Why Is That In Your Bed?; or Oh, Buy a Bag of Ice Already

I should not be allowed, unsupervised, near an oven.

You would not guess, by looking at me, that I am a clumsy or distracted person.  I don’t know why I think this – perhaps it’s pure vanity on my part.  But maybe not.  After all, I’ve been told by more than one drunk guy that I have a reasonably pleasing gait.  I regularly remember people’s birthdays, particularly when reminded by Facebook.  I pay my bills on time, I bathe when necessary, and I once owned a pair of white pants that – and get this – remained white until I outgrew them. 

Then again, I once fell down doing the hokey-pokey.  What was that about?

Still.  The oven.

I made a dish Sunday night – it’s not important what the dish was – but suffice it to say that it was made in the oven.  Said dish, fresh out of the oven, had a temperature of, oh, 350 degrees.  When said dish looked that it might fall from its precarious perch in my ridiculously tiny kitchen, I reached out, reached out to save it from falling…

Well, any thinking person – and I used to count myself among them – knows what happens next.  There’s shouting, a brief bout of weeping, blistering, and standing near a cold tap until one can stands no more. 

I don’t know why I don’t have ice.  One would think someone as hip to the kitchen scene as I am, with its potato peelers and its spatulas, would have ice; but I don’t.  So when I tired of standing with my hand in cold water, I did the next best thing.

I held a can of delicious, ice-cold Fresca.

Man.  Is there anything not to love about Fresca?

In the end, of course, I took a fresh can with me to bed, holding it tenderly until two, maybe three in the morning, when I woke up in pain, refrigerated the now-warm can of pop and replaced it with a new, cold one.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you wake up with a can of warm Fresca by your head.