Land of the Lost Ottoman

I’m firmly convinced that we could whip this terrorism and drug war thing within a month if we had 2-year-olds doing searches at airports and border crossings.

It’s a scientific fact that 2-year-olds will naturally gravitate to the worst possible thing they can get into in any given situation. You can put this theory to the test at home by putting your 2-year-old in a room with hundreds of toys, yummy snacks made easily available, and a thermonuclear device secreted beneath the floorboards. Within 30 seconds you’ll be glowing and your neighbors will be having three-eyed mutant children for the next seven generations.

Slightly more realistic case in point, earlier this week I was getting my boy ready for day care when I needed to leave the room to prepare his juice and gather a few snacks for his bag. The boy was watching the Land of the Lost marathon on the Sci Fi Channel, and I felt that his attention was sufficiently captured by Marshall, Will and Holly’s ill-fated routine expedition for me to sally forth into the kitchen.

When I returned about one minute later, the boy had somehow gotten hold of his mother’s liquid make up and dumped it on her living room ottoman and himself.

I calmly reacted by panicking, fearing for what is left of my manhood once this catastrophe was discovered. To save my skin, I knew I had to engage in a CIA-style coverup.

Because I’m borderline retarded until about noon, and it was 7:30 a.m. when this happened, I mistook the makeup for nail polish and Googled the phrase “How to remove nail polish from an Ottoman, please Lord help me, I’ll never watch Cathouse on HBO again if you do” into the computer. The online advice suggested using nail polish remover to take care of the problem, which I obtained after washing the boy and dropping him off at day care.

I promptly began scrubbing away at the problem, only to have it get worse as the makeup smeared. I then tried using a steam mop on the ottoman, which succeeded only in scalding myself a little when I held my hand under the nozzle to see if the water was really hot. It was.

Still panicking, I called an upholstery place and took in the ottoman. Once I got there, I was told that they could help, but I would have to pick up the fabric from a nearby store. The guy working there cut a piece off for me to take over so I could compare fabrics.

When I got to the fabric store, I frantically searched for matching fabric to no avail.

At this point, I knew my attempts to cover up the mess were not going to succeed, and I needed to do the right thing, so I immediately started laying plans to move, change my name to Geronimo Jackson and start a new life on an island somewhere.

Once reality set in, and I realized this plan is unfeasible, I thought about mounting an insanity defense by informing the boy’s mom about the catastrophe while wearing an adult diaper and eating a tub of Crisco. It’s hard, and a little scary, to be mad at someone doing that in your living room.

Finally I decided to be brave. I sent a text message about the incident with the offer of monetary compensation if the incident is never discussed again.

The text message is a wonderful way of relaying bad news to someone else, because it allows you to do so from out of range of his or her fists or voice. I firmly believe that doctors will eventually use the text to give patients bad news like, “U have the AIDES” (autospell always messes everything up).

Oddly enough, she was cool about the ottoman disaster.

So, could honesty really be the best policy? Is it really best just to man up and be prepared to face the music when something goes on rather than hatch harebrained coverup schemes?

Well, maybe this time.

To complain about the nonsensical headline for this column, which was written solely to capitalize off of interest in the new Will Ferrell flick, sort of like how Mario Puzo wrote Michael Corleone into The Sicilian just to piggyback on The Godfather’s success, please contact Jim Cook at .