The other day, I woke up from a nap….in time, I thought, to make it to a commitment I had promised to keep. I had left myself a good fifteen minutes grace time to get there. I am and have always been obsessed with getting to appointments on time, although as I get older it is becoming harder to do so. All the same, fifteen minutes in a town our size is normally enough to make it through the worst traffic, even if you hit all three red lights.
Of course as seems to be the case more and more these days, I had not factored in any compensation for my advancing age. My skin, which used to be supple enough to make the cover of a magazine (I believe Mad Magazine called once), now has the consistency of Play-Dough. A minor detail, perhaps, but an important one nonetheless.
I woke, stretched, scratched myself, and padded off to the bathroom where, to my horror, I saw my reflection in the mirror. I had just slept on my hand for 2 hours, and my face bore its imprint. And not just a little. It looked like someone had stenciled my hand on my face.
I made it to my appointment on time, and all the while I was there, I tried to keep the ‘affected’ side of my face from being seen (I guess that upon reflection, this looked somewhat evasive, and perhaps because of this, more and more people were checking out my face). Thrust into an awkward position, I was panicked into making a statement about said hand-print when someone suddenly asked just what had happened to me.
‘You should see the other guy!’ I blurted out.
Now, in my experience, once something is blurted, it is quite difficult to ‘un-blurt’ it. Oh, some scientists have experimented with temporal physics, trying to invent a device that could rock back time just enough for you to un-say something, which would be very useful for guys like George W. Bush (and me, apparently). But there just hasn’t been much success.
What follows when one makes such a clearly untrue statement can best be described as ‘damage control’. Horrified onlookers within earshot had their cell phones out, some talking, some texting, all reporting. By the time I got home, Facebook had a page up on my behalf, complete with ‘before and after’ pictures of my face.
It goes without saying that technology enables bad news to travel faster than ever before. The local paper had its staff on full alert, its reporters streaming out of the office, investigating this brazen attack on one of its most decorated columnists. The editor had headline samples for me to proof read. Sue asked me which one I liked more; ‘The Other Guy: Not just a 70’s hit for The Little River Band’, or ‘The Other Guy: Exposed’. She had composite sketches of possible suspects.
The press conference was epic. We had graphs, eye-witnesses, polygraph results, even a hotline set up to nab the culprit. I even signed a deal with CNN for exclusive rights to my story.
Of course, this is when I actually woke up from my nap, late for my meeting, and glad for it because my arm was asleep, and I couldn’t tie my shoes.
Bill's Musings 