Staying home is not always the safest. Just ask Cate
Cate Blanchett says she’s fine after an incident with a chainsaw.
The late Ken Kesey once told me: “It’s the stuff that we don’t do that makes us strong. What you don’t do, what you don’t eat, what television you don’t watch, what books you don’t read defines who you are more than what you do.”
The problem during lockdown is we are running out of things not to do because we can’t do what we normally do. Until this stupid pandemic, I was perfectly happy to not grow scallions and not try to become conversational in Spanish. ¿Cómo estás? I had no intention of twitching in the fetal position while watching HGTV at 2 a.m. I never wanted to care deeply about grout. Do you think I want to stockpile weekend flyers in case quarantine never ends and I run out of reading material because the electrical grid has failed and there is no more internet?
And then what? I’m skimming an old patio sale at Canadian Tire as zombies crawl through my window?
Forget about what makes us strong. We are just trying to keep our brains and souls from morphing into a cigar box full of neon markers and Day-Glo stickers of winking animals, which is what Kesey had when we hung out at the CNE many moons ago in the shadow of a psychedelic tour bus tricked out with tambourines and bubble machines.
“It’s not over until the fat lady gets stoned,” he said.
I don’t know about that. But during this pandemic, the fat lady is definitely egging us on to do things we wouldn’t normally do because we are bored out of our skulls. The danger? Trapped in our homes and stripped of all human contact, we now run the risk of a secondary outbreak: a spike in household injuries.
I do not base this observation on hard data or even soft science. I base it on the celebrity blotter, an early warning system for the rest of us. Last month, I wrote about how Queen’s Brian May badly injured his buttocks while gardening. How exactly? No idea.
But since then, he also suffered a heart attack.
A couple of weeks later, a story in the Daily Mail — “Nicole Kidman causes concern among fans with mystery injury as she’s pictured publicly for the first time in weeks” — included a photo of the actress blowing a kiss with a bootsized walking cast on her right foot. Why? No idea.
Then on Friday, a headline in People sounded like a Mad Libs: “Cate Blanchett Says She’s ‘Fine’ After Suffering ‘Little Nick to the Head’ in Chainsaw Accident.” I’m sorry, what now? News of this latest celebrity lockdown mishap came from
“A Podcast of One’s Own,” hosted by former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard. As Blanchett told her: “I had a bit of a chainsaw accident yesterday, which sounds very, very exciting, but it wasn’t. Apart from the little nick to my head, I’m fine.”
Now, it’s not for me, a lowly entertainment hack, to tell a former world leader how to do journalism. But if a famous actress casually blurts out she was in the red-zone of possible decapitation with a power tool, you might want to consider a followup query along the lines of, “Ah, Cate, why were you operating a chainsaw?”
If Kylie Jenner told me she slipped a disc after her pneumatic torque wrench seized up, I’d probably have some questions. Was Blanchett clearcutting elms to make room for a chopper pad should Benedict Cumberbatch need to be airlifted to the nearest ER after a ghastly jackhammer mishap? Was she trying to turn an unwanted Edwardian desk into three end tables? No idea. As CNN reported on Friday: “The actress, who reportedly lives in East Sussex, England, did not go into detail about how the unusual accident transpired.”
Maybe it doesn’t even matter. If a chainsaw is even in the same area code as Cate Blanchett’s noggin, it’s only a matter of time until the rest of us end up with cuts, burns or broken bones now that we are stuck at home and left to our own devices. The other night, I was trying to figure out why a ceiling fan was making an odd clicking sound. So I got up on a chair on my tippy toes and tried to inspect the motor casing. One of the blades I was holding suddenly lurched forward and I nearly tumbled over the hall rail, headfirst down a flight of stairs.
There would be no column today! There’d just be my obit, assuming there was space with protest coverage! Remember when people used to say, “Be careful out there”? Good times. All I’m saying now is be careful in there. I haven’t even mentioned a bunch of other celebrity lockdown injuries or the fact poor Dax Shepard was forced to perform surgery on himself. Think about it. You’re cooking every day. Your circadian rhythms are a mess. You’re not sleeping. You’re in a fog. You’re on edge. You’re eating pepperoni pizza for breakfast. You haven’t showered in a week. You’re working in jogging pants. You’re tinkering with things you have no business tinkering with.
This virus has turned you into a disgusting slob and a DIY freak. And that’s how accidents happen.
Cate Blanchett could be dead right now. Not from COVID-19 — from a runaway Husqvarna!
If Ken Kesey, author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and beloved raconteur from the acid-party counterculture were to be around for this pandemic, he’d say, “Far out, man.”
And then: “You probably shouldn’t do that.”