Tag: Featured Articles (Page 7 of 8)

Ahh, Early March: perhaps most widely remembered as a nation-wide period of mourning, year in and year out.

Feeling depressed around this time of the year, every year, without fail? Yeah. #MeToo.

Most people go throughout life never knowing the reason behind this annual mood swing. If you count yourself amongst that legion, then count your lucky stars, for today I shall enlighten you.

You see, early March is the official end to the 2-month jubilee commonly known as “Girl Scout cookie season.”

After ~60 days of binging on the finest sugary baked goods $4 can buy, should one really expect anything less than to come completely crashing down in a state of withdrawal? I think not.

Anyways, consider that your fun fact, “The-More-You-Know,” nugget of knowledge for the day. On with the real story.

This year I had the opportunity to see this whole experience from a slightly different perspective. Our eldest daughter, “The Elder,” joined the Girl Scouts this year, so we had the joy of helping her push them cookies onto any and every poor addict we could find.

I quickly started to notice a disturbing trend in our new lifestyle:

• Boxes stacked on end in the garage, full of highly coveted goods with a street value of over $3.99/box…
• Constantly asking friends, co-workers, and strangers alike, “Pssst! Hey buddy, I got some of the real good shit if you’re looking to score some…”
• Finding yourself making cash transactions that at least feel shady-as-hell, on multiple occasions…

It didn’t take me too long for the thought to cross my mind: “Oh, crap, am I a dealer?”

I told myself that as long as I let the Elder do at least 40% of the legwork, then a minor’s significant involvement and instigation in the project would absolve me of all immorality in the eyes of society. At least that’s how I got to sleep at night.

And despite being quite the youngster, she actually pulled her weight in our new business enterprise. Being too smart to go door-to-door like your average chump, she had the grand idea to have a “drive-thru cookie stand” out by the entrance of our neighborhood.

Without going into too many details, this was a ----- good idea, in part due to the strategic location she had selected that included high car and foot traffic. Additionally, the spot featured a long row of rarely-used parallel parking spots, forming the convenient drive-through lane where “clients” could easily pull out of traffic and make the deal without even getting out of their cars. Brilliant!

Now, the key to any successful young business–legitimate or otherwise–is advertising. Conveniently, our neighborhood has an email listserv (remember, those?) to which probably 2/3 of the local population subscribes. The Boss Lady decided to actually put this to good use for once, instead of its intended purpose of bickering over whether or not one of the residents was racist for complaining to the listserv about the volume of the Latino music lightly emanating from the construction site of our new neighborhood apartments. It sure did make for some good entertainment though…but I digress.

The day before our first Drive Thru Cookie Stand, the Boss Lady blasted the neighbors with an email advertising our goods. We ended up unloading 40-50 boxes from our inventory in under 2 hours–definitely better than trying to move that much product door-to-door. In fact, that was so successful that we decided to do it again 2 weeks later.

Only this time it was my turn to help her run the stand.¹Famous last words…

Well, actually, the real reason why I pushed the idea of doing it again was because we had inadvertently bought a $15 set of fancy-ass markers to make the signs for the stand, and I was pretty adamant about getting our money’s worth out of all that capital we had sunk into the business overhead. But, again, I digress.

Anyways, the Boss Lady had pretty strongly lobbied for us running the stand from 12-2 p.m. because she wanted, and I quote:

…to catch the after-church crowd–you know–those mini-vans full of kids going nuts after being cooped up in Sunday School and church for the last 2 hours against their free will.

The parents will be desperate for any way to get them to shut the ----- up. Then BOOM! Our cookie stand magically appears and saves the day!

A woman with some solid business acumen

Well, The Elder and I were running behind this tight schedule that the Boss Lady had kindly set for us, so come 11:50 that morning, we were shoveling pasta down our throats while haphazardly throwing our supplies in the SUV before speeding off to “our corner.”²As in, the corner where one would regularly sell drugs, turn tricks, etc.

We got set up in time, and the business started to trickle in. Now, previously, we had waaaaay too many Peanut Butter Patties (aka PBPs, aka Tagalongs) because it was the favorite of one of us two parents–not saying which one, though–and that affinity had instinctively been extrapolated to the general population. In other words, I ordered too many boxes of the wrong ----- cookie.

So I was pretty eager to push those on our customers.

About 30 minutes in, The Elder asked me if I had remembered to pack a snack for her. Of course, in the rush to get out the door, I had completely overlooked such a key parenting detail.

But, being the problem solver that you know and love, I realized that if I considered the 4 extra dollars in my wallet to be a “problem,” I could kill three birds with one stone and feed my hungry child , lighten my wallet, and remove a potentially unsold box of PBPs from the inventory, all in one fell swoop.

Careful to maintain all fiduciary integrity, I put my $4 in the money envelope, and we proceeded to split one of the three rows of cookies between the two of us. Problems, solved!

Another 45 minutes or so of solid business passes, and to my delight, the PBPs are actually selling pretty well. Around that time, the Elder asked if she could have some more cookies. I told her I supposed it wouldn’t hurt to take another quick hit from our paid-for box.

She started rummaging through the box of non-cookie supplies underneath our table where we had stashed our box. It kinda surprised me when she was underneath there for over a minute, given that there was almost nothing else in that box.

I ducked under the table and began to help her look for it. Panic slowly started to wash over me as I started to realize that, even when I searched through the cardboard box full of our spare PBP inventory, I couldn’t find one that was already opened.

Ah, poop. We had just sold a partially pillaged box of PBPs to a paying customer.

It may sound silly, but my lizard brain was totally awash with the chemicals of embarrassment…and maybe just a little bit of fear. For some of these people, this would be the only chance all year that they would get to enjoy their favorite Girl Scout treat. And here we where, effectively robbing them of 33.3% of their annual happiness.

Just imagine if you were a “Christmas crackhead.” You know, people who somehow have enough executive function to limit their enjoyment of crack-cocaine to once a year as a yuletide treat.³TOTALLY ----- KIDDING. These people don’t exist. Addiction is not a matter of being “strong-willed.” That is possible one of the stupidest and most dangerous ideas out there. Folks, that is simply not how brain biochemistry works. Educate yourself before you end up losing someone you know and love because of this ill-informed dumbassery. You wouldn’t be too happy if you opened up your Christ-blessed dimebag⁴I think that dimebags are the unit of marijuana distribution, not crack, but I have to at least pretend I don’t know too much about the drug trade. of crack, only to find it’s actually just a 6.66-cent-bag, would you? Didn’t think so. You would probably grab your gun and go hunt down who ever screwed you over.

Now, since these were primarily semi-anonymous cash transactions, we had no way of tracking down the aggrieved party and rectifying the situation with a pristine box of PBPs.

The best I could hope for was that whoever they were, wherever they were, they were getting and reading the neighborhood emails. So I furiously tapped out a neighborhood-wide apology from my phone, begging for any information into the identity of the recipient of our bone-headed ----- up so we could set things right. I pride myself in being a provider of award-winning customer service⁵So much so that it actually appears on my resume. and wasn’t about to let 5 cookies be the death of my hard-earned reputation.

Alas, days passed, and not a single brave soul responded to my email.

So that was just wonderful. Not only had we screwed over a customer, but now my extremely high level of competency was on display for more or less the whole neighborhood for no good reason. Doh! I wanted to die from embarassment.

Eventually I got over it, thanks in part to some pseudo-therapeutic conversations with the Boss Lady. Her opinion on the matter was that either the afflicted customer wasn’t too bothered by it, or most likely, there were multiple members in their household, and they all just assumed it was somebody else in the family that had busted into the package.

True, I could see that being the case…but instead of it being an assume-the-best-in-your-family-members scenario, my ever-optimistic imagination envisioned it being the proverbial “pebble in the shoe” in an otherwise happy marriage.

Five years down the road, I just know that I’m going to find myself subpoenaed as a key witness for some divorce proceedings. The poor couple never will have stood a chance after they independently realize that they couldn’t trust their partner. After all, what kind of person lies about eating a few Girl Scout cookies, and, when caught, isn’t adult enough to own up to their actions.

Instead, they got to blame it on an innocent 6-year-old Girl Scout, for g-o-d’s sake.

And then I’ll get caught in the middle of that because one of them will discover my email somehow persisting for years in their Spam folder.

Yes, they will have uncovered the email that would have absolved both parties of any wrong-doing…had the irreparable damage to their mutual trust not already been done.

It’s a sad tale really. Though I can’t be 100% certain until I actually get that subpoena, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say “True story.”

Anyways, as any experienced distributor of a controlled substance will tell you, the point of the story is never, ever, ever-ever-ever ever forget Rule #1 of the industry:

Thou shalt not get high on thy own supply.

The First Commandment of Dealing

It will only end with a soiled sales reputation and the blood of a whole family torn apart on your hands.

Content created on: 11 & 14 March 2020 (Wednesday/Saturday)

I’m not quite Over The Hill yet, but you know how I can tell it’s clearly coming up over the horizon? Wait–that’s a poor invocation of that metaphor. To be more accurate: you now how I can tell I’m pretty much firmly atop the Hill, mere months away from tumbling down the other side?

Two words: Leg. Acy. Or, if you’re a normal person, one word: Legacy.

I’m about at the age where I’ve really started to think about my legacy and how the world will have been changed because of me. I mean, just looking at some of my fairly recent posts, such as Epitaph…, My Time To Go, and Dear Doctor Future President, and it’s pretty clear that’s been on my mind lately.

Speaking of which…

I have big legs. Like, those-aren’t-legs-those-are-tree-trunks legs. And don’t even get me started on my those-are-not-cow-calves-those-are-whale-calves calves. Seriously, though. I need you to stay focused on my thighs.

I have had big thighs as long as I can remember, and the historical record will attest that this has been the case at least since my sophomore year of high school.

One of the plethora of problems that teens face at that age is their ever-changing bodies. One way this is manifested is that one does not always have clothes that fit as well as they should. And for me, this played out in the form of having too-big thighs and not-big-enough pants.

But we haven’t reached the end of this path of logic yet; we need to go one step further.

How this really played out for me was that my wondrous-thunderous thighs would incessantly rub together and wear a hole right where the two pant legs met. So almost every pair of pants that I owned would sooner or later fall victim to the friction, making an eventual wardrobe malfunction¹Mind you, this was circa 1996, almost a decade before Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake made that phrase infamous. statistically inevitable.

One day in Sophomore English, after the main lesson was through, the gang and I were just sitting around and chillaxing in the back of the classroom. Feeling particularly chillaxed that day, I casually had one leg up, with my foot resting on the seat of an adjacent desk.

At some point in time, one of my female classmates, whom we’ll call “Ms. May” for privacy purposes, got real quiet before eventually piping up, “I hope you’re wearing underwear, because you kind of have a hole in your pants and I can see your leg.”

*Record scratches*

As if I would reply with anything different, all I could really say was, in classic form, “Well, actually…”

Time out. I need to back up the story to earlier that morning.

A key detail that I had previously omitted was that, by some sick twist of fate, the weekly laundry cycle at home had gotten out of whack, resulting in a dearth of clean underwear in my drawer.

But who wants to wear dirty underwear, especially when you’re a greasy, smelly, sweaty teenage boy? I did what all y’all would have done in the same situation. I went commando.²AKA free-ballin’, in case you’re more familiar with that term.

The stars had mis-aligned, and as a result, I was sitting there caught with one leg up, the first-ever victim of a double wardrobe malfunction.

Time in.

So, sadly I found myself dashing Ms. May’s hopes, responding with a long pause that said that all that needed to be said.

To which someone else logically pointed out, “Then that’s not his leg you’re looking at…”

This being high school, of course everyone had a heyday with my predicament. One might even say they went a little nuts.

Later that day, I came back to my locker to find a note on it asking the question on everyone’s mind: “How’s it hanging, Breezy?” ³It was either that or “How’s it blowing, Breezy?” Same idea.

I wasn’t surprised to find out later that none other than Ms. May herself had been the primary instigator behind the sign, though at that point it could have been anybody since pretty much the entire school was privy to the story of my exposed privates by then.

Being the negative-attention whore that I am, I actually didn’t really mind all the ribbing, and secretly basked in the glory of the moment. A little bit of infamy is better than a lotta bit of obscurity, right?

On a brief side note, my best friend and owner of a blog-alias ironically appropriate for this story, Phillip K. Ballz, has claimed that there was a certain young lady in the crowd that had noticed my fleshy patch long before anyone had said anything, and that she chose to enjoy the view rather than ruin her moment of bliss. But, unless this happened on more than one occasion–and I can’t be 100% certain it didn’t–I’m not so sure about the veracity of his account, as he was one year younger and it doesn’t make sense that a freshman would be hanging out in sophomore English. But I digress…

It wasn’t until several months later, at the beginning of our Junior year, when the real payoff came. During back-to-school orientation, we were tasked with the chore of reviewing the boring ol’ student handbook. In the front we happened to find an insert highlighting the changes that had been made since the previous school year.

To my surprise–and to my delight–I found this little nugget, lightly paraphrased due to memory constraints:

“No jeans or shorts with holes in or near the crotch region shall be worn to school at any time…”

The “breezy” Amendment, Rolla High School Student Handbook (1997-98)

The point of the story is that’s not my leg you’re looking at.

That’s my “Legacy.” *wink*

Content created on: 19 February 2020 (Wednesday)

This is Part 2 of my Pee-No-Evil adventure. It will probably make much more sense to first read Part 1, Touched By An Angel, if you haven’t already.

That’s okay. I’ll just wait here…

When I last left you, I had just experienced for the very first time not only an ultrasound, but also the wondrous joys of a catheter as well.

As such, this seems like the appropriate time to reflect and philosophize on the nature of catheters in general, before moving along with this enrapturing narrative.

You see, it was in that exact moment of sweet relief when I realized that catheters were much like root canals.¹Although I wasn’t about to experience my first one until a month and half later, but that’s a story for another time. The common perception is that these are horrible things, when in fact the public view is completely wrong.

What is horrible is if you need a root canal or a catheter. And in turn, if you receive a root canal or a catheter in that moment of desperate need, you will realize that they are the best ----- inventions of the last 5 centuries.

So think twice before you go talking smack on either of these wonderful, wonderful pieces of medical technology. *Dismounts soapbox.*

Getting back to the story: the medical staff actually ended up having to ultrasound and cath me again about 30 minutes later after the initial “life-altering event.”

As it turned out, I was unbelievably full of piss.

Naturally, I wanted some answers as to what had happened to me. But as to what was causing my unusual medical condition, the doctor’s best guess was that I had an allergic reaction to the anesthesia. Most likely it had interfered with the nerves that control the bladder,²Maybe this reference holds some clues? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1502389/ he said.

So now every time a dentist or other medical professional asks me the age-old question “Do you have any allergies?” I get to give one of my classic responses that start out, “Well….it’s a funny story, doc…” Unsurprisingly, I have yet to figure out how to get it down to under 2 sentences…

However, my favorite part of the whole episode was when it came time to discharge me in the early afternoon, and the doctor had to discuss the options at hand with me and my mother.

“So, originally we were planning on discharging you around noon. But of course that was before your…complications.”

“Now, we don’t know if you’re in the clear, or if you still may be susceptible to complications later today. This is a pretty serious issue, so we recommend that you stay overnight. But, if you really want to, we will go ahead and let you go home now…”

His voice trailed off as he appeared to be searching for the right phrase.

“Well, if you go home now, we’ll need to send a catheter with you. And if anything happens, we will need your mother to cath you. Are you okay wi–“

Without skipping a beat, Mom pipes up: “Oh, he’ll be staying the night here…”

It’s good to know that we were on the same page at least, and I wouldn’t run the risk of hurting her feelings by saying that no way in hell was I, a grown-ass 24-year-old man, going to let my poor dear mother stick a catheter in…well, where catheters get stuck.

Ironically, I had thought that getting cathed by that cute nurse was awkward and embarrassing…and that’s when the Almighty Cosmic Force said, “Here, thou shalt hold my beer.”

Anyways, it turned out to be the right call. Even though I didn’t have any issues nearly as serious as I had had in the morning, my bladder’s self-functionality that evening was still enough of an issue that Mom and I would had to have had a serious debate whether she should cath me, or–and hear me out–I should just let my bladder explode and save myself the humiliation.

E-“pee”-logue

While this actually is a fan-favorite bedtime story of The Elder’s, and having told it to her at least 10-15 times, there are still several things that never really occurred to me until recently.

A few days ago, when peeing happened to come up in conversation with a colleague, I regaled them with the aforetold tale. Apparently, I was anticipating writing this blog post and so it was a completely natural connection in my mind.

When I mentioned that the ultrasound had revealed over a liter of pee in my bladder, they asked perhaps what I should have asked the doctor many years earlier: “How much does a bladder typically hold?”

I realized I had no idea, so we googled it together, and I about shit myself when I found that an adult human bladder typically only holds 400-600 ml. I had no idea how far past the limits of all that was reasonable my bladder had been stretched.

Shortly after they had left, my newest colleague–fresh from France–came by to get my help on some stuff.

I told him that he had just missed an enthralling pee-pee conversation, and of course had to regale him as well with this tale of epic bladder proportions.

He had a good laugh about it, and then proceeded to tell me about what I suspect might actually be a French urban legend.

Apparently, the French are renowned for their love of trash-talking each other, even more so back in the days shortly after the French Revolution. In that era, there were a rather large number of town and civic meetings, and they were notorious for running ungodly lengths of time–often 6-8 hours, even.

And because every Frenchman was by default a prolific shit-talker, any time that someone left the meeting to go use the bathroom everyone else in the room would just spend the entire length of their absence talking smack on the poor shit-taker.³See what I did there? The fun with words never ends around here.

Eventually one bright fellow realized that if he never used the restroom during the meeting, then no one would get the chance to openly trash his reputation. This young man turned out to be rather dedicated to his own cause, and had successfully endured 5 hours of a meeting despite desperately needing to “take the piss.”

Unfortunately, his bladder wasn’t as much of a steel trap as his mind was, and right about 5 1/2 hours in, it ended up rupturing. And killing him in the process.

True story. Allegedly, at least.

It took me a moment to internalize the story I had just heard.

And when combined with the conversation I had only moments earlier, I came to a very sobering realization. While it seems like a humorous predicament, what had happened to me was actually a veritable close-call with death.⁴I wanted to say “near-death experience,” but I don’t think that means what I think it means.

Anyways, the point of the story is, first and foremost, for god’s sake use the restroom before you go into surgery.

And secondly, think twice before letting a doctor med-splain to you that your urge to pee is all in your head. Truth is, sometimes the health system will fail you and you’ll find that you’re your only advocate.

So here’s what you do: you grab them by the stethoscope and you tell him or her to “shut the ----- up and get me a ----- catheter right now. I’m having a life-threatening allergic reaction to the anesthesia, and if you don’t believe that this is a real medical condition, I know a guy how wrote not one but two whole blog posts about it!”

After all, unlike that dead French guy, I am verifiably not an urban legend.

Though I was just a wee bit too close to going down in history as a urine legend…

I mean, we all gotta go somehow, though, am I right?

Content created on: 27/28 January & 17 February 2020 (Monday/Tuesday/Monday)

Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone.
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot.

Joni mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi” (1968)

In the year and a half that I took off between undergrad and grad school, I worked my first real job at a cellphone company. The great thing about a real job is that, if it is indeed a real job, you get health insurance.

About two months before I was set to head off to North Carolina to become a graduate student for the next 5-6 years of my life, it dawned on me that being a graduate student wasn’t going to be a “real job.” In other words, I was about to lose any semblance of meaningful health insurance.

Realizing what I was about to lose, I went off on a manic medical appointment making spree, tearing through my bucket list of check-ups and procedures that had been on my mind.

By some miracle I pulled off a trifecta, and after less than 15 minutes on the phone, I had somehow scheduled 3 doctor’s appointments for three consecutive days the following week. I was–and am still–way too proud of having achieved that feat in my lifetime.

Two of these were really run-of-the-mill: an eye check-up and a trip to the dentist’s office. The third one was a little more interesting: a consultation with an ENT (ear/nose/throat) specialist.

Well, it shouldn’t have been that interesting, and it didn’t really seem to be at the time. The pretense of the appointment was related to my lifelong bad habit of picking tonsil stones out of my tonsils in my spare [alone] time.

It wasn’t anything crazy like the tonsil stone videos you might find on YouTube–they were just little fellas. Quick tip, though: if you haven’t seen a video of someone harvesting¹That can’t be the right term, yet somehow feels the most right… their tonsil stones…you might want to pass on that offer. It’s about as bad as the cockroach-nest-in-the-kid’s-ear videos…

Anyways, I decided to be proactive and seize the opportunity to do something about my tonsils while I had the coverage, so my trip to the ENT was to see if I could get a tonsillectomy scheduled before the end of the summer. While the doctor said my condition was only a low-grade infection that I had probably had for quite some time, he agreed that I could get them taken out if that’s what my heart so desired.

Fast-forward a few weeks to the night before my first-thing-in-the-morning surgery. I was trying to be a good patient, so I had dutifully followed the no-food-or-drink bit, and didn’t consume anything after 10 pm. Of course I didn’t want to get dehydrated between then and after my surgery, so, thinking ahead, I drank a bit more water than I normally would have otherwise.

My mom was the one that would be accompanying me to the surgery and taking me home afterwards, and right on schedule, she picked me up and whisked me off to my date with destiny.

The surgery itself was pretty much run-of-the-mill: they knocked my ass out, and when I came to, I was slightly less of a man than I used to be. I was little ticked to learn that they had immediately disposed of the trophies with the rest of the medical waste, as I was hoping to keep them (or at least see them) like I got to with my wisdom teeth.

After I came out of surgery, they let me have a quick bathroom break before wheeling me off to the recovery room for a planned hour or two of rest and recuperation.

Well, it was supposed to be a quick bathroom break. I ended up setting up camp for a good 10 minutes, as I was pretty sure I had to pee, but instead just sat there having not a single drop of luck.

I thought that was odd, especially since it occurred to me that while I had drank plenty of water the night before, I had forgotten to use the restroom before going into surgery. So surely it couldn’t be that I didn’t actually have to pee, could it?

I tried sitting in there as long as I could, but the orderly kept nagging me and said I had had more than enough time to do my business and that I needed to get to the recovery room. They basically had to drag me out of that bathroom. A boy knows when he hasn’t peed enough. I can’t explain how, he just knows.

After about 10 minutes in the recovery room, the need to pee hadn’t subsided at all, so I made them take me back to the bathroom. But, it was just pretty much déjà vu all over again, with the exact same script as before playing out.

They told me I just needed to chillax, and I tried to explain to them that it was kind of hard to do that when I seriously needed to take a leak.

But, again, I found myself trying to relax in the recovery room against my will. The doctor had ordered me to just lay there and try to maybe nap some, and then in 40 minutes I could try again–if I really thought I needed to do my biz and take a whiz, that is.

They kept telling me that it probably just felt like I needed to pee, so I should be able to safely ignore the urge. I thought, hey, what do I know? and tried to take them at their word.

So I just laid there in the dimly lit room, so ----- miserable, trying to convince myself that my body was lying to me and that I should just get a little shut eye. I had the mental fortitude–I could do this. Only 40 minutes until I had another shot at sweet relief, right?

After about 30 minutes had passed, I started to be confident I could make it the full 40. Of course I needed some objective verification of the situation:

Me: “Hey Mom, how long has it been?”

Mom: “Since when?”

Me: “Since, you know…”

Mom: “Since you last asked how long it had been?”

Me: “Yeah, I guess. I thought it was patently obvious what I was asking.”

Mom: “Oh, about 5 or 6 minutes.”

Me: …

Me: “Fuck this shit. Call the doctor in here NOW.“

It was at this point when I realized that I had entered into the bowels–no, bladder–of hell.

After much pleading with the doctor, he finally ordered an ultrasound for me. I gotta say, given that I was a virgin,²You expected this footnote to completely contradict that statement or have some Mormom-type qualifier saying that butt-sex is excluded, didn’t you? Well, guess what? It’s actually as true of a statement as it seems. I hadn’t even gotten to second base at this point in my life, save for one time in 5th grade that was completely by accident. I hadn’t envisioned myself getting an ultrasound any time soon.

Or ever. Because, you know…I’M A ----- DUDE.³Okay, so we know that I don’t mean this literally. I just established that this was one dude who actually had never ----- , so ” ----- ” in the usage as “one who ----- ” is not what is intended here. In case that wasn’t clear. Which it’s probably not, thanks to every other word getting censored.

Well, anyways, it took waaaaay too long (~20 minutes) for the ultrasound tech to show up. The tech did her thing, and, as she came to terms with what she was seeing, she actually let out a soft audible gasp . “Oh my” was all she said at first.

That is not the response you ever want to hear from a medical professional.

She went and grabbed the doctor and he came back to double check her calculations.

The doctor:⁴Not to be confused with my friend The Doctor… “So…I guess you were right when you said you needed to pee. According to the ultrasound, you have over a liter of liquid in your bladder. That’s well over the capacity of a normal human bladder.”

Me: “No shit, Sherlock–or should I say, ‘no piss, Paddington’?⁵I’m indulging here. I didn’t say either of those. Though it would have been completely appropriate in that moment. What’s our move here? I’m dying, Doc!”

Doctor: “Well…we’re going to need to insert a catheter up your urethra. Are you okay with–“

Me: “Yes, I know how caths work. Shut the ----- up and stick it in my ----- for God’s sake!”

Anyways, as you can imagine, it’s not within the doctor’s pay grade to be shoving catheters in every Tom, Dick, and Harry that comes along…or should I say…nevermind. You know where that joke was going. Implied humor should suffice here.

About 5 minutes later, a nurse walks in with the godsend/catheter in hand. A young nurse. About my age. And kinda cute.

Sooo…yeah, that was an awkward moment for me. About to get my tally-whacker touched for the first time by a comely lass, and I can’t think of a more romantic setting.

The truth is, though, I did not give a flying ----- in that moment. You know, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and all that. Not having an exploding bladder kind of trumps everything else except for breathing, I would argue.

She gracefully and deftly got the tube where it needed to go, and then…oh, the sweetest relief a man could ever taste in this lifetime.

I CANNOT overstate the flood of emotions–and urine–in that moment. On the surface, this all may sound trivial and laughable even, but I’m here to say that not being able to pee is an incredibly ----- up situation that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemas.⁶Yes, that’s a pun. Ha ha.

On top of everything else, the collection bag couldn’t handle all that I had to offer, and they had to pinch off the flow while they changed the bags out. I can’t be certain, but I want to say that the bags were 750 ml, and I filled up 500 ml of the second one, so about 1.2 liters in total (!!!).

About 20 seconds after the nurse completed her duties, I was struck by a sharp pang…of regret.

Throughout this, I was in something of a loopy state, a combination of exhaustion and coming down off the anesthesia. Add to that the weird high I was getting from the overwhelming relief the catheter offered, and my sense of humor was as mirthful as ever.

What I regretted was missing the opportunity for a couple of zingers I had come up with in the middle of the cathing process, but didn’t have the wherewithal or presence of mind to say aloud to the nurse.

I really, really wish I could go back in time and at least say to her “I could kiss you right now.” And the truth about that comment is that I could have. Not in a romantic or sexual way, mind you, but in the sense that you would want to kiss the angel who is delivering you from the pits of Hades.

But if I really had been with it, here’s how I should have answered the age-old question first posed by early-90s heartthrob Jamie Walters,⁷https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Do_You_Talk_to_an_Angel “How Do You Talk To An Angel?”:

Geez…Let me at least buy you dinner first.

A young man being touched by an Angel for the very first time

To be continued…

Content created on: 27/28 January & 15 February 2020 (Monday/Tuesday/Saturday)

Here’s a fun fact: not all Valentine’s Day stories are hot steamy messes of eroticism and romantic escapades. Now that I think about it…do any of them ever really turn out that way?

Well, reality check aside, you can bet your sweet heart-shaped ass that I’ve got a Valentine’s Day tale for you. Even better, I promise it will be safe for all ages to enjoy.

Back in the spring of 2004 I had just mostly graduated¹At some point I will tell the tale of how I accidentally graduated without realizing it. from Kansas State University, and was in search of any way possible to not use my physics degree while simultaneously eeking out an existence.

So I found myself in the hunt for some gainful employment, but didn’t have too much clear direction as to what type of jobs to seek out and apply for. One day as I was perusing the online want ads of the local newspaper, I saw a posting by a florist looking for delivery drivers for the three days leading up to and including Valentine’s Day, which happened to fall on a Saturday that year.

Seeing as how I hadn’t landed anything permanent yet, I thought it would be the perfect way to inject a little much-needed cash into my pocket–heck, I hadn’t made a proper grocery store run since mid-December!²I’m not sure if this is a story in it’s own right, but that streak actually lasted until mid May–a solid 5 months of a grown-ass man not buying groceries. It’s one of my more boastable accomplishments, and a strong contender for making it onto my headstone.

It’s not like I had anything else of note to do that V-day. Most of my guy friends were single at that time as well, so the only plans I had were to meet up later the evening of Valentine’s at a random Jamaican-cuisine-serving bar out in the boonies. We were calling it Bro-entine’s Day or Bachelor’s Day or something else obnoxious that I can’t remember off the top of my head.

Also, being the ever-over-thinking life philosopher that y’all know and love, I realized that this would be an interesting opportunity of sorts.

Let me reference the ultimate asinine life philosopher and personal idol of mine, Jerry Seinfeld. Those of you familiar with his eponymous TV show may recall the episode The Big Salad,³For a plot summary, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Salad. in which George buys a big salad for Elaine. His flavor-of-the-month girlfriend, Julie, is accompanying him, and when they show up to Jerry’s to deliver it, she is the one who is carrying it and ends up being the one who hands it to Elaine.

Elaine then proceeds to thank Julie–not George, who actually paid for it. Of course, petty hilarity ensues.

The wisdom to be gleaned here is that people often subconsciously attribute credit to the person who delivers something–not the person actually responsible for it. This principle in theory should apply whether it be a big salad, good news, bad news…or, say, flowers and balloons.

So imagine all the warm, positive, and often “romantic” feelings a woman⁴Or a man, I suppose. might experience upon receiving a lovely bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates. Now imagine all those great feelings being subconsciously–and undereservedly–associated with my modestly handsome and youthful face, and perhaps even the sound of my voice.

In the short term, well…you know how they say “don’t shoot the messenger”? I liked to joke that in this case maybe I should be proclaiming to the recipient “Don’t kiss the messenger! J.K. Kidding…you can kiss me if you insist.”

But even better than maybe getting a kiss on the spot, was the Long Game that I was playing.

I need to invoke yet another episode of Seinfeld here, The Junk Mail,⁵For a plot summary, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Junk_Mail. in which Elaine inexplicably falls for a very ordinary looking guy, only to eventually find out that she’s so voraciously drawn to him because she recognizes him from a series of T.V. commercials where he plays “The Wiz,” a mascot for an electronics store of the same name.

The idea is that later down the road, if I happened to run into one of the ladies I had previously delivered flowers to while running around town, that they would be overcome by attraction and desire for me.

Now multiply that by the some-odd 50 delivers I would eventually make…yeah, that’s the closest to straight-up Evil Genius that I’ve came in my life. In theory, I could potentially have the legitimate need to “beat them off with a stick.” Too bad–spoiler alert–that investment never paid off…

Okay, philosophical digression aside, I responded to the ad, and as you all already know, after 5 rounds of interviews and 3 background checks, I scored the gig. Well, maybe it was more like half a round of interviews and zero background checks, but that doesn’t have the same zing to it, does it?

The first morning of the gig was a Thursday, and I showed up bright and early at 6:30. In fact, I was the first one there, even beating the shop owner.

He sheepishly greeted me, and explained that the demand for flower delivery before the regular work day started tended to be on the low side, so I might just be hanging out for an hour or so before things would start to pick up.

To my surprise, within about 30 minutes he told me to warm up the Camry, cuz I had my first delivery of the day! I was so pumped and ready to harvest all the undue adoration that I was sure was coming my way.

Except…well, I had better hope that the principles I laid out above wouldn’t hold for that first delivery. Because the last thing I needed was for a random group of friends and family to forever associate me with grief and loss and embalmed loved ones.

Yes, that’s right, my first Valentine’s Day delivery was to a mother ----- funeral home. And they weren’t even open yet, so I had wait around for 10 minutes, and then I had the joy and honor of being in a dimly light funeral parlor at 7:30 in the morning, where the dead definitely outnumbered the living. This was off to a swell start, indeed.

After that, though, the fun business picked up and, honestly, the next 3 days were kind of a blur, with me rushing about, making deliveries all over a 15-mile radius. The only one I really remember is the one I delivered to a girl that I had taken Public Speaking with 4 years earlier. The main reason I remembered her was because she was on K-State’s waterskiing team, and I recall being shocked to learn that we–Kansas State–had a waterskiing team. Anyways, at least we recognized each other enough that it wasn’t too awkward of an encounter.

The funny part about all of this is that I unwisely hadn’t clarified the terms of compensation beforehand, and it wasn’t until I was getting ready to head out for my final delivery run that I learned how much I would be getting paid. The deal was that I would get $5 for every successful delivery–which was actually a bit more than I had expected. I must have made ~45 runs because I calculated that I would pull in about $225 for my three days’ worth of work. It was definitely a pleasant surprise!

Though I was running a little late, I just needed to make 5 or 6 more deliveries, and then I would be able to go celebrate Celibacy Day with a cold beer, some jerked chicken, and the company of my homies.

I had gotten to the next to last delivery, which was actually a double delivery. Some thoughtful husband and father had ordered flowers for both his wife and his wrong daughter. I found it to be a very sweet gesture.

Now there are three important details here. First, I had parked across the street from their house. Second, since I had to deliver two vases, I had decided to carry them in the now almost-empty cardboard box that I had been using to safely and securely shuttle around my deliveries. Lastly, it had snowed a few days earlier, and so there was some hard-packed snow (now ice) against the curb, though the street itself was clear.

After making the delivery, I was walking back to my car with the empty box in my hands, and I needed to gingerly step over the strip of snow that was against the curb.

It was just wide enough that I couldn’t step over it, so I daintily hopped over it…

The next thing I remember is the box going flying in the air and my body shifting into a horizontal position about 3 feet in the air before gravity took back over and violently pulled me back to Earth face-down.

Apparently when I had hopped into the street I came down on some black ice, causing my legs to slip out from underneath me in very extreme fashion.

It really was a blur, but the main thing I recall is my right hand landing first, basically karate-chopping the street. It was lightly sore, but then again, so was the rest of my body.

Not being seriously injured, I picked myself up in embarrassment–though I’m pretty sure no one saw me–and picked up my box and hopped in my car. The final delivery was thankfully more uneventful, and I headed back for one last check-in with the florist to give them my total delivery tally.

I met up with my buddies and enjoyed a good meal with them, and I related to them how my little flower delivery adventure had gone, including the surprise twist at the end there.

That night when I got ready to hop in the shower, I discovered that, in addition to scraping my cheek and landing on my hand, I somehow had a long scratch down my chest. Nothing major…just odd. My theory was that I had slid forward as I landed, and that there must have been a little jagged bit of ice sticking up, slicing me gently as I slid across it.

As they say, fun times were had by all…

Of course it would have been wonderful if this here story ended with me incurring the most minimal of injuries and walking away from the experience with a cool wad of $225 in my pocket. That would have been great.

However, after a week, I noticed my hand was still a little achey, so since I was still enrolled in a photography class at the college, I took advantage of my access to the student health clinic.

The key point here is that “access” does NOT equal “coverage” or “insurance” or anything like that. Having my hand x-rayed on the first visit was reasonable, but had I known that I would be paying out of my empty-ass pockets for every ----- thing, I would have told the doc he could shove the follow-up x-ray somewhere only his licensed and trained proctologist could find it.

It turns that I had actually fractured the pinky-bone in my hand, and was prescribed a custom-formed plastic half-cast for a few weeks. So it was probably overall better for my health that I did have my injury checked out.

But after all was said and done, I got a bill in the mail for…$205.

Son. Of. A. Bitch.

After taking into account the gas I burned making those deliveries, I was exactly $0 the richer for the whole episode.

In the end I had broken both my hand and dead even.

Unfortunately, I was too ----- hungry to appreciate the irony–and the beautiful symmetry–of the situation.

But really, the point of the story is you couldn’t fault me if I were militantly pro-“Medicare For All.” Of course the version I would be promoting would be retroactive at least 16 years…

I really, really want my hard-earned $225 back–adjusted for inflation, and with interest, of course.

Hmmph. That’s interesting…maybe–just maybe–I am but a bougie capitalist after all…

Happy Valentine’s Day, all you money-lovers!

Content created on: 7 February 2020 (Friday)