Leaking Freakitude

Ok. There's a quarter on a glass table - and it gets slowly pushed, pushed, pushed from one end of the table to the other. As long as it's on the table - it's fine - but eventually, one of the pushes will send it over the edge...

Yesterday, I was the quarter... and the last little annoyance pushed ME over the edge... I'm sure we all have our days like this - and I was so bummed and so down - it was hard to really get a handle on myself... I really hate myself when I get like this. It feels hopeless and endless... and well - (Like Lucy Van Pelt - on her eight-millionth parried advance to Schroeder at the toy piano... "My Aunt Marion was right - never fall in love with a musician)

No - my day had nothing to do with Dave, the musician...

Ok. So I go home, thinking, "Wow - it'd be really great to have a glass of wine right now..." - so I open the cool, organic wine my friend had given me the last time she was at the house.

I screwed in the corkscrew - and then... the cork disintegrated - the corkscrew emerged spilling bits of cork dust everywhere. I tried another angle - corkdust. Then I really embarassed myself - in the middle of my awful day - and my inability to drink cool, organic wine, I fought the urge to throw the bottle across the room. I actually fought with myself for a few seemingly endless seconds. Throw? Not throw. What's really embarassing is this: The reason I didn't loft the bottle? I didn't want to clean up the wine...

Enter Dave, several hours later. "Dave, can you open this?" I told him what happened.

"Did you freak out?"

"Well, I didn't throw anything." (I was trying to preserve what was left of my wounded pride, you see...)

Dave plunges the corkscrew into the battle-scarred cork. More dust.

"Let's forget it and open another bottle..." I suggested. "It's not worth it."

But now, Dave's on a mission (we're alike this way). He gets his multi-tool and begins hacking at the ever-disintegrating cork with the pliers. I leave the room to put wash in the dryer.

Suddenly, I hear, "ARRRRGH" or some other sharp, pointed explative.

"What happened?"

"I lost the cork in the bottle - and it went all over."

This was just one of those days - that I was destined to eventually calm down - only to spread my freakitude to poor Dave... I was, by this time, over my day - over the fact that I couldn't open the wine, and was ready to face the fact that where no, I didn't throw the bottle, there remained a mess... Dave, on the other hand, was newly annoyed...

So I did the only thing I could. I told him it was okay - and I cleaned it up...

This is why the soda industry invented pop tops... and why perhaps - I should start drinking Sofia - the carbonated wine that Francis Ford Coppola named after his daughter. I wonder if the pop-top was to alleviate bad corks - bad days - and the fact that bad moods can spread so easily.