12:26 a.m. - 2003-05-05
The First of Many Disgusting Remembrances.
My recertification instructor Jen is a blond, sparkling-eyed Colonel Kurtz of a woman in a What Would Jesus Do? bracelet--round as an orange on two incongruously toned and muscular legs. She has Shocking Tales (Spicy Detective Stories!)--far beyond the realm of garden-variety drownings, high-dive calamities and paralyzing shallow dives--indeed, 2 decades' worth of horrors involving lightning, nitroglycerine, chlorine gas explosions, public park suicides and driveby shootings. She is morbid without being cynical, and perverse without true cruelty. In answer to why one might need to perform mouth-to-nose rescue breathing (or, in answer to, oh, virtually any question) she is wont to brandish a mercifully B&W photocopy of a Rotten.com motorcycle-accident victim with an obliterated lower jaw, tongue swinging free. (We have now seen it three times).

"Where is his nose?" called an optomist from the back of the room, the first time.

"It's pretty well smashed too, actually," admitted Jen. "Nevermind. Just be glad this guy was conscious."

We then were glad, as directed.

But I realized at that moment that, sometimes--just as there are people who remain conscious due to sheer force of will--there are those who faint in order to clear out.

I didn't faint.

It just would have been nice.

...To the left of me, Jen's tiny dog meowed in its pram.

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