With the exception of the almost daily humiliation and embarrassment of public school, many of the more interesting pieces of my life that I can remember have occurred during the summer, including but not limited to soaking my clothing with my own urine during a childhood road trip, complaining about not being able to go on a particular carnival ride and then shrieking as soon as it started until I could get off, and putting my foot in my mouth in front of relatives on countless summer visits. Such things can't compare with the drudgery and routine of the fall, winter, and spring except for, as I said, the regular social indignations of the public school year. I suppose someday I will be middle-aged and boring, and every day of every year will be just as routine, perhaps without the social indignation if I happen to find a job with tolerable coworkers.
The same was true of my dietary habits, which consisted of breakfast pastry, sandwich, hotdog, and fast food. I don't know what more could be expected of a bland suburbanite such as myself. Regardless, the point is that strange things happen over the summer. Just recently I had a rather unpleasant experience with a ham sandwich. It was bad deli meat; not quite to the point of decomposing, and the lower life forms not yet claimed it, but it was clearly rancid. I knew from the moment I opened the plastic bag, because I sniffed it. I always sniff my meat. It helps avoid such pleasant experiences. The ham had a tangy, rancid smell to it. It wasn't terribly strong, and so I decided to take my chances and went through the whole process of making a sandwich. After all. it had only been purchased six days prior. I assumed it would be alright.
Yet halfway into the meal I realized it wasn't alright. It tasted like feet: hot, sweaty, cheesy feet. Not that I've ever tasted feet, mind you, and considering that true 'taste' is limited simply to sweetness, sourness, bitterness, and saltiness, the rest being smell, I suppose I could say that it smelled even worse when a piece of it was sitting in my mouth. I set it aside for a moment. It seemed a shame to throw away all that meat; I had really piled it on, too, because I wanted to use the rest of it before it went bad. Apparently I was too late. Finally I decided to choke down the rest of it, because it certainly wasn't getting any fresher now that it was out of in the refrigerator and in the steamy summer heat. Therefore, I struggled valiantly to finish the sandwich, but I just couldn't do it. I threw the remaining quarter away. What a waste.
Still, I'm more interested in telling a different story of culinary adventure, in which I had some variety of spicy meat. I can't quite remember if it was chicken or beef or people or what, but it was spicy. That was the point of the entire meal, that it would burn tongues and make eyes water, even if served at room temperature. There was some kind of juice on it, not quite a sauce, and there were little seeds or pebbles or something in it from which the spiciness truly originated. At any rate, it was a radical deviation from my normal diet, the spiciest part of which was the specks of sausage distributed in my morning toaster pastry treat, or perhaps the occasional dash of pepper.
As I bit into one of the seeds, it released a vile and caustic substance into my mouth. I spat it out, but residue remained on my tongue. When I inhaled, its fumes came in too, and they ate away at the tender lining of my trachea and alveoli, thus inducing a coughing fit. I clutched wildly for the glass of water I had positioned nearby in preparation for such an event. I drained it in a few gulps and felt only mild relief.
Though I'm a self-proclaimed masochist, I try to avoid pain; hypocritical perhaps, but true. As such, I decided to scrape off the demon seed. It clung with unsettling tenacity to the fork. It stuck in between the prongs when I wiped it on the plate. I would not risk ingesting any more of it, and so I was reduced to jabbing only the tips into the slab of meat and biting it as with some savory popsicle. I wept inwardly at the realization that I would be forevermore unable to dine at a five star restaurant.
Otherwise the food was alright, I suppose, once I had disposed of the spice of many burnings, but it was also almost entirely plain; dull, boring, bland, devoid of all value and meaning, much like my life. Some of the spicy sauce had soaked into the meat, but it was not even remotely as bad as it was before. It provided some semblance of nutrition, anyway. Of course, if I knew what a hassle it would be to me I would have passed it up in favor of, say, crackers or feces.
It was later that night, you see, when it came back to me. It was a couple of hours past midnight in a balmy summer breeze when I was returning home from the house of an acquaintance of mine. I had not been feeling well at all, which confused me, for I had already contracted and recovered from my yearly illness months prior. I was more than a little nauseous, and I wasn't pleased about having to make the trek across town to get home, even if it was the shorter dimension of the town. A distance of just under two miles would take approximately forty minutes.
At two blocks I became aware that some undignified doings were going on deep within my gastrointestinal tract. Rumbles emanated from down there; some mass quantity of gas was shifting around. I tried to remember the gas laws as I staggered along the sidewalk. It seemed that my bladder was full beyond excuse. If I wanted to relieve the gas pressure things would get ugly. The idea of such an incident occurring on these abandoned suburban streets in the middle of the night, not to be discovered until morning during a brisk leisurely stroll, made me snicker until another stabbing pain from below silenced me.
The road sloped downward at this point, which was both a blessing and a curse. It allowed gravity to do some of the work for me, thus speeding up the trip home and allowing me to save my energy for controlling my bowels. However, in speeding up the trip it also increased the turbulence. How typical, that an additional pain in my ass would come disguised as some object of comfort.
I remembered then. Pivnert. P V equal to n r T. I assumed the volume of my intestines would remain relatively constant, and so as the number of moles of gas increased, so would the pressure; unless, of course, the temperature was decreasing, While I was getting chills, it was certainly not from cold gas. If anything I was worried that it was hot gas.
Up ahead I saw the shining beacon of a stop light, the only one on this route. It represented the halfway mark of this journey. In the daytime it would be packed with cars all day long, and I would have to wait a full five minutes for the light to change, even after pressing the crosswalk button on the corner. Now, though, in the dead of night, the street was entirely abandoned. Even an hour ago an occasional car would zip by, perhaps ever few minutes, and I would see their headlights in the distance. Now, though, there was nothing but streetlights and the glow from roadside businesses, and so I darted across the road with only a cursory glance to either side.
Thirty minutes had elapsed since I started out. By some innate rectal sense I knew that the growing pressure would soon exceed what little power I had over my lower muscles. I feared not the violent expulsion of gas, but rather what sinister, more solid things might come with it. I was now in what I would call my own neighborhood, not that I was particularly social and/or neighborly with or appreciative of those who lived nearby.
I was a mere few blocks away from home when the first eruption occurred. It was a powerful rumbler, a rib cage rattler, a real cheek flapper; the kind of noise one would never want to make in public because it would be impossible to conceal or to blame on someone else. Perhaps in the setting of my old high school it would fun to see the reactions, those little jerks. Regardless, it almost seemed to echo between the houses in the empty night. Mercifully, that was all I produced.
Yet it continued with each step, as if I were marching to the rhythm of some very rude sounding drum. I was more than a little alarmed at just how long this went on; I had no idea that such a large quantity of anything could fit inside me. The pressure gradually lessened until my bladder was the greater threat, and I was still a few blocks away from a bathroom I would use willingly.
Excluding my infancy, there had been only three or four outstanding incidents in which I wet myself in a place that was public, outside, or otherwise not a bathroom. The first, I am proud to say, was when I let loose in one of my elementary school classrooms. My clothing got the worst of it, the floor only being dripped on. Still, I assume no other student ever left such a mark in that room. At the time I rushed to the bathroom for some paper towels to conceal the deed. Today, with my bitterness and cynicism, perhaps I would have left it there for some poor schmuck to find. I doubt I'd be quite so daring as to take credit for it openly. The second incident was during a family road trip; there is not much to say about that, except to reiterate that such notable events could only occur during the summer. Perhaps there was one more after that, but the most recent was while I was walking home from school. That was in the wintertime, actually, but it certainly would not be any better if it happened again now, on these same streets.
Finally I was on my own street, but I didn't dare run the rest of the distance, for fear that the jarring impact of my feet on concrete would trigger something awful. I fumbled in my pockets for the house key. I would not have any time to spare. My house came into view around the corner of another. Still I resisted the urge to run, but instead took larger steps. My hands trembled as I jabbed the key outward towards the lock. It connected in every possible place except the keyhole before it slipped into place. Once inside I all but kicked off my shoes while simultaneously closing and locking the door behind me. The bathroom was just upstairs.
Throwing caution to the wind, I ran full tilt towards the stairs. I hoped the noise would not wake the rest of the household. Then again, that was the least of my concerns. I closed and locked the bathroom door behind me, and clawed at my accessories. I always take my wristwatch off, though I'm not sure why. I had neglected to take my jacket off as well. Lastly, I turned on the overhead vent, because I knew this was not going to be pretty.
I emerged a full thirty minutes later, with renewed vigor, with half a roll less of toilet paper, and three pounds lighter. Oddly enough, my headache was gone. My nausea remained, but only until I shut the door behind me as I left the bathroom. I left the vent on. I swear, I never feel so good as when I have such a relieving trip to the bathroom. It makes the struggle of getting there in time seem well worth the trouble.
Anyway, it never would have happened if it hadn't been for that frigging spicy chicken. Even with the happy ending, I would not want to repeat such a thing anytime soon. I might not be so fortunate next time, and therefore I renounce all food that is not processed and blandly suburban for the sake of my own comfort. I suppose it's kind of sad that I would cut myself off from that life's pleasures, to imprison myself in a gilded cage as it were. Well, screw it.