Tales From This Side

Secret insight into my thesis chair's hopes and dreams... http://www.theonion.com/content/node/48461 ...and I swear I'll get back to the fireball story shortly.

In a cruelly ironic twist, whilst writing this bit about the time I put myself in the hospital I actually ended up in the hospital per an entirely unrelated event. Last weekend, after enduring several hours of wrenching pain in my digestive track, I finally succumbed to my roommmate's will and took a trip to the hospital. I was therein informed that my appendix would have to be removed within the next few hours. Being unable to perform such an operation myself, I resigned to the doctor's knife and got down to business. What a worthless organ the appendix is. What the hell is it? What does it do? Whence has it come? All worthy questions. Wikipedia defines it as such: "Currently, the function of the appendix, if any, remains controversial in the field of human physiology." In my body, however, the function of the appendix seems quite obvious: to fall victim to inflammatory, catastrophic failure (a failure of an aforementioned, unknown function) and render me...

You know how musicians, over the course of their careers, tire of playing the songs from their early days? How authors stop talking about the same things they did when they were younger? How actors bore of answering the same old questions that they’ve been plagued with since they first hit the scene? You can feel the analogy coming, no? Well, for the umpteenth time I was asked, yesterday, to painfully relive the moments surrounding my now (amazingly) legendary two week trip to the Grossman Burn Center in beautiful Van Nuys, California. Sighing deeply as I launched into a spirited-as-possible retelling, I decided it was high time I recorded this tale in lurid and detailed fashion in hopes of warding off future tellings. Needless to say, with this only the fourth blog entry (and really just the second, thematically), such an early excavation of the memory archives is an ominous warning about its longevity. Alas, we will live in the moment. Err, the past moment… But first, some backgro...

Continued from Part II Ok, where was I... Oh yeah. Well, as many of you already know, I’m not a big man. Its not like I’m short or rail thin, but I’m probably below average in the weight category when it comes to my fellow Americans. This girl was big. Bigger than me. Bigger than most girls. Her face? Not a monument to symmetry. Again, I’m not trying to be mean, I’m just trying to do my best to explain the level of unattractiveness that this girl had about her. So I was leading the way home from the ATM with an uncertain dread in my step while she traipsed behind me like an elephant in ballet slippers. She seemed happy. I was feigning it, though the prospect of herbal promised land was admittedly putting a bit of a hop in my step. The wine might have been helping. So we get to my hotel room, which, as you should know by now, I’m sharing with my buddy Wyllis. Now he had managed to procure a girl that he actually wanted to try and make out with and had been out with her...

Continued from Part I Ever heard of “PBR”? Its not entirely common out here on the west coast. It stands for “Pabst Blue Ribbon” which, if you don’t know, is one of the worst beers ever brewed in a country that is known for making the shittiest beer on Earth. Now, even here on the hallowed western seaboard, you can find PBR. Usually in cans. Typically in a 30-pack. Some of the low stoop even lower to carry one of these so called “cubes” out to their car, but PBR isn’t well known, for the most part, in this part. Shift scene. Bar Harbor, Maine. PBR, in all its glory, is being served on tap. A rarity, I surely thought, though I was soon to find out more than I ever wanted to know about this rustic brew. The Maine-ite female, yes, yes. Well, it is perhaps my fourth or fifth night in Bar Harbor. As previously stated, I’ve been cruising the local scene for a shot at bag of weed. I make my way into one of the bars I haven’t yet plied and quickly spot a girl sitting at the bar on her own...

It was the sixteenth day of a twenty day trip. Between the gorgeous vistas of the national park, the accumulated dust of our third rate motel room without air conditioning, and questionable, tourist-ready local culture, is it really any wonder that I needed it? I don’t have much of a defense for the deplorable act, but had you been in my shoes, you might have done the same. Judge not, lest ye be judged, or so I’ve heard it said. “Don’t bring it with you,” Wyllis kept telling me. “You’re going to get caught.” It sounded like the kind of advice I’d get from my grandmother. Wyllis was wrong. I could get it through. I had a plan. The only possible way it could fail is if there was a sniffing police dog at the airline inspection point, and really, how often have you seen one of those? It was foolproof. I was going to take the weed, and not much, mind you, in my very own pocket. Putting it in either my stowed bag or my carry-on was an out and out bad idea. My stowed bag was out of my contr...