If these are over the top for public forum, let me know and I'll stop. Sorry about the cussing. Otherwise about once a week I'll put one up. Reposted one and added a new one for this week.
Penned by Gasputin, not me.
My sister and I were less than enthused about spending the day at our Uncle M's house while our parents and aunt visited our hospitalized grandmother. Previous encounters with him and his clan had convinced us that their side of our family tree had more rotting branches than Andrew "Dice" Clay National Bank. In particular, we recalled the indecency our uncle had committed on the way to the beach, when a stop at a gas station revealed that he'd been sitting (and presumably farting) on a bag of jumbo marshmallows for over two hours in sweltering heat. Seeing as how the bag's gooey contents now resembled a large withdrawal from a sperm bank, my aunt went to throw it away. My uncle shot that idea down like a sixty pound pigeon, tearing a hole in the bag and shotgunning the confectionery ejaculate before our very eyes.
That was Uncle M. in a nutshell. Born with the undiscriminating palate of a goat, the voracious appetite of a vulture, the iron-bellied constitution of a maggot, and the razor-sharp intellect of a dustpan, the man was an idiot savant of consumption who loved pushing the boundaries of edibility. He laughed in the face of expiration dates, refused to cower to inferior packaging, and treated mold, rot, and spoilage the way cab drivers treat traffic lights: as mere colors, not incentives to brake or stop. Yet somehow he always managed to elude a date with food-borne illness.
But his gustatory "gift" didn't come without a price. For once the vittles hit his vitals, my uncle's relationship with food became a bit more adversarial.
It was established early into our visit that our uncle wanted nothing to do with us. The "why dont'cha go play outside?" mantra began the moment our parents left. Stationed firmly in front of the TV, omnipresent can of Stroh's in hand (he was a loyal foot soldier in the war against sobriety), his intentions were unannounced but clear: get drunk and watch football. Fueling this endeavor: cylinders of cellulose-encased hog batter and irradiated fecal contaminants immersed in a tangy egg-based emulsion, AKA "frankfurters dunked in mayonnaise". By no means a culinary delight, but at least it wasn't the lunchmeat developing a rudimentary brain stem or the tube sock full of onion rings we'd come to expect. The problem now was that he ate as if he had learned dining etiquette watching trapped woodland creatures gnaw their own limbs off, devouring the dogs with an open-mouthed fervor that afforded the unfortunate observer a disturbing peek into the initial stage of the digestive process. My sister and I decided to sequester ourselves upstairs with my reprobate older cousin.
As usual, my cousin wasted little time trying to impress us by tinkering with blasting caps, making blood oaths to Satan, and whatnot. But before he could teach us how to make gravity bongs out of groundhog skulls, the retort of an unmuffled anal exhalation from downstairs turned his attention to the subject of his old man's legendary bathroom exploits.
My cousin's dead eyes lit up as he filled our thirsty minds with fantastic tales of studded fecal warheads that would choke a Roman aqueduct and render most men an unthinking, unfeeling blob. Better yet, he claimed his dad was sometimes compelled to call attention to his handiwork. If we were "lucky", maybe we would be invited to admire a well-nourished anaconda of bowel meat before we returned home! He suggested a stakeout of the bathroom when and if the steady infusion of cold beer and rolled boar galvanized the old man's colon to action. I was in a state of rapture.
It happened a few hours later. With the trained ear of a safecracker, my cousin heard the soft click of the bathroom door closing downstairs, followed by the fan being turned on. My uncle was about to engage the enemy! Laughing hysterically, the three of us raced downstairs and stationed ourselves outside the bathroom door. The way my cousin told it, a comical chorus of anguished cries, explosive bodily noises, and the occasional long, melancholy wail would soon ensue.
Several minutes passed and of course none of these blessed events transpired. My sister and cousin soon lost interest and went outside to practice witchcraft and experiment with needle drugs or something. I decided to stick around lest any drama unfold.
Life as I knew it was just about over.
Time passed and I heard neither peep nor poop from him. Just ominous silence. My patience was nearing its end when my uncle quietly emerged.
I knew instantly that he had just endured a profound test of the human spirit. He was visibly aged and shaken, and cloaked in the shroud of despair and neurotoxic fumes that accompany a slow dance with Bowelzebub. My presence outside the door seemed to startle him. He flinched, his eyes widened, and a grin of undiluted idiocy creased his face as he sheepishly muttered a phrase astounding in its modesty. "I do a pretty good job in there."
My eyes were drawn to the glistening object in his hands. "Dear God almighty," I thought, as the gravity of what I was seeing finally registered. What he called a "pretty good job" was in fact a behemoth slab of hog-infested ass lumber that would separate the average Clydesdale from consciousness. By far the biggest turd I had ever seen, it was long, dark, gnarled, and greasy, like King Kong's ring finger after a bucket of KFC. Never minding the fact that he'd made the mind-boggling decision to extricate it from the shitter and handle it sans gloves, I struggled to wrap my head around the biomechanics necessary to pass this behemoth: the ringmeat elasticity, the intestinal dexterity, the pelvic displacement, the ribcage flexibility! Hell, the strain of the colonic fulcrum alone should have confined him to a rectal harness for life! A "pretty good job"?!! For fuck's sake -- a brown mass this large hadn't been freed in one sitting since the drafting of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Still cradling this zeppelin of metabolized swine in his hands, and with his ass slit no doubt suffering the effects of meat stress, my new God began gingerly shuffling down the hallway, dripping bung water and divine gastric juice all the way. Hopelessly drawn to the turd's swollen majesty and gravitational pull, I followed, despite being enveloped by the fog of boar -- a thick, hickory-smoked pestilence potent enough to cause agitated motor activity in seasoned sulfur miners.
When he turned into the kitchen, I figured he was gonna toss the goliath in a plastic bag or wrap it in aluminum foil for enshrinement in the Jesus Fucking Christ! Wing of the Smithsonian. But when I heard grinding blades of metal being fired up, I knew this saga was about to cross the line from "disturbingly funny" to "emotional-growth stunting."
With an unconscionable lack of sanity and sanitation, my uncle began cramming his illegitimeat son snout-first down the garbage disposal. My stomach lurched as the blades ripped through the beast's muscled haunches. The whole grisly affair only lasted a few seconds, but the sound of the disposal belching and gurgling on the hellish onslaught will last a lifetime.
When all was shred and done, I didn't know what to do or say. All I came up with was, "Why did you put that down the sink?!"
His response was curt and absolutely laughable. "Well, I couldn't just leave it lay there!" Suddenly he was Emily Post, a slave to social graces!!
There were so many things I could have said. But seeing a grown man reduce an anvil of processed sow into a hepatitis frappe with a beloved kitchen appliance has a way of sucking the conversation out of you. So I said nothing. In a way, I suppose that made me complicit.
The whole thing ended anticlimatically. My uncle ran some water down the sink and washed his hands with a strange look of peace and serenity on his face, as if he had appeased some long-tormented ghost. Then he wordlessly returned to his recliner and a life free from the rigors of thought and reflection.
I approached my uncle the last time I saw him (about five years ago) to give this incident the long-overdue "WHAT THE FUCK!!! interrogation it so richly deserved. I expected him to laugh the whole thing off and chalk it up to "minced pork psychosis", "mayonnaise toxicity", "post-traumatic Stroh's disorder", or the like.
To my astonishment, he threw me a curve and claimed no recollection of it. This lent credence to the theory I've always supported: he was simply a drunken pig six beers past giving a shit. Then again, maybe he just didn't feel it was an appropriate topic to discuss in front of his new wife at his son's wedding.
Whatever the case, it seems I'll never know just what the hell he was thinking. Perhaps it's for the best. As Nietzsche wrote, "Gaze long into the abyss, and the abyss will gaze back into thee."
Penned by Gasputin, not me.
My sister and I were less than enthused about spending the day at our Uncle M's house while our parents and aunt visited our hospitalized grandmother. Previous encounters with him and his clan had convinced us that their side of our family tree had more rotting branches than Andrew "Dice" Clay National Bank. In particular, we recalled the indecency our uncle had committed on the way to the beach, when a stop at a gas station revealed that he'd been sitting (and presumably farting) on a bag of jumbo marshmallows for over two hours in sweltering heat. Seeing as how the bag's gooey contents now resembled a large withdrawal from a sperm bank, my aunt went to throw it away. My uncle shot that idea down like a sixty pound pigeon, tearing a hole in the bag and shotgunning the confectionery ejaculate before our very eyes.
That was Uncle M. in a nutshell. Born with the undiscriminating palate of a goat, the voracious appetite of a vulture, the iron-bellied constitution of a maggot, and the razor-sharp intellect of a dustpan, the man was an idiot savant of consumption who loved pushing the boundaries of edibility. He laughed in the face of expiration dates, refused to cower to inferior packaging, and treated mold, rot, and spoilage the way cab drivers treat traffic lights: as mere colors, not incentives to brake or stop. Yet somehow he always managed to elude a date with food-borne illness.
But his gustatory "gift" didn't come without a price. For once the vittles hit his vitals, my uncle's relationship with food became a bit more adversarial.
It was established early into our visit that our uncle wanted nothing to do with us. The "why dont'cha go play outside?" mantra began the moment our parents left. Stationed firmly in front of the TV, omnipresent can of Stroh's in hand (he was a loyal foot soldier in the war against sobriety), his intentions were unannounced but clear: get drunk and watch football. Fueling this endeavor: cylinders of cellulose-encased hog batter and irradiated fecal contaminants immersed in a tangy egg-based emulsion, AKA "frankfurters dunked in mayonnaise". By no means a culinary delight, but at least it wasn't the lunchmeat developing a rudimentary brain stem or the tube sock full of onion rings we'd come to expect. The problem now was that he ate as if he had learned dining etiquette watching trapped woodland creatures gnaw their own limbs off, devouring the dogs with an open-mouthed fervor that afforded the unfortunate observer a disturbing peek into the initial stage of the digestive process. My sister and I decided to sequester ourselves upstairs with my reprobate older cousin.
As usual, my cousin wasted little time trying to impress us by tinkering with blasting caps, making blood oaths to Satan, and whatnot. But before he could teach us how to make gravity bongs out of groundhog skulls, the retort of an unmuffled anal exhalation from downstairs turned his attention to the subject of his old man's legendary bathroom exploits.
My cousin's dead eyes lit up as he filled our thirsty minds with fantastic tales of studded fecal warheads that would choke a Roman aqueduct and render most men an unthinking, unfeeling blob. Better yet, he claimed his dad was sometimes compelled to call attention to his handiwork. If we were "lucky", maybe we would be invited to admire a well-nourished anaconda of bowel meat before we returned home! He suggested a stakeout of the bathroom when and if the steady infusion of cold beer and rolled boar galvanized the old man's colon to action. I was in a state of rapture.
It happened a few hours later. With the trained ear of a safecracker, my cousin heard the soft click of the bathroom door closing downstairs, followed by the fan being turned on. My uncle was about to engage the enemy! Laughing hysterically, the three of us raced downstairs and stationed ourselves outside the bathroom door. The way my cousin told it, a comical chorus of anguished cries, explosive bodily noises, and the occasional long, melancholy wail would soon ensue.
Several minutes passed and of course none of these blessed events transpired. My sister and cousin soon lost interest and went outside to practice witchcraft and experiment with needle drugs or something. I decided to stick around lest any drama unfold.
Life as I knew it was just about over.
Time passed and I heard neither peep nor poop from him. Just ominous silence. My patience was nearing its end when my uncle quietly emerged.
I knew instantly that he had just endured a profound test of the human spirit. He was visibly aged and shaken, and cloaked in the shroud of despair and neurotoxic fumes that accompany a slow dance with Bowelzebub. My presence outside the door seemed to startle him. He flinched, his eyes widened, and a grin of undiluted idiocy creased his face as he sheepishly muttered a phrase astounding in its modesty. "I do a pretty good job in there."
My eyes were drawn to the glistening object in his hands. "Dear God almighty," I thought, as the gravity of what I was seeing finally registered. What he called a "pretty good job" was in fact a behemoth slab of hog-infested ass lumber that would separate the average Clydesdale from consciousness. By far the biggest turd I had ever seen, it was long, dark, gnarled, and greasy, like King Kong's ring finger after a bucket of KFC. Never minding the fact that he'd made the mind-boggling decision to extricate it from the shitter and handle it sans gloves, I struggled to wrap my head around the biomechanics necessary to pass this behemoth: the ringmeat elasticity, the intestinal dexterity, the pelvic displacement, the ribcage flexibility! Hell, the strain of the colonic fulcrum alone should have confined him to a rectal harness for life! A "pretty good job"?!! For fuck's sake -- a brown mass this large hadn't been freed in one sitting since the drafting of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Still cradling this zeppelin of metabolized swine in his hands, and with his ass slit no doubt suffering the effects of meat stress, my new God began gingerly shuffling down the hallway, dripping bung water and divine gastric juice all the way. Hopelessly drawn to the turd's swollen majesty and gravitational pull, I followed, despite being enveloped by the fog of boar -- a thick, hickory-smoked pestilence potent enough to cause agitated motor activity in seasoned sulfur miners.
When he turned into the kitchen, I figured he was gonna toss the goliath in a plastic bag or wrap it in aluminum foil for enshrinement in the Jesus Fucking Christ! Wing of the Smithsonian. But when I heard grinding blades of metal being fired up, I knew this saga was about to cross the line from "disturbingly funny" to "emotional-growth stunting."
With an unconscionable lack of sanity and sanitation, my uncle began cramming his illegitimeat son snout-first down the garbage disposal. My stomach lurched as the blades ripped through the beast's muscled haunches. The whole grisly affair only lasted a few seconds, but the sound of the disposal belching and gurgling on the hellish onslaught will last a lifetime.
When all was shred and done, I didn't know what to do or say. All I came up with was, "Why did you put that down the sink?!"
His response was curt and absolutely laughable. "Well, I couldn't just leave it lay there!" Suddenly he was Emily Post, a slave to social graces!!
There were so many things I could have said. But seeing a grown man reduce an anvil of processed sow into a hepatitis frappe with a beloved kitchen appliance has a way of sucking the conversation out of you. So I said nothing. In a way, I suppose that made me complicit.
The whole thing ended anticlimatically. My uncle ran some water down the sink and washed his hands with a strange look of peace and serenity on his face, as if he had appeased some long-tormented ghost. Then he wordlessly returned to his recliner and a life free from the rigors of thought and reflection.
I approached my uncle the last time I saw him (about five years ago) to give this incident the long-overdue "WHAT THE FUCK!!! interrogation it so richly deserved. I expected him to laugh the whole thing off and chalk it up to "minced pork psychosis", "mayonnaise toxicity", "post-traumatic Stroh's disorder", or the like.
To my astonishment, he threw me a curve and claimed no recollection of it. This lent credence to the theory I've always supported: he was simply a drunken pig six beers past giving a shit. Then again, maybe he just didn't feel it was an appropriate topic to discuss in front of his new wife at his son's wedding.
Whatever the case, it seems I'll never know just what the hell he was thinking. Perhaps it's for the best. As Nietzsche wrote, "Gaze long into the abyss, and the abyss will gaze back into thee."
