Potato Gun

My brother is amazing. He loves  to talk to people. He is always finding those who are down and out, lonely, and tired, and he strikes up a conversation with them.

One day, my brother struck up one such conversation with a lonely guy of few words. The two sat in his living room with little in common and even less to say. A painful fifteen passed with not much more than, "so how was your week?" "good, good, yours?" "good, good."  Finally, after an agonizing eternity of awkwardness, my brother's new "friend" suggested they pull out his potato gun.

I don't know of many men that would turn down such an offer. So the two went out to the patch of backyard that existed behind his tall fence with their aerosoled and fused PVC pipe. They loaded the potato and were ready to launch. A slight problem presented itself, though. This guy lived in the middle of a crowded and busy city, and they were launching in a small patch of backyard.This particular potato gun could launch a potato the length of a football field which could be dangerous and illegal in a crowded and busy city. So they loaded the potato and shot at the ground. What neither realized was that the aerosol was being pulled downward and not catching the fuse, so the gun misfired several times.

Now, my brother is a chef, so the thought of wasting a perfectly good potato was appalling. Therefore, he proceeded to procure said potato. As soon as he flipped the pipe, the aerosol caught the fuse and the potato launched. My brother's face took the hit, and the force dropped his 6'4'' frame like a sack of potatoes (forgive the pun). The potato hit him square in the eye.

He feared the worst. As he gripped his face with his hand, he yelled at his buddy, "Dude, do you see my eye?" The awkward friend was now freaking out, yelling and screaming, jumping up and down. My brother asked again, "Look in my eye socket. Is my eye still in there?"

When they realized his eye was still in place, they got in the car to drive to the hospital. The awkward friend was still freaking out and stalled the car more times than could be counted in those few seconds. Anger started growing in my brother as he realized that he just shot himself in the face with a potato. He ordered the friend out of the driver's seat and one-handed, one-eyed, dramatically drove himself to the hospital.

My brother walked into the hospital holding his bloody face; the friend on his heels holding the fated gun. The doctors were fascinated by the injury and the gun and asked just as many questions about both. One doctor finally came in with X-rays of my brother's head. "Young man," he said. "If this potato had hit any other man, with any other facial structure, he would have been dead on impact or severely brain damaged. But your head is huge!" Finally, the large skull that had gotten my brother the nickname of Cro-Magnon man growing up was good for something. It was that skull that saved his life.