the most fucked up shit

This is sort of breaking with what I've been trying to do here in the blog, as this post is mainly a big anecdote, but I spent a while typing this up to post somewhere else so I figured I wouldn't waste the effort, and drop it here as well. I don't know how funny it'll be to read, but I think it's funny as hell. Fucked up shit, indeed.

So a few Thanksgivings ago I went to stay at my friend D.'s house for the holiday instead of visiting my own family. I knew him from the liberal college town we both lived in, and we were going to stay with his family in an extremely small (like 1,000 people), conservative town a few hours away.

As it's a small town, there's lots of space, and his parent's house is pretty big. It's two stories, has a big kitchen, huge yard, nice big deck for bbq'ing and the like. We get there two days before Thanksgiving around dinner time and his father has bbq'ed up some steak for dinner to go along with all kinds of beautiful fixings. As I'm a relatively poor college student, it's not often I eat this good, so of course I'm pleased. I also don't eat that much meat that often. It's rare that I make a whole meal of just steak or whatever, and I typically stick to chicken and fish, if anything. So here I am confronted with huge slabs of steak and obviously I'm going to be eating some.

D.'s father, though, likes his steak bloody, and I mean like 60% red on the inside. Not a little bit of pink surrounded by light brown, not just a couple little patches of red, I'm talking really really bloody, lying in a pool of blood on the plate bloody. So I want to eat the steak, but then again, not so much, because I'm not so sure exactly how it's going to affect the piping. D.'s dad, though, is a funny guy who really likes teasing and antagonizing people, especially squeamish liberal people like me.

"D., you didn't bring one of those long-hair types home, did you? You're not one of those ones who can't take a little meat, are you? Eat up! I know this is the best meal you've had in a while!"

I want to make a good impression on my hosts, and I don't want to refuse their great generosity or offend or anything, and it's really not very often that I get to eat steak, bloody or not, so I eat up. And it's good, oh so good. There's steak and fixings and wine and everything, it's grand. I absolutely fill myself up to the point where I really can't eat anything more, I mean, I'm stuffed.

When dinner's over we settle in the newly re-carpeted living room and start playing some games, me just awaiting the onset of the inevitable. It doesn't take too long to come around; I need to take a shit, a big one, an epic one, a memorable one. I'm actually a little concerned with this one, because here I am, a guest in these very generous people's homes, but I know that whatever bathroom faces my wraith that evening will have to be quarantined for quite some time. Luckily for me, this house has two, one downstairs and one upstairs. In what would seem like a clever bit of courteous pre-planning, I decide to head to the one upstairs, as the downstairs one is a little close the kitchen and an office and all that, and I figure why risk cross-contamination from the downstairs bathroom when I can safely hide the fumes upstairs where no one is hanging out. I mean, this is going to be a big one, a little precaution is in order.

So I head upstairs and thoroughly enjoy the next 5-10 minutes of my life. I mean, I earned that one.

I enjoy it, that is, until I try to flush the toilet. Of course it's clogged. I begin looking around for a plunger, looking everywhere in this foreign bathroom, next to the toilet, the wall-cabinet, the mirror-cabinet, the hallway, and I find nothing. Eventually I realize that I have to face the music and head downstairs to ask my friend D. for a plunger.

I hang my head and ask him for one, trying to keep it a little hush from the folks because, like I said, I don't want to make a bad impression. He supplies me and I head back upstairs. The job itself is no small task. I begin plunging with little success. I mean, I've had to plunge a fair number of toilets, and this is really not going places. I'm doing everything I can and there's just this really backed up pool of poop-water floating around the john. At some point, after lots of hard work, I think there might have been a minor breakthrough, so I decide to flush again to see if there's some minor water movement.

Obviously, there's none. The shit-water starts rising up and pouring all over the bathroom floor. I'm in a pretty bad state at this point, as I've only been at these generous people's house abour 4-5 hours and here I've gone and flooded their bathroom with the water from one of the most epic shits I've ever taken in my life. I start panicking and head down to get D. again, completely forgetting to turn off the water valve. I have to give him some line like, "Uhhh ... there's a situation upstairs and I would appreciate your help." This is all, like 15-20 minutes after I've excused myself from company to use the bathroom.

D. gets upstairs and the whole bathroom floor is covered in nasty shit-water. He turns off the water valve, we use a generous number of towels to clean off the floor, and then we both get to the serious business of attempting to plunge the blockage. We start taking shifts, going back and forth, critiquing each other's plunging techniques and offering advice, switching out as we get too tired from all the fruitless labor. Finally, after 4-5 minutes of solid plunging, I mean rigorous, serious, desperate plunging and no progress at all, D. takes the plunger in hand for his shift and says, "Okay, if I don't get it here we're going to have to go downstairs and tell my parents we're going to need some real help."

I am, of course, mortified, but I realize that he's right as well. We can't just plunge for the whole of the Thanksgiving holiday, and I might have actually created a problem that requires a professional's help. Thankfully, for whatever reason, maybe because some Christian who I didn't know prayed for me, or perhaps because Satan grew tired of his little trick, D. finally breaks through. The seal breaks and the shit-water that still left filling the toilet to its brim begins heading to the place it was meant for. I am beyond relieved, I can return to just hanging out with everyone else and stop worrying about this huge shit. We do the final little bit of cleaning up and head back downstairs.

I settle into the couch in the newly re-carpeted living room, eager to have my life return to normal. Unfortunately, I feel a small splash of water on one of my ears. I turn to look, there is a few spots of water on the couch beside me. I look up, and there is a large build-up of water in the ceiling slowly dripping down, the ceiling obviously being the one separating the living room from the bathroom I just flooded above. This is my shit and piss water dripping into their living room.

So we had to get a big pan to catch the water and a can-opener to poke holes into the swelling to get it all to run down. At this point, I just felt like I was on some sit-com or something, and I realized that pretty much nothing more embarrassing could realistically happen during that stay. I had made my first impression, and hopefully they'd understand.

The rest of the break went great. We got shit-faced and D., all of 5'7" and 135 lbs, arm-wrestled his soon-to-be pro NFL lineman of a neighbor. On Thanksgiving Day we ended up going out to a forest with some locals, lighting tires on fire and rolling them down a hill. Food and drink were great for the whole stay, and in the end I got a pretty funny story.

the secret to my power, pt. 2

Scruples. Trust me, you can't break any hearts without them.

And actually you don't need to keep this one secret, because people seriously need to know about this. Scruples -- learn 'em, love 'em.

a short list of people and/or things I am hipper than:

(1) Homophobes
(2) Sublime fans
(3) Peanut butter and jelly that comes together in one jar ... that shit is tragically unhip
(4) Lakes fans (especially when the Lakers are winning)
(5) Tom Cruise ... I don't care what his total box office is at or who his baby-mama is, I'm still hipper ... scientology = not a good look
(6) This guy:


(7) Nuclear bombs ... tools of mass destruction = not hip
(8) Malvolio from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night ... and not just because he's a Shakespeare character, but also because he's a dick
(9) Bio-regionalism ... hip in certain circles I guess, but I'm hipper than those circles anyway.
(10) Televised poker ... and yeah, okay, I've watched my fair share, but I maintain I'm still hipper

And keep in mind that this is by no means a comprehensive list, just a quick round-up of some of the noteable items that have been on my mind lately. I'd go on, but even writing about them in this fashion has started putting a palpable damper on my hip level, so I decided to stop while I was still ahead. Trust there's plenty more (Prof. B. I'm looking directly at you).

it will all work out, I'm sure

From the pot-smoking Brazilian DJ to this. While I might have grown tired of P. and his dirty bedroom talk (although the story about his father taking him to a prostitute at age 13 was a good one), I'm not certain if I'm currently doing any better with the unemployed CDF man leaving a nearly five year relationship.

He's a good kid and all, don't get me wrong, even more interesting musical taste than P. (because, really, mid-90s hip hop can only go on so long before you get tired of it), but he's now got another CDF guy crashing on our couch. Fine by me, lessens the rent, and I get to say in one concrete fashion that I am indeed tougher than a firefighter, because whereas I slept on the iron futon for months with minimal complaint this guy pulled out an inflatable roll-out to put on it after one night. Wuss.

But that's not the point of this post. The point is this: last night the two CDF men came home at the same time and compared their daily workouts, talking about their backs and their quads and their delts and the number of reps and the weight amounts involved and other things which mean little to me. So instead of discussions about sex, porn, and prostitution, I get chatter about heavy lifting and various muscle groups.

It's a brave new world I'm living in.

white people, dancing

There's a game I learned from a friend at a club once, it's called the Dance Like That Person Game. What you do is choose somebody else dancing in the club or the party and then you try and dance like them. It's great fun, and it allows you to covertly mock people from across the room, the real reason anyone ever goes to parties.

So last night I went to a party where I didn't know anyone minus my friend who invited me. It's the best strategy for leaving the house at this point, going places with as little familiar people as possible, and these people were definitely unfamiliar.

Well, their taste in music did strike a chord. Their CD player was playing a mix of Beck, Modest Mouse (at a party, I'm serious), and G. Love and the Special Sauce. Now, I really enjoy G. Love, but even I have to admit that there's a certain undeniable frattiness about his music. I had always wondered what other types of people listen to his music besides me; now I finally had my answer. I can't say I was too far off in my estimation. These were the type of people who (a) get kegs of Mirror Pond for a relatively small party and then (b) do keg stands making them all (c) very drunk. This was the first time in a long time that I had seen an entire party approach high school grad night levels of intoxication. People who were already noticeably trashed were doing keg stands, barely able to stand upright once they were finished, with "I really gotta hold it together so I don't puke" written all over their face. It was all very novel for me.

I should mention that there was some hip hop on the stereo as well, which under other circumstances might make me glad, as it's generally my favorite music to dance to. It wasn't a groovy, dance-y mish mash of hip hop tracks, though, it was only Atmosphere, the whitest of all white people rap. I counted, the song entirely about how much Slug likes Minnesota was played a full two times, exactly two times too many. Still, the people at the party would dance to Atmosphere, because, hey, it does have an easy to follow beat. As much as I wanted to play along and dance a little, I really had no choice but to sit down during "Shoes", the song whose chorus goes, "You've got your shoes / I've got my shoes / We've got issues." I'm sorry, but while there may be a few noteable exceptions, it's still a pretty safe rule that songs about past relationships are not the best dance material.

Thankfully a live band showed up eventually, some bluegrass ensemble complete with a washboard percussionist and a guy with an upright bass. They played upbeat bluegrass and the dancing started to pick up, except I must admit, I have no clue whatsoever how to dance to bluegrass. Something tells me colla poppin' is not the move of choice in this context. So I resorted to the DLTP Game, studying these keg-standers, these Atmosphere dancers, these McKinleyvillains (my friends confirmed it, there were definitely natives present), trying to mimic their bluegrass moves and enthusiasm, and I realized that I was terrible at copying these people. The hostess had these feet moves which, for me, were impossible to recreate, simple maneuvers like arm-in-arm hoe-down stuff was more of a challenge than it seemed it should be, and I kept waiting for the breakdown and build-up to try some of my faux poppin' and lockin', but it never came.

So last night I bombed the DLTP Game. I just couldn't keep up with the bluegrass and the Minnesote love songs. Although everyone was very friendly, I had a good time, and I liked all the people at the party, there are few times I've felt more out of place.