Black Keys, Black Cojones

My friend Brad drove up from Houston on Friday and while the rest of you suckers were watching the debate, the two of us went to see the Black Keys. They played at the Granada Theater, and it was freaking PACKED. Not quite Robert Randolph at Trees packed, but still possibly beyond fire code. The people on the floor were squeezed in tight. Brad and I stood at the back of the balcony under the ginormous fans, and we were happy. (And could see.)

The opening act, Jessica Mayfield, was a horrible match for this show. Maybe if I were in a different mood I would have enjoyed it, but she was like an Emo Emmy Lou Harris and Gramm Parsons minus Gramm Parsons and plus a gram of heroin. It was twangy slow ethereal music and it made me want to just lie down in the back and take a nap until Dan and Pat hit the stage or until I died, whichever came first.

Thank goodness they eventually did hit the stage. The Keys were EXCELLENT. It was probably their 2nd best show since ACL a couple years ago when my friend Sophie (thankfully) made us camp out in front of the stage. They sounded fantastic (good sound man, for sure) and they played almost the entire Rubber Factory and Thickfreakness albums. It was so, so, so damn good.

The only bummer of the whole thing was that I was pretty sore, and standing that long kinda hurt, so I would occasionally squat down or lean on the railing in front of me and watch more over my shoulder than straight ahead.

But wait…

Why was I sore you ask? Did I leave out an essential part of the story?

Yes. Yes I did.

Friday afternoon I cleaned up the guest room where Brad was going to sleep. I’ve got a queen sized bed in there on which I had been piling all sorts of stuff the last couple of weeks, because it was a convenient place to pile things that was out of the way. I’m sure you all have similarly convenient piling places and can sympathize. Anyway, I got the bed cleaned off, and put on fresh sheets.

Then I called Brad to see how close he was so I could determine if I had enough time to take a shower before he got here or if I was gonna have to put a “come on in” note on the door.

He was in Hillsboro, so I had like 45-60-minutes before he showed. COOL. So I figured, hey, I’ve got a little extra time, I’ll use this opportunity to put a couple of mousetraps up in the attic. (I don’t think I have mice in my attic, but I just wanted to be extra sure. I’ve heard scratching up above my bed a couple mornings in a row, but I think it’s actually a squirrel in the rain gutter … But just to be sure…) SO ANYWAY, I get my couple of traps and a flashlight and I climb up in the attic and very cautiously begin tiptoeing my way from beam to beam towards my bedroom in the back corner of the house.

Then, I bumped my head on a roof joist and lost my balance. My right foot slipped off the beam and onto the sheetrock.

The world.
                 went.
                                  into.
                                                                    slow.
                                                                                                      motion.

It was like in the old Road Runner cartoons when Wile E. Coyote runs out across the canyon and there’s a delay of a couple of seconds before he looks down and THEN falls.

In this like 5 seconds (which was in reality like .005 seconds) my brain calculated that this sheetrock could not support my weight. It also then calculated that I was essentially screwed anyway, because there was no way I’d be able to LIFT that foot without “pushing off” to lift it.

So the ceiling DID in fact give way, and in a grand and dramatic fashion my right leg led the rest of the right half of my body in a mad dash for the floor 10 feet below.

Unfortunately, the right half of my body was (and still is) attached to the LEFT half of my body. And the left half of my body was trying to compensate for the sudden balance shift that had just occurred and my left leg slipped to the LEFT side of the beam I had been (partially) standing on. The left leg immediately punched through the sheetrock and essentially decided that this must be a race for the floor.

The middle half (yes, I wouldn’t have thought I had three halves before this moment either) sadly did not get the memo. It decided it was not having anything to do with this race and SUDDENLY STOPPED on the beam on which I had been standing.

The Three Stooges made crotch injuries seem so glamorously funny.

I probably hung there for five minutes wondering if I was going to die from internal bleeding and this was how my body would be found.

Once the blinding pain subsided to a mere severely throbbing death wish and my vision began to return, I pulled myself up, looked down into the gaping maw which had tried to swallow me, and screamed what very well may have been the loudest obscenities in the history of mankind. It’s quite possible you heard them.

I climbed back down out of the attic, still cussing like a sailor (who also happened to have searing pain in his crotchular area) and slammed every damned ladder and door in my path. I walked into the house to survey the damage.

This is what I saw:

Yes. That’s the newly cleaned guest bed.

Yes, the one with the freshly washed and changed sheets.

Yes, that’s about 50 gallons of fiberglass insulation.

Yes, Brad laughed non-stop for about 15 minutes when he got here.

So.

The good news is, my testicles are fine.

But before Friday if I had heard anyone utter the phrase “Bruised Taint” I would have assumed it was the name of a crappy punk band.