IS IT REALLY CHRISTMAS EVE?

Okay, boys and girls, I'm going to bring you comfort and joy. I have some Christmas wheelchair horror stories to tell.

You might want to drink some heavily spiked egg nog while reading this.

And I swear to the angels above this is all true.

First of all, I want to establish the fact that my house is small and humble but the living room is (or was) fairly decent.

Things change drastically when you're suddenly confined in a wheelchair, hardly able to walk, and temporarily living in the living room.

The room now looks like an Algerian market place. It's loaded with boxes and bags, blankets and throws, trash bags, cases of water bottles, food, medical supplies.

It's now a horrifying place to attempt maneuvering a wheel chair. My space is extremely narrow and potentially dangerous. I've got trapped in hallways, stuck in doorways. The wheelchair wheels have become hopelessly tangled with blankets. Many times the wheelchair got entangled with the walker and I helplessly dragged it behind me.

I'm thinking back when I was nineteen years old, effortlessly cruising nearly all the freeways in Southern California.

Now I'm a thousand years old and can't navigate a frickin' wheelchair in a tiny Tennessee house.

But wait - - the horror stories haven't begun yet. I've got to tell you what happened yesterday.

I happen to have two boxes of Christmas cookies that I ordered from Walmart. I haphazardly put them on top of some boxes near the front door.

And I didn't notice that the two cookie boxes fell on the floor.

So........

I unknowingly wheeled over them in my chair!!

One box was sealed tightly but all the cookies were crushed. The other box opened and all the cookies were strewn over the floor.

Generally I wouldn't have saved the cookies on the floor. But my anger inspired me to rescue them. I grabbed a "reacher" ( one of those contraptions that handicapped people use) - - and picked up every one of the cookies. I don't care how dirty they are. I'm damn well going to eat them!!

Wanna hear about the clementines?

I had two bags of clementines. One was in the box of food that the social workers recently gave me - - and I put that one safely away.

I got the other one from Walmart a week ago. Somehow it carelessly wound up on the living room floor.

So, late last night - after the cookie disaster - I accidentally wheeled over the clementines!! The fruit was completely pulverized. Thank goodness it was in a plastic bag, or the juice would have been all over.

What more can I say? I'm in a danger zone. And I am a complete catastrophe in a wheel chair.

What will I run over next? A nurse??

Finish your egg nog.

Have a pleasant Christmas Eve.

Jon, disaster prone