Results May Vary

Update on my Exacto Knife wound: Still there. Not really getting any smaller. Possibly a hallucination, but I think it's tinged with some light yellow.

Furthermore: I worked on and more or less finished another stencil this weekend. This time it's a second person view

of the outline of a cowboy aiming a shotty. I had a semi-hard time trying to some up with an easy way to make the barrel come out without making the stencil 3 layers. I decided on simply cutting out two circles and taping them on the wall inside of the barrels outline. I would have just stuck a cutout of the white part of the barrel and sprayed over it, but it wouldn't stick to the wall properly without a lot of effort that wasn't really warranted. I didn't get to place it anywhere this weekend because I'm a dork and never think of these kind of things, and on top of that, it started raining, which isn't conducive to stenciling in any form.

I'm thinking of cooking up a Mother's Day stencil today and tomorrow and presenting a finished product to my mom sometime later tomorrow, after she has given up hope of getting something from me. Maybe I'll make one in the image of one of those tatoos of a heart with the parchment that reads 'mom' on it. Classic cliche remixed in a new form. Or something.

I was taking care of it at a friend's house on his dining room table. The scene was pretty comical actually. The way I cut bigger stencils is by putting it on a table or other large, flat, elevated surface with something beneath it to protect the surface from scratches. Then I bend over and begin meticulously carving out the stencil. It looks somewhat like

those caricatures of detectives looking for clues while bent low over the pavement with a magnifying glass.

So here I am cutting away, spinning around the table as I cut big curvy lines, while my companions sit on the couch not 7 feet away from me watching Rocky Balboa. I hear a horn outside and I know that's my dad who came to unlock my car with the spare keys since I'm a dunce and locked mine inside. So, in my neglect of safety and personal well being, I pocket the Exacto Knife and go out to thank him. I'm halfway across the lawn when I feel a sharp jab in my left thigh. It fucking hurts. That Exacto Knife went straight into my damn leg. I hobble and skip on my one unmutilated leg, trying to look natural, and thank my dad for unlocking the car. As he drives off I immediately shove my hand into my pocket to remove that knife from my leg. Unlucky me, it got wedged in my pocket in such a way that the butt of the knife was at the bottom of the pocket, in that little corner that you pull lint out of when you're bored, and the blade went through the upper part of the pocket and into my thigh at a 60 or 70 degree angle. Not only did this make removal a pain in my ass, but it also added a lot of unnecessary pressure that just made the blade dig in more. After about 15 seconds of fidgeting and looking like I was pleasuring myself on my best friends front lawn, it finally dislodged itself from my body.

I went inside and immediately pulled up the leg of my shorts to inspect the carnage. Left in my leg is a wound about as wide as my finger, and nearly half as deep as the blade is long. Still, I soldiered on and finished the stencil, trying to ignore the fact that my leg was bleeding slightly.

It's goofy to think about how I was raised since birth to think of Exacto Knifes as terribly dangerous and to never play with one because I could cut my hands really bad, but my first Exacto-related injury was to my thigh, and when I wasn't even using the knife to begin with.

Moral of the story: Running with sharp things is perfectly acceptable, as long as they aren't in your pockets.