sucks.

my life is full of things i like to say "make good stories."  these are usually things that are totally disastrous or horrible at the time, but i can brush off eventually as the hilarious hijinks of my youth.  this list includes the time a fly ball hit me in the face at dodger stadium, the two years a homeless man had my cell phone number and would call me every few weeks from different area codes around the country (which is obviously the reason i don't answer calls from unknown numbers) and the october i thought it would be a good idea to drop out of my life and bottle-feed kittens.

i'd had some pretty intense things make the list.  however, this morning something happened that has blown them all out of the water.  this morning, i secured what i hope is number one on the list of "things i could never, ever have anticipated" for a long time to come.  it all started when:

my phone died on saturday night.  i don't know exactly what happened to it, considering it was three months old and i had surprisingly not yet dropped it, lost it or accidentally stepped on it.  it was in pristine condition one second and then had the black screen of death the next.  i had planned on going to a verizon store to get it sorted out yesterday, but then the storm of the century hit southern california and we had torrential rains all day.  so, instead of hitting the stores, i hit the hot cocoa container and dvd cabinet pretty hard.  i figured i could just go get the phone thing worked out today after work, as i use a landfill cell phone while i odor patrol and wouldn't really need my own phone until this afternoon.

so, i'm phoneless.  and i'm driving up the winding roads to the landfill, roads that freak me out even when it's beautiful outside because they aren't marked with lanes and have tricky speed bumps and are just generally totally menacing.  there was crap (read: giant rocks and a blue recycling bin) in the road from the storm and as i approached a familiar low spot in the road, one that always fills with water, i just knew that the free car wash i got from the rainstorm was going to get totally effed up by a huge puddle.  annnnnnd that's when my crappy rented chevy impala, which weighs about ten gazillion tons and has a frame that practically drags on the ground, got stuck in a thick, lovely layer of mud from an apparent mudslide.  i was there so early this morning that it hadn't yet been cleared and there i was, wheels a foot deep in sucking mud (i know it was a foot deep because i stepped out into it and lost my entire boot.  on a positive note, i'd decided to wear my hunter rain boots, which in retrospect was a really good idea.  thank god for small miracles.)

as i said, i also didn't have a cell phone.  i wandered around the impala helplessly, after having put the car in neutral and trying to push it out (didn't work, obviously).  i waited and waited until a truck came up the road behind me, at which point i played damsel in distress to a guy in a hard hat, who eventually sent a front loader and some dudes with shovels to come save me.  as insane as it was, i was fully aware the entire time of how i was living a five-year-old boy's dream.  the mud around the car was scraped away carefully by a giant construction vehicle and all i could think of (aside from what a dumbass i am) was the classroom full of boys at the preschool last year, who could really think of nothing else but front loaders.  god, they would have been so jealous.  when the scraping finished, they cut my tires a path with a shovel and i was free.

i was an hour late to work, despite being at the landfill on time.  so close, and yet so far.