Scared Straights

I sometimes make other people uncomfortable, and by uncomfortable, I mean I creep them the hell out. I don’t know why, but I suspect it’s because of incidents like this:

Today, I’m watching my child play with the train set in the church-run preschool corridor when one little boy tells one of the teachers/attendants about his twin brother’s cast for his broken finger, which covers the urchin’s complete hand.

Then she turns to me, the only adult in sight, and relates the story of how when she was a child, her sister was goofing off when their parents were gone and managed to knock her thumb out of its socket and jam it up into the hand itself. I agreed that it sounded painful, but the first chit-chat, small-talk comment that came to mind as I stood there, leaning against the cinderblock wall in my beaten old black trenchcoat and holding my black fedora, was:

With a thumb you can dislocate on command, you can slip out of handcuffs easily.

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2 thoughts on “Scared Straights

  1. Some people prefer to only think about worst case scenarios when it’s already too late to do anything about them.

    Related: after seven years of marriage, when I ask my wife if she wants to know the thoughts going through my head, the answer is now ‘no’.

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