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Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Skullthuggery

A couple of days ago my brother Sean informed me that the water pressure in his shower blew the shower head off the wall and bounced it right off his cranium. Naturally I laughed, and the incident reminded me of a time in the distant past, back in the days before even the Bleak House of Blahs, back during the dark era of the University of Alberta Star Trek club, back when, in the summers between university terms, I lived in my parents' basement in Leduc...

I don't remember how many of my friends from the club came over to visit that fine summer day of 1988 or 1989 or 1990, but Jeff Shyluk was surely among them, for it was poor Jeff whose blistering, pain-wracked "EARRRGH!" we all heard echoing off my parents' basement walls. I'd been first down the stairs, but I turned just in time to see a scowling Jeff clap his hands to the top of his head.

"A nail!" he bellowed, and sure enough there it was - a nail, poking innocently into the bare rafters above the stairs, right in the place where a tall fellow, taking the turn in the stairs unawares, might find a strip of skull stripped bare of hair, like a freakish geek at the fair.

Alas! Whichever lazy carpenter had failed to drive the errant nail home, flush with the plywood, was at root responsible for my friend's pain and my unwilling mirth, which pealed forth helplessly even as my mother called down to ask if anyone needed help.

Jeff recovered fully and now lives out his life as a comfortably tortured artist in the lower mainland of British Columbia. Sean's rage level has slowly dropped from "Catastrophic" to "Moderate."


2 comments:

susanrn92 said...

The irony is that all the Woods' were able to avoid the nail, and it laid in wait for Jeff.

Earl J. Woods said...

It really "NAILED" him!