Not Leprosy, Stupidity.
Not me or anyone I know. Just an image.Okay, public announcement: the thing on my left arm that looks like leprosy or some hideous skin disease that you're all staring at and hoping I won't accidentally brush against you? It's not fucking leprosy.
Here's the story.
For our vacation in July we went to Hawaii and Jackson Hole. Yes, because of the inescapable geographic logic.
In Jackson Hole my kids wanted to go on something called the "Alpine Slide." (Okay, I wanted to go and made them come along.) You take a ski lift 2500 feet up the side of the mountain and then ride down the mountain on a tiny little sled that travels in a sort of plastic half-pipe.
I did it the first time without incident. But I enjoy speed. I'm a roller coaster guy. So on the second run I thought: I can go faster. I thought: I can ignore the warning signs that say "slow." I thought: despite the fact that I'm 6'2" and weigh 235 pounds and I am squeezed onto a sled the size of a fucking TV tray, I can defy the laws of physics.
In answer to your inevitable question: no, completely sober.
So, down I go, caution to the wind, and over I topple. I slide down the Alpine Slide on one knee and one forearm and have plenty of time to consider which will be more painful: the burn I suffer if I stay in the half-pipe, or the broken leg I catch for rolling out of onto the hillside which -- don't let the picture there fool you -- is very steep and strewn with jutting protruberances.
Well, once the phrase "jutting protruberance" came to mind I decided to stay in the half-pipe and leave about, oh, let's call it eight square inches of skin behind.
Three months later it doesn't hurt anymore and it's a lot smaller than it used to be, but yes, when I showed up at "parents night" at my kid's school, I did look like someone who should be confined to a remote South Seas island, there to while away the final months of my life counting the jutting protruberances that fall off.
My son calls it my "stupidity scar." Stupidity is not contagious.
This entry was posted by Michael Reynolds, on
Tuesday, September 12, 2006.
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10:12 AM
The one time I've ever gone on an Alpine Slide (some place in New Hampshire), I got stuck behind an old woman who road the hand break the whole way down. Jutting protruberances and skin burns actually sound fun in comparison. Thanks for the laugh.
6:56 PM
I recall riding an Alpine Slide as a kid at a place called Action Park in far northern New Jersey. And if my memory serves me, the half-pipes were not plastic, but concrete.
So it could have been worse.
8:38 PM
I am gratified that there are others here dumb enough to ride the Alpine Slide. But I'm still the only one dumb enough to ride down on my arm.