ANXIETY HELL

As anyone who knows me well can attest, I have no greater phobia in life than that of losing either one or two of my eyes. I spend a lot of time gasping, cringing, and breaking out in hives over imagining freak skull socket gouging accidents. Typically, my screaming internal monologue on the perils of eyeball safety can only be quelled by a night of heavy drinking. I’m pretty sure they call it Nyquil for a reason. A few weeks ago, in a sick twist of fate, it was my very calm-inducing intoxification process that almost led to my ultimate Stevie Wonderization.

Cut to a bar where it’s clear at least a baker’s dozen of the patrons are teetering on the verge of falling into a Venn diagram that’s labeled “Angry Drunk” on the left and “Sad Drunk” on the right with a few “Batshit Crazy Hybrids” smashed into the middle. Someone’s about to start weeping while slurring “I love you, man,” and someone’s about to get punched in the face; probably the creepy dude who has his friend in a headlock and is slurring sweet nothings into his ear. You know the vibe, the escalating tension and your semi-sober observation that more than a couple human booze recepticles in the perimeter could use an IV drip before they slip into either an alcohol poisoning or fist-induced coma.

Things are nearing Red Alert Wiggity Wack Status – at least that’s how they feel to me in my constant state of human presence-induced anxiety. I think, I can either back away slowly and head up to my hotel room or I can stand there a minute longer and risk ending up in the middle of a bar brawl whilst blowing my rape whistle and pushing two people apart human wall style.

Knowing the latter could lead to me taking a few knocks to the eye region, I select Option A and begin backing up toward the doorway. I silently exit the way you do when a hungry mountain lion has just prowled onto the set of your Jimmy Dean photo shoot only to find you posing in a sausage suit. Because we’ve all been there, haven’t we?

As I ride the elevator up to my room, I become aware that my stomach does not approve of my pouring a keg’s worth of Sam Adams into it. This suspicion becomes clearer to me when I fall through my hotel room door and discover I have about negative three seconds to make it to the toilet before puking all over the kind of carpet that makes you both dizzy and inspired to go back downstairs in search of craps tables.

Feeling all Linda Blaire in The Exorcist, I stumble into the bathroom, and that’s when the toilet seat from hell attacks. I slam it up to puke and it slams right back down and clocks me in the face. It smashes my cranium into the bowl and nearly gouges out my eyeball.

Why in the hell would any company produce sharp, pointy-ended, horseshoe-shaped toilet seats? That’s just fantastic! Hi, everyone. I’m now a Cyclopes and let me explain to every person staring at my eye patch why exactly that is. This is a story I want to repeat to small children for the rest of my life.

So I’m sobbing and bleeding from the face — convinced it’s not cheek, but actual eye blood spurting from my head in a manner would make Tarantino proud — and all the while still puking, when my husband follows my Tru Blood ESP distress calls up to our hotel room. He swoops in the door, takes one look at me, then disappears.

This angers me, as I’ve just gone to the trouble of popping a Tic-Tac into my piehole. He comes back a minute later with a bag of ice, as I’m ridding myself of the one calorie breath mint. He starts acting all tender, smashing the homemade glacier against my swollen head and saying romantic things like, “I’m sure you’ll get to keep both of your eyes.”

The next day, after finding myself still vomiting, while standing in line at curbside check-in, I discover that going blind would’ve been a blessing, because then I wouldn’t’ve had to see the CEO of my former employer sitting directly across the aisle from me on my flight home. Makeupless, exhausted, and looking like I just ran into Kimbo Slice and told him he was a pussy who couldn’t throw a punch to save his life, I am in no state to be anywhere near the person whose very presence outside my old cubicle used to send me into asthmatic panic attacks.

Despite my insane fear of heights, I spend most of that flight home staring out the window — not only biding my time envisioning my escape route, but breaking my neck to hide both my identity and my toilet seat injury. By the time we land, every body part above my shoulders throbs with pain, but my story has a happy ending. Brian was right; I did get to keep both my eyes and neither of them have had any painful contact with a toilet seat or my intimidating former employer since.