Involuntary Suicide (or: Christ, I'm a Clumsy Idiot)

By Kevin Gibson
June 23, 2008

I think I may be trying to kill myself. I’m not kidding.

I have an infected big toe on my left foot, for starters, and for some reason I keep banging it into stuff. Hard stuff. Well, at least stuff that’s harder than my toe, and you know who wins in those kinds of situations: not the toe.

A couple weeks ago I rammed my toe into a piece of furniture, and the pain was so bad that I laughed hysterically. (That’s what I do when I experience really severe pain, I laugh; I may need therapy.) Seriously, I rolled around on the bed laughing, and I remember uttering something like, “This hurts more than a broken heart!”

So, over the weekend, I did it again. But in grander style this time.

Let’s start with Saturday night, though. I’m sitting at BW3 with a friend, munching on some grilled chicken buffalitos and playing music trivia, when my friend asks me a question. Like an idiot, I decided I could chew and answer at the same time. Naturally, this is the point at which I bit a crater into the inside of my left cheek.

I could tell it was bad, because the gash was big enough for me to stick the tip of my tongue into. So it began to bleed. And it bled. And bled. And it bled and it bled and it bled.

And then it got really bloody – it was trying to clot, but the massive amounts of beer I had ingested, along with the sheer size of the damn hole I had created with my Molars of Death, made that nearly impossible. But the clots were fun to chew on. Like Twizzlers.

Yet I still couldn’t stop the crimson waterfall inside my face. I went through cocktail napkins by the handful, and it wouldn’t stop bleeding, and when I spoke, I’m pretty sure I could hear my own voice echo in the crater I had chomped into the side of my head. I could have stuck my tongue out at somebody standing behind me.

It finally stopped a couple hours later when I went home, wadded up an entire paper towel, and shoved it into my mouth for about an hour.

Finally, I slept.

The next morning, around 8:30, I fed my dog Darby and my friend Julia’s dog Jasmine, who was staying with me for the day while she was out of town, and gave them both fresh water. Jasmine, whom you might say is quite a large and drooly dog (or perhaps a ridiculously sweet grizzly bear), quickly lapped up a gallon or so of water – and about two-thirds of it splashed back onto the floor by way of her gums and jowls as she walked out of the room.

I did not take note of the spillage at that moment, however, and as I walked barefoot through the kitchen and toward the hallway, I strolled through a small lake of drool (Lake Salivachobee, we’ll call it), at which point my right foot suddenly was moving at the speed of sound out from under me. I heard a sonic boom, lost my balance, and my head went crashing into the door frame. BAM!

At the same time, somehow my left foot, perhaps trying to keep up with the suddenly fleeting right foot, scrambled for purchase and found the other side of the door frame – or maybe it was the kitchen table, I dunno.

I crashed to the floor and instinctively curled up into a fetal position, my head pounding, my neck feeling like it had a telephone pole jammed through it like a lance, and my poor infected toe, which had actually healed fairly well from the LAST incident, bloody and throbbing. Incoherent and, of course, laughing hysterically, I felt myself cover up my head with my arms… and then I realized I had already been on the floor for several seconds and that the worst was already over. I mean, it wasn’t like the house was caving in or anything.

I lay there laughing, so the dogs made the assumption I was on the floor for their amusement. Naturally, Darby began licking my bloody toe, and Jasmine hovered over me enthusiastically, raining down on top of me the very drool in which I’d slipped in the first place.

Oh, irony.

I’m pleased to say that my neck is much better now and the bruise on my head is minor – and I’m really glad I didn’t bite my own face again in the fall. (Although, somehow my left index finger was hurt in the crash landing, too; I’m not sure how, although I found it inside my ear.)

However, after I came to my senses it became abundantly clear I am a danger to myself and potentially to others, so for much of the morning I seriously considered spending the rest of my life curled up under the bed. Then I realized that wasn’t practical, as my income would suffer and I would become even more stinky than I already am.

So, I’m just going to teach Jasmine how to use a straw instead. And maybe I’ll pave the kitchen.

E-mail me. And please send a rowboat; I’m thinking of having a bass tourney in Lake Salivachobee.