"Hey..um..you got a little something on your face."

In our storyline of my college disasters, I offer to you some advice:

If you’re ever partying in someone else’s dorm room…

HIDE THE MARKERS.

Let me explain.

Back in college, every Thursday night was party night. This is because some kids went home over the weekends and - much like work - no one does anything on Fridays anyway so of course on one of these happy Thursday party nights I drank so much that I blacked out.

Like OUT OUT.

The following morning, I woke up in the middle of the floor in my friend's room...still fully dressed and feeling like I had been on the receiving end of a Whack-A-Mole hammer.

My buddy Spike greeted me. He was smirking.

“Good morning. How you feeling?”

Me: “Eh…okay…”

I managed to somehow get myself upright and stumbled past him…

Me: “I’m…going to wash up.”

I grabbed my things, and headed for the shower room down the hallway of the dorm, saying hi to everyone else who was up as I walked by.

Maybe 5 or 6 of my friends talked to me on the way.

I stepped into the bathroom…and grabbed hold of one of the sinks.

I was sick. WAY sick.

After heaving a bit into the sink, I managed to raise my head…

…and look at my face in the mirror.

WHAT. THE FUCK.

I had cat whiskers.

I had Spock eyebrows.

I had tic-tac-toe drawn on my right cheek.

I had a big red dot on my nose.

I had a moustache.

I had the acronym “NFL” (Nice F*cking Life) on my left cheek.

SONOFABITCH.

"Oh no no NO NO NO"

I start the water, grab my towel and start rubbing.

…and rubbing…

…and rubbing…

MOTHERFUCKER ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!?

Nope. Not kidding.

Permanent marker.

OH COME ON!!

I grab my stuff and go back into Spike’s room…

…fully aware now that not only did HE KNOW that I looked like this when I woke up…but that everyone who said “hi” to me in the hallway knew the same thing.

Ugh.

Me: “Dude. The fuck! How could you let them do this to me?!”

Spike: “Hey..hey…I stopped them from pulling your pants down.”

Ah. Small favors.

Apparently, as I lay there unconscious on Spike’s floor, a crowd had gathered around to doodle on me.

At one point, the RA (Resident Assistant) came in to find out what was going on. He looked at everyone in the room, defiling me.

They all stopped, a room full of drunk college kids with markers in their hand hovering over a blacked-out sexy midget guy.

Oh, shit.

Busted.

Then the RA grabbed the marker from one of the accomplices.

“My turn!!”

…and started doodling himself.

Asshole.

So, back to the shower I go.

As I keep trying to scrub away, I unbutton my shirt to get into the shower…

Oh…

Oh no…

A big red heart drawn on my chest…

Even more tic-tac-toe…

The word “Asshole” scrawled across my belly.

Again…

PERMANENT MARKER.

I hate people.

I rubbed my face and stomach until I shed my skin trying to clean that shit off.

In the end, I looked like an Oompa Loompa:

Short.

Red.

And I like to sing about chocolate and row boats.

…that last part doesn’t fit the story. Scratch it.

Anyway…

I don’t think I ever drank that much again…

But my buddy, Pete, did.

At which point, we shaved his head as soon as he blacked out.

True story.

Not once, but we shaved Pete's head TWICE. You'd think he'd learn after the first time but no.

So I guess things could have been worse.

Thanks, Spike…for keeping my pants on.

Although, I would have found the joy of manscaping a long time ago.

Leg Day

Back when I cared what I actually looked like (read: before I got married and gave up), I went to the gym 4 or 5 times a week for about 2 hours at a time.

Obviously, this was also before I had anything better to do and Internet porn had not yet been invented to fill up the remaining voids.

The gym I went to was on the corner of a great big strip mall and now I'm thinking having a strip mall made of nothing but strip joints is the best. idea. ever. and AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS EVER THOUGHT OF THIS?!

Sorry. "Strip" is one of my trigger words.

To get into the gym from the parking lot required you to either (a) use steps on the end of the sidewalk or (b) take the shortcut route of stepping up the 12-inch high curb just in front of the door.

I'm lazy. I always did the curb thing. Walking around to the steps seemed like a lot of work at the time and even though I'd spend 2 hours in the gym, I'm the kind of person who doesn't even like walking to his car.

So exhausting.

One day, I decided to do a very heavy 'leg' day. Just ALL leg work for 2 hours straight.

If you've ever done this, you know that the end result of a heavy leg day is that your lower limbs become the consistency of jelly but with far much less stability and slightly more hair.

Unfortunately, my car was also a stick-shift so after some such "leg days" sitting at a light while trying to depress the clutch resulted in me looking like I was attempting an Elvis impression from the driver's seat.

Regardless, I had finished my leg workout, showered and headed out the door.

I stood on the curb for a moment, deciding whether or not I should take the stairs or risk stepping down the curb.

As I looked up, a car approached and stopped to let me go across. My decision was made for me. Off the curb it was.

I waved 'thanks' to the driver and stepped off the curb into the parking lot just in front of him.

My foot hit the pavement.

Uh-oh.

I could feel my jelly landing leg rippling as my leg completely buckled out from under me and my tiny but muscly little body fell forward, gym bag flying through the air, arms flailing, face contorted in a "WHOA" grimace as I crumpled to the pavement...landing right in front of the car that was letting me go.

I looked up from the pavement. My face beet red from embarrassment.

The driver of the car was just kind of staring at me with his mouth slightly agape, like, 'Um...okay.'

Ah. Thanks for your concern, fellow citizen.

I pushed myself up and got to my legs, completely aware that I looked like a baby horse trying to stand for the first time.

Brushing myself off, I staggered across to my car like a man with polio and no braces. Luckily, my gym back flung forward about 20-feet during this display, landing right next to my car, so I was able to just hop in and reach down through my open door and grab it. No fucking way was I bending down to get it.

I closed the door and started my car.

Ah, yes.

Stick-shift.

Motherfucker.

The Time I Was Ascared

Christmas, 1978.

I had just received my very first digital clock as a present.

As you can imagine, this is what every 10-year old always dreams of. Waking, bright eyed and wondrous...tearing into his presents with excitement and anticipation and then opening a fucking clock ARE YOU KIDDING ME, SANTA?!

But this was DIGITAL so of course I took it out of the box and plugged it in and fiddled with it for a little bit by pressing this and moving that and what does this button do? and OOH IT HAS RED LIGHTS and then kind of just threw it over on my bed because as every kid knows you can only play with a digital clock for a few hours straight before it starts to get boring.

On the bright side, I also got a book.

I'm just now coming to the realization that this was probablyl the worst. Christmas. Ever.

But the book I got from Santa was 'The Amityville Horror' in paperback. Because nothing says 'Merry Christmas' like the story of demonic possession in a house where an entire family was murdered by their son.

*angels sing*

Regardless, I remember being very excited to get this book because - as I'm sure you've realized - I'm kind of warped and at even age 10 I was a little effed in the melon. So of course I thumbed through it and got to the part where the house yells "GET OUT" and HOLY SHIT THAT WAS SPOOKY.

Being the responsible boy that I was, I immediately ran upstairs in our two-family house to get my cousin, Kim, to read her the whole passage because at age 7 this would probably freak the ever-loving SHIT out of her and what kind of cousin would I be if I didn't do that?

RIGHT.

So, there Kim and I sat on the edge of my bed as I read the passage in the creepiest voice I could muster while being a 10-year old boy with the voice of a squirrel. Please note that I'm paraphrasing here because I'm too cheap to buy the book for the actual quotes and Google was fairly useless.

Me (reading): "..the room filled with flies.."

Kim's eyes widened, as I continued...

Me (deepening my voice): "..Father Mancuso began to spread holy water..when suddenly..a voice.."

The room remained deathly quiet..

Me (in a booming voice): "..GET OUT!!.."

As I read these words, I could feel the fear growing in myself.

And as much as it was painfully obvious that my poor little cousin, Kim, was shitting her little pants, I was too.

For effect, I deepened my voice as low as I could muster.

Then I repeated the words again..deeper and louder:

Me: "GET....OUT!!!!!"

It was at this PRECISE moment that the digital alarm clock that I had received as a present and was fumbling around with earlier decided to have it's fucking alarm go off.

BZZZZ BZZZZ BZZZZ BZZZZ BZZZZ BZZZZ BZZZZ BZZZZZ

The last thing I remember was leaping from my bed and SCREAMING while running the full length of my house at roughly the speed of sound with my poor little cousin, Kim, right behind me and also screaming her lungs as well - but probably because she was trapped in the vacuum created by my draft as I made a beeline for my parents.

Sweating. Heart pounding. Scared shitless.

I could still hear my alarm clock buzzing it's evil little brain out in my room with me being too petrified to go back in there and try to figure out how to shut the goddamn thing off.

To this very day, I hate that sound.

And demons that yell at you to leave.

They suck, too.

I'd be a shoo-in if the NRA hired teenage spokespeople

When I was about 12 or 13 and a giant fat shit of a kid, my parents moved me from the city to the country - thus introducing me to the concept of ‘fresh air’ and ‘clean water’ and ‘no city trash pickup so guess who is driving with your drunk father to the dump today’ and ‘no McDonald’s within walking distance SERIOUSLY?! WTF GUYS.’

I miss the Fry Guys. So funny.

Like little midget Carrot Tops.



My new house in southern New Hampshire was surrounded by these tall weird looking things made of wood called ‘trees.’ There were lots of these ‘trees’ and when put together in bunches they were called ‘woods’ which I’m assuming is because the trees all seem to be built with it.

The more you know.


So time went by and I got older and somehow skinnier and got my license and pretty soon my old city friends would come to visit me once in a while and bring with them a trunkful of armaments and loads and loads of ammunition.

Oh.

I forgot to mention my friend, Lou.

Lou was one of my city friends who was pretty obsessed with guns and when I say ‘pretty obsessed’ I mean ‘most likely to kill all of us in a random fit of insanity’ because he was the only 16 year old I knew who could probably go toe-to-toe with Sarah Conner and her Mexican friends based solely on his cache of weapons.


So here’s how one of their visits to my quaint, suburban house would go:








Yes.

On a typical Sunday morning it wouldn’t be weird to see four high-schoolers standing at the end of my driveway emptying 53,000 rounds of ammunition randomly into the woods behind my house like a group of John J. Rambos but with less muscles and way more acne.

Also, I had a compound bow.

Because nothing says ‘being responsible with firearms’ like adding a bow and arrow into the mix and then, just for shits and giggles, doing THIS:


Right.

Like if I could do THAT I'd be sitting here writing this shitty blog.

No. I'd take my bow and so stuff like this:


I would haul back and shoot arrows way into the sky just to see how high and far I could get them to go.

Me: “Wow. That went really far.”

Ed: “Yeah. I wonder where it landed.”

Meanwhile...

...just a little further north of my house:


Yes.

We forgot there were houses behind these woods.

..aaaaand scene.

The Day God Punished Me

I’m not a religious man.

Mainly this is because my parents WERE religious and therefore I got dragged to church every friggin’ Sunday for an hour when I really should have been watching Starblazers instead of trying to figure out what yoga position I was supposed to be in because if you’ve EVER been to a Catholic church you know the whole thing goes like this:








My mother, in true Catholic-mom fashion, would threaten me whenever I did something that she didn’t want me to do using God’s Almighty wrath as her leverage.






Moms: cockblocking kids' fun since FOREVER.

Typically I blew all this stuff off because as an only child I knew I could get away with a shit ton because if I ever ran away she had NO BACKUP KIDS.

That’s why you always have at least two kids, people.

Backup plan in case one of them doesn't work out.


So my mother preached and preached about how one day God would punish me and I kept on keeping on…

Until the day after Halloween when I was about 8.

You see, I had dressed up as Frankenstein or something using one of those cheap plastic masks with the eyeholes cut out and I really really wanted to go out the next day to play while I was wearing it.


WHAT?!?

This is bullshit.

I was undaunted, though. Seriously - who would expect a kid in a Frankenstein mask AFTER Halloween?!

Such tomfoolery!

So I pressed..



OH COME ON.

Seriously. It was, like, 1976 and I'd like to think that God was busy with the first Ebola outbreak in Africa or the debate of VHS vs. Betamax so I’m PRETTY SURE he had better things to do than actually punish a fat kid running around in a Frankenstein mask.

With complete disregard for my mother’s repeated admonitions, I slipped on the mask and bolted out my side door with all the amazing crystal-clear peripheral vision of a pirate wearing two eye patches.


As the door closed behind me..I could hear my mother yelling out..


YES! God will punish me, mom?! HA, I say!


HA!

I laugh in the face of danger!


God will punish me.

How stupi...


I’m not sure what happened next but I distinctly remember somehow tripping on the very top step of our solid concrete stairs THAT HAD NOTHING ON THEM and skidding - forearms and palms first - down each of the 6 steps while my field of vision quickly changed from 'looking down my driveway' to 'stairs-sky-stairs-sky' until I landed in a fat bloody heap at the bottom.

God: 1
Rod: 0

Sonofabitch.

God actually punished me. Just like mom said.

There will be no living with the woman after this.

Update on my Childhood Pneumonia Alcoholism Post

So I posted about how my parents used to kind of drug me into a stupor when I was a kid which, honestly, probably explains A LOT..

..and I was surprised to find that I was not alone in being the recipient of homemade 'medicines' that may or may not include enough alcohol to fully stock a party at one of the Kennedys estates.

*********************

UPDATE:

If you thought I was making this up, here's an email I sent to my mom while I was writing that post trying to figure out the name of the crap they were giving me was, and what was actually in it that they were apparently trying to kill me with.

Here's what I remembered was in it:

1) HOT Water
2) Orange juice
3) FUCKING MOLASSES WTF
4) Booze. Lots and lots of booze.

Why you can't get this shit in a juicebox, I have no idea.

But that's all I could remember was in it, so I emailed my mom:




OH. Lemon. Sorry.

I was missing the obvious miraculous healing properties of "Vitamin-C" in this adolescent version of a Harvey Wallbanger.

Also, based on my mom's email, my family lineage includes a long line of parents trying to turn their small children into alcoholics.

Consider the torch passed, mom.




Oh, look.

ANOTHER INGREDIENT.

Nice.

Molasses AND honey.

Two. Natural. Laxatives.

Because once the kid wakes up in a week, it would probably be a great idea if he shit for three days just to make sure all the demons are out.

Makes sense.

Homemade French Remedies and Gradeschool AA Meetings

If you were a small child of the 70's like I was, you grew up in a time of great freedom and by 'great freedom' I mean 'extreme danger' because back then:

Cigarettes didn't cause cancer:



And, sure, lots and lots of kids disappeared on their walks to and from school, but I never did during any of my 4-block walks alone so...

Child predators mustn't have existed:



And seatbelts were simply those annoying strappy things that you sat on in the car and they gave you wedgies so you just, you know, cut them off with the scissors that you were running around with - points up, of course.


But every so often I would catch a pretty good cold so my parents would immediately call the doctor.

HAHAHAHAHA.

No. No they didn't call my doctor.

In hindsight it's probably a pretty good thing they didn't call the doctor because of that one time he mistook a cyst in my throat for my Adams Apple (I had no idea the University of Phoenix had a medical program in the 70's) and I almost died.


True story.

So, no. No doctor for me.

Instead of calling someone who was supposedly trained in the field of health care, my parents would simply decide that they would take matters into their own skilled hands as a hairdresser and carpenter and, you know..

MAKE THEIR OWN MEDICINE.



When I was really sick and had a fever and dying my father would look at me and then over at the Grim Reaper hanging out just waiting for me to die! die already! and decide it was time for me to have a drink called "Poonce" or "Pownce" but he would say it in a French accent which was appropriate because it made it sound like it was authorized as part of the Geneva Convention.

"Poonce" was made of the following ingredients:

1) HOT Water
2) Orange juice
3) FUCKING MOLASSES WTF
4) Booze. Lots and lots of booze.
5) Probably more booze.*

*optional



As you can see from the ingredient label, the primary goal of "Poonce" was to NOT actually heal me but to instead make me pass out and remain in a coma for five days.

This is why I think it was actually called "Pounce" as in "As soon as I drink this and pass out my dad is totally going to pounce on my mom."

Oh. Look.

I just threw up a little.



The problem with getting your small child completely shitfaced - outside of the obvious legal and moral obligations you have as their parent and caretaker and supposedly someone who loves them and would like to keep their liver as a functioning part of their anatomy - is that you never know what happens to their forming and impressionable little minds once they, you know, black out from all the GODDAMN ALCOHOL POISONING.

Me?

I WOULD HAVE FUCKED. UP. DREAMS.

Like this one.



Oh! A peaceful desert landscape and...

..um..


ah crap.

I remember seeing the flash and the mushroom cloud in the dream but that's pretty much all I remember so the remainder of what happened will now be brought to you from my parents' perspective.



My parents awoke to my blood-curdling scream but I'm sure my dad was probably still in a 12-pack daze so I know for sure it was my mother who bolted into my room first.



Yep.

Not in my bed.

Luckily for them, I was still screaming at the top of my lungs so it was pretty easy to figure out where I was.



To be honest here, I was a fat shit of a kid so there's no way I would actually fit under my bed so, instead, my mother found me crouched under a table in my room but it was easier to draw it this way.

But my mother found me screaming and shook me to snap me out of it at which point this happened:


As a parent, I need to tell you that if I ever run into my kids' room and he's staring wide-eyed AT NOTHING and whispering over and over 'Did you see it? Did you see it?' that I would be right the fuck out of there immediately because I've seen 'The Ring' and 'The Grudge' and 'Home Alone' and if there's one thing I know it's DON'T FUCK WITH THE CREEPY KID.

Mom: "Rodney? What? Did I see what, honey?"

Me: "The bomb. Mom. They dropped the bomb."

Mom: *flees

I don't remember any of this but when I talked to my mom the next day she told me all about it like she was telling a ghost story.

Not surprisingly, I'm pretty positive that's the last time I had that homemade Pounce or Poonce or whatever the fuck it was.

On a related note, though, I felt much better.

Nuclear explosions clear your sinuses right the fuck out, apparently.