As a little kid, I loved Cowboys. Since we didn't have a horse, there were only two ways for me to imitate my childhood idols, strapping on a pair of toy six-shooters and using my mom's clothesline as a lasso.
Nostalgia sidetrack - Ahhh, remember when you helped your mom take the clothes off of the clothesline? Remember the smell of the sheets? You could hardly wait to go to bed. Remember trying to attach those wooden clothesline holders to certain anatomical features of your siblings?
From the time I was six years old until I turned fifty, I was never able to lasso one single thing. Granted, early on my brother and sister presented a rather difficult challenge - they didn't seem to want to stay still long enough for me to rope them. But the truth is, if I wanted to, I couldn't lasso a bedpost if I were standing three feet away.
"If-I-wanted-to" I believe that these words were written into Mr. Murphy's first manifesto. Because every time that I didn't want to lasso something, I'd secure and hog tie that sucker better than Buffalo Bill. My first recollection of the fine art of not wanting to lasso something involved a household device that disappeared from my bathroom sixteen years ago...my hairdryer.
Nostalgia sidetrack - Did you ever drop the plug end of your hairdryer on your naked big toe? Have you ever felt such pain?
I would get the hairdryer out from under the sink and untangle its cord. As the cord would be flying around it sometimes got caught on the drawer or door knobs. Now I'm not talking about the kind of getting caught that a simple flick of the wrist would undo. No, I'm talking about hog tying that drawer so tight that when you went to yank on the cord it nearly tore out of the dryer, or ripped the drawer from its tracks. The reason that I know Murphy was involved in every single one of these episodes that happened to me over a twenty-year period is, when I purposely tried to use the cord and lasso the drawer I failed every single time...and then usually ended up bouncing the cord end off of my big toe in the process.
Today my lassos of choice are the cords attached to mice, battery chargers and USB devices. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, if there was a rodeo contest and I was unaware that I was in it, and it involved these types of cords, I'd win by a landslide.
Ok, as today is Thanksgiving I am going to reverse engineer Murphy's Law. I am going to try and not eat anything.
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