9-1-1

Most of my blog entries revolve around recounting alcohol induced bouts of debauchery and amusing exploits. If it isn't broke I am not going to fix it. You never mess with a winning formula, just ask Coca-Cola about the experiment known as New Coke. Here for your reading enjoyment is another tale from the vault.

Back in second year of University I lived with a girlfriend. My best friend from high school would come visit from time to time and we would party it up. We'd hit the bars and generally try to get into various forms of trouble. We seldom failed in our attempts. My friend was a bit on the shorter side and a bit chubby so he ended up with the name "Chubba". To say that he embraced it wholeheartedly is an understatement. It was a regular occurrence to see the transformation from normal person into Chubba unfold as the drinks went down. You could tell things had taken a turn to the bad side once he inevitably yelled "Chubba RULES!" and proceeded to try to knock something over. It was not exactly socially acceptable behaviour but that is what friends do, they accept each other despite the obvious temporary insanity and other faults. I spent a great percentage of the time I hung out with him trying to keep him out of fights and from causing too much destruction. He was like a mini tazmanian drinking devil.   

My girlfriend thought it would be a great idea to set up Chubba with her crazy lab partner named Pam (affectionately nicknamed Wham Bam by me for her obviously low standards). On paper the combination looked perfect, crazy drunken fool and crazy skanky chick, how could it go wrong? With a plethora of alcohol, that's how. We all met up at my place and to my surprise Chubba and Wham Bam hit it off fairly well. Any shyness was quickly dissolved as the drinks flowed from a seemingly endless supply of alcohol. After a good bit of pre-drinking we embarked to the local dance club. We proceeded to drink more and dance the night away. Chubba almost started a bit of a scene with what could be best described as potential members of the Italian mafia. Apparently one of them hit on Wham Bam and Chubba took exception to that. We somehow managed to make it out of the club without being shot or kneecapped, thank goodness for small miracles. We piled back into a cab and went back to my place.

At this point we were all a mess. Chubba and Wham Bam were drunkenly pawing at each other and I just wanted to stop the room from spinning. I went into the bathroom to splash water on my face and I heard a scream. I stumbled out of the bathroom to witness a scene that resembled something out of a horror movie. The carpet in the living room was drenched in blood and there were bloody footprints leading to the other bathroom. For some reason at this point in my intoxicated mind the most likely scenario was that we got burgled and it went wrong. I ran into my bedroom and grabbed my miniature baseball bat, then proceeded to slowly tiptoe/stumble in the direction of the bloody footprints. I finally reached the bathroom door (closed with the bloody trail leading in). I flung the door open and yelled, ready to swing the bat at the intruder. To my surprise the door hit Chubba as he was doubled over throwing up in the toilet. My girlfriend came to the door and told me to call an ambulance for Wham Bam. They told me that she had stepped on a wine glass and it cut her foot. 

What happened next is precisely why a drunken university student should never be trusted to do anything intelligent. I picked up the phone and called 9-1-1. This is how I remember the conversation going:

911:"Please state the nature of your emergency"

Me: "I got the number right!"

911:"Sir? What is your emergency"

Me: "Well I thought we had a burglar with all that blood everywhere"

911: "What blood sir? What blood??"

Me: "Blood EVERYWHERE, soaked through the carpet..."

911: "What happened sir, whose blood is it?"

Me: "It's EVERYWHERE"

911: "What is your name and address sir?"

Me: "Oh forget it, we'll just take a cab I guess..."

My girlfriend took the phone out of my hands and asked me who I was talking to? I told her it was a nice woman from 911. She assumed I was just kidding and she called a cab. It turned out Wham Bam just had a piece of glass in her foot and most of the bleeding had stopped at this point. We still needed to go to the hospital for stitches. About 10 minutes later the cab came and we all got into it. After informing the cabbie to take us to the hospital we were suddenly surrounded by cop cars, lights flashing and sirens whailing. It was at this point that I informed everyone that I had indeed called 911 and told the operator about all the blood on the floor. The cops made us get out of the cab and my girlfriend calmly explained to them that they told me to call an ambulance and that was what I tried to do, but unfortunately did a poor job describing the situation. Luckily after asking to see the apartment and seeing all the blood on the living room carpet the cops believed the story. We finally made it to the hospital and waited at least 3 hours for Wham Bam to get stitches, during which time Chubba threw up in the waiting room and a guy with a rather spectacular ponytail did the mop up duties. All in all a fairly decent eventful night.

Until next time, honour your contracts, be pleasant to strangers and never prematurely assume you've been burgled.

Deep Thoughts...

Here it is again for your reading enjoyment, a collection of my random thoughts in no particular order! Enjoy.

1. What the hell is wrong with Mel Gibson? They were playing clips of him ranting at his wife today on The Edge and I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Say it isn't so Braveheart. You've obviously lost your damn mind. It reminds me of when my mom gave our piano to a religious guy in our town. He later turned out to be a huge pedophile and served 5 years in jail for it. Good thing our piano went to someone that could use it. Well actually that doesn't have anything in common with Mel Gibson but I remember it now all of a sudden. First Kramer is a bigtime racist and now Mad Max is a racist lunatic? He's about one more rant away from being in a mental institution in Australia. Forget Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, it's Mad Max: Beyond Anger Management.

2. When is the Straight Pride Parade? I keep searching the Toronto Festival website but I can't find it.

3. I tried Absinthe the other night and I was a little disappointed in it. I've always wanted to try it and I pictured it conjuring up hallucinations, a Mel Gibson like rant, or possibly cutting off an ear and none of that happened. Perhaps I had it hyped up too much. And why the hell does it taste like Sambuca??

4. Hair is overrated. I keep thinking about all the extra free time I have from not having to style my hair. I've literally saved days worth of time. Not to mention all the money I save on haircuts and hair products. Poor suckers with hair, I almost pity you. Also being hairless lets me reach my full potential for speed. Special sidenote: I AM thinking about growing out my bangs. I have weighed the pros of style and uniqeness versus the cons of being less streamlined and possible jealousy, I am still undecided.

5. At what point should it be socially acceptable to punch someone in the face while waiting in a food lineup? I vote for "after he bumps into you 4 times when there is way more than enough room for him to move around". I am open to suggestions though.

Until next time remember that a canister of compressed air is not a toy...

Is that a lobster in your pants or are you just happy to see me?

I can't believe it has been over a full month since my last blog entry, time flies when you ignore your blog duties. Rest assured I have not been wasting this past month laying comatose on my couch watching infomercials, although I wouldn't mind getting a ShamWOW or a SlapChop (give me one of those Grate-y buggers too)...I have been traveling a lot this last little bit and I have created an internet talk radio show with The Joe Long Show (you can listen to the right). The travelling consisted of a last minute trip to Cuba and one quickly planned trip back home to the East Coast. I'm back in the TDot but my head is spinning from all the miles I have put on. Even though I have been far from my loyal readers, you have never been far from my thoughts...and after driving solo 14 hours each way, there were many thoughts.

So what was it like to be home? Well it is always a culture shock. People assume it was so hard for me to move to Toronto from Fredericton because of the culture shock, but I truly find it more difficult going from here back home. That is likely because when I go home I spend the majority of my time in the small town I grew up in. I'm talking about a town with a population of 1700 people that most of the time seems like less than 100 people. Priorities are just a little different there. Based on my observations it is normal to spend a good portion of the day making sure you can identify every single person in the town. This baffles me since 90% of the people I see on any given day are strangers and I really don't care who they are. I like being relatively anonymous and not having anyone care what I'm doing. Even though I moved away from my hometown when I was 18 for school, my mom assumes I know every single person there still. I didn't know half the people there when I lived there nor did I care. Anyways, constantly needing to know who people are is not part of my makeup.

One other thing I found out about my hometown is that there is a huge increase in the amount of shoplifting happening. My brother told me a bunch of stories about people stealing tons of stuff from the local grocery store. That is bad enough on its own but when he told me what people are actually stealing, that took the level of ridiculousness up a few notches. Apparently the store would cook lobsters then wrap and sell them individually. One guy came along and cleaned out the entire display (about 6 lobsters), except one. How did the guy steal them you ask? Oh yeah he put them down his pants. So this guy has cellophane wrapped lobsters stuffed down his pants and he walks out of the store. How's that for ballsy? The owner of the grocery store was so sure of who stole the lobster that he took the one remaining lobster, drove to the thief's house, knocked on his door and told him he might as well have that one since he had the rest of them. 

Ridiculous. As ridiculous as it is, the next one is ever stranger. A different guy went into the same grocery store and decided to steal a package of boneless, skinless chicken breast by taking it out of the package and stuffing it down his pants. Oh yeah and that guy was my old high school English teacher. It's bad enough if you steal it while it is still in the package, but taking it out of the package and putting raw chicken down your pants? Let's hope that is not the Colonel's secret for 11 herbs and spices, or the way Popeye's marinates it's chicken for 12 hours. I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. How is that for a Lysol commercial idea?

I will make an attempt to increase the blog entries going forth and remember it is not a good idea to light cop cars on fire and smash windows. It may be fun, but it is never a good idea.