Thank you Siggy and Grandpa for sharing your stories.
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Good evening.
May I ask all you wonderful authors/story tellers, do you ever break the fourth wall in your stories?
Why or why not?
I'm curious.
Peace.[/
Good Evening Ms. Siggy,
Forgive me, but what is 'breaking the fourth wall'?
Have a Peaceful evening.
Sorta, and the one time I can think of is the one I just finished. And it might not count, because it's all first-person narration anyway, but when I wrote, This is tough to write, it was a departure for me in that I stepped away from the thread of narration to bring it to the instant. So in that sense, if I didn't break the fourth wall, I at least pushed it.May I ask all you wonderful authors/story tellers, do you ever break the fourth wall in your stories?
Why or why not?
I acquired a Segway, quite by accident (accident is the salient word here). And I loved that thing. (Alert readers will already note the past tense, and the nonalert are now alerted.)
Ever been on one? Here's the tip, if you didn't get enough instruction beforehand: Just stand. Don't try to balance. If you try to balance, the more aggressively you try, the more hilarious your failure will become. Just step up onto it like you're stepping onto a ... well, step.
I took to it right away. I was buzzing around buildings, around sidewalks, both amusing and annoying people. I did doughnuts. I went fast. I stopped in a heartbeat. I had everyone in the neighborhood try it. I took it to my friends, and they tried it. Most loved it. Some hated it (see the "hilarious failure" comment above).
At one point, I got the idea that I could take it to work, some miles away from the home. It turns out there are limitations to a Segway. If you run out of sidewalk and there's no ramp, you have to wrestle it to the street. It's not fast enough to run with the cars, it's annoying to zoom past people on the sidewalk, and it's a bit too slow for the bike lane, sometimes, top speed being 12.5 mph, and it will enforce that strictly.
(There's also the dork factor. Cue in Weird Al's "White and Nerdy.")
I rode it to work, I buzzed around downtown a little bit, being quite the conversation piece, even if most of the conversation was in my head. Then it was time to go home. After wrestling with curbs and suffering the sneers and glares of bicyclists, I decided for a different route going back. I took the bike/hiking trail that wends along the local river until I got to the arterial street that leads home.
Which all sounds like a good strategy, until you find out that the bike/hike path stops short of the street, and it's time to off-road. The Seg has nothing if not good balance. So I bounced around in the dirt and bumps, gaining speed, gaining confidence until I would get to a sidewalk again, because I was taking all these bumps with ease....
Except for the last one, and it's always the last one, by definition. The Seg lurched violently, I came off the foot platform and plunged down, my left leg hitting something unkwown to this day, except that it was a nuclear power plant full of electricity and pain, and it shot a bolt of agony across and into the thigh bone (femur), and up into my brain, where it registered as a sudden emergency for a hundredth of a second before turning into a thundering shriek of "OH, SHHHHH***********!!!!!" Which might have actually been me shrieking. Not sure.
I was in so much pain that I didn't even register the passing cars that were probably carrying hooting and laughing occupants. I just sat there with what I was sure was a broken leg, the Segway about seven feet away, and if I moved the leg a certain way, it was fine, but other ways, and that lightning bolt of pain would be saying in its sudden, less-than-gentle way, "Okay, let's not do that."
I lurched to my feet, finally, taking great care not to stand on the leg just so, but occasionally not so successfully, which made my leg remind me that I shouldn't be doing this. I walked over very carefully, but not carefully enough, sometimes, and checked out the Seg. It was fine, in a lot better shape than I was.
I pulled out the phone, called Grandma, and told her what had happened and she needed to come get me. This brought up an issue of its own. Grandma is directionally challenged, and I say that lovingly and understatedly. She once was in a subdivision, wanted to come home, which merely required her to leave the subdivision to the arterial street that our subdivision is also on but some miles to the south, and she called me an hour later from somewhere that made her quite upset because the sun was never setting. Yes, I'm exaggerating, but you get the idea.
I was not really in a good place for a directionally challenged person to stop. I looked across the field, across the two lanes south, across the median, across the two lanes north, and saw a place that could be found easily for Grandma, and I gave her that location.
Then I got on the Segway, and ironically enough, the very machine that had pitched me to my doom turned out to be my salvation. Honestly, I could have never gotten to that place walking. But standing on the Seg, leaning as I needed and it rolling to my command, it was doable.
I got over there a few minutes before the Grandmamobile got there, a big SUV that could carry a soccer team of grandkids, and I love her for that, with a big ol' hatchback, which I loved her for even more at that moment.
But... we had to get the Segway in the back. It was over 100 pounds of very unwieldy weight distribution, and you won't believe this, but I'm the weightlifter of the two. She didn't know where to start. I braced my lightning-bolt-impulses leg as best I could and lifted the Seg into the back of the SUV. I wish I could tell you it was easy and painless, given all the circumstances, but I would be lying.
I hopped in the passenger seat... hopped? I made my way slowly and painfully, and when I hoisted myself up, it was kind of dragging the leg behind, with it shouting, "STOP THAT!"...."STOP THAT!!!!" in about three-second intervals.
To make a long story short less painful, on the way home, I told Grandma to divert the car to the local medical center to they could look at the leg, which alarmed her, but it I turned out not to have a fracture, although occult fracturing was always possible (which means it wasn't obvious, not that it was caused by Satan). A later MRI confirmed that I had a badly ruptured quadriceps muscle. My family doc told me it looks like someone took a baseball bat to my knee. I've already shown the pictures in the forum, so I won't repeat them here.
The Segway is in the garage. The tire went flat, and lemme tell you, the tire is not easy to get to. After not using it for a while, the battery doesn't want to charge again. It's a little frustrating, because I like it, but in its current condition, it's the most expensive paperweight ever, if we kept paper in the garage.
And there's a humiliating aspect to it. I rode motorcycles from the time I was 16 years old. Oh, I picked up a little road rash here and there and had some adventures, which you may have already read about, but no biggie.
And then a Segway takes me out. HU-miliating. Not even Weird Al envisioned that.
When people ask me about being on a Segway, I say, "Two pieces of advice. Don't go off-road. If you go off-road, don't go full speed."
The prior stories featured real names of real people. What follows are fake names of real people, and on the presumption that you make it through this, I think you’ll understand why I’m keeping it a bit more surreptitious.
I did some drinking in college. I know, that’s a shocker, right? We got a bit of a little drinking group going on, consisting of a core group of two girls - Maribel and Sally - and me, with any number of other people involved on any given night. The girls were slight, slender things, and when the three of us wanted to party, which was frequent, somebody besides me, because I looked about 14, would buy a couple six-packs of beer. We had our drinking down to a science. We would slam two or three beers in 10 or 15 minutes, then sit and have a belching contest (I didn’t necessarily win; they were amazing), and then feeling happy and warm, we would spend the rest of the evening sipping at the optimum rate for a controlled buzz maintenance. Hey, we were in college, we were oh so smart, and we addressed decadence with good analysis.
The parties could be legendary, because we were young and fearless. But the big memory I'm going to talk about is the night I tried tequila for the first time, in addition to the beer we were drinking, so we were off the buzz maintenance routine. We were in Sally and Maribel’s room, and it was the tried-and-true take the shot, lick the salt, and bite the lemon. It tasted horrible, but we had so much fun, the joy of disregarding rules and caution and convention. We weren’t very good at pouring shots, because all we had were odd assortments of Tupperware glasses. There were a couple others with us that night, a boy and a girl. I don’t remember their names. That is to their benefit, I'm sure.
We did those awful rounds of shots and joked and laughed uproariously. It was a warm but wet night, and we went for a walk. It was raining pretty hard, but that just added to the fun. Tequila was a very effective discomfort remover, at least for the short term. We were at the top of the parking lot, which was on an incline, and I looked down the rows of painted parking spaces, which were neat and straight and aligned, and I wondered when I was going to start to feel buzzed, and then those ordered lines took the sudden twists of a frenzied anaconda, and I figured I was there.
We got to the bottom of the hill, and the third girl decided to go swimming in the pool of rainwater that had collected there. It was only a few inches deep, but she had fun trying, splashing with her arms and legs, doing both freestyle and backstroke, and we had fun watching her and urging her on. Finally, survival instincts overrode lack of sobriety, and we went back to the room to warm up and dry off. The other boy wandered off to his own room.
We got back to Sally and Maribel’s room, the four of us, kicking off our wet footwear, and then realized we were getting seriously cold. Someone mentioned that if we’re gonna be wet anyway, we might as well be warm, turned on the shower, and clothed and barefoot, we crowded into the shower, warm water cascading over us, trying not to step on each others’ feet, and talking (yelling) and laughing. Ain’t tequila great?
The third girl finally gave up, or maybe got a sense of self-awareness, and went to her room. I got out of the shower, grabbed a towel, and left the bathroom, drying off as best I could. The other boy came back to the party, having gotten dried off and changed in his own place. Sally and Maribel were still in the bathroom, the door was cracked open, and it was obvious from the sounds of it all that they had attained a level of attire more suited for a shower.
“Let’s go in,” the boy said. He was excited.
“No,” I replied. I was unwavering.
He pressed. I resisted. I was ready to protect my friends’ honor. He gave up. Now, for all I knew, one or the both of us might’ve been welcome, but that’s not where my intentions lay nor, for that matter, any shred of confidence with my self-image, even if I had been so inclined, which I wasn’t. But the self-image got a little boost moments later.
Sally and Maribel came out after a bit, dried and clothed. By this time, I was starting to feel decidedly cold again. “Girls, I need to get rid of this wet shirt.”
They said I could take off my shirt, dry off, and sit around without a shirt. They didn’t care. I declined, feelng fearfully shy, even vulnerable. Or I could go back to my room and change. That didn’t sound so good, either, because I’d miss some of the party, and they’d be left with the guy who had wanted to break in on them while they were naked, although I didn’t actually voice that concern. Maribel finally took me to their closet and invited me to see if I could wear anything. I found a gray shirt that was button-down with a collar. “Can I try this?” They said sure. I peeled my shirt off, very self-conscious, quickly toweled off the torso, and slid their shirt on. It was tight, but it was stretchy, and it worked without me feeling much like a transvestite, even with the buttons on the wrong side.
At that point in my life, I wasn’t eating much for the simple reason that I couldn’t afford much, beer money being more important than food money, so my body fat was at an all-time low. Although I didn’t really work out, I did do some pickup sports with other students and wrestled my motorcycle around a fair amount. And being young and resilient, I still had muscle bulk and definition left from weight training in football and wrestling in high school, and after all the frustrating seasons of nonachievement in those sports, the training I’d had with them finally granted me a measure of ego benefit in that room...
.. because I was buttoning up the shirt, and I looked at the girls, but they weren’t saying anything. Their mouths were open just a little, and their eyes were fixed on my chest and shoulders. We were just the best of platonic friends and spent a lot of time together, but they’d never looked at me like that before. I finished buttoning, and the party continued, and they didn’t say a thing about it, but I had never felt so complimented in my life up to that point.
High school, with the exception of times with Curt and the blonde, was a time of mutual rejection and revulsion between me and the rest of society. College, on the other hand, was a time of social expansion and learning to actually enjoy life with others.
So Sally and Maribel, wherever you are: Thank you for the silent but sincere affirmation that night. It actually had a positive effect on my self-esteem and my life.
Y'know, I understand why some people try to be professional students.
"Gas Gas Gas!"In boot camp, I was sent to the gas chamber. Actually, we all were.
I can't say there was ever a fun day in boot camp, but this episode made many of others a stroll through a carnival midway.
One day, we marched to a big Quonset hut. We had already been somewhat trained in the use of gas masks, but this time the training was more emphatic. Then we lined up outside of that Quonset hut and were instructed what to do once we went inside with our group. We would count to three, remove our masks, and sing the first verse of the Marine Corps Hymn. Then we would put our masks back on and march out.
That was the theory.
As we stood in line, waiting, we talked about what it was going to be like and how manly we’d be in persevering through it. We were all blissfully ignorant, but both the ignorance and the bliss would soon come to a tragic ending.
I was in the back of the pack, and as it turned out, life’s bad timing struck again. The front of the pack was the place to be, because every time a new group went through, the instructors inside, dressed in what looked like radiation suits, would open more gas, so by the time the last few groups got in there, the fumes were pretty thick.
We marched in, masks on, and arranged in a circle around some cans that vented the gas. Everything was dim, otherworldly, Dante-esque in the faint light, in the fumes and streams of the gas, the full protective suits of the instructors, and our own insect-like head apparel.
We got yelled at, we counted to three as a group, and removed our masks. The giant fist, made of of flaming acidic hornets, that grabbed our chests immediately and violently squeezed all the machismo right out of us. I simply could not breathe for a moment, I felt my gorge rise, fought it back down all while bending over quite involuntarily because my stomach had contracted into a small, tight ball of lead, and then getting hit, in addition to the gas, with the full scent of the deposits right at my feet of someone else’s weaker stomach, which I’d failed to see until I was bending over it.
The room had immediately transformed from an orderly group of gas-masked Marine recruits to a flailing, wailing, hacking mob.
“You can’t get out of here until you sing the Marine Corps hymn!” one of the instructors bellowed, although a bit muffled through his suit, not to mention the sonic miasma of the crowd. A ragged chorus started up, “Frub duh haws…”and then degenerated into coughing and spitting.
Somehow we did what we needed to do to appease our dungeon masters, and then once ordered to depart, crowded through the back door, pushing and swearing at each other in our panic to get out, and then burst out into the sunlight and fresh air, with comet trails of spittle, tears, emesis, and streaming mucus in our wake.
Such was the glamor of boot camp. It wasn't quite the proud Marine Kodak moment.
Y'now - that story built up to a wee bit of suspense - thanks for the tease Grandpa! (Cue the 70s porno flick music).
Sorry - hubby is up North in Nunavut - perhaps my hormones are acting up again!In telling that tale over the years, I've had one guy ask me why I'd bother to tell a story that featured showering with coeds with all our clothes on.