The Clincher.

whenever I tell this story in the 'real world' I always ask whomever I'm telling if they have ever seen the movie "Magnolia"
If you haven't seen it - what are you waiting for? it's a great movie! but it also works as an excellent segue to my story, which I like to call "The Clincher" (based on the fact that the story has gotten me laid twice - thus clinching the deal.)

At the beginning of Magnolia we are party to a few odd occurrences. 1 being about a fellow in full scuba gear is found dead ontop of a very high tree apparently dead from drowning. it's revealed that he was scuba diving in the ocean, when a forest fire helicopter scooped down to retrieve water and picked him up as well. when it dropped the water onto the forest the man went with it, explaining the odd scene of where he was found.
The second odd occurrence happens when a young boy gets tired of seeing his parents fight, and tired of seeing his mum wave an unloaded shotgun at his dad during said fights. the boy decides to commit suicide by jumping off his apartment building, but not before one last act of defiance as he loads the shotgun his mum often swings around. The boy makes his way to the roof and jumps off. While he is jumping, his mother and father are fighting and his mother shoots the now loaded shotgun. The blast misses the father completely, but does end up going straight out the window at the exact second the boy is falling past it, hitting him straight in the gut. When the medical examiner later looks at the body it's discovered that had he not been shot, he would have survived the fall. his mother is then charged with murder, but because the boy loaded the shotgun he is listed as an accessory to his own death.
both stories are great examples of how every minute of every day for your entire life had to happen exactly as it happened in order for the events to take places. which is exactly how what happened to me could have happened.

this story is 100% true.


during my adolescent years I spent a lot of time living in an apartment with my mum. it was a small two bedroom apartment with a windowless bathroom. One evening I decided to take a bath in said bathroom. As I was enjoying my bath I felt a sneeze coming on. I often found myself wondering After I sneezed if the old wives tale of why your eyes close involuntarily when you sneeze because they pack enough pressure to shoot your eyeballs out of your head, could actually be true. I figured then was the perfect time to test this tale out. so I held my eyes open and waited for the sneeze to come on. when it did, everything went black.

I, of course, panicked and started screaming I'M BLIND I'M BLIND and grabbing at my face. Surely I was going to find my eyeballs blown out of my head and I would surely attempt to stuff them back in right? wrong.

see, at the exact moment that I sneezed, the power had gone out in our building. since our bathroom had no windows, it was pitch black. No, I wasn't blind. my eyeballs did not shoot out of my head from the pressure of my sneeze. I merely just had a once in a lifetime hilarious moment.

seriously. everything in my life up until that point had to happen. every other sneeze, every red light, every alarm waking me up, every step I took had to happen in the exact way that it did in order for me to seemingly blow my eyes out of my head.
weird, isn't it?

now a days we have mythbusters to do all the dirty work for us - imagine my delight when a few years ago they did an actual bit on the same myth that I had tested a few years prior.