Stoooopid

Unfortunately, the finger points to me.

At his office, my father always kept a cactus in a clay pot on which these words were merrily painted in sunny yellow: “Stupidity is frequently rewarded with intense pain.” I found it amazing and cool that people outside our home knew the phrase my father had coined—his secretary had gifted him with the cactus—and I prided myself on spending the bulk of my life proving the veracity of that prickly statement, living up to my father’s sentiment over and over and over again. For example, I once grabbed a cactus with both hands because it looked so furry and soft. Do you know how long it takes to tweezer millions of cacti spikes out of your hands, which are nearly paralyzed from the poison on every fucking one of those prickles? I do. I do. Over the years, I have gradually morphed into the poster child for massive fuck-ups. I’ve been so successful at screwing up that I deserve some kind of golden, naked statue.

Today, as I was driving home from my soul-sucking job, I almost drowned from reverse-snorting McDonald’s sweet tea out of my nose because I launched into a fit of uncontrolled mirth remembering one really dumbass thing I did last year. Yes, I know that dying that way would’ve been the ultimate irony. What ev. Let’s stay on the point, shall we? Here: I’ll share.

I spent a fall weekend in a large, southern metropolis at an educational conference, which consisted of going to interminable seminars conducted by hopped-up presenters— who used to be Chihuahuas in their previous lives— alllllll day for forty-eight hours with breaks for quail. Yes. Quail. Whoever catered the shindig obviously couldn’t spring for good old meaty chicken, so they served microscopic breasts that looked like those little plastic turkeys that come in a Barbie kitchen set. For every meal. Two tiny chews, and it was over. It’s no wonder that as soon as we were free for the night, teeming swarms of starving teachers spilled into the streets like ants when you turn a garden hose on their hill.

A co-worker, Trace, and I had a lead on Mexican restaurant, so we hunted until we found its location in an underground mall. Unfortunately, the entrance involved an escalator and a lot of construction mess. Yellow tape blocked off the stair case and the up-escalator, and the down-escalator was not running. My buddy and I started down the stationary metal steps, but I panicked. “Shit!” I hollered, stopping on the second step. “We can’t go down there.”

“Why not?” yelled back Trace, who’d already made it to the bottom.

“The up-escalator is broken,” I shouted. “How'll we get back up?”

What. The. Fuck.

Yeah, I said that.  The really, really frightening thing is that I still didn’t recognize my stupidity until Trace got over her shrieking outburst of laughing at my ass and pointed out that we could just walk back up the fucking steps on which I was standing.

Holy shit. I am a moron. I have no business shaping the minds of the future. If you cut open the skulls of all the students with whom I’ve had contact, their brains probably look like those horrible clay pinch pots that kindergartners bring home and force their parents to display and to pretend to love.

The only redeeming piece of the escalator-fuck-up-story is that there really wasn’t that intense pain that Daddy’s rejoinder promises. Aside from a little embarrassment and the realization that most of my brain cells have apparently mutinied, it was no big deal. No one’s ever died from embarrassment. I’ve come close, though. But that’s a subject for another post.