Let’s be honest, man: your impromptu roadtrip went exactly as unplanned.
So don’t act so surprised that it all ended up in the sh*t can…
“Yo, yo, yo! Who wants to go to Kansas City with my for New Year’s?!?”
This was not a trivial quest that I was hoping my two hometown-and-still-in-high-school buddies would join me: we were Rolla, which, while technically in the state of Kansas, is the second-furthest populated town from Kansas City. Should the choose to join me in my mission to escape our boring middle-of-nowhere desolate hellscape. it would be right about 7 hour journey each way. Quick fun fact: somebody in Terre Haute–that’s in Indiana, for f*ck’s sake–could make it to the Kansas side of KC before we would, assuming we left at that same time.
Alas, I was home for the holidays during my sophomore year at Kansas State University, but I really rather would have been in the Greater Kansas City area where many of my college friends were–that’s were the real action was, and I was battling a raging case of fomo. They were going to have all the Christmas break fun without me, so I had hatched a plan to make sure I didn’t miss out.
Step one: road trip to Kansas City!
Step two:
…
Uh…
…
Ummm…
Step two: figure it out as we go! We don’t need a plan when we have so many local friends!
“We’re young, bored, and jonesing for the slightest hint of excitement–and we’re not gonna find that here in dusty-ass Rolla. So who’s coming with me? Giakob?”
Giake (pronounced ‘Jake’) thought for a few moments before giving me an answer.
“Yeah…uh…sounds fun and all, but I got prior commitments, so I think I better stick around here,” he said, though I couldn’t be sure how sincere he was.
“Ahhh, fine. Suit yourself.” I turn to the third member of our little group, Big Mike. “Mike, you down to party with me and my college friends?”
“What the heck, I ain’t nothing else going–I’m in!”
“That’s what I’m talking about! Pack your bags, bro–we ride at dawn!’
“Ummm…well, I actually have some stuff I have to do in the morning. You cool if we, say, ‘ride at approximately 3 in the afternoon instead?” Mike asked.
“Dammit,” I muttered under my breath. “My dude, that’ll have us getting into Kansas City at 10 at night, best case scenario.”
“Sorry, man, but if I want to go with you, I’ll need just a little bit more prep time.”
Luckily, I was a problem solver, and came up with a solution within a minute or two.
“A-ha! I know!” I said, snapping my fingers in the most cliche manner possible. “My grown-ass cousin, Jenny, lives in Wichita–I’m sure we’d be able to crash at her place on the way up. That would break our trip into a 4 hour and a 3 hour segment. Leaving at 3 would be no prob then–we would be rolling up into the ‘Ta right around dinner.”
“Just let me give ol’ Jennifer a quick call to confirm…”
“So, boys, you got big plans for your time in K.C.?” Jenny–who had graciously accepted my request for her to host us for the evening–innocently inquired of us that next night as we were settling into her one bedroom, one bathroom apartment.
“Uh, well–funny story–I haven’t really got that far yet,” I admitted, but not as sheepishly as I should have been. “We don’t even know where we’re going to stay at while we there. I just assumed that at least one of my friends would have offered to let us stay with them once I announced my plans to come up…but I’m sure something will turn up.”
“Wait, what?” Big Mike turned to me, clearly caught a bit off guard. “You don’t have that slightly important detail figured out yet?? And I don’t have ‘stay at a motel’ type money…and I’m pretty sure you don’t either, bro.”
“Aw, it’ll be fine, dude.”
Despite my reassurance, Mike could only give me that blank ‘Wtf, mate?!?’ look.
“Okay, maybe I should say it will probably be fine. Don’t worry man, we’ll be good.”
Fortunately, my kin-folk tended to be thoughtful and generous, and Jennifer was no exception.
“Well, you know my current boyfriend, Quinton, he lives in KC…in a rather large house all by himself. Let me make a quick phone call first, but I’m pretty sure he would let you crash there for a few days.”
I hadn’t realized it, but I had been my holding breath as the reality of my short-sighted had started sinking. It was at this point that a let it all in a big ol’ sigh of relief (though I tried to play it cool).
“Um, yeah, that would be mighty kind of him if he’s up for it. We’ll wait while you ring him up.”
Sure, I would rather be staying with a college friend…but apparently I didn’t have any true friends1Okay, glutenfreedad, I know you’re probably thinking, ‘Wtf, mate?!? We were friends back then, and you dang well knew I lived in KC…” Yeah, well, I don’t remember whether I thought to hit you up and hint at the fact that we needed a place to stay. I’m pretty sure I didn’t, so that one was kinda on me. It’s me–I’m the sh*ttier friend between the two of us. Now, there’s also a chance that it is Brandan who is reading this. I have a bone to pick with you, since I got the idea from you that I could just show up in KC and crash with friends when you told me that you were doing exactly that with Raul. But then I show up, and it was clear that we wouldn’t be staying with you guys, you bag of d*cks. in Kansas City, but ----- if that wasn’t a cold-ass winter, and I would rather stay with a complete stranger twice my age than have me and my esteemed guest Mike sleep in my Ford Taurus.2To be clear, it was a Taurus SHO, which stands for ‘Super-High Output, i.e. it was the Taurus that cool kids like me would actually drive with pride. I mean c’mon, do I look like the type of guy that would drive the same vehicle your mom indubitably did in 1999? That’s what I thought…
Moments later, Jenny rejoined us.
“Good news, boys, you’re not going to be temporarily homeless this week!”
“See,” I said smugly to Big Mike, “the Lord doth provide…”
“Well, sh*t.”
“Man, that’s not what I want to hear,” Mike said in response to my mild oath. “What is it?”
“It appears that I have locked my keys in my car…” I replied. “So much for our plans to go sledding with friends today…”
And that was just one of the many shenanigans a reasonable person might expect from such a poorly-planned trip with quite a few faulty assumptions baked in.
Quinton–who turned out to be an excellent host–just had one fatal flaw: he had a full-time job, while may fatal flaw was that this was just months before cell phones hit that critical mass of ubiquity and thus I hadn’t yet adopted such a handy piece of technology. The upshot of this confluence of flaws was that Mike and I ended up stuck at Q’s house during our entire first day at our destination, and only regained access to transportation when he got home around 6 pm and showed us where he kept his Slim Jim (no, not the beef jerky–the machete-like tools used for getting into locked vehicles).
“Welp, we better get some food, Mikey. Where you wanna go grab some grub at?” I said, once we finally could actually drive ourselves wherever we wanted.
“Uhhh, well, I didn’t bring alot of cash, so nowhere too fancy.”
“Oh no worries man–I’ll cover you this time. Hmm…how about we go snag 3 or 4 bean burritos from Taco Bell?”
Yes, that is how our trip went. In addition to somewhere around 75-80% meals consisting of exactly that menu, other highlights of that rather-interesting-but-mostly-for-the-wrong-reasons excursion included (but not limited to) the following nuggets:
- Upon our arrival in KC, Quinton was still at work, so we didn’t have anywhere particular to go. Yada, yada, ya, and we found ourselves inviting ourselves to the home of the young lass that I had spent the previous semester unsuccessfully pursuing (though I had thankfully given up on that idea by that point). It wouldn’t have been that bad…until somebody busted out the Scrabble board. Playing with her younger brother, as well as her mom, I didn’t even make it through the first round before not-so-graciously razzing one of them for grossly misspelling a word she (either my friend or her mom) really should have known how to spell.
In other words, I proved her right in her decision to not date a d*ckhead and unabashed Scrabble snob such as myself. - For New Year’s Eve, we had been partying as hard as you would expect from a bunch of relatively devout Christian college boys, and we managed to integrate ourselves with the friend-group of one my acquaintances. So when they decided to leave wherever we were (a church? a concert? don’t remember) and head back to one of their houses to have a NYE sleepover, it was only mildly awkward when we were like “sure, we’re in!” though no one had actually asked us.
Anyways, this dude, Reid, had a huge a basement where about 6 or 7 of us had eventually crashed for the night around 2 or 3 a.m. Around 5 in the morning I was startled awake by the sound of…a chainsaw? As I fumbled around in the pitch-darkness trying to figure what the hell was going on, I stumbled into another one of the guys, who had been awakened by the 110-decibel ruckus that was most definitely coming from within the house. “What is that noise??? It’s so frickin’ loud!” he asked, to which I responded, “I don’t know either man, I’m just trying to figure out where it’s coming from, so I can turn it off and get back to sleep!”
So with our powers combined, we combed every room in the basement, only to discover that it was Big Mike, who had passed out in a Lazy-Boy, snoring so loudly that we actually thought that it might have been a motorcycle engine. “Dude, you gotta sleep in a different position–no one else can sleep down here with you’re ----- sawing of logs!” I said as I shook the big fella awake. And let me reiterate that I’m not exaggerating in the least how eardrum-shattering of an experience it was–maybe I should have likened more akin to being in a one-car garage with a jet engine intermittently going at full blast. It was an experience unlike any other I’ve had before or since then. - More ----- bean burritos from Taco Bell. Did I mention those already? Well I’m going to mention them again. Like, we were so cheap that it was almost comical, hardly even willing to spend money on feeding ourselves (as bean burritos from Taco Bell, is literally the bare minimum), with only the occasional meal mooched from a compassionate friend and/or an organized activity where refreshments were provided.
After a good 4-5 days of such a thrilling bum-cation, you can imagine that we were ready to head back to SW Kansas, and were actually looking forward to doing nothing for the remainder of our holiday break.
And of course, we got a late start getting out the door.
“Say, Jennifer, you mind if we crash on our way back?” I found myself calling in another favor from her.
“Anything for my favorite cousin. Anything at all…”
“You got any food you don’t want, cuz?” I asked that evening once we found ourselves at Jenny’s one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment for the second time in less than a week.
“Actually, I’ve been needing to clean out my fridge for awhile…you boys are welcome to anything and everything in there,” she said.
Her words were like music to our ears…our ears that were bleeding…bleeding Taco Bell taco sauce.
“Oh thank god!” Mike said. “You’re a life-save–literally. If I had to eat one more ----- bean burrito I was going to murder somebody!”
“Dang, Jenny, you really are the best cousin a guy could have…now, if you don’t mind, could you kindly step away from the fridge. You’re blocking our path to gastro-intestinal Nirvana…”
“Hey Mike, you think this lunch meat is too old to eat?” I asked between munches of other random food items that I was chowing down on indiscriminately.
It was almost a rhetorical question, as I already had piece of that sweet, sweet, juicy pig-flesh halfway to my mouth.
Mike gave a cursory at the expiration date on the package, before realizing that he simply had no f*cks left to give at that point.
“Screw it!” he said as he watched my shovel the meats from my fat mitt into my gaping maw, “if you get sick, we’re gonna get sick together!”
…and I’m just going to pause for a moment to ask you, Dear Reader, if you can guess what the point of this story is? Because you’d probably be right…
*a few hours later*
“Uggggghhh,” I said to no one in particular in the darkness, “I think I’ve made a huge mistake. I think I need to go sit on the toilet for a bit..”
“You gonna have to wait your turn,” moaned a voice in the darkness, dang near literally scaring the sh*t out of me.
“Oh, no. Mike, not you too.”
“Ugggghhhh. Yeah, #MeToo,” he replied.
“Dear god, this is going to be one long-ass night…” I rued (I would have bemoaned the situation, but Mike had just ‘moaned’ a few lines of dialogue earlier, so I figured it wouldn’t be a good like to be bemoaning anything so soon after his moaning, so I’ll just rue it instead).
“You’re telling me, boys, you’re telling me…” said Jennifer from her bed–she must have been awakened not by Big Mike’s snoring, but instead our borderline-uncontrollable and quite noise bodily function.
Verily, verily, I say unto you that it didn’t help anyone that the ‘one-bathroom’ in her ‘one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment’ was only accessible via the aforementioned ‘one-bedroom’.
And so, as a token of our gratitude to her for opening her house and her fridge to us ragamuffins, we opened up the bowels of hell on her bathroom. And she had no choice to use that same bathroom, hoping for a window of opportunity to do her business as needed in between me and Mike tag-teaming her toilet and trash can with organic waste coming from multiple bodily orifices.
Yeah, it wasn’t pretty. And I profusely apologize for any mental images I might have conjured in your unsuspecting and innocent mind. Didn’t mean to blindside you with all that..well…sh*t.
And we were having such a fun time that we kept the party going well beyond the break of dawn. It wasn’t until early afternoon that we both felt minimally stable enough to endure a 4-hour car ride without permanently ruining my leather upholstery. Sure, we still felt like crap, but we were just so over it–the whole fricking ill-conceived and poorly executed trip–we just wanted to get the hell home..and out of Jennifer’s hair.
*sigh*
All I can say is: gosh damn, that slightly-out-of-date ham…
The point of the story is that maybe you should think twice any time you find yourself thinking or saying “f**k that sh*t! Consequences be darned!”
‘Cuz, lemme tell you Cuz, you might just find yourself back in Soviet Russia, and that sh*t just be might f**king you instead…and your hefty friend…and your bestest cousin’s only bathroom…
Just because you’ve done your penance and have spent the last 5 days consuming a cumulative 10-15 Taco Bell bean burritos, that doesn’t mean that somehow the laws of microbiology and gastrology no longer apply to you, you reckless jackass.
You know, come to think of it…yup, I’m quite sure of it: the inspiration to share this PSA of a Point of the Story post must have been on account of my eldest daughter just celebrating her 12th birthday earlier this week–what a milestone!
Well, that must have, on a subconscious level, really got me to thinking about my memorable 12th birthday. However, I gonna leave it to you, Dear Reader, to click on that link, and I’ll let you connect the dots for yourself.
Let’s just say that I would never wish that kind of birthday experience on even my worst enemy or the shittiest human being or even the anti-Christ.3Ok, minor correction: I wouldn’t be opposed to that fate befalling one of Elon Musk’s bastard children.
Yes, that’s right: I know you’re listening, Herr Musk–or at least using A.I. and the technological powers you have usurped from our government to surveil the entire interwebs–and I would like to officially proclaim to my sizeable audience that the excrement that I have described in this story is vastly morally superior to you as a human being. Like, calling you a piece of sh*t would be indefensibly demeaning to actual fecal matter.
Come and get me, you doo-doo head, come and get me…
Uh, what I’m trying to really say is, “Happy birthday, Boo-Boo,4My pet nickname for my daughter. happy birthday…”
Hope your birthday was The Sh*t…
Content created on: 15/16 March 2025 (Sat/Sun)
Footnotes & References:
By tanked, do you mean toilet tank? The “end” of the trip sounded terrible, and the part about staying with a total stranger.
I don’t even know what year that was, but I remember some New Year’s get-together at E.M.’s house. I drove all the way back to Manhattan after that, because my parents dead-bolted the house, and couldn’t hear the doorbell!
Yes, you caught the “tanked” pun—congrats! My first choice of pun was “plunged”, but couldn’t quite make it work with the rhythm I like my titles to have.
Staying with the stranger wasn’t that bad…it might have been better than staying with a friend and their parents, on account of there was little to no expectation of socializing with our host (remember, for the most part, the parents of your college friends are borderline complete strangers).
This happened in 2000/2001, while the party you’re thinking of (if I was there) was the following year, 2001/2002. Did I have pink hair? I was struggling mightily with my hair color at the time, so you would probably would have noticed that detail.
That’s almost hilarious, that your parents locked you out so you had to drive 2 hours back to Manhattan. Good thing you hadn’t been drinking!