what is this i dont even

So, we’re friends, right?

We can talk about anything?  No judgments?  You won’t store what I tell you to use for later during an entertainment-starved winter, not unlike a gossip-hungry hamster, greedily stuffing his fat, fluffy face with all manner of horrible secrets to use in his deadly hamster politics?  No?  Good.

I’ve heard tell that some people use blogs to talk about stuff that doesn’t pertain to writing, work or books.  This struck me as absolutely insane, at first, since I always feel vaguely guilty about wasting peoples’ time with my blog.  It’s like, if I want to say something, I have this intense urge to make it somewhat relevant to what’s going on in peoples’ lives so they don’t read this blog and go “what’s this nonsense?  He has a personal life?  I came here to learn.”

All the same, people have used their blogs to tell stories and I haven’t posted anything in awhile.  Part of this is due to the fact that I am basically a busy beaver, busily penning The Skybound Sea and hoping it all turns out okay.  Another part of this is because I have been in Portland, Oregon for the past week, gleefully enjoying its sights.  And in fact, these two are related.

I quite like Portland.  In fact, I like anywhere that rains because I tend to feel better about things when other people are miserable in some way, shape or form, which is why I occasionally send anonymous hate mail under the guise of one Jethro Rumpette, French migrant and luddite, to various authors.  But there are many reasons to like Portland.  Chief of which is that I got to meet Brent Weeks while I was over there.

With the exception of that one time I urinated on Joe Abercrombie’s foot, it was possibly the best encounter I have ever had with another author and, in fact, Brent remains the sole person in history to ever render me speechless.  Not by wit, mind you.  Nor by awe.  Simply because Brent, while only slightly intoxicated, managed to string together a sentence so insane that there was absolutely no way I could have said anything that could have possibly matched it without going into realms of forbidden expressions.  Unwilling to commit myself to these darker conversational arts, I yielded and, for my failure, Brent now accepts this as blessing and curse.

Suffice to say: anyone hoping that Brent Weeks’ personality does not match his writing will be sorely disappointed.

It’s hard to beat that for sheer awesomeness in a trip, I admit.  In fact, not even the self-fellating sea otter we encountered at the Oregon Zoo could top it (and fuck if that otter wasn’t trying his damnedest to earn that honor).  There was, however, one activity that did eventually trump it for sheer command of attention.  Not in terms of positivity or negativity, but simply in terms of being.  This event was so eventful that it demands, and receives, the top spot for this trip.

It’s worth mentioning that my cousin was on this trip with me, visiting from Virginia.  My cousin is seventeen and I am an immature man-child, so we spent a lot of time playing “Would You Rather.”  This is not a fun game.  This is not a good game.  This is a horrible game in which you offer a man two terrible choices and ask him which he would rather do.  Usually, these involve concepts like having to choose between receiving gratification from an orangutan and placing your face in a pile of manure or something similar.  But it was a vacation, so things got spirited and we came up with the following question:

Would you rather never have the ability to fly or have the ability to fly via propulsion from a corkscrewing stream of watery waste expelled from your rear end?

This eventually weighed heavily on our minds.  On the one hand, it’s flight.  However, all the things one hopes to do via flying (such as saving people from burning buildings) goes out the window when it’s a rocket of diarrhea that does the work.  I mean, no one’s going to climb on your back and let you poop them out of a house, right?  Right.

But what if it wasn’t a choice?  What if Uncle Ben was right and power, no matter what it is, must be used wisely?  What must you do?

This became more apparent when my sister, whom we were visiting, introduced us to a little restaurant called Salvador Molly’s.  I’m not going to link it.  Because it’s awful.  If you were to choose five decrepit representatives of the countries in the UN, at random, and put them in a kitchen and tell them to best express their culture through food to hipsters, you would have Salvador Molly’s.  You would also have severe diarrhea, as my cousin had.

Some people tell vacation stories as they relate to locales.  Some people tell stories through the food they ate.  I tell stories based on bathroom experiences.  And this one was pretty horrifying.  This is not an exaggeration.  It was horror.  It was Lovecraftian.  My cousin would go to the toilet in the middle of the night and emerge whispering strange things in strange languages, like a man who had seen the absolute nadir of decadence wrought by that which nature could not destroy and rejected society–nay, reality–outright.  The bathroom was a gateway to a world beyond our own, existing parallel to ours and yet coming frightfully close, as though it were the grill of a semi truck we could see in the rear view mirror of our tiny mini cooper.  Except with poop.

It ended, as so many things do, without climax.  No songs from heaven, no odes composed, for poetry is a joyous thing and who could find joy in the tragedy that we bore witness to that day?  Upon the third day, my cousin emerged from the toilet.  He looked at me, sadly, as though he had learned some great truth and it burdened him to know it.  And he said, quite softly.

“And now I know what prison feels like.”

Gentlemen.

I have just written over one thousand words on this subject.

You have read it.

If you are feeling even a little worse for having done so, I feel better for it.

Good day.