Friday, March 11, 2005

truth doesn't make a noise

Walking around with my arm in a sling attracts all sorts of people asking questions. The actual description of my injury is pretty long-winded and not very exciting. The fact that the injury occurred a couple years ago coupled with the fact that I'm not even completely sure that falling off the bouldering wall at the climbing gym was how I hurt it makes it hard to describe in the small amount of time I really want to be interacting with these people. And often it ends up with someone suggesting that I sue the climbing gym and then I have to get into a discussion about how people need to take responsibility for their own actions. And that I don't want to sue the climbing gym because it's hard enough for them to make money and I don't want them to have to suffer financially because really, it was me who fell off the wall – no one pushed me.

So I need a new story.

I was making a summit attempt on K2 when my climbing partner fell down a crevasse. While self-arresting in order to save both of our lives, I dislocated my shoulder.

(To be said in an outrageous Australian accent) I was attacked by a giant salty!


I was spelunking in the caves of Madagascar and I spied a new amphibian species. Crawling down to get a closer look revealed that they were not very friendly and I was promptly attacked by its entire pod. They latched onto my arm with jaws of steel, and I was unable to pry them off. It took two days to hike out to a hospital. Turns out these little buggers have some rare venom. It's really a miracle of modern science that I got to keep my arm.

1 comment:

Merce said...

You should come up with a story involving monkeys. Something that goes like this... You were on an expedition in the Amazon researching secret stuff for the Government. And you can't say what because then you'd have to kill somebody and that would be really hard with your arm in a sling. So there you were minding your own business, researching away, when suddenly you catch sight of a pack of obviously starving constipated, (Scott's contribution), monkeys. You had been warned about this very scenario and pull out of your pocket a box of e-lax... Well, you can fill in the rest.