Weird Shit From Russia!

[Currently Listening To: Talking Heads - Remain in Light]



By now it's no secret that I spend a lot of time traversing the globe. I've been to a lot of countries, and seen the type of cool shit you expect to see in foreign lands - old buildings, exotic food, etc. But since I'm always traveling on business, finding myself in major cities with little time to thoroughly explore, my favorite way of discovering other countries has been to mine them for weird shit. The States have become such a wasteland of blandness, such a vapid expanse of corporate sameness, that any opportunity I can find to score some strange foreign crap is more than welcome. To that end, something I often find dismaying about the world outside of America (here's a handy map for those of you confused as to what that might be) is the alarming lack of weird shit. The angry beast of globalization has spread its red-white-and-blue blandness across the earth with insatiable aggression, ensuring that in exotic-sounding places like, say, Budapest, where I am right now, there's still a Burger King down the street, The Simpsons Movie at the local cinema (in English), Coke Zero in the vending machines, and "My Humps" playing loudly on the radio. Like cultural HIV, America continues to spread unfettered.

I love Japan because it's one of the few places I've been to whose uniqueness seems impervious to the American disease, managing to filter U.S. influence through its own bizarre cultural lens and present it as something entirely its own. And for the same reason, it was a pleasure to recently visit Russia for the first time, and find with much relief that there still is some weird shit in Europe after all (although the rest of Europe likes to exclude Russia from the precious title of "European," geography places Moscow and St. Petersburg firmly within the boundaries of the European continent).

To an American, Russia seems a strange and backwards place - a country struggling to get its shit together after centuries of chaos and turmoil. Things don't seem to work the way they should, no one seems to have discovered deodorant, and you are warned from the beginning that corruption is rampant: Stay inside the main cities, because more or less anything goes in the outskirts, and you're likely to be kidnapped. Keep your passport on you, because if you get stopped by the corrupt police and don't have it, they might kidnap you. Don't take taxis, because many of them aren't real taxis, and they'll kidnap you. We had to fly from Moscow to St. Petersburg instead of driving, because on the country highways, sometimes you'll find a broken down truck blocking the road. Stop and get out to help, and you'll be met by men with guns, who will kidnap you. Kidnapping is apparently all the rage in Russia. It's also, by its nature, a terrifying concept, mostly because it's so vague. The term "kidnapping" describes only the act of being taken away itself, and leaves the rest of your life after that point open to any sort of possibility. Will you get killed? Anally raped? Held for ransom? Sold into prostitution? The future is an open book! With all of that in mind, I stuck to the central parts of Moscow and St Petersburg, and found them to be refreshingly nice places, especially for a country that completely collapsed a couple decades ago. Sure, you can't drink the tap water, but come on - baby steps.

So now, sit back, and let me now take you on a wonderfully xenophobic tour of the strangest moments from my extremely brief and limited Russian experience. For your enjoyment, I've decorated this post with deliciously homoerotic stickers I found of this mulleted Russian pop star. Mullets, by the way, are still high fashion in Russia. Anyway, let's begin...

The People.................

There are a handful of stereotypes about Russian people, and at least one of them is true: those fuckers like to drink. As soon as they get off work - and sometimes before they get off work - they flood outdoor gathering areas and chug beer and vodka on the streets like there's no tomorrow. On my first night in Moscow, while walking through an underground passage near Red Square, my friend and I encountered an absurdly drunk Russian dude, dancing to terrible techno music and shouting loudly. He was wearing one of those big furry Russian hats, and his shirt was unbuttoned, exposing his pasty, sweaty gut, which jiggled as he danced. This is him:



He leapt in front of me and yelled something about Russia. He seemed to desire some sort of response, but I can understand Russian about as well as I can menstruate, so I was clueless. In a situation like that, what else could I do? I handed my camera to my friend, and started an impromptu Russian dance party. Homeboy put his big furry Russian hat on me, and for approximately forty five seconds, we partied like few have partied before. Scope the unbelievably hot dance moves:



That was pretty much the high point of my entire time in Russia.

The Food.................

I'm still not exactly sure what exactly constitutes Russian food, but expectedly, meat plays a heavy role. So how could I pass up a restaurant with an incredibly straightforward sign like this one?



As soon as we saw that, there wasn't really any other option for lunch that day. Inside, the waiters wore strange fur hunting outfits, and every wall was decorated eerily with dead animals and primitive weapons. The whole place was a sort of morbid celebration of carnivores where animals stared at you while you ate their relatives. Near our table were creepy squirrels on the wall, and a genuinely terrifying wolf:



The selection of meat on the menu was no less bizarre than the decorations:



I was going to avoid stating the obvious, but fuck it: "Beaver with cowberry sauce" might be the best new euphemism for a menstruating vagina since "muff marinara." And of course, I tried it. When it Rome, right? Bear was actually my first choice, but they were out. Big rush on bear. So beaver it was. You're probably wondering what cowberry sauce is, and I'm afraid that after eating it I'm no closer to having an answer for you. I can, however, assure you that beaver meat is without question the most nauseatingly awful thing I have ever had the misfortunate of putting in my mouth. I've eaten some gnarly shit in my time, and I have a seemingly iron-clad stomach when it comes to weird food, but this time I nearly puked before the meat even hit my throat. It was impressively terrible. It tasted like disease. Like pure, miserable death. Pretty much what I imagine rat meat tastes like. So, lesson learned: If you ever see beaver on the menu and you're feeling adventurous (or just want an excuse to make a sophomoric sexual pun), don't do it. You will be very sorry. Try the wild boar instead.

The Arts.................

One of my favorite things in Russia is how they've adapted the beloved tradition of the matryoshka - the Russian nesting dolls - for the 21st century. In Russian souvenir stands, the variety of hand-painted matryoshkas ranges from quaint and traditional to utterly, fantastically bizarre. Consider, for example, my new prized possession, the George W. Bush Russian Doll - complete with the "I'm a fucking tool" cowboy hat that characterizes our great President so very well:



That's just the beginning, though. Strangely, Osama Bin Laden has been immortalized in Matryoshka form, with other terrorists and dictators nesting inside him:



You can also find dolls for various Soviet dictators, British and French politicians, and even a Bill Clinton matryoshka with a doll inside for each of his many women. None of them, however, can compete with the selection of dolls from the music world:



The greatest compliment I can give the Russian artisans who created this unique masterpiece is that they have captured with alarming accuracy the spiritual essence of Freddie Mercury's overwhelming gayness. You can almost smell the butt sex. Here's another stunning masterpiece:



When I was a wee child, if a magical fairy had come down from the stars and told me that some day, my journey through life would somehow bless me with a genuine traditional matryoshka doll adorned with a hand-painted portrait of Jon Bon Jovi in all his trashy 1980's glory, and that if I cracked him open it would reveal yet another doll featuring Richie Sambora's stupid fat face, I would have said "No, magical fairy, you are a liar, for I could not imagine a life so good for myself." And yet, here I am. But alas, it gets even better. For even as I delighted in the glory of the Bon Jovi Russian doll, I knew not that my next discovery would be...

THE MANY FACES OF MICHAEL JACKSON RUSSIAN DOLL PLAYSET (OR: THE GREATEST THING EVER CRAFTED BY MAN):


Look at it! Feast upon its greatness!! My favorite part is how only the last and tiniest doll portrays Michael when he was still black.

If my funds had been unlimited, I probably would have bought every bizarre Russian doll the country had to offer. Some of the other ones I saw included Britney Spears, Elvis, Metallica, Kobe Bryant, Madonna, AC/DC, Depeche Mode, and many more.

Assorted Weird Shit................. Here are some miscellaneous photos of weird shit from Russia: These are some super cool Russian music dudes. Most importantly, check the terrifying guy at the top. He wants to eat your soul. It was really nice of Kevin Smith to lend a hand on the bongos, too.
Loosely translated, this Russian t-shirt says "I don't drink with gays." Tied with this for best Russian t-shirt ever.	Speaking of homophobia, it's ironic that the Russian police force, often criticized for violence and discrimination against gays, has "HOMO" written backwards on all their uniforms. LOL @ TEH HOMO PATROL!!!!1
I guess Jessica Simpson has fallen on hard times lately, as she's apparently been forced to take up work as a Russian escort.	This is my new favorite drink.
Here's a strange and incredibly unpleasant-looking trans-species stuffed animal, which I can't imagine has any effect other than to frighten children.	Look how tough this dude thinks he is with his Yoda tattoo.
This is a statue that was on the street. Children were getting their pictures taken with it.	Like Germany, there's a lot of highly questionable fashion in Russia. I saw more than a few women dressed like my Grandma's couch.

Well, that just about concludes our tour of Russia. I'm confident that it accurately represented all aspects of the entire country. If for some reason you want more, I took some arty tourist photos of Moscow and St. Petersburg and put them up here. They're actually very beautiful cities.

And before I go, please enjoy the unique musical stylings of an old Russian dude playing Celine Dion on a saw, interrupted by a strange dancing man:






EDIT: I can't believe I forgot about this - just a few hours after my tragic encounter with beaver meat, I saw this t-shirt at a souvenir stand. I have no idea what it says (my bet is on sexual innuendo), but it was so eerily appropriate I had to pick it up:

An Open Letter To The Person Who Vomited In My Sink On New Year's Eve

[Currently Listening To: The indescribably irritating sound of my idiot friends laughing obnoxiously loud at the television from downstairs]


Dear Person Who Vomited In My Sink on New Year's Eve,

On the eve of the new year, I invited you into my residence to partake in festivities relating to our passage into 2007. It is my sincerest hope that you enjoyed yourself and that I for my own part was a gracious host. However, I am disquieted to confess that I have not prepared this correspondence in good temper. Quite on the contrary, my message is one of disappointment and admonishment. You see, in the morning following my new year's gathering, I was alarmed to discover a scene of no small horror laid out in my downstairs washroom. The sink, part of the counter, and indeed even part of the mirror were painted quite generously with an extremely foul green-colored sludge of a substance which I came to recognize as vomit. Certainly you can understand my reaction of considerable disgust, for I am no savage, and prefer not to encounter the stomach contents of myself nor anyone else, if indeed it is possible. As such, I found your actions in my washroom to be quite disagreeable.

Please, Person Who Vomited In My Sink On New Year's Eve, do not think me brutish for my words: I fully comprehend the rather fragile predicament you must certainly have found yourself ensnared in that fateful night, and hold great sympathy for it. The intake of spirits by all parties was understandably more gratuitous than might be considered appropriate on an evening of any lesser festivity. I will confess that on certain gay occasions even I have been known to act in poor judgement and indulge too heavily in the consumption of adult beverages, and I have on those occasions found myself feeling quite ill as a result. Undoubtedly this was the case for you on the eve of the new year, and for that you have my sympathies. However, I must take issue with your choice of location when emptying your stomach contents. Customarily, one who is overcome with the need to be ill does so in the toilet, as it is by its nature a repository for things unclean. Had you merely repositioned yourself thirty six inches due east when emptying your stomach, and flushed the results, I doubt with great sincerity that I would presently be inclined to exchange words with you.

I don't know who you are, Person Who Vomited In My Sink On New Year's Eve, for you did not own up to your wrongdoing. All I can be certain of is that you ate a salad for dinner on Sunday. From the looks of it, a spinach salad, possibly with tomatoes. Full-sized tomatoes, not the miniature ones they put in salads sometimes. It appears also that you made at least a passing attempt to clean your mess from the surface of the mirror, as it was streaked with foul-smelling, spinach-laiden bile in a pattern suggesting it had been partially wiped off. While I appreciate this, I would have preferred a great deal more effort be invested in the attempt, as the unenviable burden of undoing your grotesque wrongs subsequently fell squarely upon myself. I should also note that the unpleasant results of your salad, marinating overnight as they did, saturated the washroom with an impressively pungent aroma. I have never sliced open a goat's belly and let its filthy innards spill out, then left them sitting in the summer's heat for several days time, rotting and collecting maggots under the unforgiving sun - nor have I any desire to engage in such a practice. However, if I had, I am certain the fragrance produced from said rotting innards, although awe-inspiring, would fail to equal the uniquely unbearable odor which hailed from inside your body and took unwelcome residence in my washroom.

In closing, Person Who Vomited In My Sink On New Year's Eve, I hope that this letter finds you, and causes you to rethink your choice of vomit receptacle if ever again you find yourself needing to be ill in my or any other washroom. The sink is a poor location for stomach contents, and any persons who think otherwise are quite unwelcome in my home. I very much doubt I will ever know your true identity, Person Who Vomited In My Sink On New Year's Eve, but should I discover it, I would be strongly inclined to shake my finger at you and say "for shame!"

With regards,

Robert

My Fourteen Year Old Self Was So Fucking Goth

[Currently Listening To: Home Video - No Certain Night or Morning]


I've been a little busy lately, so the ol' blog hasn't been getting much love. It keeps asking me "Rob, maybe you could... write in me tonight?" and I say "Not tonight honey, I have a headache. It was a long day at work. Maybe tomorrow."

Yes, I speak directly to my blog, and I call it "honey."

Anyway, I'm still busy, but while I was looking for something today I came across a folder of funny old drawings from when I was a kid, and I felt they were worth sharing.

When I was a wee lad, drawing was everything to me. I would draw all day, every day, filling any scrap of paper I could find with the fruits of my overactive imagination. I drew comic strips and trading cards and 3-d pictures. I had hundreds of little characters I'd created, and I spent hours upon hours carefully rendering their little adventures. The sheer volume of childhood art I produced bordered on obsessive-compulsive, but it was all very cute and innocent - exactly the type of spaceships-and-monsters fantasia you'd expect from the mind of a little boy. This, for example, is a drawing I did when I was eleven years old:



Aww, isn't it cute? A cute little dragon in a magical land. At twelve years old, I got into an extremely neurotic phase of drawing giant, elaborate mazes. I don't know why - they were too unwieldy for my friends to even want to attempt. But I was oddly fascinated with them. I drew dozens, maybe hundreds, each more pointlessly complex than the last. Here's one I found:



In retrospect that's a pretty weird thing to do, but I was only getting started. As puberty encroached, bringing with it the strange traumas of acne and voice changes and hair growing on my balls, something must have snapped in me. Out of nowhere, my formerly cute drawings became absurdly graphically violent. At the tender age of fourteen, I was very into comic books, and spent a great deal of time perfecting my ability to draw Spider-Man and Wolverine, as any other artistically-inclined teenage nerd would do. One day, during math class, I inexplicably felt the need to draw Wolverine ripping a guy's head off with his claws:



These days, I realize most fourteen year olds already have three kids and a coke habit, but in the comparatively innocent days of the early nineties, being dweeby pubescent boys meant that our days were spent playing Super Nintendo, our nights were spent lighting off fireworks in the park, we'd never so much as sipped a wine cooler, and our closest encounters with sex involved trying to glimpse a nipple through the fuzzy lines of the scrambled Playboy channel, and denying that we ever masturbated (i guess not much has really changed in my life). So it was probably some sort of pent up teenage angst that turned me into that kid - you know, the one sitting quietly at his desk, wearing torn up jeans and a black Nine Inch Nails t-shirt, scribbling away at methodically-rendered images of death and violence. I didn't feel mentally disturbed, I just... really liked drawing blood and guts.

The result was hundreds of drawings and sketches, usually done during school when I was meant to be paying attention (what do you learn in middle school, anyway? I don't remember any of it), of people being violently maimed and tortured in the most graphic and imaginative ways I could come up with. My mother was very concerned about me, and I was sent to the school counselor by worried teachers on several occasions. I really don't think there was anything wrong with me, I was just beginning the long and wonderful journey towards complete and utter desensitization that would culminate in this atrocity.

I was so enamored with my Wolverine drawing that I decided to explore some other interesting ways of killing people. Here's a guy who was caught off guard by some angry spikes while he was, I don't know, just sitting around in a dungeon, I guess:



For some reason, my victim was always the same guy - some anonymous, perpetually shirtless dude with bad nineties hair who apparently deserved to suffer endlessly at the merciless hands of my colored pencils. Maybe it was just the only guy I could draw, but either way, the incredibly homo-erotic overtones of all these buff, topless men were somehow lost on me at the time. Here's my same shirtless guy again; the spikes theme was working out well for me, so I expanded upon it by tossing the poor fellow into a pit of them, where his body tore into pieces like a stuffed animal:



Then I brought the grim reaper in for some good ol' fashioned beheadings. I like the cross going through the guy's severed neck hole, out his mouth, and leaving a piece of his nose stuck up at the top. Nice touch, teenage Rob:



And, yes, the tombstone on the right says "R.I.P. K Cobain" (although the date listed is the date of the drawing, not the date of his death). Could I be any more of a cliche angst-wridden nineties Seattle teenager?

What I considered to be my masterpiece at the time was a two-page spread I called "The Rack," depicting a torture chamber which looks more like it's one semen stomach pump incident away from being a gay S&M club gone horribly wrong (click to enlarge):



As ridiculous as these are, I have to at least appreciate the knack for detail I had at such a young age. Notice the rats gnawing away at the whip-lashed flesh of dead buff shirtless guy #1:



Or the vertebrae coming apart amidst snapping tendons and tearing flesh as the medieval stretching device pulls a little too hard on dead buff shirtless guy #2:



Needless to say, I, uh, wasn't exactly a big hit with the ladies at this point in my life.

There are many, many more where these came from. Thankfully I was pretty much out of my death and gore phase by the time I got to high school, but some sort of subconscious need for balance plunged me immediately into an arguably more disturbing phase of drawing really gay psychedelic fantasy art. Looking back on it all, it's hard to imagine my mother didn't send me to therapy.

Okay, back to work now.

Paradise Lost (OR: How My Hawaiian Vacation Ended In A Big Pile Of Shit)

[Currently Regretting: Writing this entry]

There is a universal sensation we've all experienced at some point in our lives - a unique blend of urgency, fear, and sometimes pain. We rarely talk about it, but it's happened to us all. It's an ill-acknowledged commonality amongst all of humanity. Christians, Jews, Muslims... It unites us, if perhaps only subconsciously. I'm talking, of course, about the sudden, overwhelming, uncompromising need to rush to a toilet and shoot hot molten stink liquid out of your ass. That's right, diarrhea.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me rewind a little bit.

Last week I went to Hawaii with Tam for a few days. Nothing huge, just a quick getaway after finishing a big project at work. I'd never been to Hawaii, and it's kind of one of those places you have to go - or so I'm told. We stayed on Kauai, which is the smallest, prettiest, and least developed of the islands. There you can snorkel amongst exotic fish, see dolphins and sea turtles in the open ocean, hike through the rain forest... Orrr, sit on your gargantuan ass and sip mai tais by the pool all day long while your back fat boils lobster red in the sun - which seemed to be the favorite activity amongst the many super-sized American tourists scattered along the sand like beached whales. I don't really understand traveling four thousand miles to sit on your ass at the beach as a vacation from sitting on your ass in your living room, but whatever - I've never been good at relaxing.

Kauai is refreshingly rural - you won't find any tall buildings or Wal-Marts (yet), and most of the shops and restaurants are Mom & Pop operations. Near the condo we stayed in, for example, a tiny general store became our regular stop for food and other day-to-day needs. The quaint little market had the type of basic necessities you'd expect - snacks and groceries, beverages, some Hawaiian gifts, and a tiny health care rack, stocked with Tylenol, Band-Aids, Chapstick, cough syrup, and enemas.

Wait... enemas? That was our reaction, too. There were two of them, sitting inconspicuously at the bottom of the rack, just like that. They looked like this:



Naturally we examined one, and giggled like fourth graders at the instructions and funny diagrams on the side. It was a very juvenile "hee hee you put it in your butt" moment, inspired largely by how utterly out-of-place such an item was on this tiny rack, in this tiny store. Why would a place that doesn't even carry condoms have an obscure item like a home enema kit? Maybe more people need to cleanse their bung chambers on a regular basis than I realize, but it still seemed weird. Tam decided that we needed to buy one - as if its unusual presence were some sort of sign that we were, in fact, destined to buy one. Besides, she added, there must be something funny we can do with it. I concurred, but suggested buying both of them, so we could use them as squirt guns and have an enema battle. It seemed the logical thing to do, right? Of course it did. I grabbed the two boxes, effectively clearing out the store's enema stock, and handed them to Tam. "Here, you buy them." She refused, saying that I should be the one to buy them. I told her that it made much more sense for her to buy them. "If a girl buys an enema," I told her, "the assumption is that she has some legitimate medical purpose for it, whatever that might be. If a guy buys an enema, they assume he's a pervert - which I am, but not in this particular case." Still, she refused, so I suggested rock paper scissors as a compromise. Loser buys the enemas.

I always lose at rock paper scissors.

Maybe things like this should be easier for me at this point in my life, but I really, really was not excited about purchasing two enemas from the little old Hawaiian lady we had bought groceries from every day at this tiny general store. I tried to go back on the whole thing, suggesting it was stupid of us to be buying enemas in the first place. "Let's just forget it, we don't need these." Tam wouldn't let me off that easy, and insisted I proceed with my mission - taking delight, of course, in my misery. Fuck. Okay. Suddenly I was a nervous teenager buying condoms all over again - I scoured the aisles for appropriate padding material, as if attempting to conceal the enema boxes amidst candy bars and soda would somehow de-emphasize them as the clerk rang them up. Of course, she didn't say anything - they might as well have been boxes of shortbread cookies, for all the difference it made. But inside, I knew what she was thinking. I could feel her judging me. Bitch. We left the market ten dollars poorer, two enemas richer, and blissfully unaware of the horrors that awaited us.

Later that night, we returned to the condo after eating too much at a luau (luaus, incidentally, are kind of boring, but the food is good), and found ourselves wondering what to do. Kauai is hardly a nightlife kind of place, so it can get a tad mundane during the later hours. Debating our options led to the enemas, which sat in their boxes on the coffee table, glowing with the promise of some sort of untapped entertainment. Should we have an enema squirt gun fight? Should we throw them at each other like water balloons and see if they explode? Should we... "I dare you to use one," Tam suddenly said. "Use... use one?" I asked. "Like, use one?" Oddly, the enema's intended purpose had been the last thing on our minds. "Yeah. I dare you."

Oh, the power of those three simple words. How many obscene, dangerous, humiliating, extreme situations have occurred throughout history as a result of the unique provocation implied by those three words?

"You dare me?"
"Yes, I dare you."
"I dare you!"
"You can't dare me after I dared you!"
"Sure I can! I just did!"
"I'm not going to do it!"
"Fine, be a pussy."
"I'm not a pussy! You were the pussy first!"
"Fine. I'll do it if you do it."
"Fine. You go first."
"You go first!"
"Rock. Paper. Scissors."
"Fine."
"FINE."


I never win at rock paper scissors.

And so it was that I would be the pioneering explorer into the uncharted world of rectal cleansing.

First, though, let us pause for a moment to consider the nature of the enema. For the wholly uninitiated, a home enema is kind of like a DIY colonic. Its primary use is to clean out all the excess shit that builds up inside you. It looks like this:



The little skinny end goes in your bunghole, and then you squirt it like a turkey baster and fill your stink cavern with liquid. Once you're filled up, you then poop the liquid out like you would anything else, and it theoretically flushes out a lot of other crap along with it. The power of the dare had left me determined to experience all of this for myself.

I went to the bathroom, and followed the instructions on the box. The process, so you know, is fairly simple and painless, although it's indescribably weird feeling your bowels fill up with liquid. As soon as you've squirted it all in you feel a very strong need to send it back out, and so you poop, and that's the end of it. No big deal, really.

Or, so I thought.

I left the bathroom and proudly shrugged off the whole ordeal to Tam. "Dude, that was nothing," I told her. "It's like a walk in the park." She wanted to find our for herself, and so disappeared into the bathroom with the other enema.

And at this point, I learned something very interesting.

As it turns out, the liquid I had just squirted up my ass was not simply some kind of purified water, as I had naively believed. In fact, it's a powerful saline laxative - it even says so on the box. I'm not sure how I missed that detail, but as I sat there on the couch, relaxing as if the event was long behind me, my stomach suddenly cramped up in a very alarming way. I shifted uncomfortably, and went to get a glass of water in the kitchen. It hit me again like a punch in the gut - a hard, crippling blow that made me lean forward in pain, clenching my abdomen. The agony rumbled down lower into my intestines, and settled into that ominous spot just above your groin which tells you one thing very specifically: Things are about to get messy.

Still clutching my stomach, I hobbled down the hallway and banged on the bathroom door. "Are you almost done in there?" I shouted, "I have a problem!" From the other side of the locked door came a loud "Go away!!" Fuck. Okay, okay, it's alright, I can wait. Maybe it'll pass. A deeper, harder tightening of my intestines pointed urgently to the contrary. Something wanted out of me, and it wanted out immediately. Fuck, fuck, okay, what now? The condo had only one bathroom. I ran back into the living room and paced back and forth furiously, my eyes darting around as if they might discover another hidden bathroom I hadn't noticed before. Inside me, my guts twisted as if some menacing, unseen birthday clown was crafting a little balloon poodle out of my intestines. I was sweating profusely. My ass clenched up in instinctual defense. This must be what labor feels like. Except I don't think my baby is going to be very cute.

Back to the bathroom, and I banged on the door again. "Tam, seriously, I really need to get in there!!" I pleaded, which was met with an aggressive "GO. AWAY!!" I figured she must be in a similar Hell. But where did that leave me? My body was not going to hold out much longer. I was getting dizzy and insane. The feeling in my bowels was angry and urgent. In my delirium I imagined a mob scene of slimy brown turd people shouting and waving torches as they stormed the gates of my sphincter. They had built a battering ram and were slamming repeatedly at my ever-weakening last defense. They were desperate to escape their fleshy prison, and with each charge they came closer to freedom. But if I didn't figure something out in the next thirty seconds, they were going to be escaping all over my pants.

Back to the living room. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Okay. At this point there was going to be no happy ending. At this point it was pure damage control. I looked towards the back door. Maybe I could just run outside. Settle this the way nature intended. No, no, there might be people outside. Fuck. Owww. Okay, garbage can? Is there a garbage can?? No, fuck, it's just a tiny little wastebasket oowwwwww fuck fuck fuck, okay, okay, uhhh fuuucccckkkk. I was out of time. This was it: Make a decision, or shit your pants. And then, I saw it...

The sink. The kitchen fucking sink.

Fuck. I had no choice. The sink had a deep basin, so there would be no splashbacks. Stainless steel for minimal mess. It had a large drain for quick disposal. Most importantly, it wasn't my sink. It would work. It would have to work. I ran to the sink, pulled down my pants, and leaped up on the counter backwards, hanging my ass into the basin just in time for a Roman candle of turd blasts to explode from my strained rear end. The simultaneous feeling of relief, agony, disgust, and shame was almost too much to handle. The room seemed to be spinning as I sat there hunched over, fingers digging into the edge of the counter, stomach churning like an alien was about to burst out of it, and molten mud lumps from the farthest reaches of my innards splatting against the bottom of the sink with one wet thump after another.

After a couple minutes of intensity, the misery tapered off and I could breathe again. I didn't move for another minute - I just sat there, breathing, dripping sweat, wondering what the hell had just happened to me. It seemed to have subsided, at least for the moment. But now what? Thankfully there were paper towels to substitute as toilet paper, but another major issue remained: A big pile of poop sitting in the sink drain, too thick to go down on its own. Fuck. It didn't smell very good. In fact, it smelled uniquely terrible. Clearly the enema had worked - this poo didn't smell like poo, but rather like stale insides. Like guts. Like it had been rotting inside of me for a very long time. And it was getting worse. My relief turned to panic once again as I looked around for some sort of solution. I turned the faucet on, but the water didn't help. Fuck, fuck, now what? The garbage disposal. The fucking garbage disposal. I flicked the switch on the wall, expecting it to whisk the poop away in that magical way that only garbage disposals can. It shouted a loud angry "VHWHRRRRRRRRRR" as the blades inside the drain began to spin. And what happened? Well, more or less what common logic - distinctly vacant from this whole situation - would suggest would happen: It started splattering little bits of poop everywhere. FUCK! FUCK FUCK FUCK, I turned the switch off as quickly as I could - thankfully with little damage done.

Now what? The problem, I deduced, was that the shit pile was too high up in the drain - instead of being sucked down in, it was being pushed upwards by the garbage disposal. Okay, so, how to get it farther down? Tam would almost certainly be walking in any minute, and happening upon a uniquely grotesque situation. I yanked open one kitchen drawer after another, digging through the kitchenware for... A fork! A big fork! It was a long, oversized skewer of some kind, with two prongs. Like something you'd poke a steak with. I guess. Whatever, it would work. It would have to work. Holding my breath, I poked my slimy mud pie with the sharp prongs, stabbing it frantically as the faucet ran, working it down into the drain. Okay, good, good, it's working! I reached over to the garbage disposal switch, and...

OWW FUCK! I keeled over again, struck with another sudden intestinal cramp. It was back. God help me, it was back. Round two had commenced - and like a Jerry Bruckheimer sequel, it was bigger, badder, and more explosive than the first. Helpless, crippled, I struggled to pull my pants down and leap back up on the counter for a second agonizing barrage of filth. This one was quicker, but no less painful. Groaning, sweating, catching my breath. Paper towels. The faucet. The long fork thing. Okay, let's try this again. I flicked the garbage disposal switch and flinched a little, defensively backing away in the event of another poop shower. The angry drain roared with life, and...

It worked. It worked! The slimy goo pile slid down the drain and was gone as quickly as it had appeared. All that remained was the dramatic odor, which I imagined was more or less what the underside of Satan's nutsack must smell like. Sighing, groaning, clutching my wounded stomach, I left the water running and stumbled into the living room and collapsed on a chair. I sat there for a moment, sweat dripping down my forehead, heart racing, breathing deeply. It was over... It was over. Tam appeared then from the hallway, looking pale and distraught, as if she'd just seen a ghost. She collapsed on the couch next to me, and sat in silence for a moment before saying "What just happened...?"

"I don't know," I told her. "I really don't know." All I knew was that, with the agony and embarrassment fading behind me, I felt refreshingly light and cleansed. I felt like demons had been exorcised from my colon. I felt like I'd had a religious experience. Tamar then asked me, "why did I hear the garbage disposal?" and so I told her my story, and we laughed for a long time. Dolphins, boat rides, lush tropical landscapes... None would emerge as highlights of our trip quite like the time I shit in the kitchen sink.

So if you're ever in the mood for a unique, possibly traumatic, ultimately cleansing experience, you can buy enemas from the comfort of your own home right on amazon.com, for only $1.69! And if you ever happen to find yourself staying in unit 167 at the Outrigger Plantation condos on Kauai... don't use the steak skewer.


P.S. - While searching for images to use in this post, I happened upon a very strange Japanese website called The Enema Museum. It is, as the title implies, a gallery of various enemas. Why? I don't know. Some things aren't meant to be questioned. I love Japan.

Investigating Lunchables' Alarming New Desire To Mess With My Mouth

[Currently Avoiding: Work]



For my entire K-12 public school career, I was a brown-bagger. While other kids lined up in the school cafeteria for wondrous $1.25 meals of macaroni and cheese, chocolate milk, chicken nuggets, and other lukewarm fat-kid-food delicacies, I dined enviously on my boring home-prepared sack lunch formula: ham sandwich, apple, juice box, and small treat. My jealousy peaked on pizza days, when those very fortunate school lunch kids were treated to the legendary rectangular pizza slices, topped with that curiously rigid layer of white cheese which could be easily removed as a single piece. Pizza for lunch?? To me it was an unfathomable luxury. After all, my family was hardly wealthy, and my frugal mother saw absolutely no reason to waste money on unhealthy school lunches when she was more than happy to prepare a sensible alternative for me every morning. So when the mighty Lunchables arrived in stores, and were marketed to children as being mysteriously more fun than regular lunch, it was beyond perplexing to my mother why I would persistently beg her to buy them for me, when she could easily and economically prepare the very same ingredients herself.

In case you live under a rock, Lunchables are little pre-made lunch packs which include crackers, slices of cheese, and slices of turkey or ham. At least, that's what they originally contained. Later, juice and candy were added, and in recent years the Lunchables line has expanded to include grotesque-looking tacos, chicken fingers, mini hot-dogs, and other high-fat snack foods that children really don't need.

I don't know what it was that made Lunchables so appealing to me. Perhaps it was how neatly arranged and packaged everything was, with the individual components of your eventual cracker sandwich stacked flawlessly within their own compartments. Or maybe it was the amazing perfect circles of slimy lunch meat - a shape that assured you nature took no part in their creation. Perhaps it was the delicious, high-fat cheese slices, brought to you by the crowned kings of processed foods, Kraft. Kraft's flagship cheese is so far away from being actual cheese that the box labels it "Kraft Pasteurized Prepared American Cheese Product." Whatever the case, I was somehow convinced that Lunchables were in all ways superior to any cracker-cheese-meat combination my mother could prepare, so when she occasionally gave in and packed them for me in my sack lunch, it seemed almost as exciting as rectangular pizza.

I ate Lunchables regularly, even through high school. By that point most of my peers had come to regard the little lunch packs as the disgusting, over-priced processed garbage that they are, but not me - I still loved them. I also discovered that those perfect circles of slimy lunch meat had mysterious adhesive properties. If thrown directly upward with a good bit of force, they would stick to the cafeteria ceiling and never, ever come down. Whenever I had Lunchables I would add another meat circle to the ceiling, as part of an ongoing art installation / science project which, as far as I know, is still there.

These days I don't eat Lunchables anymore, and I haven't tried their many off-putting new varieties. But the other day at the grocery store I noticed a particularly alarming new twist on the classic Lunchables formula that was simply too bizarre to pass up.



What you see above you is the new Lunchables "Mess With Your Mouth" line of lunch packs. Displaying an admirable dedication to new frontiers of disgusting, unhealthy children's food, Kraft has outdone itself by adding a packet of "Sour Tongue-Teasing Fizz" powder to the package, and directly suggesting that you pour it onto your turkey and cheese cracker stack. Here's a close-up, lest you doubt me:



Think about this very carefully: Kraft wants kids to pour what is essentially sour Pop Rocks onto lunch meat, and eat it. This is not some small notion on the back of the box - it's the foundation of a whole "Mess With Your Mouth" ad campaign, and the entire packaging is dedicated to this seemingly unHoly marriage of sour candy and processed meat. Oh yeah, they also want you to pour sour fizzing powder onto tacos and hamburgers:



Now, I realize children are much more, shall we say, "open minded" about what they'll eat than adults are, and most seemingly-disgusting snack foods are easily excused by being designed for the adventurous palettes of children. But this time, even with a child's interests in mind, it seems like Lunchables has gone way too far. That meat is nasty enough on its own, but with sour candy on top? EWWW. Still... I bought it. I just needed to know.

When I got home, I opened up my Lunchables pack with excited trepidation. The cheese squares and meat circles were as unnaturally perfect as I remembered them, and every bit as artificially delicious. Now accompanying them, though, was the much-hyped new packet of sour fizzing powder:



Determined to try it out exactly as the box demonstrated, I poured the powder out directly onto the turkey of a cracker stack, and it looked like this:



Mmmmm. Appetizing, no? Its appearance has nothing in common with the colorful popping confetti candy shown in the illustration - rather, it looks more like a pile of cocaine on top of wet turkey. But hey, Kraft is devoting a lot of marketing to this concoction, so maybe they know something I don't. Maybe, despite common sense's drastic assertions to the contrary, it's actually delicious. There was only one way to find out. Here's a grotesque close-up of my tongue teasing the powdered turkey before it went down the hatch:



As it turns out, the taste of Ritz cracker, Kraft cheese, Oscar Meyer meat, and third rate Pop Rocks combining in your mouth is every bit as unpleasant as it sounds like it would be, confirming my suspicion that this is the most disgusting and senseless product in grocery stores at the moment. Convinced that someone at Kraft had completely lost their mind with this promotion, I decided to search for answers.

On the Lunchables website I found a whole section devoted to the "Mess With Your Mouth" foods. "Messing with your mouth" is apparently the prerogative of The Lunchables Brigade, an animated crack team of processed food enthusiasts comprised of a white boy, a black boy (complete with dreadlocks to assure you he's black, and glasses to assure you he's not threatening), and an ambiguously brown girl, who conveniently could be either Asian or Latino, depending on your specific needs for ethnic identification.



As demonstrated in this TV ad, The Lunchables Brigade seems convinced that your lunch is far too pleasing in its current form, and will break through your walls and aggressively coat your food with disgusting fizzy powder, thereby effectively messing with your mouth. This approach likely stems from the Kool-Aid Man School Of Food Mascot Tactics, which teaches that the door is simply a far too inconvenient entry point when fun food is urgently needed.

Even more perplexing is the Kraft website, which is advertising some sort of dancing game and makes no real mention of food whatsoever. I suppose it's a half-assed attempt at giving the impression that Kraft is out to get kids active, when of course its true mission is clogging millions of little arteries with its strange adhesive meats.

Okay, it's way past time for me to stop procrastinating with artificial food and get some work done.

Adventure Notes: Aquatic Humiliation, Renaissance Faires, Tyra Banks, and Hip-Hop Looney Toons.

[Currently Listening To: The Rapture - Pieces Of The People We Love]



Beach culture is easily avoided when you grow up in the overcast gloom of Washington State. There we defined beaches as cold, gray, uninviting places where Laura Palmer's plastic-wrapped dead body washed up onto the rocky shore is far more appropriate iconography than a bikini-clad Pamela Anderson running slow-motion through golden sands. Add to that my penchant for activities that involve sitting in dark rooms basking in the artificial glow of various screens, and my pale Irish complexion which conveniently sidesteps golden brown on its short journey from pasty white to bright pink, and you have a recipe for someone who feels very much out of place on the sunny beaches of Southern California. So in hindsight, I can't exactly say why Tamar and I chose Big Bear Lake as our destination for a much-needed weekend off last week, but it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that we were only actually on the water for about 30 minutes of our 48 hour journey. And, appropriately, it was an absurdly awkward thirty minutes.

Our intention had been to rent jetskis, but the nearby marina didn't have any in. All they had short of a fishing boat was a pedal boat - one of those little plastic things you sit in and pedal like a bicycle. Fuck it, we thought, let's try the pedal boat. It seemed fun in a quaint sort of way. That is, until we gave the lady at the marina our ten dollars, and she took us over to the dock where our aquatic chariot awaited. It was tiny, and plastic, and falling apart... and pink. Bright, flowery, pillow-biting, little girl's bedroom pink. It was the water sports equivalent of a Barbie tricycle. Still, we had come this far, so with some uncertain laughter we climbed aboard and pedaled our way out into the open waters at something akin to a snail's pace. We knew we looked retarded, but it was nice to have it validated by the children who were laughing at us as they zipped past on their jetskis. After fifteen minutes of constant pedaling, our little pedal boat that couldn't had taken us maybe thirty feet out onto the lake. And then, as if fate had constructed a diorama to demonstrate to us exactly how out of our element we were, we lurched right past a big fancy boat where two hunky, golden-skinned frat boy types were drinking beer and rubbing sun tan lotion onto the perfect bodies of two bikini-clad, silicone-enhanced beach babes. They were listening to some kind of sophomoric rock anthem - Linkin Park or whatever frat boys listen to - and laughing and drinking and having a great time, which got even better when they spotted two pasty LA hipster douches with black t-shirts and "I'm an asshole" sunglasses, chugging along the lake on their ironic little pink dingy. They pointed and laughed at us, along with the children who were already laughing at us, and we felt about as uncool as humanly possible. Even the lake itself seemed to be patting us on the head condescendingly and saying: "Oh, my dear little pale, out of shape city-dwellers, you really don't belong here. Please move along, before you get run over by frat boys on jet boats." And that was pretty much the end of our time on the water.

We were actually going to try again with the lake, but then we saw a sign for a Renaissance Faire going on that weekend, which sounded like pretty much the most amazing thing we could possibly do with our time. I'd never been to a Renaissance Faire, so if you're in the dark about this, Ren Faires (as the kids call them) are basically weird little events where the type of people who watch Xena Warrior Princess get all dressed up and party like it's 1399. It's mostly a lot of fat, greasy thirty-somethings who would look strangely at home at a swingers party, and who for some reason find the culture and stylings of the medieval period completely irresistible. I mean, I like Lord Of The Rings as much as the next guy, but these people take it a little too far. They talk in Olde English and sell chain mail and dragon goblets at little stands, and they drink ale and have sword fights and romanticize over a period of time that in all actuality was probably unbelievably shitty to live in. Everyone gets all into character, and it makes me feel indescribably uncomfortable having to talk to someone - say, for example, a guy at a food stand selling me the medieval equivalent of a gyro - who insists on speaking to me in exaggerated Olde English. "Good day, my Lord, art thou interested in a devine feast of dragon's flesh wrapped within the finest pita bread in all the land?" Dude, please just stop it. Clearly I'm not wearing a tunic and drinking mead, so I'm not one of you people, and I know you don't actually talk like that, and it's weirding me the fuck out, so just give me my gyro and let's pretend this never happened.

Oh, and it gets about ten thousand times more embarrassing when they start to sing and dance.



The most alarming thing you'll see en masse at a Ren Faire, though, is a staggering volume of fat mutant tit flesh. There are scores of very large middle-aged women who have stuffed themselves into heavily-strained corsets, and their cups runneth over with ye very olde giant, stretch-marked flesh pillows. I like big boobs as much as the next guy, but it doesn't really count when the boobs are only big because everything else is big, too. It's like if some of my aunts got together and dressed up like medieval princesses with ninety percent of their wrinkly fat old knockers squeezed out into plain sight. It looks something like this, but way worse:



Speaking of large things: Last week I got a call from a producer for The Tyra Banks Show asking if I would go on camera and elaborate my opinions expressed in a blog entry from two years ago entitled "Fuck, I Hate Fat People". That was about the weirdest phone call I've ever received. I tried to explain to her that most of what I write - particularly over-the-top rants like that one - is exaggerated, tongue-in-cheek absurdity for the sake of humor, and that entry was really about my disgust for laziness and gluttony, not some blanket disliking of anyone who's overweight. I'm not going to back down from my stance that you're fucking grotesque if you weigh 400 pounds because you stuff your face with cheeseburgers all day long and never exercise, and even worse if you let your kids get fat by giving them whatever junk food they want. But somehow, the thought of sitting on a daytime talk show looking like the world's biggest asshole as I try to explain the intricacies of my opinion while Tyra Banks paints me into a corner and the blood of a million overweight housewives boils over with rage... Yeah, that didn't seem too appealing to me. So that was the end of that. But hey, Tyra, if you're reading and you want me to come onto your show and talk about how much I hate right wing Christians, I'll fucking show up with bells on. There's no intricacy to that opinion, at all. I just fucking hate those ignorant fucks, and I'll talk about it until I'm blue in the face.



Anyway, after the Ren Faire started to get creepy we ventured into the town of Big Bear where we discovered The Super Bear Arcade - only the greatest old arcade in the world. I've discussed at length my remorse over the tragic death of the great American video arcade, so whenever I happen upon one which, either through extreme care or extreme negligence, has managed to retain that forgotten magic of yesteryear - it excites me to no end. The Super Bear - nearly forty years old and wearing age on its sleeve - is pure, glorious nostalgic heaven. It has well-worn but working original versions of every classic arcade game ever made, a long, gorgeous row of skee ball lanes, a homemade light gun shooting gallery, a curious offering of punk rock t-shirts for sale, and an adorably Mom & Pop selection of bizarre redemption prizes. Where most arcades reward you with stuffed animals and candy when you collect enough prize points, this arcade's big-ticket items included an iced tea maker, dinner plates, and yes, a crock pot:



What lucky child will save up FOUR THOUSAND coupons for that enticing prize? Amazing. But best of all, The Super Bear Arcade was home to Hercules - THE WORLD'S LARGEST PINBALL MACHINE:



An oddity from the late 70's, I'd never actually seen one of these before, and this place had two of them. They're about twice the size of a normal pinball machine, and smack around an 8 ball with their giant flippers. It's actually not all that fun - everything being so huge slows the action down considerably - but hey, the novelty factor is through the roof.

We also became oddly determined to collect the entire set of a particularly distressing series of Looney Toons figurines from a 50 cent machine. To this day, the classic Warner Bros. animated shorts of the 40's and 50's remain some of the finest cartoons ever produced. But the old-fashioned simplicity of Bugs Bunny and his pals aren't nearly as attractive to the trend-savvy children of the 21st century, which have led to many desperate attempts to modernize the Looney Toons characters and make them "hip." I really hate seeing great American icons dirtied with the callous, shallow trappings of disposable fads for the sake of making a few bucks, so when we discovered Hip-Hop Looney Toons figurines, it was an alarming new low for me. Take a look at these, and cry a little inside as I did:



Porky Pig wearing a gold cross? Taz freestylin' on the mic? Daffy saying "holla at a duck"? Seriously, what the fuck is going on? Aren't capsule toys meant for ten year olds? The day the word "bling" enters my ten year old's vocabulary is the day we pack it all up and fucking move out to the middle of Montana and fertilize crops with our own feces, Unibomber style, and have a six month detox course of reading Tom Sawyer and watching old Disney movies and, like, learning to play the piano or something.

Also, does anyone know what "flossin'" means? Apparently it's what Porky Pig is doing, and I don't think it involves his dental care. Man, I'm so not down with the kids these days. Anyway, my favorite Hip-Hop Looney Toon - and by that I m