nitroglycerine, those were psych meds! Elavil and Stelazine are among the nasties that they try to shoot us up with in psychiatric bins. (The leg thing is part of what are called “extrapyramidal symptoms”, we get them all the time when we’re drugged up).
Man, I can’t believe anyone would be selling that stuff as pleasant recreational high!
(OTOH, people used to deliberately do PCP which is almost as bad)
Mine:
Cars way back when had little triangular windows in front of the main windows and a post sat between the triangular window and the main. The triangular window hooked to it and the main window had window guides running along it. If both windows were open, you could grab the post in lieu of the door handle to pull the car door closed.
In sedans (but not hardtops) there were frames around the outside of the window glass as well. When the door was open and the windows were rolled all the way down in a hardtop, the door “ended” where you’d rest your elbow, nothing but empty space above that, except for the triangle window which would still stick up. In a sedan, on the other hand, there would be this metal rim that would still be there, echoing where the top of the window glass would have been if the window were still rolled up.
My car was a hardtop. My dad’s was a newer model of the same make, and a sedan. I was driving his car one day, stopped for something, slid back into car seat, reached around behind me. Hand finds the sedan metal rim that ghosts around the window instead of the pillar between triangle window and main window. Hand closes and yanks door closed with my usual emphatic yank.
On a sedan, when the door is closed, the window rim sits flush against the door frame, nothing sits in between them.
Except my stupid hand. ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow.
I look after my elderly/disabled Dad, during the day I’ll ask him if he wants a cup of tea, he’ll say yes, I boild the kettle, pour the water into the teapot, and sit down to read the paper or something while it “brews”. half an hour later I’ll realise there’s a pot of cold tea on the worktop. I do this three or four times a week. Funnily enough he’s never said anything …
I bought an expensive icecream cone once, unwrapped it, threw it in the bin, and attempted to eat the wrapper.
One of my friends bought a new house. Small started place for her and her husband. They arn’t they richest or most sophicticated of people. She’s showing me around the house, and the fairly meager furnishings they have gotten together. I’m politly saying how nice everything is, then we walk back onto the porch. I see this really cool wrought iron table and chair set. I think it is really cool, and figure I can express my admiration without lying this time. So I plop my fat ass hard into the cool wrought iron chair, starting to say how cool it was.
About three things happened instantly. The chair didn’t respond the way I expected it to, there was much flex, I felt myself going backward much farther than I had expected, and there was a sharp pain in my lower back, follow by a pain in my head. The damn thing was only plastic, designed to look like iron, I broke the back off, got gored by a plastic spine, hit my head on the table foot breaking it( the table foot, not my head, although a broken head would have given me a better out then sitting their feeling like an ass after breaking their brand-new fake iron chair).
My husband managed to set the kitchen on fire, but unlike the others who’ve wandered away or fallen asleep. He was cooking dinner He was grilling steaks 2 feet from the kitchen door (open) He’d put some onions on to saute while firing up the grill. The phone rang. He talked away, while watching the fire, but this annoying sound was distracting him. Finally, he hung up, looked toward the kitchen door. Black smoke boiling out. The annoying noise… the smoke detector.
Oh one last thing… He’s a firefighter.
Paging Mr. Kornbluth, Mr. C.M. Kornbluth to the white courtesy phone, please.
Once upon a time I had a job. We were, basically, moving administrative rooms around a hotel. We’d demolish the office and a cafeteria and then put the office where the cafeteria had been and a cafeteria where the office had been, that sort of thing.
One day we were ripping out a room. We’d torn down all the drywall, bashed the aluminum studs away from their supports, and went to lunch. When we got back from lunch the electrician was supposed to have the juice cut off to the room so we could finish up. I posed the question of whether this had been done as we were hip deep in debris. My workmate decided to check by using his crowbar to tear a wire loose and knock the exposed end into one of the many pieces of loose metal that surrounded us.
Electrical sparks are blue when you can see them inside the white and it’s only luck that has kept me alive to this point. Circuit breakers are your friend.
The time we cut through a pressurized water line in the bar with a reciprocating saw before the plumbers had cut off the water was more spectacular, but far less life threatening.
I had a brain dead moment which was followed immediately by my son having his own while laughing at me.
We were cleaning the back yard and I decided that I needed the rake which was laying on the ground. Do I bend over and pick it up? Noooo, I use the brains god gave me and very lightly step on the tines in a doomed attempt to make the handle slowly come up in the air. Obviously this rake was made by the devil and not god as it springs up very fast and just misses my face. It smacks me hard on the chest and shoulder leaving a nice red mark.
Much laughing from my son. HA HA! Dad is an idiot. I have to find someone to tell. Hey look! There is mom. I’ll tell her she’ll think it’s funny too. For some reason I do not see the humor of it.
My wonderful wife looks at him and grinning says “What did he try to do?” My son answers “He tried to get the rake handle to come up by stepping on it like this.”
WHACK! The rake snaps up and hits him right between the eyes.
Now I recognize the humor of the momment! HA HA HA! That is funny! It is even funnier when the rake catches you in the head.
Darwin was right. You are stuck with your genes and my knothead son gets to look forward to a long and painful future. I just hope I live long enough to see it all.
Sorry to derail the thread, but can you explain this a little further? “Inside the white” of what?
Speaking of Dads… 
My genius of a theoretical nuclear physicist and experienced wilderness camper of a Dad came back to our camp site after a short fishing excursion. He’d gotten no nibbles but found some trash left by previous uncultured campers and, deciding to be cute, brought it back to camp by impaling it on the fish-hook as if he’d caught the trash. Then continuing the joke he lowered the tip of his fly rod so that the trash descended down onto the camp fire, whereupon the nylon line promptly turned to liquid and deposited not only the trash but the relatively expensive lure into the flames.
Once after a college dinner, I scraped my food scraps into the dirty cutlery bucket and then threw my cutlery in the bin. That was pretty classy. I got the scraps out (at great personal expense) and put them in the bin, but the college will never see that knife and fork again.
~ Isaac