Shameless Plug for My Favorite Book #5 - Clumsiness
Of all the thousands of books I have read, Chuck Amuck is my favorite. It is by Chuck Jones, one of the geniuses behind the Golden Age of Warner Brothers cartoons (that would be Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, and Elmer Fudd, not Minnie Mickey and a Duck with a speech impediment).
My favorite part of my favorite book is a description of where Wile E. Coyote (one of the author’s creations) came from. I think these are the two best-written and most entertaining paragraphs I have ever read.
“The Coyote is a history of my own frustration and war with all tools, multiplied only slightly. I can remember that my wife and daughter would start to weep bitterly and seek hiding places whenever they saw me head towards the tool drawer, if only to hang a picture. I have never reached into that devilish drawer without starting a chain of errors and disasters of various but inevitable proportions. Like any other man, I would rather succeed in what I can’t do than do what I have successfully done before. I have never reached into that drawer without encountering one of those spiny things you stick flowers in. We don’t keep that thing in that drawer, but it is always there. I consider it a good day when I get only one spine under a fingernail. I tried to get the spiny thing out of the drawer once, but found out that the last time, when it had stuck to four fingers at once and been in fact lifted a few inches out of its nest in the resulting shriek, it had fallen on a tube of glue, puncturing the tube and affixing itself to the drawer for all time.
I have tried lackadaisically from time to time to remove it and have succeeded in breaking: a rattail file, a kitchen knife, three fingernails, a pair of manicure scissors, an eggbeater (in one of my more fanciful efforts), and a window, when the tail of the rattail file separated from the rattail file.”
