I really thought the mud shark story was gonna go in a Zeppelin/Zappa direction. I think I’m a little disappointed that it didn’t…
A while back I remember reading a thread here where someone shared the story of drinking a half-empty Hawaiian Punch that had been sitting in his locker. He’d been drinking it for a while, and chewing up the chunks of fruit, before he remembered that Hawaiian Punch didn’t have chunks of fruit in it. He dumped it out to find it full of drowned roaches, which had soaked up enough punch that they had the flavor and pulpiness of fruit chunks.
Why does the nasty stuff happen to dads? I have a similar story, although it was self-inflicted. My son was maybe 8 months old and, unbeknownst to me, had just eaten. I picked him up and held him above my head, with my mouth open.
You can guess what happened next. Straight from his mouth to mine.
I was feeding my infant son, and he wound up with bits of food all over his face. They were pretty big bits, and he’s my second kid (so I no longer do squeemish). I was plucking the chunks of food off his face and popping them in my mouth- Carrot! Pea! What the…Snot!
Another favourite was the time that my daughter (kid one) needed to be burped after breastfeeding in the middle of the night. I was more or less nekkid, but it was apparently my job, so I hoinked her up so her head was over my shoulder, and started walking around patting her gently on the back. She promptly puked breast milk down my butt crack.
This doesn’t even approach the level of grossness of some of the other posts in this thread, and its somewhat similar to Arglefraster’s “cockroaches in the Hawaiian Punch” story.
When I was seven I went into our garage and saw a half-full can of Sprite on a stool. I think I had left it there a few days earlier. I took a big swig of it… but it was chewy. When I spit it out I saw it was full of ants, and if I remember correctly (there’s a good chance this has been embellished in my mind) they were still writhing around.
I just now read the title of this thread, and the first two posts --and right away, not even trying, I recalled the half-dozen awfullest, most disgusting things I ever saw. Vividly. In detail. And my scalp’s still trying to crawl off my head. This message board having triggered said compilation of reruns for me, the least I can do is offer them up for your viewing pleasure…heeheeheeheehee…
Presented in chronological order:
the toad: I was four, maybe five, and playing in the weedy overgrowth at the edge of our property on a warm afternoon; I forget exactly what I was up to that had me creeping around on the ground, but I do remember coming around the base of our apple tree and face to face with the toad. When it lived, this had been a hefty sized (about as big as my two little boy fists clasped together) specimen of its kind, but now it had been dead just about long enough to be partially dessicated and wholly flyblown; its mouh gaping in the familiar batrachian grin…and I could see down into its erstwhile insides, which were, well, a knot of hyperactive maggots, of course. When she told my mom about it later, the girl from down the road who kiddy-sat for me that summer said I had run into the house screaming and crying so hard she couldn’t get any sense out of me about what had upset me so bad.
the fish-gut corkscrew worm: Fifth grade, a science class that had been studying animal anatomy for the last two weeks. There was a dissection kit. Little boys who live in the backwoods are sadistic, ghoulish fiendlets, and the teacher was a young inexperienced girl just out of Glenville who didn’t have much control over her pupils. So when Robert Woods brought a live bluegill he’d caught yesterday to class in a pickle jar and asked if we could dissect it, she said yes, of course–and we should take notes about its organs. The murder of the finny unfortunate wasn’t
particularly traumatic–most of us had been fishin’ plenty of times. Neither was the autopsy–a procedure somewhere between gutting one’s catch for dinner and a proper biology-class dissection.
“Hey,” said Johnny Morris, “his guts are still alive, looky there!” So we did, two dozen of us all gathered around a lab table. We saw a pointy white protuberance poke itself out of the heap pf fish innards, followed by about six inches of slimy corkscrew-curling body about as thick as a strand of spaghetti—some piscine parasite, a worm which somehow caught on that its host was deceased and it was time to bail. It worked its way out of the dead fish’s entrails and corkscrewed aimlessly around until our horrified teacher finally doused it to death with liquid disinfectant and told Robert to clean up his fish and the rest of us to get out our arithmetic books.
mama gerbil’s brunch surprise: we’re grownups now, and we know what gerbils are capable of. I was ten, and didn’t, and had five of them for pets. When the mama one had a litter; my little brother and I were thrilled and delighted. I very much wanted to be a good pet keeper, so I did what the booklet said and moved the other grown-up ones to another cage. Two days later–it was a Sunday morning and we’d just gotten home from church–we ran in to see how the mama and the babies were doing. Mama was eating her way through her brood and had gotten the job halfway done when we interrupted. They were alive, and as conscious as a two-day-old gerbil can be. We were neither thrilled nor delighted, nor yet capable of stopping the cannibal infanticide binge. A few weeks later one of our cats got in my room, and somehow managed to get the door of the gerbil cage open. He had a real blast for an hour or two, and after that Sunday brunch, I really didn’t mind much.
ole’s potful of shit in 1983, I lived in an illegal encampment just outside the Santa Cruz city limits with a dozen or so other young, nomadic longhairs. It was actually a rather tight, efficient and functional campsite we had set up, and for a crew who existed mostly off food stamps and dollar hits of blotter acid, we had our shit together – enough to stay established and undetected from late October to mid-March. Since we tried to live by the Rainbow Way, we tried to be accepting and inclusive–which led to the predictable complications. The most difficult and unnerving complication being a guy named Ole–big and blonde, older than most of us by five-plus years, and crazier than a rat up a drainpipe with some combination of schizophrenia and mania and acid damage and religion and childhood abuse. I do not remember how he came to live at Puddin’ Hill (so named because of the texture the ground took on during the long winter rains), but he was there–a presence sometimes pitiful, sometimes menacing, mostly flat-out obnoxious, and occasionally vulnerable and sweet. We couldn’t just kick him out to get taken up by officialdom and locked on a nut ward maybe forever, we said.
When the law dogs finally found the Puddin’ Hill camp, it was by accidentally stumbling onto it. The sherriff who had ridden in on his horse much to his amazement admitted that we had done so well at keeping our site clean and righteous that he really was gonna hate having to come back tomorrow morning to officially run us out. Ole left right away after that and it fell to me and Cowgirl Betsey, as ones whose tents were closest to his, to clean up his campsite. He’d created a foul little midden for himself, of junkfood wrappers and discarded wound dressings (did I mention that Ole had some kind of big awful sores on his arms and legs? Well, he did) and used wads of T.P. and beer quarts full of past-dated pee; to our credit, that *was *the only real nasty spot in our camp. We almost gave up on the job when Betsey lifted up a bag of trash to discover the camp’s best and biggest cooking pot, the cast iron one with the tight fitting lid and three legs for cooking over a campfire, which had mysteriously disappeared from camp about a month ago. It was full of Ole-ordure. Odiferous Ole-ordure. Several different vintages of Ole-ordure. With the predictable squirming mass of larvae plopping about in it. Worst part was, we couldn’t just leave Ole’s pit of shit in that state; that ain’t the Rainbow way.
my uninvited dead bedfellow a few years had gone by and I was sort of settled down: living with my then significant other and a few others in a house in West Oakland. It was not up to code at all, and had this huge half-finished basement divided into a laundry-utility-and-storage area on one side and a series of semi-completed rooms on the other. I had that side pretty much to myself, the end room was my sanctuary, my den of depravity, and my crypt of permissions. I loved the place but it was not actually fit for human habitation – and being an unfinished cellar with a few open hatchways to the backyard and the neighboring alley, even some gaping holes in the walls at ground level, I of course found myself often entertaining guests such as black widow spiders (who I didn’t mind sharing a pad with–they were polite and retiring and fun to watch taking prey), five-inch fat slugs (whose presence I did mind, very much), the occasional Jerusalem cricket (which I tolerated, because they are so totally ugly and freaky-looking, and even more totally harmless)–and mice. And then a rat. As soon as I saw the rat, my little war with the rodent population of West Oakland got real, and earnestly murderous. I don’t know whether it was one of the three different brands of poison bait I had laid out which got him, or if he ran afoul of one of the alleycats our idiot cat-sappy housemate insisted on feeding, or even the neighbors’ terrier mutt–but one morning I found him dead, covered in runny rat-mess, with big clots of his fur torn out. It was when and where I found him, though, more than how he was, that really bothered me. Because I had just woke up that late morning, and found him, nastily dead albeit still faintly warm with hard-lost life, in my bed with me!
AAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEYAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!
Later I realized what must have happened. The rat had been busy dying an awful death and taken refuge in my room where in the extremity of its agony and fear, it sought out the only warmth and companionship it could–its hereditary enemy, the man, who had almost undoubtedly brought about its sorry end. And it cuddled up to me trying to find some kind of comfort as it died. It took me two days to get over the horror enough to realize that was what had happened, though; when I did, I actually felt some pity and sadness for the vermin. But if I had had to do it all over, I’d have done the exact same thing again–it was a rat, after all. In my pad. So it had to die
thirteen and covered in snot: one of the worst things about my ex was his offspring, who was very much in residence–a truly appalling youngster, product of all the worst follies of his parents’ milieue. Physically unprepossessing to say the least, he was also a spoiled, self-absorbed, tyrannical and arrogant uber-twerp who was never been made to do anything he didn’t want to, kept from doing anything he did want to., or denied any thing he wanted. You can imagine how well that worked out (and no, I am *not *exaggerating for comic or dramatic effect!). At thirteen, he couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a map (which was of course just dandy, as that meant his father would have to do it for him, and there’d be trouble if he didn’t do it fast and make it fun). And it is at thirteen that I most vividly remember the sight of him. He’d caught a cold, you see, a very bad cold, mostly centered in the nasal and sinus areas. I walked into the dining room of the house I shared with his poor Papa one afternoon just as he ripped off a series of convulsive and propulsive sneezes–five of them at the least. And there he sat, covered in what looked like a gallon and a half of snot, dripping off his face and chest and fingers and even his arms. Thirteen freakin’ years old and apparently incapable of getting off his ass and grabbing some paper towels and cleaning himself up, and quickly getting pissed off at me, because I stood there and stared for a moment and then walked off ,laughing to myself, instead of taking care of his pitiful poo-butt self for him.
Okay, my last vignette might seem a touch anticlimactic to some of you reading it–but if you’d seen the scene yourself, I think you’d agree with me, at least as far as the visual aspect of the thing.
Bon appetit!