An Axe to Grind...

One night, back in the residence years, a few of us were sitting around in my room having a few beers. Suddenly my door flew open and a guy we had never seen before walked into the room. His head swiveled from side to side, and his eyes seemed glazed. He seemed lost but then he nodded firmly and said, "This is my room." Well, I hated to disagree, especially since the guy looked like a maniac, but I piped up and said, "Well, actually, this is my room." That didn’t really seem to register with him, but after a moment’s silence he corrected himself and said, "This was my room." Well, that made a whole lot more sense. He seemed to decide to stay awhile, since he proceeded to walk over and grab a beer out of my fridge, so we asked him exactly when the room had been his. "During the Persian Gulf," he replied. I was kind of taken aback by this frame of reference so I instinctively said, "What?" He looked at me as if I was the idiot and said slowly, as if to a six-year old, "You know, Operation Desert Storm?" Now, if any of you are finding it hard to keep American incursions straight these days, that was the one back in 1991 where they saved the little, oil drenched, dictatorship from the big, oil drenched, dictatorship. (That being a slightly more plausible reason for invasion than say, a country you’ve bombed every day for 12 years suddenly becoming an "imminent" threat.) In any case, I thought it would have been much simpler had he just said, "I lived here in 1991." Trying to grasp his wavelength I said, "Cool, I’ve lived here since Kosovo," but he didn’t seem to appreciate my efforts.

Everyone in our residence is given a nickname during their first week, some stick and some don’t, but sometimes you remember someone better by their nickname than their real name (for example I always have to think before remembering that PussNuts’ real name was Mike). So we asked our visitor what his nickname had been. "Woodcutter," he said with authority. We all shook our heads, not remembering the name. "I wasn’t here very long," he said as explanation. And then someone amongst us, it may even have been me, asked the fateful question: "Why?"

Well, Woodcutter, as might be guessed, was enrolled in the Forestry Faculty. And everyone in Forestry is issued a big forester’s axe to use during their lab work because if there is one thing we’ve got a lot of in New Brunswick, it’s trees. So Woodcutter was sitting in his lazy-boy one day, absently gazing the length of his room and out the open door. Completely bored, he was looking across the hallway to the room opposite his, where the old wooden door was closed. "Hmmm," he thought to himself, shrugged his shoulders, picked up his axe and tomahawked it across the room and out the door. With a thump the axe embedded itself in the opposite door.

Impressed with himself for such a throw, he got up, retrieved the axe and sat back down. He considered things for a moment, shrugged again and whipped the weapon out the door and across the hall again. Once again it slammed solidly into the door and stuck there. Apparently, the thought that someone could be walking down the hall at any moment did not really cross his mind as he retrieved the axe once more.

As our friend the Woodcutter primed himself to see if he could go three for three, the guy in the room across the hall was starting to wonder what the hell was going on. He got up from his desk and threw open the door, only to see a full sized forestry axe flying toward him. The axe flew over his shoulder, slammed into the radiator at the back of the room, ricocheted up and stuck into the ceiling. Before the axe handle had even stopped shuddering, the nearly decapitated neighbour, as you might imagine, started losing his shit.

His tale finished, Woodcutter slugged back the rest of his beer and looked to each of us in turn. The room was completely and utterly silent. It was the first time I had ever seen actual jaws dropped. Meeting no response, Woodcutter threw his hands out in complete confusion and said, "And can you believe it? They kicked me out of residence for it!"

And with that, he strode out of the room.

I got up and locked the door.