Every Monday, I am blessed with the illustrious and most noble of obligations… taking out the trash. Now, I don't know exactly how long the driveway is but if I had to guess, I'd say it's probably a little longer than a blue whale, about 125ft or so. Yes, I absolutely use blue whales as a unit of measurement. Don't judge me. I can't help it, I'm American. We don't do metric so we're forced to use all manner of weird bullshit for scale. I promise you, blue whales are not the weirdest thing I've used to measure distance. (That would probably have to be buttcheeks….. don't ask.)

The trashcan and recycle bin are almost as tall as I am and usually quite heavy, the former weighing probably about as much as six toddlers and the latter weighing about as much as three toddlers, or thereabouts. (Yeah, I know, Americans really should have gotten on the metric bandwagon by now.) I don't really "drag" the bins so much as I escort them like an angry teacher marching naughty students off to the principal's office by their collars- that is to say, I get one in each hand with myself directly between them, elbows bent. Usually, this is an uneventful affair. Usually.

As soon as I set foot onto the driveway, I knew it was gonna be a fun time because instead of pavement, which is what I thought I was stepping onto, my foot came down upon a perfectly invisible, uniform glaze of black ice. Great. Now, I may be a dumpy little shortshit, nolo contendere, but I am also somehow decently athletic in my own way and I can usually remain upright on ice, even if it does require some slick dance moves. So I moonwalk-jazz-tap-ballet-clog-squaredanced my way across the ice until I made it to the bins where I would have expected a standing ovation if anyone had been watching. No one was, thankfully… that I know of. I grabbed the handles and gave a good yank.

You ever see in the cartoons where the character's feet are going yet they aren't really moving? Yeah, that shit can apparently happen in real life. I pushed, I pulled, I invented some magnificent new cursewords, and after a solid minute, I managed to dislodge the bins from the ice they were glued in place by. The first 25ft were pretty uneventful if a little more taxing than usual. It was less like marching naughty students off to the principal and more like skiing a pair of refrigerators across an ice rink but I managed to get a decent rhythm going and after that, it was smooth sailing. A little too smooth.

Uh oh.

See, the driveway is not flat. It has a flat area where I started out but after that, it "gradually declines" and let me tell you, it is amazing how not-so-gradual it feels when you abruptly find yourself Tokyo Drifting down a 125ft invisible ice rink in near-pitch darkness. I went full-on reverse Sonic the Hedgehog trying to stop the shitshow from going south but there was no stopping.

Completely without any permission from me, my mouth began to make this sound I can only describe as "operatic yodeling" the likes of which would impress even Andrea Bocelli, if for no other reason than that I could likely have shattered glass. It felt almost malevolent somehow, schadenfreudean, as if the bins were getting some kind of perverse enjoyment out of it. Like, "haha, ya bitch! How do YOU like it! In Soviet Russia, trashcan take out YOU!"

The driveway ends in a little rampy-swoop that I was sure would launch me clear across the street into the neighbor's lawn gnome colony. Amazingly, that did not happen. Bobbie Jean: Shitshow On Ice came to a full and complete stop with a perfectly anticlimactic thud. I stood there for a moment wondering how, given all the many ways that could have gone spectacularly wrong, I somehow managed to land the Shitshow with all the uneventfulness of a docking passenger jet. Hm. Oh-fucking-kay, I guess.

So I went to park my bins on the curb when I heard this EAR-PIERCING SHRIEK that startled me so badly, I nearly lost my footing. I suppose it would have been some form of comedic irony to have survived being escorted down a 125ft-long invisible ice rink in the dark by a pair of trash bins only to eat shit because a bird startled me. Except it was not a bird. In was, in fact, my neighbor, laughing his ass off. I can't entirely say I blame him given the repertoire of Animal Planet noises I was making on the way down.

"Are you okay!?" he shouted.

The affair having been witnessed, I was too mortified to speak actual words so I gave him a simple thumbs up and beat a careful retreat back up the driveway. If nothing else, I can say I invented a new sport; I call it Involuntary Skiing.