Seventeen Man-Eating Clams

Last night, I swallowed a great pokey ice-cube. It had at least a thousand corners, each honed to a deadly point. Brilliant, I thought, as it scratched its way down my throat--it's going to freeze my whole stomach. Ah, if only! A frozen stomach's not so bad. One can ignore a frozen stomach. What really happened was worse, much worse: damn thing lodged itself firmly in my esophagus, right beside my heart. Frantic swallowing only served to entrench it more deeply. Furthermore, all attempts to cough it up resulted in an agony beyond my powers of description. It was--it was like being pricked by a thistle dipped in hydrofluoric acid. Chilled acid, no less. Or maybe it was more like a nettle. No, a burr. That's it: a bloody enormous burr.

Inside my brain, all was panic and confusion: Prickly burr! Great, fat, horrible prickly burr! In my throat! Burr! Throat! Burr! Throatburr! Get it out! Ouch! No, don't get it out. Wait it out. Ohhhhh, burr! Throat! Burr! Throatburr! Make the bad man stop!

I made a pained little "auuk!" sound. That hurt, too. So did my ill-advised effort to melt the ice-cube with hot tea. (Ever been burned and frozen at the same time? Rather unpleasant, I must say.) There was nothing for it but to wait, breathe shallowly, and try not to swallow.

Waiting. That was the easy bit. Any idiot can wait. Trying not to swallow, on the other hand, is an exercise in futility. See, the minute you start thinking about swallowing, your throat-muscles go all tense and bunchy: "What, time to swallow? Okay. Gulp!" You try to relax, but the tension soon becomes unbearable, and you swallow reflexively...and repeatedly. Same goes for breathing shallowly. You can do it all day, if you're not thinking about it, but the minute you start trying to control your breathing, your lungs are all "Oxygen! Oxygen!"

So there I was, panting and gulping, with this horrible pointy ice-cube inching its way down my throat. It took ages. It took hours and hours. It took...oh, about twenty minutes, I'd say. Longest twenty minutes of my life. I'm never putting an ice-cube in my mouth again.

Thanks to my ice-cube adventure, and attendant troubles with heartburn, I did not sleep well last night. (I slept so poorly, indeed, that I woke up thinking: Ey, you know what would be funny? If they made a mistake on an NC-17 film, and put MC-17 instead. Then, everyone would think it meant "Warning: may contain seventeen man-eating clams.")

Seventeen man-eating clams. Where does one go from there? Back to bed, I think.

My immediate plans involve sleeping for about a thousand years. I leave you with this picture of a funny-looking rat and a hundred-sided die: