sandusky waiting for me in the shower.

It happened again two nights ago, but this time something went REALLY wrong. This time Gloria was balanced right at the end of the Fucking Recliner, and as I turned right to go down to the bathroom she launched herself out across the 10 or 12 feet that separated us and slammed into my back just below the neck. It was like getting hit by a fur covered boat oar.

But that wasn't unusual. What was unusual was that I was carrying my Nintendo DS in one hand, because I charged it on my bed stand overnight and needed to put it in my work back before I forgot (I get one extended bathroom break at work per day, during which I sit and build levels in "Animal Crossing").

Since I had the game still in my hand when the cat latched on, I decided to take a selfie. The DS has a little camera built in, along with a pretty funny little edit feature where you can add all sorts of effects. So I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and turned the thing on.

Normally Gloria stays draped across my shoulders while I pee and brush my teeth, then I walk down to the kitchen with her like that and open a can of cat food. That's her cue to finally stand up and hop onto the side counter where her dish is, and I fill it up. After that I can go about the rest of my business unmolested.

But two nights ago, for some reason, Gloria stood up on my shoulders just as I was raising the camera to take the picture. I clicked the shutter just as she was looking up at something over my head.

That something turned out to be a hunormous Brown Spider. I mean, hu-fucking-normous.

Brown Spiders are not something to be messed with. They're almost as venomous as Black Widows, as a lot of people up here who are hospitalized every year from their bites can attest.

And now there was a 4-foot-long, 25-pound one in my bathroom lowering itself from the ceiling by a thread, right towards my cat's head.

Towards MY head!

The cat, of course, didn't know she was looking at death approaching. She probably thought it was a mouse coming down a zipline into her mouth, an early Christmas present or something.

So less than a second after I snapped that pic the following things happened in quick succession:

I glanced up to see what Gloria was looking at.

Gloria shifted all her weight to her back legs, lifted her front end and got ready to jump.

I saw the spider and reflexively leaped sideways to avoid it.

Gloria's back claws extended and dug into my shoulder as she started to leap.

I twisted and began to fall, having caught the side of my foot on the door sill.

The cat shot off my shoulder 20 degrees to the left of where she was aiming, since her launch platform had moved.

I hit the ground. Hard.

Gloria the Boneless Cat hit the medicine cabinet over the bathroom sink. Hard.

The various perfumes, colognes and eau-de-whatevers that NewWifey(tm) keeps in the medicine cabinet came raining down onto the tiled bathroom floor. The ones that didn't hit me exploded next to me.

The cat bolted out of the bathroom into the kitchen, where she sat down and waited to be fed.

The spider ran back up its silk thread and disappeared...somewhere.

I peed on myself.

From down the hall I could hear NewWifey(tm) yell, "WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON OUT THERE?!" The bedroom door opened, and she came running down the hall. When she turned the corner to the bathroom she saw me laying half in the hallway, in a spreading pool of urine, blood, and cologne, and covered with bits of broken glass.

"WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO YOU? Are you ok??"

I barely knew what happened to me. It all went down so fast, and at 3 in the morning I'm not good at processing facts quickly.

"Uh...the cat...there was a spider...she wants food...."

NewWifey(tm) stared at me with her mouth open. "You're covered in piss, and your shoulder's bleeding. And...oh my god, are those broken bottles my good perfumes?! WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO?!"

I staggered up to my knees and started to brush shards of glass out of my hair. "Listen, honey, I'll explain it all when I get home, ok? Right now I've desperately got to shower this pee off me before I get to work. I'll clean the mess up when I get back, too. In the meantime use the back bathroom, alright honey?"

"Don't 'honey' me. You better have a damn good excuse why you just demolished probably 200 dollars worth of my favorite fragrances when you get home. And you better replace them on your way home, too, or we're not going to be using that recliner for anything other than sitting for a long, long time." And she stomped back to the bedroom and closed the door.

I got off the floor, laid a couple of our guest towels on the floor to soak of the pool of mixed filth, and showered up.

Needless to say, it didn't help. Oh sure, I looked clean. But the smell? Wheeeeeeeee-oooooooooo! A medieval king of France would have thought I overdid it. There was nothing gonna wash away 4 or 5 ounces of Avon's finest in that short a time. I had to go to work smelling like a 19th century New Orleans bordello.

I won't bore you with what I had to put up with from my co-workers - the ones who could stand to get close enough to hurl abuse at me, that is. But it was awful. The waves of flower/musk/spice/estrogen coming off me made everyone I get within 10 feet of start retching. I wouldn't be surprised to find out even my listeners could smell it right through their radios. It was a looooooong shift. And when it was over I had to go shopping for replacement perfume. The poor salesgirl's eyes watered the entire time she was helping me.

When I got home I showered again, then scrubbed the bathroom. It'll probably stink longer than I will, which might actually not be a bad thing considering how hideous it can be after I "drop a friend off at the pool" there some days.

NewWifey(tm) softened up a bit once I told her about the spider (and presented her with 200 worth of new perfumes). She still thought I was an idiot. But she always thinks I'm an idiot. So no harm done. Tensions eased, and even though the waves of stench coming off me were still too overpowering for any physical contact, she assured me that as soon as she could be around me without fear of asphyxiation we could hop back on the Fucking Recliner. Not to sit.

All in all then, although the whole thing was pretty traumatic at least it didn't last long. I went to bed last night and went peacefully to sleep.

Then at 3 in the morning my alarm clock went off and I stumbled down the hall towards the bathroom in the dark.

The cat was waiting on the living room light table. When she leaped, I ducked. She sailed over my head into the bathroom, and slid on the tile floor right into the toilet.

After 13 years, I finally figured it out.

Well, gotta go take another shower. I'm still wilting house plants at 20 feet.

Ciao!

*Oh my god was that a long entry. Do yourself a favor and start 2/3 of the way down.

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Oh, and because I know the first joke wasn�t so great, here�s another one:

A high school couple is saying goodbye on a beach. They�re going to separate colleges, but they promise to meet back in 4 years, at the same beach, at the same time. They exchange promise rings and leave. Four years pass. The girl arrives back on the beach, same place, same time, and waits for her love. He never shows up. She rips off her ring, throws it in the water, and leaves. However, a few miles down the beach is the boy. He had forgotten the correct place. The girl doesn�t show up, but he decides to wait a while. He pulls out his fishing pole and casts the line. He suddenly feels a tug at the end and, thinking it�s a fish, quickly reels it up. He spins and spins, until it finally breaks the water. He pulls it up and sees...

the rice cake.