Things I Love

I always write "Things I Hate," so here's a list of "Things I Love:"

-Making perfect contact with a baseball with a wood bat.

-The feeling of blood rushing into your muscles right after completing a really difficult last rep. Especially good for dumbbell bench and skullcrushers.

-The face all dogs make when they take a dump - sheepishly glancing around, mouth pulled tight into a frowny clown face. Combines well with the posture every human assumes when he realizes the dog he's walking is about to drop a deuce: standing still and looking around helplessly, dangling the leash while maintaining a safe distance from the biohazard being deposited.

-Puppy breath.

-When an athlete goes into the "violent elation" pose after a hard-fought victory - fists clenched by the waist, head back, eyes wide, screaming "AAAAHHHH!!!" in one short burst. Kevin Garnett is a master of this.

-Taking a really long, satisfying piss and getting that shiver that runs up your spine.

-Putting your freshly shaved head under the showerhead for the first time.

-When someone you don't know quotes a really obscure movie line that you love, like Chong Li admitting defeat by saying "Mah... te" from the end of Bloodsport.

-Peeing outside under the stars.

-Being anyplace where you can turn 360 degrees without seeing any manmade structures.

-When you've been in the ocean all day and you lie in bed at night, and you can still feel the phantom current pulling at your legs.

-The back part of a girl's neck that you can only see when she has her hair up in a ponytail.

-Going for a run to "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails.

-The way the drive-thru person at In-N-Out gets my order right every time, even when it's complicated, and reads it back to me in coherent, audible English. It practically brings a tear to my eye, if only because it's so refreshing compared to other fast-food places. I understand that the Taco Bell guy can't speak English, but he could at least turn the speaker volume up past "Ghost With Emphysema" so I can GUESS what he's saying.

-Starting your car just in time to hear the beginning of an awesome song.

-Trying to pinpoint where you remember a TV character from for 10 minutes and then successfully remembering. (Recently made obsolete by the iPhone.)

-The feeling of anticipation you get when you make a throw to the plate from the outfield and you know the guy is out while the ball is still in flight.

-The barely-painful tingling sensation you get in the middle of your back from a light sunburn after you spent all day outside.

-Conversely, looking outside and realizing the sun's going down and you're still wearing a bathrobe.

-When someone's behind you in line at the supermarket and the items he's purchasing speak such volumes about his life that you feel like you know him intimately. This is gratifying regardless of the statement the person's groceries make; either you mentally congratulate the person on his excellent taste (Cookie Crisp, Blue Moon beer, beef jerky, and Bagel Bites) or you get to feel like you're better than him (hummus, TV dinners, and low-fat yogurt).

BLLLAAAAAAGGGGHHHH!!!

Puking is unique. It's one of the handful of human experiences that are truly universal. It's also rare that you can be at your physical rock bottom and still have other people laughing at you - for example, if you're wearing a Tinkerbell costume and throwing up still-undigested black beans onto your own front porch during a Halloween party. Aside from that fun experience, some lessons I've gathered from a lifetime spent discussing philosophy with the porcelain pillow:

Don't ever rent an apartment with a gross bathroom if you can possibly afford it. Apartments are retreats, and as a human being, I can guarantee that some of your darkest hours will take place on or near a toilet. It’s important to have a faithful, clean friend in that time of need. There's nothing worse than desperately clinging to the rim of an unfamiliar toilet, guts convulsing furiously, and having to wonder how much butt gravy has been splattered over the space your chin occupies. It's definitely possible someone like Chris Farley or John Goodman or someone who really liked Indian food owned the place before you, and that is not a thought you want to conjure up during the "nightmare" portion of your puking vision quest.

In other words, when you’re looking at a new place, inspect that shit close. Look behind the septic tank. Know in advance how much Comet it's going to take to rectify the situation. Bring a blacklight if you have to. Think about it this way: your face will probably only touch two surfaces in all the time you live there - your pillow and your toilet. You can always buy new pillowcases, but you don't get to bring your own toilet. Eventually, you and that toilet will come to share an intimate bond. If you think about it carefully, you can probably describe every toilet you've puked into with the same level of detail as many of your relationships. Some toilets are stable and forgiving and can always be counted on. Others are just fuzzy memories that you only met because of tequila and poor decisions.

The first time I puked from drinking was actually in college. I don't know how I managed to hold it off until then, considering everything I drank in high school was some horrible combination of things like powdered Gatorade and Goldschlager. It was less than a month into my sophomore year, and I had friends visiting me from out of town. My roommate had taken the opportunity to make floats with ice cream, root beer, vanilla vodka, and Bacardi 151. I know because the last thing I remember was asking him about the recipe.

I don't remember anything that happened between the time we started drinking and midnight, when I decided it would be a good idea to go to bed. Because our room was tiny, I had lofted my bed and put my desk under it to conserve space. This required that I climb up to the bed using the desk as a foothold, which is more difficult than it sounds when you're incredibly drunk. After a heroic struggle, I managed to summit the bed and passed out.

Thirty minutes later I woke up with my mouth watering. To the experienced puker, this is a dead giveaway that the stomach has given the "Lube up the pipes - it's coming back up!" order. I knew I had about thirty seconds to get to the bathroom down the hall. Logically, I figured that the best way to do this would be to just jump out of bed. My body, however, was still hammered and translated this into falling six feet directly onto a metal dumbbell that had been lying on the floor. For a quarter of a second, the thought that I might have just cracked my rib overwhelmed the need to barf, and I groaned enough for my friend - who was sleeping on the futon - to wake up and laugh at me.

I got up, drunk-jogged down the hall in my basketball shorts, and hustled into the bathroom. Thankfully, it was empty. At this point the "24"-style clock in my digestive tract was at about 0:03, so I got into the first available stall and cut loose.

"BLLLLAAAAAAAAGGGHHH!!!"

After about five minutes of puking up everything I'd eaten since lunch, I was confident that I had everything under control and decided it was time to go back to bed. My brain chose not to remember leaving the stall... which is probably why my (very conservative Mormon) friend walked into the bathroom to pee at 4 AM and found me with my cheek comfortably resting at the base of one of the urinals. Thoughtfully, I had cleaned up the leftover barf I'd deposited there and was employing the unused paper towels involved in that effort as a pillow. He started laughing immediately. I opened one eye and saw where I was.

"Whah... wha?"

He kept laughing.

"Wha... awww! Awww!" I realized how I'd spent the night. I also later found out that several other guys from my house had come into the bathroom, peed in the urinal adjacent to mine, and decided not to wake me up. I must have looked peaceful. Needless to say, that urinal and I are now forever connected, whether I want us to be or not. I'm surprised there isn't a plaque above it with my name on it.

There were others, too. I shared a precious moment with the toilet on the second floor of the house I lived in junior year. That session was made even more special by the fact that my girlfriend thought I was dying because it looked like I was puking up blood. In reality, I had come home drunk and wandered into the kitchen, where I had come across an entire bowl of fresh strawberries. I ate all of them, and they all came back up about twenty minutes later in various states of digestion. In case any Hollywood special effects designers are reading this: this is an excellent way to make other people think you are either dying or possessed by some kind of demon. I actually had a brief "Holy shit, THE DEVIL IS COMING OUT OF ME!" moment when the first salvo of chunky, bright-red puke rocketed out of my mouth and into the toilet, but this was quickly replaced with "Haha - AWESOME! [BLLLAAAAGGGHHH!!!!]"

That toilet and I grew to have a loving relationship over the next year. There would be others; I grew close to my toilets in Massachusetts too. I threw up in my apartment in Cambridge the night I moved in, after a game of Beirut with my new roommates. That bathroom was the site of multiple lessons for me, the most important of which was that when it comes to drinking, West Coast colleges don't really compare to the Northeast and South. Two of my roommates had played hockey at the University of Vermont. If you know anything about hockey players or Vermont, you know that that combination is a recipe for disaster on the order of Andre the Giant attending school at a brewery. There was a full-size Rubbermaid trash can in our kitchen just for empty MGD cans, and they filled it to the top every week. After six months of living with them, I don't think I can be an organ donor anymore.

I'm pretty comfortable with my toilet now. She's cool, and we talk every now and again, but recently we've been in a dry spell, and I'm not sure I'm giving her the attention she deserves. I'm not sure it's time for a change just yet, but it might be time to spice things up. Maybe add some strawberries or something.

ED: Yes, I'm sorry it's taken so long to put stuff up here. One of the key steps to becoming a writer is actually, you know, writing, which is something I should do more of. In the words of great butt pirate/writer Oscar Wilde, "If you want to build houses, build a house."