He Screamed "Caulk"!!!

I had a joke book when I was a child. I think that I got it at the “Book Fair” that would come to our school each year. That travelling group of literary carnies sure did make for a good week. Everyone loved the book fair. This is where all the kids stocked up on all of their “Garfield Treasures” and “Guinness Book of Records” needs. Along with posters of all of the fancy sports cars that we would never own as adults. Wouldn’t it have been great if they would have had posters of Civics and minivans? “OOhhhhh mom…. I need $5 to get a poster of the raddest Caravan that I have ever seen…. Good times. Take a look, it’s in a book… A Reading Rainbow!


So the possible “Book Fair” joke book had a joke in it that read, and I quote “How do you know if there is an elephant sleeping under your bed”… Stay tuned for the shocking answer, after these words…

My new joke is “how do you know if you have a hole in your air mattress?” answer – You wake put by your nose being slowly crushed by the weight of your gigantic head pushing it into the hard wood floor. Maybe that is a little too inside to gain any ground in the joke book world, but it you have a huge head like me, go ahead and use it.

I have no real aspirations that I will ever get out of the current plant that I work at, but my contract is never extended for more than a month or so at a time. So I am basically a lifetime temporary resident of Rochester. I do actually like it that way, for some reason it makes me feel closer to home when I don’t have a lot of long term type things in the town where I work – furniture, tooth brushes, ect.

This is an actual photo of my apartment from Boston where I lived for about a year. The only two things that I owned in this picture were the TV and the book, and I threw out the book.

I moved out in about 6 minutes

So this leads me to sleep on an air mattress. This was the source of very un-restful sleep for the past week or so. Not because it was uncomfortable, but because I was stressed that I was going to wake up on the equivalent of a dry slip and slide after about an hour.

When someone asks “do you like your bed hard or soft”, no one ever responds with “I like it as hard as I can get it right when I get in it, then I like it to get progressively softer for about 15 mins, and then get really REALLY hard until it wakes me up". That would be a hard setting to put on a sleep number…

My bed had a blowout. I am not sure what caused it, as I have lost a few pounds as of late, so I don’t think that my girth was the cause. Maybe it was not designed to be inflated and slept upon night after night for over a year. Whatever the cause, I had a hole about a ¼ of an inch long (giggidy).

Being the modern day MacGyver, and in dire need for a place to sleep after being up all night, I ran to the garage, and got the tube repair kit off my bike. Worked like a charm! I slept like a baby that was very proud at his resourcefulness.

The next night… not so much… I woke up in the morning (well my morning, about 1:30 pm) with my elbows and ass bone pressed against the floor.

That night at work I “borrowed” about a half a roll of Nuke grade duct tape. You know the douchey saying about fixing anything with duct tape… Whoever said that has not slept on a flat air mattress with me.

I taped over the patched hole, and then I laid me down to sleep. After less than a minute, I knew that I was leaking (so to speak). I pulled my sheet off, and found that there was another similar hole about 2’ away from the first one. I tried the duct tape but it did not work at all without the patch underneath, and I was out of patches.

When fixing something in duct tape, the rule is, if the issue isn’t solved, add more duct tape. I had the original patch area with about a 6” square of tape, and the new patch area with about 8” square of tape, then 10” then 14”…. Then I filled the bed up and laid in it, trying to think of my next course of action.

Mind you it was one of the first warm days of the year, it was about 8 in the morning after getting up the previous day at 2:00pm and working a 12hour shift overnight. So my disposition was somewhere south of cheery. The bed deflating beneath me was like the Jeopardy music playing. It seemed like I needed to come up with a solution before I hit the floor. Then it hit me… Caulk!

It’s not unusual to hear me happily yell CAULK! from my bedroom, but it was odd that I immediately ran out of the room afterword.

Looking back, this not my best idea. At the time, I was thinking that the chalk would fill the voids in the tape, and form a seal 10 times tighter than anything that Billy Maze ever sold.

So I pulled back one corner of the tape square, and squeezed an ample about of caulk underneath it (giggidy)… That didn’t work. So Itried to smooth it out with my finger, and like I do with all messy construction supplies, I immediately had it all over my clothes, hair, teeth… This is when I realized that I had made a huge error in judgment. It was kinda like that episode of Friends where Ross tries to use lotion and powder to get his leather paints back on.

(Now just a back story to give the rest of this one some reference. Charlie the dog has a habit of running at you as fast as he can when he first sees you. It is a combination of excitement, retard strength, and very poor depth perception. But when he first sees you, you need to make sure that you don’t have your feet planted, or he will blow your knee out with a Lawrence Taylor type chop block)

So there I am, on my hands and knees on my deflated air mattress, hot, extremely tired and frustrated, covered head to toe in caulking, and angry at myself for the chain of events in my life that have lead me to this exact moment in time.

I hear Shaun yell “Charlie!” just as my door is pushed open. I turn my head to have Chuck, while running as fast as a large hound dog can get running in 15’, drive his dog nose into my eye socket (while my eye was open) with all of his weight behind it.

There was a flurry of sensations. The wicked odd feeling of his cool slobbery nose touching my bare eyeball, coupled with blinding white agony, coupled with fear that my eyeball may have ruptured, coupled with palpable rage and the question of how long it would take Dale to notice of Charlie just wasn’t there when he woke up.

While he was there, I used his ears like shop towels and cleaned the chalking off my hands. Then pulled the duct tape off the bed and stuck it to the back of his neck, and then worked the hole in the mattress into a large opening, shoved Chuck inside, slung it over my shoulder like a sack of taters, and carried the whole works out to the curb. Came back in, crawled in bed with Dale, and tried to sleep it off…

Answer: You your nose is touching the ceiling.