An Ode to My the Adhesives in My Life

Glue-All? ALL? EVERYTHING?

This week the carpet in the hallway near my work area is being replaced, and the new flooring consists of large patterned squares that needed to be glued to the floor.

My co-workers in other areas of the building have asked me, jokingly (I hope), "Have you gotten high off the smell?"

I've never been a huffer, though there have been certain aromas that are both toxic and alluring, including:

• Sharpies
• Dry-erase markers
• Gasoline
• The leather jacket my high school girlfriend wore during our first date, to see the Bill Murray movie Scrooged
• The orange-infused cleaner I would employ to sanitize the restrooms during my high school janitorial job

I could have (and, due to the boredom I was experiencing today, should have) gotten high off the carpet glue, but there was one problem: the smell was loathsome.

But as the fumes started to destroy my brain cells, my memory was also prodded to recall various glues that I've used throughout my life.

That sounds like an exciting blog topic, right? Read on!

Just Mow Me

Not the tree in question, but
after a few hours it felt that way.

I spent most of Sunday dealing with a large branch — more of a mini-tree than a branch, actually — that landed on an adjacent tree. The rain and wind were particularly nasty on Saturday night, and this branch landed so it was about eight feet high, parallel to the ground, braced by the two trees like a log bridge you'd find in an Indiana Jones movie or the original King Kong.

I enlisted my father's help, because I'm so handy that I require a soon-to-be 75-year-old with sooner-to-have open-heart surgery to assist me with simple horticultural tasks. Dad brought over an assortment of tree-cutting weapons, but fortunately my probably-older-than-my-father neighbor whose house is behind my own took pity on us and offered his electric chain saw.

In the process of digging out an extension cord in great haste, I ending up breaking some items of personal value that shouldn't have been in my booby-trapped garage in the first place — a mere hour earlier I was in the garage and thought to myself, "Hey, I'd better move that crap" — and I cut myself on a splinter of glass. And this was BEFORE we even started.

Unfortunately, cutting this log down, then into pieces, took much more time than I'd planned, so I inadvertently screwed up Mrs. The Anthony Show's schedule. She usually does her freelance and school work on Sundays, and she was forced to make sure our kids didn't wander over near falling branches and spritzes of sawdust.

And then, after that shit...

I'd Definitely Say I Wasn't a LOVER... (Or, My Fights, Round 1)

Me and Ali: two fightin'
peas in a pod.

...so that means I must have been a fighter. If you were to scan my entire school career, from kindergarten to 12th grade, you'd be able to count all my girlfriends on the fingers of one hand even if the hand ignored the explicit warning on most fireworks — LIGHT FUSE. GET AWAY. — and allowed that cherry bomb to expel every digit but the thumb.

LET'S CLARIFY THINGS A BIT
By "girlfriend" I mean someone whom I asked out, and who agreed to go out with me without immediately adding, "April fool!" (I have been asked out before, believe it or not, but those tales are worth recalling in a future post.) There were other girls with whom I'd had a tangible amount of romantic involvement ranging from minimal to I Love You Almost Like A Third Cousin Once Removed, but for this exercise I'm talking about situations where I was able to say, "X is my girlfriend" without appearing delusional or in need of a restraining order.

THERE'S NO PITY PARTY TODAY
And this isn't one of those "poor me what a loveless loser I was in high school" posts. (Not today, anyway.) My point, and I don't have one, is that if you were to tally the number of fistfights I've had during my time in school, well, let's just say my lips touched more boys' fists than girls' lips.

And I write "fistfights" instead of plain ol' "fights" because I don't mean the occasional rough-housing that gets, er, rough. I mean either...