Breaking News: Mugger claims Scurvy made them do it!

Some day it will come to this.  One day I will hardly be able to fend off the scurvy and the madness and I will simply snap.  This will be my headline.  Mugger claims "Scurvy made me do it!"

I can tell you are confused.  That furrowed look on your brow, that raised eyebrow, that slightly narrowed eye tell all.  You cannot understand what I am talking about.  Well how could you?  YOU do not have scurvy.

At first I just thought I was tired from working too hard and maybe the tiniest bit lazy.  But then I realized the terrible truth.  I was in line to buy my handful of bargains at M&S when realization struck.  Out of all the things I could have selected to buy I had chosen to buy a lemon cake, a lemon mousse and a grapefruit.  I wasn't just tired and lazy.  I was craving fruit.  I had scurvy!  The hard yellow evidence was staring me straight in my scorbutic face.

Maybe the presence of this pirate cake alongside my lemon cake subconsciously started this whole thing? Nah, it was the scurvy.  Had to be.

Scorbutic, that's just such a great word.  No, focus Madder Hatter, you must stay focused.  Don't let the scurvy take you like this.

Ok, produce wallet, produce change, pay for citrusy products.  Almost safe.  No, the madness is taking over.  The scurvy... It. Is. Too. Powerful.

I stumbled back to my desk at work, delirious with laughter and the sickness.  I managed to obtain a spoon somehow in this state, peeled back the lid with trembling fingers and dug into the lemony mousse.  Ahhh.  The cure.  I could feel the sugary lemony goodness fixing me.  The madness slowly receded to a normal level and I went back to my work.  I had been saved from the scurvy, but not before I had realized my fate.

You see, it seems to be my fate to constantly battle scurvy.  I do not eat enough broccoli obviously, as I have explained before here.  So it is with a heavy heart that I must realize what my eventual fate will be.  I am destined to battle with scurvy my entire life.  Yes, tragic, but true.

I will not always be so lucky as to be within reach of a cure, however.  So, I am doomed to be the madman on the loose grasping at anything that even looks like a cure.

Mad with the scurvy I will scuttle down the street.  Nobody sitting at a quiet breakfast with grapefruit will be safe from my ravenous need for citrus.  I will be forced to grab lemony desserts from people's hands and down them without elegance or dignity.  Scorbutic hands trembling I am doomed to terrify the lone bearers of fruit flavoured cakes on public transportation.

With wild and anxious aspect I will spy the cakes from a distance, perched prettily on the lap of an unsuspecting bus passenger.  My desperate deficiency heightening my senses and screaming that I act now to restore my health, I will leap to my feet and race to my supposed salvation.  Muttering in demented demeanor aloud to myself about the scurvy I will pitch back and forth with the motion of the bus.  The scurvy will feel the motion, reach back into its ancient memory and believe with renewed audacity that it is afflicting a hapless sailor, demanding satisfaction in a fruit flavoured cake sacrifice to its honour.

I will battle with the scurvy.  I am a good person and won't want to take the poor passenger's cake.  But the scurvy will be strong and I will eventually be forced to steal their cake.  Unceremoniously, I will be found tearing into it to relieve my scurvy and become the world's weirdest and wildest mugger.  Stealing cakes from innocent people.  Once the scurvy has been sated and my sanity has returned to me it will be too late.  I will try to explain that the scurvy made me do it as I am led away in handcuffs for mugging some poor old lady bringing a lemon cake to her friends birthday.  But it will be too late she will already be terrified and traumatized by my public scorbutic debacle.

I am doomed.  Summer days may find me trying to pry orange popsicles from unsuspecting little fingers.  Fingers that will point me out as the orange-handed culprit.  Sure, sure I could have asked where they got their popsicles from, but scurvy doesn't heed logic.  Scurvy does not brook disappointment.  Scurvy is a law unto itself.  It is a bleak bleak future that awaits me.

Even if I try to stockpile on citrus products there is no telling when scurvy could strike.  I could be anywhere and nobody will be safe from my scorbutic mania.  Maybe I should get a lawyer.  Perhaps a good lawyer could explain that these innocent victims had knowledge of the whereabouts of the popsicle and cake vendors and that they were withholding that information from me.  I was forced to steal the popsicles and cakes out of great underprivileged need.

Or insanity.  The insanity plea could work.  The terrified lady from the bus could probably testify on my behalf even.  Insanity may just be my salvation. 

My carnivorous door.

I'm a bit fuzzy on the particulars... but I do believe it's tea time.

I don't know about you, but I have had one of those weeks that merits a large cup of tea, a good book, and a spell under the covers.  For a start it's been raining all week and rain always makes me want to curl up with a book.  As much as I love reading with the rain against my window and puddle jumping with giant rain boots on, I do not like going to work in the rain. This may sound silly, but they are not at all the same.

Don't get me wrong, puddle jumping and singing in the rain are fantastic pastimes.  They allow you to be five again and watch the way the puddles swish about around your boots.  There really is something magical about water.  The key here is that the getting wet part is deliberate.  You don't go puddle jumping if you don't want to get wet.  After a good puddle jumping, rain-drenching, singing-in-the-rain experience you go home and change into your warmest clothes and sip hot chocolate or tea with a big smile on your face. Or at least I do.

Walking in the rain, on the other hand, is not the same as a singing-in-the-rain type stroll.  If you are walking, and it happens to be raining, chances are you need to get somewhere and getting wet is not ideal.  Working for hours at a computer is not an experience augmented by soggy clothes.  It would have been a trifling matter if the week's troubles had ended there.  Such was not my luck.

By Tuesday I must have done something to anger all the gods.  It didn't take them long to enlist the fates to come to their aid.  And so it was on Tuesday morning that I awoke blissfully unaware of the things in store for me.  I wandered into the kitchen and found I was out of milk.  Small matter I thought, I will make toast.  Small matter?  More like warning.  A taste of how my day was to progress.

All too soon it was time for me to get ready for work.  I returned to the kitchen and got out food to bring along.  Then with my hands a bit too full I tried to leave the kitchen.  I say tried because of what follows.  I had to put down a glass to open the door.  So, I swung the door open and then shoved my foot in to hold it while I picked up the extra glass again.  Then I attempted my usual maneuver.  I pushed the door open wide with my foot while I scooted through the doorway hands full.  Usually this ends with me safely on the other side of the door and on my way to do whatever it was I was too busy doing to use my hands to open the door with in the first place.  Today was not my day.  The door slammed shut ever so much faster than usual.  I believe it was helped by the fates.  Suddenly I was standing halfway between the kitchen and hallway in ever so much pain.  The door bit me!  It bit me with it's pointy-ish hard unforgiving handle.  You don't think a door can bite a person?  I refer you to my name.  The door had slammed shut burying the handle into my hip with such force that I had to stand there awhile to recover.  It was the sort of pain that forces you to turn nearly statuesque for a bit, first in shock, then in realization and lastly in pain as you grimace through that first fierce and biting wave before it subsides into that dull ache you knew was coming.  That is to say, it REALLY hurt.  But I still had things to do.

The Culprit

I finished getting ready for work in a bit of a haze trying not to bend in particular ways.  You see, the door handle was at just the height where all my pants and belts hit.  Convenient.  I finally left my house and it was, of course, raining.  By the time I arrived at work I was dripping wet and probably looked as though I'd run behind the bus all the way to work.  I sat down and discovered that sitting really hurts with a bruise in just the right place on your hip.  Then I was handed my client for the day, a law firm specializing in personal injury claims.  Ha.  Funny.  Good one fates.     

Work was work, nothing dramatic or damaging happened there.  I was finally done with the trouble, or so I thought.  While I waited for my bus after work I had a growing sense of dread.  It turned out to be a bit justified as my bus never came.  I had to catch another one home after waiting in the really cold, very un-spring like rain for an hour and a half.  Though at this point I was just glad to be on a bus heading to town.  I do not know what I did to anger the gods so, but it must have been pretty terrible.

The rest of the week was largely uneventful.  Any lingering wrath was spent in sending down soaking rain that made sure I was thoroughly wet at work.  And of course there is my large, unpleasant, inconveniently placed bruise.  I don't think you will blame me if I declare that I am not leaving my bed for anything this weekend.  Now, if you'll excuse me I have a book that needs reading.