Truesday: SxSW 2006 Day Three Pt. Two

Well, that wasn’t going to fucking happen as fast as I needed it to. Ceeplus, a good friend from days of way-back needed a ride back to his hotel, downtown. No problem. Quick jaunt into town, quick back out, then to bed. But I neglected to factor the peeing issue into the equation. I figured the worst of it was over, far behind me, having stopped drinking them for a solid block of time, that everything had been properly flushed from my system, and it’d be normal from then on out. Oh hell no. Not by a fucking awkward mile, quite literally.

I dropped Cee off and hit I35 south. My crib is about five minutes away, so the mild annoyance that accompanies the need to urinate was easily ignored. But as soon as I entered the on ramp and got up to cruising speed, my battered bladder started screaming. Mad loud. Sharp, stabbing pain. Like a branding-iron to my gut.

At first I wasn’t panicking in any way. I just figured: no big deal, I’ll be home in a minute, and that’ll be that. Easy breezy.

Oh hell no. Breezy nothing.

Somewhere near Oltorf, the pain of my bladder crept its way all up my spine and to my face. It was horrific. Like I was being electrocuted, from the inside out.

And that’s when the panic started to set in.

You already know where this is going. But I’m going to drag you to the finish anyway.

So I immediately started looking around for a place to drain out my problem, but by then I had hit the flyover for Ben White. Well, there’s nowhere to pull over and take care of such personal business on a goddamn flyover.

I was in an awful tight spot.

There is a certain internal dialog which comes to pass in every person’s head when they realize that they have tread way too far from safe ice. When the cracks beneath them moan, and it becomes painfully apparent that all reasonable options were foregone in favor of a handful of wretchedly perilous outcomes. That ice WILL break. And no matter what one ends up doing after that, regardless of the eventual outcome, it will undoubtedly suck.

A good friend of mine, just recently, was climbing over a five-foot security fence to get into his apartment complex (forgot his gate card in his car, which he was not driving), and when he reached the top and was ready to hop down, he realized his pant leg was caught on a fence spire. It was at that point that he knew his landing would not be pleasant. His balance was already lost, so he had to begin his descent, sans grace. He had to either fall forward, or backward, and simply hope for the best. Perhaps a bruise or two, maybe a scratch, no big deal. An inconvenience, if anything. But he sat up there, teetering back and forth, debating the relative merits of an uncontrollable fall in either direction. Backward would be strange, since he couldn’t see where he would be falling. Too unnerving. Falling forward would be both better in terms of visibility, AND he’d end up on the side of the fence he was trying to arrive at in the first place. Prepare for some mild pain, and maybe a dislocated something-or-other.

A week later he left the hospital after having his spleen, which ruptured from the impact of him hitting the ground, removed in the emergency room to stop the life-threatening, massive internal bleeding he sustained. Hitting the ground burst a blood-filled internal organ. Petty bruises and mild scrapes? How about a foot long scalpel scar up the midsection, a loss of fifteen pounds, and a compromised immune system for the next two years.

But he made that decision, in the nanoseconds that he had to do it. And he’s living amazingly well with the consequences. Admiration is due.

As the song says: The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind: the kind that blindsides you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday. Gospel. Irritating, but gospel. Back to the bullshit theatre that was: my drive home.

The pain had become so wretchedly unbearable by the time I ascended the flyover to Ben White. I was developing tunnel vision, my teeth were clenched to the point of becoming atomically fused together, and I think I might have been crying. Full-blown Steel-Magnolias-watchin’ tears. But I’m really not sure what was going on, not in any measurable way. Pain like that will distort memory something serious.

The obvious problem was that I had tread too far out on the ice. And the cracks were thundering beneath me in a symphony of oncoming disaster. Quickly, the popping and cracking turned from a semi-structured symphony to a raucous and chaotic cacophony of roaring sounds that waved through my entire being, rippling across my teeny-tiny perception of this infinitely-immense reality…

And then, as if it were a gift from god him/her/whateverself: the warm release. It was the most amazing feeling I believe I’ve ever had. If I ever won the lotto, it would probably pale in comparison to the euphoria I felt. It was like fifty simultaneous orgasms all rolled together into one sweet moment. So beautiful. I have never experienced elation like that. Ever before. And for a brief moment, I thought I had the clarity that Buddhist monks spend their entire lifetime to find.

Then I realized that I just pissed all over the front seat of my truck. And that, my friends, is really, really fucked up. Crazy existential, but fucked up nonetheless.

I don’t believe I’ve laughed any harder than I did then. Being a human being continues to be fascinating.

Did I just make all this shit up? Not cool man. Not cool at all.