So for about the last decade I have been living a pretty funny lifestyle that revolves around hanging around bars and being drunk most of the time when the sun is down.

This lifestyle has good and bad features, here's the good.  In this environment you get to witness(or perform) the stupidest, worst, lamest, and most despicable behaviours perpetrated with almost no consequences.  That is if you don't count bar fights, lost friends, empty wallets, criminal records and herpes infections.  By what must be a complete miracle I have managed to avoid all of that myself, I guess that implies I hold a low bar for miracles.

Anyway, here's a funny slice of this way of life which happened to me recently.  

A friend of mine who is in law school now and then invites me when he goes for drinks with his law school friends.  Most of them are fucking intolerable freaks, but a few are bearable.  One night he invited me out to join him at the bar with one of his law school friends, who is a girl, who is also on the university girls hockey team.  So I meet up with him, his law school friend, and half the university girl's hockey team.  I ain't niave, and when I met the girls hockey team I wasn't amazed that they all had the same boy's haircut, all were wearing boys t-shirts, jeans and Teva's.  In case you didn't get it, they're all lesbians.

So I'm slightly curious of whether hanging out with a bunch of dyziko's might be good for a laugh.  Maybe we will all have a good time.  Hey, just think of me as one of the guys!

The group of lesbians is sitting at a booth along the wall.  The u shaped vinyl upholstered booth is a panorama of split ends, natural eyebrows, blunt fingers and the conspicuous absence of make-up.  So one obvious quality of this group of girls was; when you looked at them for one second you could tell their table felt they needed any more dick even less than a young life convention needs a condom vending machine.

As it happens there is no more room to sit at the lesbian booth, so my friend, myself, and his law school friend on the hockey team sit at a table separate from the rest of them by a couple of feet.  One of the lesbians is actually pretty hot and has big knockers, a phrase I'm sure she would love to hear.  Anyway, some guy comes up to their table, which is all girls ... technically, and I think that he thinks he's struck it big.  A table of 100 percent girls all to himself!

He starts chatting them up and I'm puzzled at first, wondering when he's gonna catch on.  Then I think that maybe he knows what's up and its all just a laugh for him.   But he's putting in a lot of time for a laugh.  After half an hour I start to wonder the following things: 1.  He's so fucking dumb he can't see he's wasting his time.  2.  He's so smooth that its actually working and he's going to switch one of these butches off the dug out.  3.  Its a game, and these girls are leading him on because its something funny to do to a male dunce, a game which to a man hater is like chocolate fudge cake to a fat bitch.

Once he calls over all his friends I become a little more convinced that the joke is on him.  

His friends crowd around the table and put their game faces on.  Out comes the imagined slick moves, they put on their cool acts, and now him and his mates are on the pull!  I am watching this from about 2 feet away at a separate table and I am stunned that these dipshits don't catch the drift that these birds aren't the right article.  These guys oughta split for a shasta and a hot pocket.

We are sitting with the girl from law school, the one who is on the hockey team, arrive at your own conclusions.  She seems amused too, watching these dudes working their best game on these girls.  The night continues, my friend, me and her are drinking and during this time the girl from law school goes back and forth between the two tables to keep up to speed on what's happening. 

At one point I say to the girl, "Those guys are barking up the wrong tree."

"Yeah that happens a lot when you hang out with them."  She says looking over at her friends.

"How is it possible that those guys don't realize they're lesbians?"  I ask, gesturing at the dudes.  

"They're from Ireland."  She says back.

At the time that seemed acceptable as an answer.  I left the table and never saw how the pick up efforts ultimately ended.  But if I had to guess...

Another big plus of being a drunk bar star; I rarely feel inclined say no to myself.  I can indulge every urge and whim no matter how poorly thought out, socially irresponsible, or personally disastrous.  And since I am out indulging my liquor fueled whims, women also get some of my attention.  In my experience, it doesn't pay to care too much about whether or not what you say to women actually works.  Attraction is complex, it is generally ruled by the physical, and what you say will either get you in, or it may make no difference at all.  Clever things get cancelled out by things that don't land, jokes will hit or miss, overall its better not to think about it.  So, since a lot of the time I'm not really even listening to myself, I say some pretty slick and/or hilarious things to women.  

Here's a bad example, one time a girl told me, "I have a boyfriend, and he's big ... and black."  I said "What a coincidence, I have a girlfriend who is big and black too!"  No laugh from her, but her friend laughed, advantage ... me.  But I can't remember what happened next.

Anyway, being drunk I take the opportunity to say funny things to girls like "Allow myself to introduce myself."  With a witty opener like that who could say no?  Hard to imagine, but sometimes those antics are irresistible.  Either that or I have had some good luck meeting sluts.  I sometimes can't believe how easy girls are.

But this lifestyle is not all amusing nights where clear cut lesbians are indetectable to the untrained Irish eye, or witty banter with local vodka guzzling bunnies or smirnoff ice guzzling sku-wanks.  This lifestyle is not all upside.  Sometimes it sucks.  When you hang around bars, you hang around with barfly's.  The major thing you have in common with the people that you see the most often is an equal sized inability to spend a single night at home.  So you wind up knowing people that under other circumstances you might not sit near on a bus.  In this lifestyle the people you hang out with aren't your friends.  Friends usually know your phone number, and your last name. 

In fact I couldn't say if most of the people I know from the bar even like me.  I also don't care if they like me, and I think they have tuned in to that.  So chances are that they don't like me.  But like I just said, I don't care.  Because, and please excuse the unnecessarily dramatic metaphor, most of them would just as easily leave me shivering in a wet speedo on the south summit of mount mckinley as finish a conversation with me.  And I would do the same, except I also might leave a trail of polar bear food heading towards the last place I saw them.

And there is another downside to this lifestyle.  Its ruining my stomach.  Apparently alcohol is hard on your stomach.  I learned a lot of this first hand via repeat trips to the hospital.  This brings me to the story.  Starting about 2 years ago, with no explanation and not much warning my stomach will inflame and burn like  basement meth labs in those neighborhoods where everyone over 25 looks like Kid Rock.  Anyway, the technical phrasing the doctors gave for the medical problem with my stomach was -"I don't know, did it go away last time?"  That was what the doctor told me the second time I spent a night at the hospital.  That night was highly unproductive.  All they did was took guesses at why Demerol, muscle relaxants, and what they called pink lady's didn't have any effect on the inflammation.  I never got an answer either.  

I learned to live with the problem by controlling my diet.  It's really kind of simple.  I continue to eat and drink total junk, and then when the searing pain lances through my insides I eat 8 tylenol 3's instead of dinner and then I lie in bed shaking until the painkillers knock me out.  This works pretty well, and after about 3 more of those random episodes of fireguts the problem kind of stopped happening.  After the problem seemed to be no longer recurring, I assumed I was now in the clear for life.  But, if I wake up and my stomach feels kind of funny at all I take a Prevacid and stay away from coffees and soda's.  And now I have a stomach more useless to me than a math textbook is to Jessica Simpson.

Which leads me to the next thing.  A friend of mine was getting married and so we had a stag party/weekend at a lake for him.  I saw the lake for about 1 minute.  The night we all arrive at the cabin we all start drinking.  Things are fun, I'm drunk, so the key ingredients are mixing nicely.  Around 11:15 I start to feel some pain in my guts.  The pain is familiar, dull and constant.  I ask if anyone has any stomach acid medicine.  A friend has Zantac, I eat some.  30 minutes pass.  The pain grows, my stomach grows and pushes outward.  I ask if anyone has any painkillers.  A guy does, so I eat some.  But I know its too late already.  The reaction has started, the gases start to burble, salmon steak and potatoes start poking their way around my chest cavity looking for a lung or a pancreas to wrap themselves up in.

The first time I vomit that night it is voluntary, special note, for me it almost always is.  Being a drinker I have incredible control over that one function.  This time I have no choice but do it, just to release some of the pressure.  I think some of the painkillers went along with the salmon so between heaves I stalk the cabin looking for more pills.  My friend is reluctant to give me more.  

My thinking is - What are you fucking cheap?  I'm in pain here!  His reason is that it is written on the bottle to take 2 every 4 hours and I have already had 2.  Actually I had 4.  But the bottle is wrong on this one.  It should say take 4 whenever you say so until you black out.  I crawl into a bedroom with a bunch of bottled water.

This is a repeating pattern that night: I take pills, I throw up.  My friends bring me water and check up on me.  

They offer to take me to a doctor.  I say that won't be necessary.  They carry on drinking.  No one complains that I am ruining their party, I am glad about that.  I regret being a fucking sick invalid.  I wish I was sick alone and not wrecking their fun.  The next day I can't eat.  In the morning I take a crap, it will be the last one for a while.  I drink water, get out of bed maybe 3 times and just sort of haunt the cabin.  I manage to eat something that night, in the long run that turns out to be a mistake.  My stomach is bulging out of my chest, pushing out my ribs and expanding all my abdominal muscles.  I try and participate in the stag party fun but I don't do too much of anything except listen to Jay Z as it plays on my friends Ipod and drink bottled water.

We come back home to town, in theory I am expected at work the next day.  When I wake up the next day I feel worse than before.  I call in sick and then go to the doctor.  I am having trouble breathing and all the muscles in my abdomen are burning, either being torn from vomiting or stretched for a surprising reason that I will learn.  The doctor sends me for an x ray.  In the exam room he puts the x ray up and says it appears I have an obstructed bowel.  I think - That's strange.  Other thoughts I had at the time include - the fucking pain in my stomach is pure agony!

He says I better go to the hospital, if my bowel is obstructed I will need to have surgery to un-obstruct it.  It wasn't exactly what I expected, but overall it sounded like a good idea to me.  He showed me something interesting on the x ray.  On the x ray, in the lower part of my abdomen there were these solid colored long shapes, but in the upper part of my abdomen there was these big kind opaque shapes with ribbed looking lines on them.  He told me that was my colon, and above the obstruction it was full of gas and inflated like a balloon, below the obstruction it was normal sized and not full of gas.  Interesting.  At around this time I am incapable of standing upright or taking steps where I move my legs further than about 6 inches.  

So anyway, I drove to the hospital, parked my car in the overnight parking and slow motion walked into emergency.  Thinking ahead when I went to the doctors I had brought a book and my Ipod, the book wasn't much help, the Ipod was.  It doesn't take a very long time to get into a bed, maybe 2 hours.  When you get admitted in emergency they put you in a bed in a large rectangular room with 5 other beds each with a curtain around them.  I got the feeling I was going to be there for a while.  Also, I don't know how emergency surgery works but my guess is that they probably don't plan it around when you feel is a good time for you.  Other significant details, I am not allowed to eat or drink anything in case they have to do surgery.  This is decided almost immediately when I arrive, and before I ever see a doctor.  Not eating is no problem since I haven't eaten in 2 days.  Too bad I'm feeling a little thirsty though.

I got put in a bed around noon, nurses checked on me every 15 minutes for some reason.  Since there were no doctors to assess me, I think the only purpose of these visits was for the nurses to show me they hadn't forgotten I was there.  Later they abandoned efforts at maintaining that impression.  After a couple of hours the visits died off, but about every hour they would peek in through the curtain and ask me "Is everything alright?"

That depends on what you mean by alright. My intestines were sticking out through my abdomen and inflated like a rosy balloon of flesh and stringy tissues. When I shifted positions even an inch the gases stirred and bubbled like a witches brew, mixing less appealingly than a duet with Ashanti and Ashley Simpson would.  And, my mouth was a little dry.

But on the plus side, of the seven nurses who attended to me, the first nurse was very hot.  She must have been about 25, very fit, a face that could have been on TV.  Would be at least an 8 out of 10 on any man's scale.  Give her a tan, do her hair and make up and she could sell phones, cars, toothpaste.

But instead of fame she apparently chose this humanitarian mission as a career path.  Why anyone hot doesn't just coast down easy street with the free ticket that good looks gets you, it beats me.  Either she has some sort of genuine human depth, or something to prove, or the sense to know that good looks fade.  While I was guessing things about her career choices I couldn't help but notice I was also thirsty.

I made a sad effort to be as low key funny and cool as possible whenever the hot nurse came by to check on me, if I am going to be honest with myself about it, it wasn't working.  I don't know what would have happened even if she went for it.  Me a gas filled blimp of a body and her gracefully contoured shoulders and legs, flawlessly curved and balanced tits.  These things would not mix.  But the romance was doomed from the start.  Once a doctor showed up and assessed me he ordered blood tests and some other, samples.  The doctor wasn't 100% convinced that I had an obstructed colon and they wouldn't do surgery until they were sure.  That sounded smart to me.  Now, could I have a glass of water?  

No.  

What I got instead was a foam cup filled mostly with ice and a bag of lolipop sticks with a pink foam sponge on the end.  I was allowed to wet the sponge and put it on my lips.  That sounded pretty fucking pointless to me.  I didn't bother with the sponges for the first hour I had them.  Eventually I used them all.

They wanted a stool sample.  An older nurse handed me something that was like an upside down plastic cowboy hat.  You are to place it on the toilet and drop in whatever you got.  After that, the nurse collects some of it into a vial using a little ice cream spoon, and sends it off to some lab where I am glad I do not work.  I told the nurse that I hadn't eaten solid food recently and what was going into the hat wasn't going to be pretty.  She told me that if I wanted to I could save them the trouble and spoon the sample into the vial myself.  I said no thanks, I would leave that to the professionals.  

When I looked at myself in the yellow light of the emergency berth bathroom I saw a bright red mess carved ugly by contracted muscles and pen dots for eyes in the place of my handsome easygoing face.  This face couldn't be making really good headway with the hot nurse.  My electrifying blue grey eyes were murky and red, squinting through lights that are way too bright for the undead.

When I exit the bathroom the very good looking nurse is the lucky one waiting to receive my piping hot fresh shit cowboy hat.  I look at her, then I laugh at the circumstances, then I hand her the hat.  Her expression only changes subtly, what a pro.

Anyway, after I was sitting in that bed for about 8 hours the nurses started to switch off as their shifts ended.  Oddly, and for no reason I could grasp, one of the middle aged nurses on the new shift kept glaring at me.  This made no sense to me at all.  Maybe I looked like someone who had fucked her over somehow, but I had never seen her before in my life.  It was so weird and crazy that I hated her pretty quick.  I caught her glaring at me over and over, luckily she wasn't attending to me so it didn't matter, but it was still totally bananas.  Note, I never got any clues, and still have no idea why she was glaring at me.  My working theory is she was psycho.  Anyway, she was middle aged and plainer than the great plains.  Buffalo would run across her plainness.  This plain metaphor is bananas.  Anyway, I didn't really mind her inexplicable unwarranted loathing.  As far as my observations of her, she struck me as the kind of boring hausfrau whose boundaries of normal and radical ran in very tight parallel lines between which her Chevy Suburban crossed the tedious ground of CBS sitcoms, and snacks, lingerie, and CD's all bought in one trip to Walmart.  She was someone who listens to Enrique Iglesias on a regular basias.  Then I got a visit from the surgeon.

The blood tests showed my white cell count high, which could indicate an infection.  Other than that all my organs were working satisfactorily.  I took a second to think about the implications for my liver, ten years of boozing and its still working.  Then I laughed at the forecast for my liver, guess who's getting a brand new program of abuse!  The doctor told me what the test results mean.  He says that I probably don't have an obstruction, that chances are my colon is inflamed and that is what has sealed it up.  So no surgery.  Great, can I have something to drink?  

Yes.  

A pleasant middle aged nurse, although slow and lazy, brought me juice and milk.  They told me I could go home after they pumped one last IV bag into me.  I had to keep hydrated, and I had to come back in 2 days for more tests and more IV's to keep my kidneys from failing due to dehydration.  I will discover over the next 2 days that it is hard to consume anything, even juice, if your digestive system is blocked.  If too much goes in, it has nowhere to go, so it will come back out your mouth.  I stop at a grocery store on the way home and buy juice and soup.  I move in slow motion through the store like someone who has had a soccer ball inserted and removed from his anus.  This is embarrassing, and annoying.  In these moments I wished I had formed a bond with another human being that extended far enough beyond being a social acquaintance that they cared enough about me to do this shit for me.  Hindsight is 20-20.  I tell my friends what has happened, their reactions range from concern to amusement to slight boredom.  I understand each reaction.  Again I wonder if I should have been nicer to other people so they would care more and want to take care of me.  Nah.

I spent the next 2 days taking sips out of juiceboxes and watching a dozen DVD's.  I tried to watch some porn but my heart wasn't in it.  It was impossible to sleep, and the dull ache from my ballooning guts was punctuated by arcs of white hot pain and that did put a small damper on things, but I kind of liked the break from work.  I decided to take more time off this summer once my guts were working, and spend them drunk somewhere hot.  I returned to the hospital the second day.  I was hoping not to do anymore of that cowboy hat business, which would have been a waste anyway.  There was no food to shit out anymore and all that came out was yellow bilge.

I got put in a bed and put on a fast IV.  I guess I didn't look so good.  The doctors came to see me with the results of all the tests.  Their diagnosis was that I had caught a viral infection of my intestine, which was the cause of all the, pause, discomfort.  I don't know if that is unusual.  How did it happen?  They didn't know, possibly something I ate.  I could have pressed for more on that but I was more interested in what they were gonna do about it.  The plan was to fill me up with IV's all day, give me drugs for the pain, muscle relaxants for the cramps and allow my immune system to handle the problem.  That last part would happen at home.  No need to keep me there.  That all worked for me.  Just a waiting game.  Fab.  Get me the fuck out of here so I can get back to watching Battlestar Galactica.

Well, my immune system worked its magic and about 2 days later I could eat solid food.  The day when I took my first solid shit I actually clapped.  By this point you are probably bored of this story.  Do you want to know how I got the infection?  Was it from a dirty hooker? a chupacabra bite?  I'd like to know too, but I don't.  How's that for irritating storytelling?

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