Page 22 - Demo

22 | October 2024
Slippery Rock Gazette
Which brings us to Step Five, and you know what it is even before I type another word: The hateful AWOL item magically reappears, like nothing ever happened.
Over the past three months — I swear on a stack blood pressure charts — Mary Ann and I have lost/replaced/found a set of heavy-duty knee pads, a level, a packet of hose washers, a medical test kit and a framed photograph of wildflowers in bloom at our house.
Still AWOL, as of this writing, is an alarm clock. We finally ordered a replacement, which arrived in the mail a little over two weeks ago.
I double-dog guarantee the original clock will have surfaced long before the words you’re reading right now roll off the Slippery Rock Gazette’s printing press.
Sam Venable is an author, comedic enter- tainer, and humor columnist for the Knoxville (TN) News Sentinel. His latest book is “The Joke’s on YOU! (All I Did Was Clean Out My Files).” He may be reached at sam.venable@ outlook.com.
How to Lose Your Mind in Five Easy Steps
MY
How?
By wearing the hide off our Visa card in a game called “Finding Lost Items by Purchasing Their Replacements.”
This is not a game in the relaxing, recre- ational sense. Quite the opposite. It is a mad- dening experience that plays out in five steps.
Step One. You have an item.
Any kind of item. A wristwatch, knitting needle, hammer, hairbrush, fishing lure, serving spoon, necktie, magazine or any of 10-kajillion others. It can be expensive — a diamond ring, perhaps. Or inexpensive — say, a favorite cereal bowl.
Step Two. You lose the item.
You’re holding it one moment, and it’s
Sam Venable
Department of Irony
gone the next. Poof! Just like that. Conversely, the time factor can stretch much further than a minute. Hours, days, weeks, months, even years could elapse between usages. All that matters is that the
item is now AWOL.
Rarely is it truly lost, with no hope of
recovery. Most of the time, it simply has been misplaced, either through boneheaded absentmindedness or first-degree stupid- ity. You’ve set it down somewhere, any- where, and when you reach for it again, it has disappeared.
Step Three. You start looking for the item. You retrace steps to where you remem- ber having it last. No luck. You check,
wife and I are doing our part to boost the American economy.
double-check and triple-check the place it’s supposed to stay when not in use. Could be a bracket on the garage pegboard, the medi- cine cabinet, your catch-all drawer or a shelf in the hall closet. No matter how many times you look, it’s just as gone as when you first launched your investigation.
During this step, your sense of humor wanes and your vocabulary coarsens. A jovial “reckon it sprouted legs, ha ha, and walked off?” soon morphs into “where in the (bleep) could I have put that rotten, no-good (bleepidity-bleep)?”
Step Four. After days or weeks of failed searches, you abandon the quest, buy a replacement, and write off the tribulation as “one of those nutty things that happens to everybody.”
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