Rant-Man's Notebook

By Jim "Rant-Man" MacQuarrie

I Fought the Law and the Law Won

The Law of Gravity, that is. But we'll get to that. Got another thing on the agenda first....

I need to thank my friend Bill for a great Halloween idea. You remember Bill? Proprietor of MUGG Manor, inventor of the Misfortune Cookie, and all-around nut. This is the guy who used to own a tank. Anyway, a while back, Bill tossed off one of his random ideas, which I eagerly grabbed and ran with. Any time he says "you know what would be really funny..." I snap to attention. So here's what I did....

On the day after Easter, I bought up a big pile of chocolate eggs from the clearance shelf at the supermarket. I had previously bought a bunch of leftover chocolate hearts after Valentine's Day. I tossed 'em in the freezer and saved 'em for The Big Night. On Halloween, I dressed up in the bunny suit I had once made out of stuff I had lying around the house (what? Doesn't everybody have boxes full of white fake fur?), and handed out Easter Eggs to a lot of confused children. "I'm the Easter Bunny and it's MY job to give out candy and I'm NOT going to leave it to amateurs!" HAR!

To make it even better, I did it at my pastor's house. No funsucker he.

So thanks, Bill! You did it again!

So, what's this about gravity? (Gee, it just occurred to me that my mom doesn't know about this yet. I'm in trouble now...) Sunday afternoon, I'm moving all the Halloween gear up to the attic of our house. We have about four large plastic totes full of costumes and decorations; flying bats, cauldrons, strobe lights, all the good stuff. Anyhow, I'm moving the containers from one side of the attic to the other. (Back when our house was a rental, it was illegally divided up into apartments, and to keep people from living in the attic they tore out the stairs; when we want to put stuff in the attic, we have to carry it up a ladder, set it in the attic, then climb up--the ladder's too short--and move the stuff further in and get it out of the way. With me so far? Good.) Most of the attic has plywood flooring laid down, but there's a large area that doesn't. It just has the bare rafters and the lath-and-plaster ceiling of the room below. You know where I'm going with this, don't you? Yep. I stepped between the rafters onto the flimsy, 95-year-old ceiling.

Suddenly there was crashing and swearing and children running upstairs to see what the commotion was. They found my legs dangling though a hole in the ceiling, kicking frantically as I tried to remove myself. By the time I got down from there, two of my fingers were swelling up and my wrist was sore, so I drove myself to the emergency room.

I broke the bone that goes from the wrist to the pinky finger, and also put a crack in a bone at the wrist. Not too bad. I have to learn to type with one hand (this is taking an eternity to write), driving is miserable (my next car will have power steering), and my daughter cracks up every time she sees the cast on my arm. But my pharmacist is an evil vicious monster.

She put my prescriptions in bottles with child-proof caps. Ever try to open those with your teeth?

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