DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

San Francisco’s Exploratorium will host a webcast of Thursday’s total solar eclipse. Tune in at 5:30 AM PDT. Totality begins at 6:11 AM.

I sat down to breakfast, a bowl of my favorite granola with rice milk. Except that the rice milk ran out after about a tablespoon. Damn.

There was a half-gallon of milk, I mean milk milk, the stuff that comes out of cows, in the refrigerator. “One more dose won’t kill me,” I thought. I haven’t had real milk in a few months but I figured I could afford one relapse.

So I poured it on and slurped up a big spoonful. “Man, that tastes funny!” I thought. I marveled at how quickly my tastes had shifted, to the point where milk didn’t taste quite right any more.

After the second spoon, the feeling intensified. The milk didn’t taste “funny;” it tasted bad. A small bundle of nerves began firing somewhere in the back of my brain… better check the milk. I opened the carton, took a whiff, and my eyes opened wide. The milk had turned. Phew, that don’t smell too good.

My kitchen sink has no garbage disposal, so I had to find something else to do with my bowl of rancid-milk granola. I didn’t trust the trash can not to leak. I guess I could have tossed the mush out into the back yard, maybe sprout a granola tree? But I opted for the toilet. I’m pretty sure my septic system can digest anything; when we moved in we learned it had even eaten through some of its own plumbing.

Now I know, there’s nothing that granola in a toilet bowl resembles so much as vomit. Should you ever need to simulate vomit in your own bathroom, I suggest granola and milk. In a curious twist, the visual image caused a powerful wave of nausea. Even though I knew I was looking at granola, my brain processed it as “vomit,” and vomit I nearly did. This capped a morning of revolting sensations, which I relive here for your benefit.

So, aren’t you glad you stopped by debris.com today? Let me know if you’d enjoy a weekly feature on vomit, or perhaps a daily essay on one or another aspect of my digestive process.

I find this hard to believe.

ns-62> /usr/bin/whois corinthianleather.com
[whois.internic.net]

No match for "CORINTHIANLEATHER.COM".

In December 1994 I drove east from California in search of old Route 66. One of my stops was the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, Arizona.

Inside each wigwam, the walls tilt in at about a 25° angle. This makes using the bathroom mirror a unique experience, because the angle of the mirror allows you to stand straight, gaze straight ahead, and look at your feet.

I dug this image out of my archives so I could be a part of The Mirror Project.

“I’ve always wanted to be a doctor,” said my doctor as she continued with the procedure involving sharp-bladed instruments. “When I was 17, Dr. Leibenkind used to let me practice installing stitches for patients whenever the scar would be hidden.”

(She didn’t say “installing,” but I like the sound of that better. Also I enjoy the hardware connotation. Certainly you can imagine how stitched-up human flesh takes on the appearance of an obscure cable connector, like something out of the Belkin catalog.)

I grimaced again, as I tend to do when I’m being burned, cut, sewn, etc. “17?” I grunted. “Was Dr. Leibenkind a friend of the family?” I wasn’t sure how else a 17-yr-old would get her hands on a set of sutures, much less a live patient and an open wound.

“No,” she explained, “I was his file clerk.”

I had to laugh, but I stifled it so as not to impale myself on a scalpel. “Did the patients know they were being stitched up by the file clerk?” Something about that just had a funny ring to it. The doctor laughed, too; I can tell because of the little jog in my scar.

She explained that the patients didn’t know, but that Dr. Leibenkind had supervised every stitch, mitigating the risk that my then-only-a-file-clerk doctor would accidentally sew someone’s earlobe onto their scapula, or something. I took this as good news, because if the file clerk was doing surgery, it follows that the surgeon might be out in the office putting correspondence into folders.