the abyss means...

I recently had an experience, which I sincerely hoped would be the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

I was wrong.

A so-called friend had decided to buy me an interesting birthday present. For reasons that we won’t explore, he bought me a jar of whole pickled baby octopi.

It took a lot of alcohol and a complete lack of common sense before I tried one. It was a bit like fish & chip flavour chewing gum - salty, vinegary and chewy. Not so bad, but I decided not to ever eat another one.

Much later on I felt a bit nauseous & felt a catching sensation in the back of my throat. I coughed for a very long time, hoping to dislodge whatever it was.

Eventually, I dislodged the source of my irritation from behind my right tonsil & spat a 5mm piece of tentacle into the sink.

The octopus had had it's revenge & I had learned a valuable lesson .

Anyway, I had been hoping that this would be my worst experience ever. It turned out that I was wrong.

I was sitting in my room about a week later when I heard the most terrible noise. On investigation I discovered that one of the cats had caught a small bird & was busy torturing it to death. The noise, the blood & the bird's obvious distress bothered me slightly, so I decided to go out for a while until it was all over.

When I got home it was blissfully quiet. All I had to do was to find and dispose of the body & it would all be fine. Unfortunately, I could not find any sign of the bird or the cats. After searching the house I eventually found that the cats had gone out and left the bird cowering behind one of the chairs.

I then spent the next half hour running around the living room trying to catch it.

When I had finally caught it I found that it was in a sorry state - most of the feathers were missing from its back, its wings were broken & there were claw wounds all over it. It was in pain and wouldn't survive for very much longer. I did the only humane thing. I took its body in my left hand and its head in my right hand and tried to break its neck...

Unfortunately I was far too eager to be humane & broke its neck a little too sharply. The head came off.

I was left standing in the kitchen holding a bleeding twitching corpse in one hand, which sporadically spurted blood over the bird's head that I was holding in the other hand.

I've probably had a fairly easy life if these are the worst things that have happened to me. I am still vainly hoping that nothing worse will happen though.

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That was Cuzin Loom (aka Unkle Pete) saying his bit.

joh on July 29, 2003 10:27 AM

A similar, though, not as horrid thing happened a couple months ago to me.

I was awoken one morning by the sound of my flatmates outside in the garden. I look out my window and they're all standing around looking at the ground. "That's strange," I thought. I drag myself out of bed and down the stairs.

Scattered around on the concrete outside the patio are the bodies of four relatively young birds.

We stand around discussing the possible reasons why four dead birds are littering our yard. The best we come up with are:
a) A hatian voodoo practitioner has taken a disliking to us and decided to place a curse.

b) There's a cat that really wants to move in with us.

c) These were a rare species of Lemming birds.

We eventually settled on c, and buried the bodies. End of story.

Exciting eh? (Come to think of it, that story lacked a bit of drama. Oh well. Deal.)

Matt on July 30, 2003 08:47 AM

That's a great story Matt!

joh on July 30, 2003 11:07 AM