I know what you’re thinking:  “pot” + “God” = “some sort of story about smoking from some sort of multicolored bong and eventually ending up naked on a stage at a Shriner’s convention with a tasseled felt hat on his head and dollar bills dangling from his rectum.”

I assure you, this little story isn’t about THAT sort of pot.  (In fact, it’s officially been eight years since I tussled with that kind of pot, and according to sources, my brain is STILL somewhat affected almost a decade later.)  No, this is a story about the cooking pots -my nemesiseses (nemesi??)- that lurk in the kitchen in the cupboards and want nothing more than to see me lying in a pool of my own blood on the little patch of linoleum that claims to be my kitchen floor.

See, I inherited a set of pots from my dead grandmother – not the cool dead grandmother that baked cookies and cinnamon buns and let me sleep hangovers away on her couch – no, the OTHER grandmother who was a werewolf and liked nothing better than to feast on our cheeks as kids, and with the rest of her free time, she spent it on garage sales and euchre tournaments and living far enough away to never have to deal with us hillbilly riffraff offspring.

These pots and pans have collectively been a thorn in my side for a number of years now.  I received them from my mother as the inheritance when my grandmother went to the great cribbage game in the sky.  Where other grandchildren get houses and fistfuls of dollars and photograph collections, I get 1950’s pots and pans purchased for $5 from a garage sale in Tampa.  Which is okay, because at the time I received them, I had split up with my ex and was in the market for some tools to cook my sole source of nourishment – macaroni – with.

The problem is the screws.  I don’t want to be a whiner, because you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but the fucking screws in these pots are determined to kill me.  See, every few hours, the screws in the handles inexplicably work themselves loose to the point where the handle is ready to come off under the weight of a pot full of boiling water and baby heads.  Okay, not baby heads, I’m just kidding around, I dehydrate those.  But y’know, only when I can least afford to drop a pot full of hot dangerous shit does the screw come loose on a pot in order to kill me by burning my feet off is what I’m getting at here.

Then when it doesn’t succeed in killing me, it implants thoughts of “Hey, tighten that screw with a sharp knife.”  Seriously, it has telepathy and will stop at nothing to ensure I come and visit old grandma in cloudy heaven by slipping when tightening a screw with a steak knife and slicing my wrist off.  (I should point out to grandma that if there’s such a thing as heaven and hell, I’ll likely be joining the ranks in the latter.  Sorry, that’s the way I roll, gramma.)

You may ask yourself, “Why doesn’t he just buy new pots and pans?”  The answer is, “What will I have to remember my grandmother by?  Certainly not my memories.”  Oh, and “Because I’m cheap.”  More because I’m cheap, really.

In fact, yeah, only because I’m cheap.  I’d rather spend my money on taxis to Shriner conventions (and sometimes from, depending on whether or not some old saggy guy is generous enough to give me a ride home after despoiling me) than buy new pots.