Tales Of Younger Me Suffering Absurd Amounts Of Pain: A Miniseries - Part 5

Age: Eight years old (?)

The injury: I basically vomited the human equivalent of a bird pellet.

The story: When I was little, I almost went deaf. Apparently, there's some weird sort of brain fluid that will accumulate behind your ear drums after a while. Normally, it drains out via tiny openings in your ear drum. Unfortunately, I didn't have the aforementioned openings, and as such, I was subject to chronic ear infections (which usually resulted in me bawling my eyes out from the pain, being the manly little bastard that I was) and a steady decline in hearing. In order to avoid this, my parents scheduled me for a surgery in which they would take tiny little plastic tubes and ram them into my ear drums, in order to facilitate some much-needed cranial drainage. Because what my head really needed was more fluids coming out of it.

Come on ladies, you know you want me. 

So my mom and I arrived at the building where my surgery would take place. Being as young and inattentive as I was, I forget the details of what happened, but the end result is that I ended up in an alarmingly revealing hospital gown while an anesthesiologist prepared a dose of knock-me-the-fuck-out. 

(C) ER Productions/CORBIS

Not pictured: appropriate attire for an eight year old.

A little side note: I don't do any drugs, nor do I endorse the usage of them, but should you ever have the chance to introduce a suitable amount of anesthesia into your system, you introduce the shit out of it. Life itself is but a pale substitute when compared to the unbridled euphoria I experienced right before passing out in that operating room. Man, that was awesome.

I woke up in a groggy haze several hours later in my hospital bed. The surgery had evidently been a success, and when I regained consciousness, my mom was in the room conversing with a nurse. Upon noticing that I had finally come to, the nurse grabbed a small pink plastic tray and handed it to me. Confused, my mom asked "What's that for?"

I, too, was confused. Apart from the mental haziness and physical exhaustion that generally comes post-op, I felt pretty ok. It was nothing worse than waking up from a particularly deep sleep, and I didn't really see the need for a tray. The nurse calmly stated "Patients can sometimes have a bit of a violent reaction after surgeries like this."

My mom responded "Violent reaction? What does that mean?"

Right on cue, I vomited a hair ball into the tray. Except, instead of it being a hair ball, it was a congealed mass of blood and scab fragments. And instead of vomiting, it was more like 30 seconds of retching and dry-heaving, followed by an unexpected and painful explosion of lumpy red...something. 

(C) MM Productions/Corbis

I'm beginning to notice a pattern of violent blood expulsion in my life.

Reader, I don't know if you've ever vomited a fur ball composed entirely of what basically amounts to hardened blood pudding, but it is so horribly uncomfortable. I'm not entirely sure how to end this post, so here's a picture of a painting of the death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

(C) Francis G. Mayer/Corbis

My Stupid Dog

So I have a doberman, and for the sake of anonymity (because a dog really needs that), we'll call her Ceiling Fan. Ceiling Fan, to put it gently, is a hopeless idiot. I've never met an animal so reminiscent of Simple Dog from Hyperbole and a Half in all of my life, with the unfortunate exception being that Ceiling Fan is much bigger and much more capable of destruction. She once got so frightened by the appearance of a water sprinkler that she ripped the entire thing out of the ground and tried to bite the water that sprayed out of it.

This is like her Vietnam.

Story time. On a rainy day a few years ago, I was getting a ride home from school with one of my friends. As I exited my friend's minivan, I noticed an odd little lady in a yellow rain slicker, standing in the middle of the street outside my house and staring into the sky, her face pelted by rain and her whole body completely rigid. I was slightly unnerved, as the whole scene was a bit reminiscent of the scene in It where the little boy gets his arm ripped off by the sewer-dwelling demon clown (what an incomprehensible book/incomprehensibly awesome movie).

I decided to ignore her, and was about to open my front door when I heard her yell.

"Hey! Do you live there?"

I paused for a moment, my hand hanging in the air, and slowly turned towards her, hoping she was addressing someone else. Alas, she was facing my way, and after ensuring no one else was in my immediate vicinity, I steeled myself for the inevitable social interaction.

"Well hey there, little guy! Don't you wanna balloon?"

"Nope."

"Um. Yeah?"

She got a bit giddy at this and started hopping in place. "Oh! Do you happen to own a doberman?"

Oh God damnit, I thought. "Yeah, why?"

"Because I saw her running away and I chased her into this bush!" The accomplishment and pride in her voice was palpable as she excitedly began gesturing to a massive bush in the front yard across the street. I told her to wait a moment, at which point I entered my house and verified that Ceiling Fan was, in fact, gone. The only living thing in the house was my fat basset hound, who seemed completely oblivious to Ceiling Fan's absence, and whose defining physical trait is that she always smells exactly like Fritos. 

After grabbing a jacket and leash and bidding my other dog farewell, I rejoined Slicker Lady in the street, where she had gone from standing in the street to plowing her way through my neighbor's massive bush (hahaha. Oh man, that sounds nasty). I watched her thrash around for a bit, whereupon she informed me that my dog was not, in fact, in the bush.

It was at that point that I got a call from my mom. I asked Slicker Lady to give me a moment to answer my phone. She seemed a bit helpless, as without her bush thrashing, there really wasn't much she could do, so she reverted to her natural sky-staring state. I awkwardly looked at her for a bit, then turned my attention to my phone. "Hello?"

"Hey, is Ceiling Fan missing?"

"What the hell? How do you know?"

"Because I just got a call from a woman who says that Ceiling Fan is sitting in the backseat of her car."

"...What?"

"Look, I need to get back to work, I'll give the woman your number and you can talk to her. Let me know if you get our dog back."

"Um..well, alright, I'll -"

Click.

"- try. Ok then."

"I love you mom!"

"Nope."

While waiting for Ceiling Fan's unfortunate new supervisor to call, I engaged in a bit of strained small talk with Slicker Lady, where I learned that she really was quite an unfortunate creature. Our dialogue was mercifully cut short by my phone's ringing. I looked at her and said "Hey, thanks for letting me know that my dog ran away, but I think I can get it from here."

"...Oh."

Slicker Lady wheeled around and, without saying a word, bolted to what I'm assuming was her house further down the road. After taking a second to process her abrupt exit, I answered my phone. "Hello?"

"Hey, is this your dog sitting in my backseat?"

"I'm assuming, yeah."

"I'm at the elementary school down the street. I was picking up my daughter from school, and as soon as I opened the door for her your dog came sprinting out of nowhere and just leaped into my car."

"...Huh."

Dibs.

About ten minutes later, I had walked to the nearby school and managed to find the woman's car. Ceiling Fan was staring at me from the rear window, furiously wagging her tail and just happy as shit that she had finally done something to make me proud. I thanked the woman and apologized profusely for Ceiling Fan's behavior, which the woman surprisingly found really endearing. Ceiling Fan was mushing her face into the window and covering the whole thing in slobber. "She seems really excited to see you," she said. "I'll open the door."

"No, best let me do that."

I immediately braced myself, spreading my feet and holding her leash at the ready, dreading the result of opening this woman's car door. Confused, she asked me "Why are you doing that?"

"You'll see."

I pulled the door handle, slowly, carefully, my ears straining and waiting for the worst. 

Click. 

The moment the car door latch released, Ceiling Fan tackled it from the inside, flinging the door open and nearly decapitating the woman's poor little daughter. Absolutely mindless with joy, Ceiling Fan torpedoed into my crotch, giving me a warm greeting and doing her best to communicate to me her latest adventure. 

"FRIEND!!!"

After a brief wrestling match on the sidewalk, I successfully restrained my dog and attached the leash to her collar. I hurriedly said goodbye to the woman and proceeded to walk my dog home, hoping that my dog's impromptu attempted murder of her daughter hadn't left too much bad will. When I got home, I took Ceiling Fan's leash off and took a seat on my staircase. She sat down in front of me, her chest heaving with her excited breathing, gazing at me expectantly and waiting for me to commend her on her latest display of idiocy.

I tried headbutting your testicles into paste because I love you.

She's a nice dog.

Tales Of Younger Me Suffering Absurd Amounts Of Pain - A Miniseries: Part 4

Age: Third grade.

The injury: a thorough embitchening at the hands of a grass field.

The story: For most elementary schoolers, Field Day is great. It's such an objectively awesome concept that nobody, myself included, can really find any fault with it. Rather than struggling to shove some learning into the sugar-addled minds of small children, teachers can just take them outside, make them play some games and maybe check up on them every now and then to ensure they're not killing one another. I myself was never talented enough to win any of the events that I partook in, but I sure had a lot of fun losing.

"Mommy look! I lost again!" 

"We're all losers, honey."

So we were doing Field Day at my school, and my particular group of kids was at the 3-legged race station. The teacher there was pairing us up with our race partners, and much to my dismay, I was partnered with a kid that we'll refer to as Johnny Psychopath. To this day, Johnny Psychopath remains one of the most aggressively pissed off third graders I've ever met, and having him strapped to my leg for a competitive event was nothing short of terrifying.

After unwillingly having my leg attached to that bull of a child, we all lined up at the start line. While the teacher rattled off the rules of the game, Johnny Psychopath looked me dead in the eye and said "If we lose, I'm going to kill you." 

Now, I shouldn't have to explain this, but a 3-legged race is kind of a group effort. One can't exactly expect to win without the help of the person attached to their leg, and it wouldn't do one any good to, say, punch their partner in the side of the head as soon as the race starts. Hopefully you understand that, my dear reader, because Johnny Psychopath sure as shit didn't. The instant the teacher said "Go," Johnny Psychopath decided that an excellent way to achieve victory would be to punch me in the side of the head and drag my ass across the field like a person tied to the back of a rampaging elephant. Surprisingly, his tactic worked, if only because everyone was so dumb-struck by the indecipherable workings of his mind that they couldn't help but stand there and wonder. 

Man, do I love me some Spongebob. 

After a moment or two of dead silence, punctured only by my panicked screams for help, the teacher grabbed Johnny Psychopath by the ear, and she beckoned to a nearby adult to take off our leg strap while the other kids commenced with the race. I laid there on the ground like an upturned turtle, covered in grass stains and unable to right myself, stuck on my shell while my exposed belly acted as a beacon for any hungry predator that might have passed my way. While they feasted on my turtle-y insides, I would crane my head and gaze at the sky one last time, cursing the cruel, unloving god that would let such a terrible fate befall as beautiful and majestic a creature as a turtle. 

I never was very good at similes. 

Tales Of Younger Me Suffering Absurd Amounts Of Pain - A Miniseries: Part 3

Age: Fifth grade-ish.

The injury: A stationary truck had its way with me.

The story: As I've mentioned before, my dad looks a lot like this.

And, as I'm so annoyingly fond of pointing out, I used to look something like this. 

The thing is, man-gorillas like my father get a little confused when handling small children, so when it came time to teach me how to ride my bike, my failure was such that my dad rage-quit on the whole endeavor and drowned out his disappointment with TV. This suited me fine, as riding a bike was far too physical an activity for my pudgy frame, and we both reached an unspoken agreement to never speak of it again. This happy ignorance lasted until my family got sick of hearing gunshots every day, and decided to pack up and move from our home in the city of Aurora, Colorado to the nifty little suburb of Centennial. Not only did I have to deal with a substantial amount of culture shock (where were all the kids trying to make me cry?), but it was also my first time living in a suburban environment - a place where virtually every kid rides their bike and you're absolutely hopeless if you can't keep your balance on one. In an effort to adjust to my new home, I took it upon myself to teach myself how to ride a bike.

Suffice it to say, this story wouldn't end up in my childhood pain miniseries if it had gone without some colossal screw up on my part. The short version is that I got the everloving shit beat out of me by a parked truck.

There's a stone-cold killer behind those goofy Pixar eyes. 

The slightly elongated version is this: on the day that I decided to learn how to ride a bike, I took my long-forgotten bicycle out of its dusty corner in the garage and wheeled it to a nearby cemetery, where I spent most of the day losing my balance, eating shit and presumably being laughed at by all the dead people. However, my perseverance began to pay off, and after several hours I had succeeded in keeping myself balanced long enough to be considered adequate at bike riding. Reveling in my victory, I got a bit cocky and decided that the only way to cement my status as a cool kid was to ride my bike all the way to my house.

Here's the thing: I live on a bit of a hill, and as successful as I had been at riding, I hadn't actually bothered to try my hand at braking. So when I got on my street and rapidly started gaining speed, I panicked. Rather than applying the hand brake, I started crying and screaming, my vision quickly blurring as my velocity approached terminal levels. I helplessly zoomed right past my house and continued down the hill, where, to my horror, my path intersected with a rusted out heap of a truck that was parked on the side of the road.

Pic unrelated.

Oh, I tried. I flailed like an idiot, doing everything in my limited power to prevent the inevitable collision. But like most things in this world, I was doomed to failure. 

My face and the side of the truck rushed to meet each other like two long-lost lovers. Unfortunately for me, those lovers were engaged in a highly abusive relationship, so when my face met the truck it raised its proverbial hand and bitch slapped me to the curb with all the force of a fat kid crashing his bike into a truck. My poor bike, ill-prepared for the collision as it was, crumpled into a confused mess of pedals and whatever else a bike is made out of. My only saving grace was that I was wearing a helmet, a positive which was somewhat refuted by the fact that my helmet had left a massive dent in the driver-side door and knocked the rear view mirror off of the vehicle and into the street, where it lay shattered and useless (much like my pride).

After disentangling myself from the misshapen remains of my bike, I assessed the damage that I had done to the truck, whereupon I looked pretty much exactly like this.

Being the responsible young child that I was, I gathered the various pieces of my bike and ran away as fast as I possibly could, leaving the unfortunate truck owner to contend with the consequences of my own incompetence.

I am a burden to society.

Making Fun Of Handicapped People (Is Still A Really Bad Idea)

Despite the impression that you, my highly valued reader, may have of me from this purple little blog of mine, I am no superhuman. To the disappointment of all involved parties, I am not a towering monolith of everything that humanity could be if it simply fulfilled its potential for greatness. In fact, as difficult as it may be for you to swallow, I am only human, and just as fallible and stupid as the rest of my ilk. Yet, even for a species as destructive and short-sighted as mine, one would have to be exceptionally lacking in areas both intellectual and moral to do something that could be considered a sequel to something like this.

Alas, that person is me. I'm so sorry for all of this. 

Take this bottle of shampoo as a gift to show you how remorseful I am.

So I'm white. I happen to live in an area where just about everyone else is white too. Virtually every friend that I have is perfectly acceptable WASP material. Because of this homogeneous atmosphere, my friends and I have all picked up a bad habit of using terrible words to describe unfortunate things. We feel pretty secure using these terrible words, because none of us really know anyone who's retarded or gay or any of our other horrible adjectives; consequently, we don't know anyone who has a real basis for being offended. 

This is my friend, Bucket Of Dicks. He gets really offended when we call something a bucket of dicks.

So the other day, I was hanging out with a friend of mine at school. Neither of us had class for a while, so my friend suggested going across the street and getting some food. I was happy as a clam at the prospect of perpetuating my fat existence, so we went on our merry way. All was well until we got near the crosswalk. 

I have a special reservoir of hate in my heart, reserved specifically for people who incessantly mash on crosswalk buttons. It's more than just a pet peeve; every time I see a person press a crosswalk button more than once, I want to slap them across the face and explain why I believe every major tragedy in the last millennium has been directly caused by them. I firmly believe that rapists, racists, murderers and crosswalk-button-smashers are all going to the same part of Hell. I hate crosswalk buttons because they serve no purpose and the ones in my area make a God-awful clangy metal noise that can be heard from space. 

Hate Puppy knows how I feel about this. 

So we came within view of the crosswalk, and I immediately felt my soul turn cold and black, because some girl was beating on the button like a particularly bad case of domestic abuse. As we approached, the girl pulled out her cell phone and started perusing through it, pushing that Goddamn button all the while. At some point, the little white crosswalk guy came on, and every single person crossed the street except her, because she was still checking her phone and pressing that awful button. 

This blatant stupidity stoked the proverbial fires of my unreasonable hatred into a blazing inferno. Turning to my friend, I vehemently whispered to her. "Is this girl retarded or something? Why is she still pressing that button?"

My friend was horrified and urgently whispered "Johann, that girl is retarded!"

"....what."

I usually turn to the internet to express my feelings. I'd like to think it does a pretty good job.

When we got to the crosswalk, I timidly looked at my former hate-target, and sure enough, the girl was actually retarded. 

This post doesn't get a satisfying ending, as I feel the urge to repent. Goodbye.

Tales Of Younger Me Suffering Absurd Amounts Of Pain - A Miniseries: Part 2

Age: A tender 8 years old.

The injury: A finger that snapped in half like a dry twig.

The story: As I mentioned in the first installment of this ill-conceived miniseries, my parents sent me to a daycare almost everyday for a period of almost 9 years. If memory serves me correct, this daycare was filled with some of the most dumbshit ignorant old people I've ever had the misfortune of knowing - our bus driver was a 70-something year old man who had a habit of sitting down in the middle of our playroom and clipping his yellowed old man toenails, and one of the staff members was an elderly lady who went on frequent diatribes against the music industry and how she thought it was a cardinal sin that they didn't rate CDs the same way they rate movies.

  

Apparently this isn't a thing?

The children were just as weird - there was a prolific kleptomaniac tomboy from Russia, the boy with debilitating asthma and about 6 different speech disorders, some kid named Juan who once bit my arm so hard that I squirted blood into his mouth, and a small child who had a frightening habit of eating every single thing he could get his disgusting little hands on. Wood chips, dead wasps, markers, rocks, worms, crayons, everything went down this kid's throat like it was a garbage disposal. This kid is important to the story. We'll call him Rainbow Tongue. 

Imagine this, but with more insect innards.

Apart from strange people, our playground was also home to a big ass tire swing. Said tire swing was suspended by three uncovered chains. The problem is that uncovered chains on a playground are a really bad idea. For those of you unfamiliar with kids, children can, and will, find a way to wedge one or more of their appendages into just about every nook and cranny that they can find (that's what she said? Wait, no, we're talking about kids here. Oh God. Forget I said that).

So I was somewhere on the playground, waddling about as I was wont to do, when Rainbow Tongue came to me with a request. "Johann," he mumbled between mouthfuls of orange marker, "You're a big kid and the tire swing is spinning really fast and I wanna get on it. Can you stop it for me?" 

I looked at his diminutive little form, then directly behind me, to where the tire swing was indeed spinning around quite fast. To this day I have no idea how it attained such a phenomenal velocity. Mumbling in acquiescence, I approached the whirling death tire and tentatively reached my palms into its general flight path, hoping to lightly tap the side of the tire and slow it down a little each time it passed my hands. 

This is when the tire swing made a valiant effort to murder me.

The life expectancy of these children can be measured in seconds.

It happened instantaneously. The moment I raised my hands, some unknown force yanked me off of the ground, and suddenly I was very comparable to a pigeon caught in a tornado. My world became a blur as the tire swing picked me up and swung me through the air, and the only thing more surprising than my sudden flight was the blinding amount of pain shooting through my hand and legs. I've always been a big kid, and I was just tall enough that when I started flailing in circles like a rag doll, my legs smashed into the wooden supports that upheld the swing. After about 5 rotations in the air, I came to an abrupt halt, as my trajectory took a sudden downturn and I smashed into the sand with my shins. My vision blurred with tears, I cast my gaze about and discovered what had caused me to go airborne. My finger had apparently gotten caught in one of the chain links upholding the tire swing, and in the process of attempting to rip off my finger, the link accidentally picked up the rest of my body. Despite the fact that I was going fast enough to escape Earth's gravity well, my finger was simply too stubborn to disconnect with the rest of my hand, opting instead to hang on for dear life and simply see what happened. Dizzy with pain, I slowly extricated my finger from the chain link. I successfully removed my digit, and was rather surprised when the end half of my finger immediately flopped out like an uncoordinated fish.

As I've mentioned again and again, I was an impressively stupid child, and at no point in my 8 years of existence had I conceived of the idea that bones could actually break. Indeed, I was convinced that bones were the end-all be-all of material strength, and was somewhat flabbergasted to discover that my ring finger had snapped like a popsicle stick. At least, I would have been, had I not immediately passed out and face planted into the sand.

In my defense, I probably drink enough milk for my skeleton to register as a 7 on the hardness scale.

I woke up approximately 2 seconds later and began howling like a banshee, because despite what some people would have you believe, breaking a finger really really hurts. Thankfully, it only took about 2 and a half minutes of incessant screaming for some of the daycare staff to come to my aid, where they began giving me proper medical attention. Which in this scenario means I got a firm scolding for being in the big kid's playground and a bag of ice to hold on my finger. After a bit of deliberation, the staff decided that it might be a good idea to give my parents a ring. Unfortunately for them, they decided to call my dad. I'll get to that in a second, but for now, just know that my dad looks a lot like this.

Being the little dipshit I was (am), I decided that a good way to pass the time while I waited for my dad to arrive would be to play with my now extraordinarily flexible finger. I did this for about 30 seconds, showing off my cool new trick to all of my friends, until I twitched and accidentally mashed my two broken bone ends together. That was a bit unpleasant.

My dad arrived and, following his typical modus operandi, immediately tracked down the daycare's elderly manager and threatened to beat her into a little granny pancake (I'm probably paraphrasing that a bit more than I should). Unbeknownst to me at the time, it turns out that leaving the playground unsupervised at a daycare center is the exact wrong thing to do. It's also exactly what they did. After reminding them of all the reasons why uncovered chains and unsupervised children are a really bad combination, my dad grabbed me by the shoulder and started leading me towards the car.

It was at this point, right before I passed through the fence gate and into the parking lot, that I began looking around for Rainbow Tongue. Having dipped into shock, I was barely coherent enough to reach the conclusion that this was all his fault and that I should really start hating him more. I found him, staring at me with horror, his eyes filled with guilt and overflowing with tears as he felt the unbearable responsibility for my pain and suffering seep into his system like arsenic.

Haha, just kidding. He was in the corner scooping handfuls of sand into his mouth.

Tales Of Younger Me Suffering Absurd Amounts Of Pain - A Miniseries: Part 1

Age: I can't really remember, but it was when my friends and I considered nose-picking and marker-eating to be competitive sports.

The injury: Just a stupid amount of blood loss.

The story: When I was really little, my parents used to dump me off at a daycare everyday - the reason being that my parents had absurd work schedules and couldn't really let their pudgy little toddler waddle around the house on his own. One particular day, my mom had come surprisingly early to pick me up, and I, ever the rambunctious little boy, was more than eager to get going. I bade a hurried farewell to my friends (which consisted of some weird Russian army brat and another kid with, like, 6 different speech impediments) and rushed out to my mom's car. As I was getting in, she said "I need to go inside the daycare and talk to one of the grown-ups for a little bit. You just stay here, ok?" I mumbled an agreement, not really paying attention to what she was saying, and it wasn't until after she was already inside that I realized I was stuck in her car alone.

Now, I've never claimed to be all that bright (considering the fact that every linked word in this sentence leads to another story about my functional-retardation). But even for someone as deprived of common sense as me, I was an exceptionally stupid child, and as such, I was possessed of an attention span that could be measured in microseconds and an unshakable fascination with the inner workings of my nose. After processing the possibility of having to sit still for an extended period of time, I promptly buried my finger into one of my nostrils and staged a small reenactment of the Gold Rush.

Ladies.

I was having the time of my life, when all of a suddenly, I felt a sharp pain somewhere deep within my nasal passage. I was about to write it off as some strange finger-induced phantom pain, except when I extricated my finger from my nose, blood started gushing out of my face. It was like a mix between a fire hose and that scene from The Shining, and the closest I've ever come to bleeding that much since then was...well, this.

Being the little dumbass that I was, it never occurred to me that I should unbuckle my seat belt and take my bleeding outside. Instead, upon seeing the sheer quantity of blood that I was spilling, I had a bit of a panic attack and started crying. I was rocking back and forth, trapped by my seat belt like a rabbit caught in a snare, and the front of my shirt had turned a surprisingly vibrant shade of red. I sat in my mom's car bleeding all over myself for a good 5 minutes before she finally came back. At first she started panicking, as any competent mother would when their only begotten son is drenched in blood. However, once she saw that my nose was the source of it all, she looked at me with what I can only describe as a weird mix of disappointment and complete befuddlement at my total incompetence as a human being. 

I've gotten that look a lot since then.