Witz DOESN'T Pick: Shattering My World, One Slice at a Time...

There are basically two things sustaining me these days: Netflix instant-streaming video and Trader Joe's Three-Seed with Honey Bread. This may seem melodramatic, but I recently realized my facebook account is about six pics short of one hell of an "In Memoriam" slideshow. There are a few I'd need to get rid of, but overall, I dare you to look at those pictures while listening to "Glycerine" by Bush and not cry. The day you see "Witz has untagged himself in 30 pics" is the day before I take this movie to the checkout counter. The moral of the story is that this morning, I went to retrieve my toast and it was on the floor.

Yyyup. My toast was on the floor, meaning my toaster-- my GD inanimate top-load toaster, which I have used with the same bread almost every morning for the last few months, ejected my slice of comfort from its belly and sent it hurdling to the cold, clammy, poorly-cleaned kitchen floor. If you were wondering what "Fuck You" sounded like in Toaster-speak, it's "Ch-chnk!"

At first, I didn't know what had happened. I returned to the kitchen to find an empty toaster where once there had been bread. My first thought was that one of my roommates had wandered in and forgotten whether or not they were the ones who had started making breakfast. I was momentarily astounded and infuriated that one of them would do that. "Time to move out," I decided. My second thought made a lot more sense: Ratatouille was actually a documentary and the main chef rat lived in my apartment, was probably hungry, and was POSSIBLY still voiced by Patton Oswalt. "I'm not moving anywhere," I determined.

My third thought was far less plausible: the toaster fired my food out of its cage and onto the floor. This theory meant that my toaster had somehow become stronger and was able to send bread of the same weight a further distance today than it could yesterday. If this was true, it would mean I could no longer assume anything would function one day as it had the last. The radiator might try to cook us all in our sleep, the microwave might turn my potato radioactive, and, obviously, all of these things might have free will.

My shower might watch me bathe, my Gilette Power Razor might try to slit my throat, or my phone might call people while in my pocket for no apparent reason and give them a frightening window into my life-- oh wait, that already happens. I don't know why I assume these things would gain free will and become evil, but it seems logical. I even assume that my fan, which I turn on most nights to fall asleep, would start changing settings from low to high to medium to high to low to high, just to alter the sound level it's producing and thereby negate the white noise affect that I turn it on for in the first place.

These are all reasons why I was both skeptical and terrified to look down at the floor to where my toast might be if the world is a mischevious, bedeviled, chaotic, insane asylum-- and so, of course, there it was. Shocked, I picked up the toast and stared at the moist outline it left behind on the black and white tile. I looked at the toast and blew on it half-heartedly, already knowing that I wouldn't eat it. At least one person living in this apartment (read: me) has dropped raw chicken on the floor and not cleaned it properly afterwards.* The chicken isn't half as bad, however, as the incident which occurred at one of our parties, where, as far as we all could figure, a pirate drunkenly used our toilet, stuck his peg-leg in the bowl and proceeded to wander out through the kitchen and the dining room, leaving circular shaped tracks along the way before disappearing into the night. Sooo, yeah, I wasn't gonna eat the toast.

Throwing out the improbably ejected piece, I placed another slice of bread in the toaster and waited, watching. "It won't happen again," I hoped aloud. In the other room on my computer, The Office was still on pause via Netflix. My apartment was the same, my roommates were the same, and the same smell of browning bread filled the kitchen as it had so many times before-- but as I looked down at the moist outline left by the bread on the cold, clammy tile, I knew; everything was different.

Maybe This Is Why I Need A Job,
Witz

*To be fair, I did clean up the raw chicken after I dropped it, I just have no idea what level of clean is CLEAN ENOUGH when this has happened. I don't know if it's me or a generational thing, but I was raised to pretty much believe raw chicken is THE WORST THING THAT CAN TOUCH ANYTHING. Salmonella, food poisoning, other bacterial infections, bird flu, swine flu, AIDS, a conservative congress-- these are all things that can be caused by raw chicken. Can soap really get the job done? Can the floor ever really be cleaned without getting a shaman involved??