Hot Stuff
Hot Stuff
We Will We Will Shock You
Thursday, June 9, 2016
I don’t know what the deal is with me, but there’s a good reason I look like Roseanne Roseannadanna. I’m electrified, and, by that, I don’t mean thrilled or captivated (I looked up “electrified” in the dictionary – it does mean thrilled or captivated but it also means electrically charged. That’s me.)
I’ve had a lot of strange experiences with electricity in my life and it makes me wonder where I’m coming from. I mean, one time, I nearly electrocuted a horse. Of course, that had something to do with trying to touch him over an electrified fence (I got thrown a few feet myself, much to my husband’s amusement). But even without the electrified fence, I’m dangerous.
Take, for example, the time I knocked a young massage therapist across the room just for rubbing my forearm. I didn’t actually haul off and hit him (after all, he was only rubbing my forearm). It was the flame that shot out of my arm with explosive force that did it. Hey – I damn near fell off the massage table, myself.
“What the hell was that?” he squealed, which sounded kind of funny with the New Age music playing in the background. “I think I have a lot of electricity in my body,” I said, as calmly as possible. I mean, how calm can you be when flames are coming out of your body? Electricity? I’d be good to have around in a blackout, in case someone runs out of matches.
(And, yes, for those of you who are familiar with my writing, I stole this paragraph from one of my earlier blogs, which was written exclusively about massages. If you’re interested in reading this paragraph all over again in a different context, go to http://mindylittmanholland.com/MLHdotcom/Blog/Entries/2013/9/12_Massage.html.
Now, every time I get a massage, I have to warn the therapist about the electricity in my body – especially in my left forearm. If they rub me the wrong way, there won’t be a happy ending. Just an ending. Possibly a fatal ending.
My own husband is a little afraid to kiss me. He kind of has to extend a finger and touch me on the shoulder first (notice how I said shoulder and not forearm). Only then does he feel safe to approach my lips with his. It’s an important precaution. You really don’t want to have someone yelling, “Goddamnit” and setting your nose on fire every time they kiss you. It’s a buzz kill. On the other hand, once it’s safe to proceed, he really does get a big charge out of kissing me. We not only have chemistry. We have electricity.
Unfortunately, I do end up yelling, “Goddamnit” every time I flip a light switch or touch the refrigerator or a car door handle. It’s not like I’m picking up static from carpets. I’m walking on travertine, but the cat’s fur still stands up when he sees me coming because he knows that Mommy is going to shock him. Poor Sparky. (Okay, you caught me. Everybody knows that my cat’s name is Alfie.)
For some reason, I have always been afraid of lightning because I seem to attract it. I was once on the phone with a tenant who was hysterical because a mudslide had just come cascading through her living room. As I was contemplating how I could help her, the tree outside my window got stricken by lightning. It literally exploded, frying every appliance in the house with a motherboard. It could’ve happened to anyone in the neighborhood. After all, it was Atlanta in the summer and Atlanta’s like one big lightning storm in the summer. But it happened to me. At least the house didn’t burn down. Perhaps I am a human lightning rod.
Sometimes, I’m just present when someone else is getting electrocuted. No, I’m not talking about an execution. When my ex-husband and I were sailing around the Aegean on our honeymoon, we had a bathroom in our stateroom that was an accident waiting to happen. There was a drain in the middle of the room and an overhead shower. When you took a shower, the whole room got soaked.
Well, one day, my ex took a shower and the drain wasn’t working properly. He ended up standing in water up to his ankles. That’s when he decided to plug in his electric razor. I suddenly heard a great, loud explosion and he went flying sideways out of the bathroom and nearly crashed through the porthole. This may make me sound a little sadistic but it had to be one of the funniest things I ever saw in my entire life (aside from the time my current husband nearly got sexually violated by a rutting elk that he was trying to photograph in Banff. But that’s a whole other story.)
Just before we moved here, around eleven years ago, we were visiting Santa Fe when an amazing storm came. By amazing, I mean it looked like War of the Worlds. I literally felt like we were in a bowl of fire. We went up to a place called Museum Hill and I just stood there screaming because I couldn’t imagine a creature left alive or a house left standing anywhere in town. It was that intense. And, with all that lightning, not a drop of rain!
When we managed to survive this apocalypse, I called our realtor, who had lived in Santa Fe for over a decade, and asked her if the previous night’s storm was anything unusual. She said, “Are you kidding? I was SCREAMING!” There we were – two middle-aged women from Long Island screaming in the Southwestern desert over a lightning storm.
I wish I had a picture of that. Taken with a flash.
I have way too much electricity in my body and that’s a drag because it seems like every time I touch something, I, or somebody else, get fried. I know that most people get zapped when they walk on carpet and then touch something metallic. I, on the other hand, could be standing on cement and will still practically incinerate the poor cat when I touch him. Seriously, I feel like the character, Jubilee, from the X-Men series: the one who is able of creating pyro-kinetic sparks from her hands. Guess I’d better keep my hands to myself! And forget about becoming a massage therapist!
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