| I used to live in an apartment
on Hatcher Lane in Columbia, Tennessee. I stayed there
for two years, attending a small college there. One evening, I was cramming for a big chemistry test with my best friend. We were sitting in the living room, poring over our lab notes. I heard the dishwasher complete its cycle, so I went in the kitchen and began putting away the dishes. I had purchased a set of four teal-colored glasses that were short and bottom-heavy to make mixed drinks in. I thought they were very pretty and the low weight distribution seemed like it might be useful whilst getting drunk. These glasses had a special place reserved for them in the back left corner of the bottom-most shelf of our cabinets. That way, they weren't too visible so visitors would be less likely to drink out of them. (I told you I quite liked them!) I put all of the dishes away, including the snappy green ones and returned to the living room. I had just enough time to pick up my lab journal and light a cigarette before we heard the sound of glass breaking from the kitchen. We were the only two people in the apartment and the kitchen, while out of sight, was just around the corner from the living room. I got up uneasily, remembering that there was nothing sitting out on the counters or otherwise eligible for breaking. I saw that one of my green glasses was smashed to bits, all over the kitchen floor. It looked as if someone had opened the cabinet, picked up the glass from the back corner, closed the cabinet, stepped back against the wall opposite the refrigerator (visible from the living room) and hurled the glass very hard against the refrigerator. Glass was all over the kitchen floor, sprayed out from the apparent point of impact on the fridge, partly onto the carpet outside the kitchen! Tiny fragments of glass and glass "dust" were stuck to the glossy, textured surface of the fridge, where it appeared the glass had hit. I opened the cabinet from which I could only presume the glass came from. The remaining three glasses were sitting as I had left them, with a neat space where the fourth had been. Perhaps a week later, I was sitting in the living room with my roommate. We were relaxing after a long day, having dinner, and chatting. Suddenly, we heard the distinct sound of glass breaking. We stared at each other for a moment, blinking, both knowing that no one else was in our apartment. The sound of liquid flowing or being poured followed immediately. We both jumped up. The sounds were indistinct in terms of direction, so we started looking frantically around the apartment for the source of the noises. The apartment was small, so we sort of ran in opposite directions. My roommate went into the kitchen, while I went to my bedroom. As it turned out, my Lava Lamp had exploded. It was sitting on top of a bookcase at the time. It hadn't fallen off; the metal base was still sitting there neatly. In fact, the bulb was still burning. The bottom part of the glass section was still sitting on the base, broken, with several large pointy shards of glass sticking straight up. The rest of the glass section was all over the room. Most of the shards were on my waterbed, covering it pretty thoroughly. The plastic top piece was across the room, on the floor, with little bits of glass hanging off of it. Small fragments of glass were strewn about the room with no apparent pattern. The oil and paraffin wax inside the glass section was all down the wall behind and beside the bookcase. Somehow, the glass went all over the room, while the liquid splattered and ran down the wall only. It was really bizzarre, and one hell of a mess to clean up. I've never heard of one of those lamps exploding, before or after this happened to me. [An interesting sidenote: At the time, I was seeing a girl who continually asked to borrow my Lava Lamp. I never let her, thinking it an odd request: Do people borrow lamps?? Anyway, I did let her borrow a fabulous book about witchcraft and black magic I found at a curio shop years before. Right after the "explosion" of the lamp, she called, and we wound up breaking up. I don't hold much stock in witchcraft and its associated fields of study, but that always made me wonder.] The only other thing that happened in that apartment was that during the week or so between the previous two occurrences, our telephone went wild. It used the old fashioned bell and striker type ringer, and it managed to produce some pretty weird noises with it. It would ring sometimes and when we answered it, the line would be dead. Or it would half-ring, on and off, for a minute or so, and not stop, even if you picked up the handset. Or it would buzz or hum instead of ringing. I am pretty good with mechanics and electronics, so I took it apart and looked at it ... everything seemed just fine. We had decided to call the phone company about the time that the Lava Lamp blew up but after that, it quit misbehaving. |
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