On Friday afternoon, I was taking a leisurely stroll through my neighborhood, en route to hang out with my pal Sam. Springtime weather finally had Chicago’s testicles in its seasonably warm grip, and so, with my cool sunglasses on and my billowy black hair tied in a fashionable “pony-tail”, I casually strode along the sidewalks of quiet city blocks, delighted to be outside on such a lovely day.
Three blocks south of my apartment, I noticed that up ahead there was a girl standing outside an apartment building, presumably having just pressed the buzzer. Such a thing in my neighborhood is so regular and unremarkable that I had already forgotten about it by the time I reached the other end of the block, where she was still standing. As I passed her, she spoke suddenly:
“Did you see who did that?”
“Did what?” I said, turning to face her. The answer was self-evident once I did so, because the entire upper half of her person, as well as part of the door she was standing in front of, were covered in the remnants of one or two or three eggs. Judging from the points of impact, it seemed likely that the eggs were hurled from far away rather than dropped from above.
“Hurled an egg at me. Did you see it?” she asked, obviously not having overheard my internal monologue.
“No, I didn’t. How long ago did it happen?”
“About twenty seconds ago.”
Holy smokes! I thought. If I hadn’t been lost in thought while meandering down this block, I would have been a witness to this girl being pelted by an egg! Actually, it then occurred to me, if I had been walking at a brisker clip, it may have been me who would be wearing the egg entrails.
“Jesus!” I said. “So you were just standing here, and suddenly you get hit with an egg?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “I have absolutely no idea where it came from, either.”
Neither did I. A passing car? An apartment building across the way? An invisible pedestrian? Could *I* have done it? Had I been brainwashed by the government into becoming some sort of subliminally-influenced assassin, with this egg-hucking incident being one of the final trials of their hypnosis technique before they finally send me in to take out Tony Blair?
“This fucking sucks,” she summed up.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not your fault,” she replied.
With that, a buzz came from the door of the building, and she bid me farewell as she pushed her way inside. I had no idea who she was there to see, but I immediately imagined a scenario wherein she arrives at the apartment covered in egg, and a concerned boyfriend asks her what on earth happened; then, she takes him aside and yells that if he had his pants on already when she got there, none of this ever would have happened.
