I’m not the kind of guy who wins too many trophies. I’ve never been too inclined to excel at sports even when my body was able, and my Math Olympiad medals are surely rusting away in an attic somewhere, having lost all significance as my IQ steadily drops a few points with every pound I gain and bit of Batman trivia I absorb. I’m not even the kind of person who will go out into the vast bounty of nature and shoot things, cut off their heads and call those little artifacts ‘trophies’. No, I don’t measure my successes with collectibles, though I can absolutely understand the appeal.
I collect things because it’s ingrained in my bones. While I’m not prideful enough to show off how awesome I am, I’m somehow much more inclined towards displaying the things which I have survived. I don’t know where into the ‘psychology of collecting’ this falls, but I’m the guy who saves rejection letters more faithfully than letters of congratulations, and who’s more interested in picking up a shard of headlight after an auto collision than collecting insurance information – a practice which has caused at least one insurance company to refuse to cover me and run in terror.
Back in the early days of 2009, I was searching through our garage for a set of screwdrivers that had been misplaced. When I couldn’t find them in the regular spots, I climbed up on a ladder to look in the loft, to no avail. I climbed down the ladder and hopped off the last step, when I felt a sharp pinch on the bottom of my foot. When I lifted it up, a large piece of wood from an old, broken table followed my foot upwards.
As it turns out, an uncareful relative had left the broken wood on the ground with a couple of razor-sharp screws pointing directly upwards, and I was barefoot. While sparing you the gory details and unbelievably powerful jets of blood that I was suddenly projecting, I made a quick trip to the emergency room after almost losing consciousness and going into shock from the blood loss (and of course, a quick Facebook status update). There, I was wrapped up without stitching, and sent home with some antibiotics.
$600, a few months of limping around in sandals, and a permanent injury that still hurts when I stand on it for too long later, I’m alive. I survived the great Screw Incident of aught-nine. So, you can imagine my pleasure when my grandfather held a bonfire to burn boxes and extra wood last weekend, and I got to throw the table into the fire. I had already decided that once the table burnt, I was going to sift through the ashes for my pointy little trophies. Sure, I could have unscrewed them methodically from the wood months earlier, but where was the ritual in that? Something about a prolonged, horrible injury demanded to be cleansed with fire. Sure enough, they were waiting on the top of the ashes for me.
It’s not as if I regularly collect dirty old screws, so how do you preserve your gallery of injuries? I’d ideally like to build a small wooden frame and suspend them harmlessly and delicately between the sides, and display it anywhere I end up as a reminder that things hurt, and to wear shoes, and that hospitals are expensive, and that I survived the whole thing. These screws, after all, have gotten to know me better than I know myself. A football trophy is a symbol of perseverance, while these screws are a symbol of endurance.
Hopefully, the day will come when my personal Gallery of Fail will be an ironic footnote in a massive life full of unimaginable success, but until then, at least I have some screws.
October 7th, 2009 at 8:02 AM
In my teens, I jumped out of a chair during half-time at a Green Bay Packer game on TV. I wanted a sandwich, but would never leave a game you see. Well, the end result was that I broke my ankle! This from a tom-boy who jumped out of trees when mom called, leapt off of rock piles, played jump rope for years and on and on. But it happened, was quite painful and after that I hated that chair and tried to sit elsewhere, even on the floor. I was not lucky enough to save the chair as a momento, but truly understand and empathize with you. Fun article.