I Would Rather be Locked in a Cage With a Lion

Does anyone else get those moments where all of life seems to look you in the eye and say “go jump off a cliff” after giving you a big heavy rock?

I typically block these moments from my mind. The problem is that when one happens, it acts like a key and I remember a slew of the older ones too. So when I was drawing the slender man post and Photoshop crashed on me five times in the same doodle at about the same place, I caught a nightmare of reminiscent memories.

One I remembered with extreme vigor was from my first semester in College. A lot happened in my first semester of College, and in-between those things I tended to sleep.

I am the sort of person who uses my phone as an alarm. I can typically trick myself into thinking someone is calling and get up to answer it. I put my phone above my head on a little bed post my bed had, an easily accessible location. I didn’t want it much farther away for fear of waking my two roommates, Scott and other Scott. I always had to wake up earlier then they did.

Well, one night I’m sleeping having some awesome dream most likely involving fight zombies with nothing but my bear hands.

Then I rolled over in my sleep. This is not common, and in so doing I knocked over my phone and it falls to the floor below.

I’m a light sleeper and the “plink” of the phone colliding with the ground awakens me immediately. I quickly grasp the problem at hand and am determined to get my phone back.

I’m so happy I have a loft.

I’m so happy I have a loft with a dresser under it.

I’m so happy I have a loft with a desk under it.

I’m so happy the layout of my room makes it impossible to get behind my dresser,

I’m not very happy my phone fell behind my dresser.

I’m not a big curser. As in, I do not curse that often. (Or so I tell myself.) But I sort of let loose a few at this point. All to myself and in the quiet of my pillow covered face, but curses flew none the less.

 It was four o’ clock in the morning. I had work in two hours; I had gone to sleep two hours before. I wanted to sleep. I tried to calmly get out of bed.

This resulted in my falling to the floor.

I just about broke my neck in the fall, but I seemed to be fine by the end of it all. I lay in a tangled mess of my own limbs too asleep to care about much of anything other than not waking up the Scotts. I’m polite, what can I say?

So now I was on the floor; still had no idea how to get my phone back. Worse yet if I didn’t get it the darn thing would go off like the 4^th of July when it was time for me to wake up. I’d wake up everyone in the suite if I didn’t get this over with by then.

I shook myself to semi consciousness. I needed to man up and get this done. Then, I could go back to sleep.

I needed a flashlight. It was strikingly dark in my room, even more so behind my dresser. I was sure I brought some form of light apparatus with me to college, but where was it? I spent half an hour groping around in the darkness trying to find my little flashlight. I felt like a blind person. With the mixture of my sleep deprivation and innate fear of going blind I began to realize that being blind would suck. In fact it did suck and would continue to suck forever after. So for all the blind people out there reading my post, I understand a bit of your pain and I am sorry.

I found my little light in a treasure chest like box. As I opened it I felt awfully reminiscent of all the old Zelda games where opening the chest was this huge moment in any dungeon.

At least I didn’t get the compass.

I switched on the small light and welcomed the light like I do when I see my dear Ramona after a long days work. With a kiss, a hug, and commonly a compliment on her outfit. The flashlight seemed far less responsive then Ramona to such things, but I feel like we connected a bit more over it.

My phone was in the far back left corner. If I gnawed my left arm off and used it as an extension of my right arm I still would not be able to grab it. Looks like I was back to the ol’ drawin board.

I have no idea where the idea came from, or why it did not involve something else, but a brilliantly stupid idea came to mind. I owned a small collection of rulers. I suppose just in case they continued to break? Well I thought it would be a wonderful idea to take all my rulers and tape them together. THEN, make a circle of tape and attach it to the end like a fishing pole. Only not in any way like a fishing pole as there was no line, or hook, or anything even remotely like a fishing pole; I was using rulers.

The rulers were, by a stroke of luck, just long enough to touch my phone.  Course the whole thing weighed less then my phone. Any moment the whole thing could just disassemble in my hands; I used scotch tape.  You could see this was really well thought out. The clock was ticking, I was running on fumes. I slammed down the rulerrod, as I have named it, and slowly reeled in my prey.

I’m a little under the assumption I broke physics, or physics was just as sleepy as I was because I was soon holding my phone in my hands.

I was asleep in my bed a full three seconds later.