Can Someone Gimme A Hand?

Not to make light of what's clearly a troubling thing for this family, and due to be a horrifically difficult surgery for this poor kid, but...

The other day, the Guy and I were wandering through the Emporium of Food and talking about how difficult life is sometimes and what a pain in the ass having only two arms can be. You go and break your leg one day, and you're fucked. It's you, your sticks, and if you want to carry anything, a backpack or something. If you're carrying, say, food, you need to do so in sealed containers in a bag. Every step you take, the container thwacks up against the crutch, and if you're having a bad day, it eventually bangs open, causing even more grief, when grief's something you already have plenty of.

I remember being on crutches and trying to get my pitcher of water over to the coffee table. I was normally really good at it, but it was tricky and took extreme concentration. This time, a bit of water splashed out, my crutch contacted it, and I slipped, went five feet up, and came crashing down REAL hard on my back. GREAT! A fucked-up leg AND a gimped back! I laid there horrified for three or four minutes, about to break into tears at how depressing my life had become, but then discovered the fluke of actuallt being okay. Getting off the floor, however, was another story. It took about three or four minutes of trying to haul myself up on furniture and trying to make my one good leg SuperHuman Strong! for the task. A third arm would've saved me from ten really fucked-up minutes there, and might've made life overall a Better Thing.

I feel for this kid, though. It'd be awesome to have something as convenience-building as a fully-functioning third arm, but he's clearly in pain in both his left arms, according to the news story here.

You gotta wonder... what the fuck are they putting in the water? Ever hear those stories about the towns on the Rio Grande near the GM plant back in the early '90s? 19 kids in one area were all born without brains? The only answer was the pollutants being pumped out by the manufacturer. We keep seeing all these "freak" kids and no one's asking why the kid's got two heads, why these kids are being born without brains, why there's three arms... why cancer keeps going up and up and up.

Yesterday I was doing eBay whoring, getting things all purtied and gussied up for eBay, where I'm trying to sell a shitload of things for some cash. (My sales items are all here. Go buy my shit!) So, there I was, trying to get things all perfect when I noticed how yellowed with age my Elmo Super-8 projector from the '70s was, and I dug through my closet to find my only Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. I gulped and decided I had to use the fucking thing.

See, I was a big fan of the Magic Eraser for a while there -- it got marks off my old yellow-and-white scooter that nothing else would remove. I was HOOKED, man. Anything was real stubborn? Mr. Clean was the bomb, man.

Then I was talking to the Guy, who informed me that one of the engineers in his firm sent out an email warning everyone off of the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. Why? The fuckin' thing's made with formaldehyde!

"Here, clean this. While you're at it, what flavour would you like your radiation treatment in? Cherry? Rootbeer?"

I mean, fucking hell. Cancer is caused by formadehyde. Don't believe me, listen to them. You know, if it's a cleaning product, the government says, "Well, you're not supposed to EAT the fucking thing, so we're not going to tell you what's in it." There's absolutely no laws of disclosure when it comes to purchasing cleaning products. Nada, man.

So, I grudgingly cleaned the fucking projector, and now I've thrown the damned things out, and I'll never buy them again. Pity, they work so well. I just have such a high incidence of cancer in my family that I figure I don't need a fucking headstart.

It's nice to know we live in this world full of chemicals that we're "not supposed to ingest," but instead we get to breathe them, touch them, and absorb them in our skin. Is there any real surprise that asthma (particularly in children) is at epidemic levels? Is it any surprise that we just have to talk about someone who's died recently, and say just one word, "Cancer," in order to get a knowing, sad nod from another person? I'm sick of living in a world where I need to start questioning the make-up of every little thing around me.

I shoulda been more suspicious that this silly little spongey thing could clean marks off that nothing else was able to make a dent in. I mean, if it's too good to be true, y'know...

Who says the Industrial Age is over, huh? This is the Age of Industry, man. We little guys don't matter. And, hey, a third arm really comes in handy... when it's not in agony every time you touch the fucking thing.