Gather 'round, children, for I have a story to tell you. It comes to you from the guy who consumed 45 peanut butter cups in one day, had a mini stroke trying to start a new roll of toilet paper while taking a dump, referred to himself as a “grammar Nazi” while interviewing for a job at a Jewish organization, bathed in someone else’s shit accidentally, and started a thread from a hotel bed in Kansas while wearing nothing but black socks, eating microwaved pizza rolls and drinking OJ straight from the carton. So…rest assured that this story’s gonna have a healthy dose of dumbassery.
Once upon a time, this past Wednesday, I took my contacts out and grabbed a travel-sized saline bottle from under our bathroom sink to soak them in. I’ve been wearing my glasses for the past few days in order to give my eyes a little rest, until this morning when I was getting ready for church.
So I take out my case, unscrew the caps and bring the left contact up to my eye. There’s an unholy burn in my eye the second the contact made contact. I didn’t even get the thing in. I do the only thing I can think of at this point, and I grab the same little travel-sized saline solution bottle, and give the contact a nice big squirt; I figure there’s some sort of debris on it and that’s what caused the burn. I also wash my fingers, thinking maybe there’s some cologne/soap/oil on me that may have contributed to the burn. So after the squirt and hand-washing, I try again, and there it is again: an intense burn the nanosecond it gets near my eye.
I put the contact back into its little holder, and think for a second, “What the heck is going on here?” I suggest to myself that I try the other eye. So I take the right contact and plunk it directly onto my eyeball. Success! Well, “success” meaning it made it into my eye. Problem was it now felt like someone just poured lit gasoline into my eye socket.
I scream like a woman for my wife to get in here, all the while I’m clawing at my eyeball with my fingernails, but my eyelid is welded shut from the pain. Finally, using both hands, I pry my eyelid open and start really digging in to the flesh of the ball with my thumb and forefinger until I get that sonofabitch out. My wife runs in, and I tell her my eyes are on fire with heat of 10,000,000 supernovas (or something like that-- it may have come out as “FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKMEINTHEASS!”), so she hands me the little bottle of saline solution sitting on the counter, to help me douse the fire.
As I’m lifting the little bottle over my face, she asks why it reeks of mouthwash in there-- now let me take timeout here to explain that I’m completely plugged up with a summer cold and couldn’t smell a rotting skunk carcass right now if is was duct taped to my shirt, so this “reeks of mouthwash” was completely unknown to me-- but before I could even react to her querry, I squirted a fireman’s stream of fluid from the little saline solution bottle onto my now-gaping raw eyeball.
And holy moses, I thought I knew pain before, but this is when the lit gasoline turned to fucking napalm on my entire face. I think I screamed again, and flailed around, pulled the shower curtain off the rod and scrubbed my face with it, hoping…honestly, I don’t know what I was hoping that would do.
My wife apparently reacted by grabbing the *big non-travel-sized bottle of saline * from inside the medicine cabinet and held my head back while she doused me with a generous dose of that. After a good three minutes of me polluting my kids’ brains with words that shouldn’t be uttered an hour before church, and hoping for quick death, my wife finally asked where I got that little bottle of saline.
“Under the sink,” I told her.
“Uh, that was mouthwash,” she replied. “It says so here on the side of the bottle in big red letters that you apparently scrawled at some point in the past”-- and she was right. Let me take timeout again, and explain why there was mouthwash in a saline bottle under our bathroom sink. Just before Christmas, I ran out of travel-sized mouthwash right before a week-long work trip. I’m a little OCD about oral hygiene, and didn’t have time to run to the store for a new travel-sized bottle of mouthwash, so I decided to empty out an almost-empty travel-sized saline bottle and fill it with some mouthwash for my trip. I even marked on the side of the bottle in big red letters “MOUTHWASH!” But apparently the letters weren’t big and red enough for me to see them without my contacts or glasses this fine August morning.
So to sum up: Happy’s a dumbass. And whitening mouthwash really only works on teeth. On eyes, it turns things a real bright pink. For hours and hours and hours.
You’re hilarious.