I have never had a reason to reflect on the various forms of vigilante justice of the early America’s (other than a brief, four hour Advanced Placement US History exam where the information may have come in handy) but after an incident this afternoon, I have decided that I should avoid being tarred and feathered.
I am fully aware that this is an odd thing to realize but I do believe that this information will come to serve me well. Imagine it, if I stumbled upon a wormhole/time machine/Star Trek episode/insert your chosen method of time travel here, and end up in the British Colonies chased by vigilantes (did I not mention that you should have suspended reality about 30 seconds ago?) I now know that tarring and feathering is really not in the cards for me.
To truly understand my study into the method, you have to understand my discriminating taste for the place of which I lay my head every single night – my pillow.
Now, I am of the belief that if my head is going to rest on an object for approximately 2,549.75 hours a year, it better be somewhere comfy. Pillows are a very serious matter for me. I have been known to visit high-end retail stores, box stores, discount outlets and even my parent’s guest room in the search for the perfect pillow. I punch them, I throw them in the air and I lay on the floor to test the optimal squishability of each option. Purchasing a pillow takes days, sometimes weeks and once I find that perfect pillow, I don’t go anywhere without it.
Unfortunately this practice is predisposed to a high volume of orphaned perfect pillows. Airports, hotel rooms, friend’s apartments - no matter how hard I try, my pillows seem to lose me.
I found myself in this all-to-familiar situation recently having absented my pillow at an airport hotel in San Francisco. I went through my well-honed, established pillow testing process to no avail and after a week of no pillow, I broke down and purchased a pillow that I could only qualify as merely satisfactory.
After three days of sleeping on my merely satisfactory pillow I knew something had to be done. This pillow was just not cutting it. Drastic measures were necessary to rectify the situation. It was time to perform surgery.
With my needle and thread at the ready I slowly sliced into the side of my merely satisfactory pillow. One snip. Two snips. I was almost there. Just a couple of inches more and I could remove the delinquent feathers to make my merely satisfactory pillow the perfect pillow.
But my plan was flawed and feathers began to make a break for it, not nicely – one at a time, but at a rate that no human being would have the ability to catch. Feathers everywhere.
Now my simply satisfactory pillow was not a pillow at all, but a sad shell of the potential that it once was. I began to slowly, one handful at a time, replace the offending feathers only to cause an even larger dispersal of plumage.
I am no way OCD, but itty bitty little feathers poking out of carpet in centimeter intervals will drive the most level-headed person insane and caused me to spend the remainder of my afternoon removing the irritant feathers. It was during this seemingly never-ending hunt that I had a moment of clarity and realized - I cannot be tarred and feathered, it would simply drive me nuts.
On a positive note, I now have the perfect pillow.
