Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
There’s a nursery rhyme that haunts me now. We’ll get to that.
A winter storm hit Virginia a couple of weeks ago and left a sheet of ice on everything. The driveway, the porch, the path to the trash cans, the road, the concept of dignity. For two solid weeks, the entire county looked like a Zamboni had a nervous breakdown. People were going down everywhere. Knees. Butts. Wrists. Tailbones. My neighbor went outside to clean off her car and came back inside with a limp and a newfound respect for gravity. She didn’t even make it to the car. It was just a dream she had.
Not me, though. I was fine. I fell twice and walked away clean both times. No sprains. No bruises. Just the quiet satisfaction of a man whose body remembered something useful from childhood. I told everyone who would listen, “I grew up in the North. I know how to fall.”
I said this a lot. I said it to my wife. I said it to the neighbors. I said it to the guy at the hardware store who didn’t ask. Two falls, zero injuries, and I was treating it like a credential. Like I had a PhD in Controlled Descent. Like the ice was a test and I was the only one who’d studied.
The Third Fall (The One That Counts)
Then, I fell a third time.
Forehead. Direct hit.
Face-first into the frozen earth like a man auditioning to be a lawn dart. Blood everywhere. The kind of head wound that bleeds like you’ve insulted it personally. I now have what I can only describe as Gorbachev’s birthmark, except mine occasionally reopens like a franchise nobody asked for. It’s on my forehead, roughly the size and shape of a small, troubled country. I tell people it’s just my birthmark. They believe me until it starts bleeding at brunch.
The beautiful part, the chef’s kiss of cosmic irony, is that I was taking out the trash. Not skiing. Not BASE jumping. Not doing anything that would warrant a cool story. Taking out the trash.
After spending an entire week talking trash about how everyone else was falling wrong. If you’re looking for a funny essay about falling down, congratulations, you’ve found the man who built his identity around a skill he does not have. The universe doesn’t just have a sense of humor; it has timing.
At least I was sober.
This time.
The Gravel Incident: A 1980s Origin Story
Because here’s the thing about my relationship with the ground: it’s long, it’s complicated, and alcohol has been the third party in most of our encounters. What started as humorous falling stories I told at parties has become, over time, a medical pattern.
College. The 1980s. Mid-afternoon.
Already several beers into what I was generously calling “a Tuesday.” I was stumbling back to my dorm when the sidewalk, which had been perfectly level for the entire history of the university, suddenly wasn’t. I went down face-first into gravel. Not grass. Not a forgiving pile of autumn leaves. Gravel. The kind of surface that doesn’t just hurt you but itemizes the damage.
I picked myself up, bleeding from approximately eleven points on my face, and did what any rational adult would do: I locked myself in my dorm room and refused to acknowledge the outside world. My face looked like I’d tried to exfoliate with a cheese grater. I sat in the dark, swelling, contemplating my choices.
My RA keyed in about an hour later. Just opened the door like it was a wellness check, which, in fairness, it was.
He surveyed the damage. The gravel rash. The swelling. The blood I’d only half-heartedly dabbed at with a dirty t-shirt.
“What’s up?” he asked.
I pointed at the ceiling.
“Plastic plants.” I slurred.
I had a plastic fern hanging from my ceiling in a faux wicker pot suspended by real macramé. It was the eighties, and that was interior design. He looked at the fern. He looked at me. He decided this was above his pay grade. He left. I went to sleep. The gravel scabs lasted three weeks. The fern lasted until graduation.
The Bush, the Coffee Table, and Cole Porter’s Ghost
Fast-forward to the 2010s. I’m living in a historic New England compound, the kind of place that has a Wikipedia page, once owned by Cole Porter and visited by the Marx Brothers. I’m not making this up. Cole Porter threw parties there. Harpo Marx probably honked a horn in the exact garden where I would later lose both my glasses and my vertical orientation. History is layers, and I am one of the worse ones.
We lived in what had originally been the schoolhouse on the property. Charming. Stone floors. A concrete coffee table that my wife loved and that I was, on a molecular level, destined to meet with my face.
But first, the bush.
We’d been at a party. I’d been at the party enthusiastically. Walking back to our little schoolhouse in the dark, I veered. Not dramatically. I wasn’t careening. I just… listed. Like a ship taking on water. One moment I was on the path, and the next I was three feet deep in a hedge, horizontal, looking up at stars through branches.
People extracted me. Wonderful people. Patient people. People who said things like “Are you okay?” instead of what they were actually thinking, which was “How is this man alive?”
I assured everyone I was fine. Absolutely fine. I went inside, took three confident steps across the living room, and fell directly into the concrete coffee table. Forehead-first. Again. Because apparently my skull has a homing instinct for the hardest available surface within a twenty-foot radius.
Blood. Again. The head doing its thing. My wife doing her thing, which is the particular exhausted sigh of a woman who chose this.
A week later, our neighbors found a random pair of glasses in the bush.
“Whose could these possibly be?” they wondered.
Ahem.
They were in the bush. Where I had been. In the bush. The glasses had stayed behind like a piece of me that had the good sense to just stop and rest.
The Old Man Who Bumped His Head
So here I am. Decades of experience in falling. A forehead that looks like a topographical map of bad decisions. A batting average of roughly one spectacular face-plant per decade, which means I’m actually due. Most people’s hilarious fall stories involve one good wipeout. I have a trilogy.
And I cannot stop thinking about that nursery rhyme.
It’s a man’s life, you think, when you’re young and falling into gravel pits and hedgerows and getting away with a few scabs and a good story. It’s funny. It’s a bit. You’re the guy who falls into bushes at Cole Porter’s house, and that’s a personality.
But now?
There was an old man who bumped his head and couldn’t get up in the morning.
I’m the old man now. I’m standing on my frozen Virginia driveway with Gorbachev’s birthmark weeping gently down my face, and I’m the old man. The one from the rhyme. The falling isn’t charming anymore. It’s diagnostic. When a twenty-year-old falls into a bush, it’s a party story. When a man of a certain age falls taking out the garbage, his wife starts Googling “neurologist Charlottesville.” There’s a fine line between a funny ice storm story and a cautionary tale, and I crossed it somewhere around the third decade of cranial impacts.
Three decades. Gravel. Bushes. Coffee tables. Ice. My forehead has absorbed more punishment than a crash test dummy with a drinking problem. I’ve left blood and eyewear across multiple states. I’ve been extracted from shrubbery on property once owned by the man who wrote Anything Goes.
Which, honestly? As a title for my autobiography?
Not bad.
But I think I prefer: I Know How to Fall.
I do. I’ve been practicing my whole life.
Forehead first.
Key Takeaways
- A winter storm led to numerous falls in Virginia, highlighting the author’s surprising resilience until a disastrous third fall caused injury.
- The author reflects on their long history with falling, often involving alcohol, leading to comical stories blended with medical realities.
- Memorable incidents from the past include face-planting into gravel and colliding with furniture, illustrating a pattern of mishaps.
- As age progresses, the author feels the shift from funny stories to concerns about health, symbolized by their forehead injury.
- Ultimately, the article conveys the blend of humor and reflection on consequences of falling, capturing the essence of a life marked by tumbles.
Related Links
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His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos. He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
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