Your Worst Day (not including death) ...

I dreamt I was struggling to cross a thin ledge in roaring rushing waters. I woke up. The day began.

I paid 40 cents more per (mesh) bag because Walmart ran out of their regular stretchy plastic bags.

I decided, instead of driving my car and losing a primo parking spot, to ride a sidewalk scooter to the laundromat, some 4 blocks away, to get the clothes out of the dryer but once there realized I forgot the laundry bag in my car 4 blocks back.

I scootered back to get the laundry bag and started back toward the laundromat.

I hit the gear to start scootering thru a busy intersection and lost control and ate it ...

... and scraped my hands and knees ...

... and fell on the handlebar, which felt like it crushed my liver and kidney ...

... and smashed my head on the asphalt.

For 2 seconds I was in a world of shit. But I collected myself and tried to regain my composure and dignity and got up and righted the scooter and tried to shrug off the sting of the scrapes and the pain above my right eye and I hit the gear and started scootering again.

I have no doubt my eating asphalt, head-first, was captured on surveillance cams.

I was back at the laundromat. I parked the scooter and ended the ride. I folded my clothes.

I hung the laundry bag over my shoulder and walked 4 blocks home.

It's still not even 11 o'clock in the morning.

(What have been some of your worst days?)

 

The best and worst day of my life are the same. My son was born and wasn’t breathing. I watched him have to be resuscitated, my wife completely unaware of what was happening, looking excited at me while I quietly screamed inside. He’s fine now and quite healthy, but I can’t quite ever shake that day. I feel like I have some sort of PTSD about it. It turned out fine, but I haven’t been able to completely relax since that day. (If I seem way too open with sharing my personal details on here, I think it’s a coping mechanism since then.)

 

Excluding days filled with tragedy or personal loss, I think the most miserable I've ever been was one day in college.
I had to get up early to take a test at 7 a.m. because of a schedule conflict, and to get there I had to walk across campus in a pouring rain. The first intersection I come to is at the bottom of a hill where all the water drains to, so it's basically a two-foot deep and 6-foot wide Class II rapids. Needless to say, I'm fully soaked by the time I'm a block away from my dorm room. Then, because of classes and assignments stacked throughout the day, I couldn't ever get back home to change. So for about 12 hours I'm walking around in this damp and clammy state, and freezing to death in the air conditioned classrooms.
The worst, though, was my feet. My clothes dried out to some degree after a couple of hours, but my feet never did. And it's not like you can peel off your disgusting shoes and socks in a classroom. Even if I could, I'd never get them back on. So there was nothing to do but soldier on all day with cold, wet feet.

That experience has taught me to always keep a spare pair of shoes and socks in the car at all times. I'm never going through that again. I've even left work a couple times to go to Wal-Mart and buy a new pair of socks and a cheap pair of shoes to get me through the day rather than endure that again.

 

Along the worst-best lines . . .

Went to the chapel to get married . . . 30 minutes before the ceremony was to begin, I opened suit I had picked up from the cleaners a couple of days before . . . only to find they had given me one that would fit Aaron Donald (I'm built like a jockey). After some furious needlework by the chapel's helpers and a LOT of padding, I managed to look presentable.

Some Bridezillas may have gone ballistic that their perfect day was in jeopardy, but when mine was told what the delay was about, all I heard from the adjoining room was laughter.

 

I think wetsock is by far the worst physical sensation there is, barring ones that cause pain.

 

After that experience, whenever it would rain really hard in the morning I got in the habit of walking to class barefoot.

 

Not sure if it’s my worst day, but I’m coaching my son’s t-ball team. We have nine players. Three no-shows today. One of the kids is diabetic and had no interest in playing today. He wandered off the field several times today. So, now five. Another kid got hit in the stomach by a flying bat. Down to four. Then another kid’s little sister got stung by a bee so his dad left to take care of that so the player kind of lost it thinking his dad had left him alone. He actually asked if we could drive him home. Then another kid wrenched his elbow.

 

I admit, I would've been beside myself if that happened on my wedding day.

 

On my wedding day, our limo driver got lost on the trip from the ceremony to the reception and we were an hour late. We were yelling at the guy to go certain directions and he kept missing turns and getting us further lost.

So, instead of my bride and I getting to be in a room for the cocktail hour before making our grand entrance, we ended up walking in to the reception and just started announcing we had arrived. Then I grabbed a few pigs in a blanket to chow down right before we made our second “official” entrance because that was one of the foods I was looking forward to.

The next day, the limo company owner called my parents upset that nobody had tipped the driver. They told him we were late to our reception because his guy fucked up and the owner said “well, other than that ...”. If ever there was a case in “You had ONE job ...” that was it.

Not my worst day, and kinda amusing. But still, wedding days can be hazardous to one’s sanity.

 

Appropriately enough, my wedding was 23 years ago today.

We were truly lucky in that a lot of our college friends showed up for the wedding, which would have made for a very festive reception. We were unlucky in that my ex didn’t want any photos of us together until after the ceremony. So by the time we got to the reception, everyone else had eaten and we got bum rushed through the thing by her parents. I might have gotten some chicken nuggets and a couple of bites of cake. We wound up having to go out to eat afterwards because we were starving.

When we got outside for the big send off, we discovered that my uncle had decided to not only put white shoe polish and shaving cream on the windows, but the car body as well, which is not recommended for paint jobs during a Tuscaloosa summer. Before we could get to the hotel across town we had to stop at 2-3 different car washes and that still wasn’t enough. (I got a bawling out from her dad after we got back from the honeymoon. She was in the other room looking at pictures.)

As we were getting in the car, the plan was for everyone to throw birdseed at us. One of my groomsmen decided this wasn’t enough and poured his down the inside of my shirt.

Finally we got to the hotel. We were good Baptist kids who had contented ourselves with ground rule doubles instead of trying for home runs, so this was a pretty significant moment. We started undressing each other and finally she pulled off my underwear - to discover an oversized piece of birdseed wedged neatly inside the tip of my penis. Laughter ensued, but not from me.

 

I was trying to get a job at my old high school where I was a student teacher and knew a bunch of people. It would have been a great set up. A bunch of people were advocating for me to get one of the three open positions in the history department. I really thought it was just good to be a formality to get the job. Not that I treated it as such. I really made myself indispensable.

I had also signed up to teach summer school with the district and the summer school principal was at the high school I was trying to get a job at. Figured summer school would both give me a chance to make some money (which I really needed) and let people see how hard I was going to work for them. So I show up to an orientation early so I could shoot the shit with some buddies. One of them looks at me and says man I’m so sorry to hear about the job. It was the first I had heard anything about it. Come to find out they hired two people completely new to the district and one transfer from the district. This wasn’t the only job I applied to but I had put all my hopes into getting. Now I’m mad and hurt but I have to go through this dammed orientation and can’t blow off because I need the money. To make matters worse, in order to find a new job, I had to take time off of summer school and not get paid for it. That day royally sucked. It was almost like getting dumped by your girlfriend of four years the night before going on a 5 hour drive back home and her asking you to drop something off at her parents when I get there and being too much in a daze to say no.

But I landed in my feet, found a teaching gig that actually paid better and I fit right in with.

 

I actually went through that scenario -- on steroids -- once.
It was my first serious girlfriend, and after dating for six or seven months it was time for her to meet the family. I lived a dozen states away from any of them, but we were all gathering for my sister's wedding in Nebraska in the middle of summer so I figured it'd be a nice, fun trip. I was so, so wrong.
The night before we were to leave I came home from work around 8 and all the lights in the apartment were out. She was already in bed even though the sun was still out. No biggie, I thought, maybe she just wanted to go to bed early since we have a long drive ahead of us.
Next morning, as we get in the car and get on the road, there's nothing but dead silence from her. Somewhere in the previous 24 hours she decided she didn't love me (or even like me very much) anymore and we were through. Unfortunately, she still felt the need to go through with this 18-hour, two-day road trip.
The bad part was, I thought this might just be a fight or she was in a bad mood. I had no idea that she had already broken up with me and I just didn't know it yet.
Got the "Nothing" and "It's fine" treatment through the length of Arkansas, Missouri and Iowa on Thursday and Friday. There was finally the big break-up moment at the reception on Saturday. And then we got to drive home -- or rather, she drove and I sat there in icy silence -- on Sunday. We took her car, which was stick and I couldn't drive it. I'd have been afraid to ask at that point even if I could. I felt about as welcome in that car as a hitchhiker showing off a nervous twitch.
She made a damn cannonball run to get back home, driving 18 hours, straight through, with only a couple of gas stops. I didn't stray too far from the car during those, lest she leave me in the dust.

As an epilogue, she had essentially moved in with me by that point and it was almost another month before she fully moved out. So that same scenario played out daily for that entire time. And she never did tell me what the major issue was that caused her to do a 180 like that. I think an old boyfriend popped back into the picture, but I'm not sure.
She also kept randomly popping back into my life every few months for the next couple of years. Right when I was set to move on, it's like she had a little "Show up, tease Batman and kick him in the emotional nuts" reminder that went off on her phone.

It took me a few more years, but thank God I eventually found a sane woman to fall in love with and marry.