Near Death By A Thousand Cuts: A Humorous Memoir Of Misfortune

Introduction

This book contains vivid descriptions of shenanigans.

To be more specific, you are about to embark on a journey where I describe myriad details of personal injuries, alcohol consumption, drug use, and general dumbfuckery. There’s also a little bit of swearing (yes, I should have mentioned the swearing before I dropped the word dumbfuckery on you, but you’ll soon read that I have no shortage of examples where I lacked foresight).

It’s also worth noting that my parents are going to read this. At least I think they will. My mom will read it for sure, but my dad isn’t a fan of f-bombs or sarcasm, and holy shit on a stick there is a good amount of both contained herein. My point is, there are revelations among these pages. Revelations that to this point have remained hidden from my parental units. I expect a stern look, furrowed brow, or finger waggle the next time we see each other.

Like jokes, these stories come in all shapes and sizes. Some are like a quick Mitch Hedberg or Steven Wright one-liner. Others take on a format mastered by Kevin Smith; a long, meandering story with an epic punchline. Some are in between. Some aren’t even funny. Where it was difficult to make the tale entertaining, I attempted to make it informative, or at least useful as a cautionary tale. If all you get out of this are examples of what not to do, then all the hard work of writing this book will be worth it.

After my good friend, Jim, brought me the idea to put together a compendium of physical misfortune, I was undecided on how to start. It was a big decision and one that I did not take lightly. Having lived to tell the tales I had complete control over how to present them to the world. Unlike other memoirs where the author undoubtedly goes to great lengths to make themselves look as good as possible (I’m looking at you, Barack), these are all stories that don’t necessarily show the best side of me. In short, you will shake your head and wonder how I’ve managed to stay alive for as long as I have (or find a wife or reproduce for that matter).

The biggest challenge I faced sitting down at the computer with nothing but a headache and a blank page was determining the order. Do I go chronologically? Group by the type of injury? Severity? In the end, I decided on dividing my body into quadrants. Head & Shoulders is first. Naturally, Knees & Toes come next. After that, we have Upper Limbs & Digits and rounding out the list, Torso & Stuff Near the Equator. There’s also a Sign of Things to Come section that includes a couple of incidents that spawned the nickname lovingly assigned by my parents (The Walking Accident), and a chapter for Dishonourable Mentions. Once I had that figured out, I simply told the stories in whatever way made the section the most readable and attempted to end each one with the most entertaining anecdote.

With that out of the way, the next hurdle was to decide what stuff to include. After much deliberation, I settled on two basic criteria:

Severity. If it was a break, strain, sprain, drew significant blood, or required a trip to a doctor or hospital, I would use it.

Comedy. Fortunately, there’s considerable overlap between this and the first criteria, but in those cases where the connection is weak, I hoped the humour in the story outweighed the fact I took some liberties with the definition of an injury.

All in all, there are seventy-five separate discomfort or pain-inducing incidents mentioned on these pages. More than enough content to keep you laughing, shaking your head, and amazed at my ability to not-quite-off-myself.

As my wife has pointed out on more occasions than I care to admit, at least I’m cute.

A Note About Pain

Never in my life did I imagine I’d contribute in any significant way to the discipline of science, but life can be surprising. So, when I got the idea for a new law of the Universe, I was suitably shocked. I will spare you the academic explanation and jump right to the point. After all, if you were here to learn something I’d have marketed this as a textbook and charged you $250 for it.

In its simplest form, Butters’s Law¹ states: The more it hurts, the more you swear.

It’s a combination of how much, how long, and how loud someone swears when they get hurt along with the duration of the pain. A person who doesn’t swear, or is incapable of swearing, can substitute an exclamation of their choosing (Gosh diddly darn it!) or an episode of crying in place of an expletive (though I can say from experience that in this context expletives are much more effective).

The official scientific units are Fuck-Decibel-Seconds (FkdBs), but they are more commonly known as, Fuckibels (not to be confused with Pachelbel, the one-hit wonder composer of Canon in D, or fuckable, which I suspect after reading this book is not a word too many people will use describe me).

There is a way to violate Butters’s Law and that is to not react at all. Grin and bear it. Suck it up, buttercup. Pretend it never happened. This results in what is called The Black Knight Paradox, wherein irrespective of the severity of the wound, the response by the affected person is always, ’Tis but a scratch.²

When it comes to severity, doctors like to ask you to describe pain on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst pain imaginable. This is impractical and requires us to imagine comparative pain. I think a better way to do it is to describe pain-causing events that most people are familiar with. This led me to create the Butters Relative Pain Scale™ (BuRPS). In order of least to most severe:

Onset of gastrointestinal discomfort after eating bad food

Being punched in the arm by someone bigger than you

Walking into something while staring at your phone

Pulling out a nose hair

Cooking bacon naked

Stubbing your pinkie toe on the foot of a bed

Catching one or more fingers in a door

Stepping on a Lego® barefoot

Getting your private parts caught in a zipper

Kidney stones/childbirth³

Throughout this book, I will tag each incident with the appropriate number of BuRPS and the corresponding Fuckibels.

A Note About Parental Foresight

I’m going to take you back to when I was a kid. In the 80s, there was this insurance that parents could get that would pay them cold, hard cash every time their child broke a bone or lost a finger or limb or something like that. If memory serves, the forms would come home from school in September and were for a coverage period of twelve months. If you broke a bone or had something untoward happen, your parents got an amount of money proportional to the severity of the injury. Broken arms were worth more than broken fingers. Broken legs were worth more than broken arms. If you lost a limb or digit, they hit the jackpot (losing a pinkie AND a thumb on the same hand was in the thousands of dollars).

Every year, from the time I was in first grade up to my eighth, my parents would pay the however-much-it-was for this insurance and they cashed in—big time. When I got to high school my parents bought a brand-new K car. Coincidence? I think not.

A Sign of Things to Come

Let me give you a taste of foreshadowing before we get to events which attempted to remove me from the gene pool. Strangely enough, I walked away from these unscathed, but with a stronger appreciation for the fragility of life. Now, you’d think the rest of the stuff that didn’t kill me (but left a scar nonetheless) would have made me wiser, but you’d be wrong. Mark Twain once wrote, Good judgment is the result of experience, and experience the result of bad judgment. I’m in my late forties and still gaining that valuable experience, but it all started innocently enough—in the womb.

It was Fall 1973, my mother was five months pregnant with me, and she was out with my father at some sort of event or soirée. As the evening progressed, my mom became increasingly unwell with morning sickness. They had taken her car, an early 70s Ford Pinto stick shift (the ones that would catch fire if you hit them from behind), and my dad wasn’t as familiar with it. Plus, his car was an automatic. She stood in front of the car, put her hands on her knees, and puked into the ditch. It was cold out so my dad hopped in to start the car. Plus, he figured he’d be driving since my mom was ill. He turned the ignition and popped the clutch and thunk! the car lurched forward because it was left in gear, and the front bumper knocked my mom right in the keester. No stranger to feats of athleticism, she stuck the landing, avoiding her puke in the process.

This is the point in the story where my dad lost his ever-loving shit. Straight to the doctor, despite my mother’s protestations that she was fine (aside from nausea). She was fine. I was born with cephalohematomas on either side of my head and severely jaundiced, though I’m told they were unrelated to the car accident (*eyebrow raised in skepticism*).

Given what I know about my mother’s propensity for using the word shit, I expect there was at least one sustained utterance—and not a quiet one at that. However, being a fetus and all, I was unable to react so I will eliminate this data point as an outlier and invoke the Black Knight paradox.

☠

Nearly two years of uneventful existence followed—until I started walking. At the time I’m not sure anyone thought much of it. Toddlers are supposed to stumble and fall. It’s what they do. Fuck around and find out is their whole raison d’être. However, my mom didn’t expect to pick me up from a friend who was looking after me to find my head split open. I had attempted to climb up onto a television stand (this was the 70s so televisions were either giant pieces of furniture or required a giant piece of furniture to hold them up), misjudged horribly, and conked my head on the corner.

BuRPS (4.5). Halfway between pulling out a nose hair and cooking bacon naked (900 Fuckibels).

☠

I hadn’t made it to two and had already been in a car accident, been born severely jaundiced, and had my head stitched up. They say things happen in threes so you’d think I was set, getting them all out of the way before my second birthday. Life had other ideas.

I did manage to have a few injury-free years but whether that was due to me learning my lesson from the TV incident or whether my mom was more protective of me we’ll never know. I do know that at some point before I started school, my mom used to dress me for winter in one of those puffy one-piece snowsuits with the hood. I couldn’t tell you what colour it was, but I’d wager blue. Regardless, I thought it would make a suitable ghost costume so I put it on—backwards—and started walking around with my arms outstretched walking stiff-legged (unable to appreciate the differences between ghosts and Frankenstein’s monster) making spooky oo oo oooo, I’m a ghost sounds.

In my young mind, I was being fantastically hilarious, right up to the point where the monster ghost walked through the open door to the basement and tumbled ass over teakettle down the uncovered wood steps, bounced off the wall at the ninety-degree corner, and continued to the bottom, finally coming to rest face down on the concrete floor.

Thanks to the bulky snowsuit and the fact the backwards hood was covering my face, there wasn’t any visible damage. Recall at that time in history there were no concussion protocols. If you got knocked on your ass, nothing appeared broken, and all the parts that were supposed to be on the inside were still on the inside, you dusted yourself off and went on with your day.

BuRPS (3). Equivalent to walking into something while staring at your phone (500 Fuckibels).

☠

Hell, by the time the 80s rolled around the idea of seatbelts saving lives was still struggling to find acceptance. I am almost six years older than my little brother and I can remember sitting in the back on the passenger side and my mom laying him down as a baby in a bunting bag and securing him with the middle seatbelt. Buckle up for safety! they used to say, meanwhile I could look down at the floorboards and see the road whipping by under the rusted late-70s model Plymouth Volare.

To be fair a seatbelt saved my bacon more than once over the next several decades, but still, my little brother didn’t know how good he had it.

Dishonorable Mentions

I would forgive you if you were skeptical about what you are about to read, so here is a selection of events to set the tone for the rest of the book. A few (dis)honourable mentions, if you will. By some miracle, in every one of these cases, I walked away unscathed, or at least reasonably so. My parents were only aware of a couple of these incidents, with one being purposefully buried for almost exactly ten years so they wouldn’t have post-hoc anxiety.

Unlike the rest of the book, I’ll tell these stories in chronological order.

Before I was adept at swimming, I was at a lakeside event with my parents at a cozy Lake Haliburton abode. All the kids were down by the dock, while all the parents were, well, elsewhere (it was 1979, man, and GenX was free-range). I had spent my life to that point around water, but at a beach where the water was shallow and the introduction to it was sandy and gradual. Being on a dock with boats and instantaneously deep water was a novel concept and I guess I was a little too curious about the boat bumpers or something. I got a little too close and, fully clothed, slipped into the water between the boat and the dock—and sank like a stone.