I Told You So...

You know when your mom tells you not to lick a frozen pole because it will get stuck? Then your friends dare you by saying they’ll give you a dollar, and hey, what kid doesn’t need a dollar? So you end up licking it, getting stuck, and calling your mom through a muffled and embarrassing scream. Three cups of warm water and a thousand taste buds later, your mom calmly says to you “I told you so!” Those ‘I told you so’ moments are so precious aren’t they? I mean, what kid on earth hasn’t heard the ‘I told you so’ saying at least a million times from their parents?

Well, having established that we’ve all had the ‘I told you so’ drill, but have you ever experienced the ‘I told myself so’ story? Yes, I feel this happens at the moment when we are no longer dependents of our parents, thus we don’t have them telling us right from wrong, however we are old enough that oftentimes our minds have already gone through the ‘is this going to work’ process, and having come to the conclusion that this is not a good idea at all, we proceed to “lick the frozen pole”.

This very thing has happened to me on a number of occasions. There was one time when I was snorkeling off the coast of Kauai when I saw a vehicle that resembled a small submarine. Now comes the thought process: for what seemed like an eternity I waged battle with my subconscious about the pro’s and con’s of exploring this small submarine. In the end my mind said no, don’t do it. So of course that left me no option but to go and take a look. Upon reaching the outer shell of this strange sea vessel, I realized that it wasn’t a submarine at all, but a giant cucumber! As you can imagine, I was quite disturbed at the thought of a giant cucumber floating through the Pacific Ocean!

The origin of this cucumber is neither known nor important, suffice it to say that you could easily make quite a bit of cucumber salad with this sucker (mmm, cucumber salad with a little bit of vinegar, that would be great, especially with a nice BLT sandwich where the bacon is nice and crisp, and the tomato is so moist! Perfecto!). Upon examination of said cucumber, I found it had several electronic panels on it, with many random buttons and triggers. Once again the battle waged inside my head to touch the buttons, to not touch the buttons, and once again my mind said definitely not. So I of course began pressing buttons with such fever that I thought I was playing Wack-a-Mole at the fair! This was thoroughly exhilarating, as it took me back to a simpler time on the farm in Athens, GA.

My brothers and I (there were 16 in all) used to play a game where we would throw M80’s down the rabbit hole and see them come scramming up the other side. Then one time we decided to do it in a port-o-john only the fuse didn’t burn down as quick, and right when we ran out to wait for the explosion my uncle frank walked in to “read the funnies” as he liked to call it. Well let’s just say that he didn’t even get “the paper open” before that M80 put a scare into him like the Manager of an all you can eat buffet seeing my aunt petunia walking in for “Bingo Night”.

Where was I? Oh yeah: cucumber, buttons, wack-a-mole, aunt Petunia (ever wonder how one of your story’s end up being about something completely different then what you originally wanted?)
Anyway, so this cucumber begins to shake in the water, and I begin to ask myself two questions. First, why am I still in the water? I hate it when I get pruney! Secondly, I’m thinking: This shaking can not be a good sign!

And it wasn’t, so basically what had happened, is that my aunt Petunia and my uncle Frank wanted to get back at me for all the stuff I did to them, and so they launched this giant cucumber from Georgia, directing it where to go via this satellite, and they, knowing that I loved to push shiny buttons, programmed the cucumber to explode just as I was gleefully pressing the knobs and triggers.
Long story short, I knew I shouldn’t approach the cucumber, I knew I shouldn’t press the buttons, but I did anyway, and what did it get me? A whole lot of cucumber right in the schnozz. Lesson Learned: I told myself so!