When you get injured in any way you are always asked the question, “How did that happen?” After the 20th time you get the question it starts to become taxing to say the same thing over and over again…so….you start to make things up. A lot of people have the default made up answer of, “I fought a bear…and you should see the bear.”
Vicious creatures.
Sometimes I add on, “You can’t see the bear though, because due to my undying respect for animals I gave him a proper burial.” Then I watch as laughs turn to groans and it’s awesome (for me.)
But I think there needs to be way more answer options to have in our arsenals when we are injured and get that question. You can’t say you fought a bear every time, because then even THAT will get boring. So I decided to sit down and think of some more things to say…and here they are:
- I was vaulted into the future and took part in a robot vs. human’s war where a giant mechanic version of Osama Bin Laden fell on me after I stabbed him in the face with an ice pick.
- I was racing Koala bears in South America when all of a sudden poachers stormed in and I got this wound from hacking and slashing my own bull knife that was given to me by the local chieftain after I saved his daughter from a forest fire.
- Cage Match with Carrot Top
- A school of midgets attacked me from all sides like a pack of tiny awkward werewolves.
- I burnt myself with coffee…that was brewed on the god damn sun…it was Sun coffee.
- Oh this? Got this on my trip to the arctic – My partner fell through the ice and I pulled her to safety and to save her from hypothermia I wrapped my body around her like a man cocoon.
- I Twittered way too hard last night.
- Freak Violin accident
- I high-fived the hulk.
- Got caught up in an Ugg fire. I was burning all of the Uggs. Now I have this scar. Totally worth it.
- I saw a woman with her feet up on the passenger dashboard of a car across the highway so I jumped the divider and then one thing lead to another and now I need all of the surgeries.
- I broke up a fight between Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen. It was boss.
- Reinjured it while in Retail Physical Therapy
- Some dude was all like, “You can’t put shrapnel in the microwave!” and then I was all like, “WANNA BET BRO?!” so yeah, no more face.
- She broke my heart man…and then my leg.
- Remember when I died for like 3 minutes? Completely Unresponsive. Brain dead, really. Yeah, well I guess I was in heaven for a bit and randomly met up with Macho Man Randy Savage. The dude dropped a bow on me. It was great.
- I didn’t start the fire. It was always burning since this world has been turning. Either way though, smoke inhalation is a real bitch.
- Entered a boxing match against a bull with red shorts on.
- Flash Gordon scissor kicked me.
- I was Tubthumping.
- I was on the red carpet when Joan Rivers called Adele fat and me and Ryan Seacrest were the first to try and break up the fight…Adele has a mean haymaker.
- How many bullets where inside 50 cent? Well whatever, it was a bunch more than that. While on an erupting volcano.
- Tom Cruise electrocuted me.
- I was on this juice cleanse diet and my insides drowned themselves.
- I was singing a cover of La Roux’s “Bulletproof” on the street and then some vagrant was all like, “Wanna bet?!”
- Yeah, turns out I’m The Last Airbender.
- Got this one when I rode that Eagle to the world fair in 1930. Also I’m immortal, so, not a big deal.
- Battle Royale: Me vs. M. Night Shama-lama-dingdong. The twist ending was me pushing him off a cliff into a dark abyss.
- Got shot out of a cannon at clown school
- An onslaught of Corgis happened. I don’t want to talk about it!
- I was reading YouTube comments where Atheists and Christians were ripping into each other and then I proceeded to slam my face into the keyboard.
- I played Baskiceball with the Erickson brothers. It was a total blood bath.
- I hopped aboard the murder train.
- I had to get down on Friday.
- Bit too hard into my 8 candy necklaces.
- The door knob shocked me while I was standing in water and using a blender to chop up old hard drives and stray pieces of glass.
- Gravity is a bitch.
- I French fried when I should have pizza’d.
- …it was that stupid blue shell again.
- This? You don’t even wanna know…oh you do? Well…okay. So I was looking towards the sky as a shooting star threw itself across my vision like cotton on a breezy day – I looked around me and saw a long stretch of rope. Picked that shit up, tied a few knots, and starting whipping it around my head. As it got faster and faster the star got further and further away – and at just the right time I hurled the rope as fast as my arms would let me – and it flew across the horizon, out of this world, light years away until it wrapped tightly around that beast of a star. Before the rope pulled tight I wrapped it around my waist – and then WOOSH I went flying up into the sky – just before I hit the top of the atmosphere I took one last breath and waved goodbye to the Earth. The Star was headed out of our solar system, it had seen all it needed to see and picked up a passenger in the meantime so it decided to move on – I passed Mars and ate it like a candy bar, I dodged asteroids while fixing my belt, I rode the storm on Jupiter like Pecos Bill in the Tall Tales, I river danced across the rings of Saturn, held my laughing back on Uranus, took a picture of Neptune to send to Poseidon (we have fun), and softly pet Pluto for old time sake. For years and years we traveled, boldly going where no man riding a star had gone before. Met an Extra Terrestrial, who when he found out we called them that he that said, “I mean, I might have gained a little weight over this past cosmological decade, but not enough to call me extra.” Then he cried. It was sweet. Then an immense amount of time passed, but I did not age at all. Until one day while sitting on a planet light years away from home I looked up to the star and said, “You know what. I know when I go back no one I knew will be alive…hell, the earth might not even be there. But I think the end of my story is me knowing what happened to where I came from, because without that land to stand on I could have never caught a star.” The star looked down upon me, obviously disappointed, but she understood. When we finally got back to Earth it was a little rustier than before and the O-Zone was all but gone – but it still had that green and blue I missed so much. The star set me down where my home used to be; now a field of a plant I did not recognize. As I waved good bye to the star I turned to see what was ahead of me. I had ridden around the universe – to the edge of it and back – but I didn’t do the one thing I had always wanted to do. Have an adventure on a land I called my home. Oh, also there was some time travel involved somewhere…not a big deal…and I tripped over a rock and scraped my knee. Wanna grab me that ointment? Cool, thanks.
Ryan Brady 