*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole. Thank heavens.* -The Editors

Shame is a strange thing. The places it comes from. The way it affects our projected behaviors.

I used to have these horrific dreams where I would be doing something fairly standard, like shopping for vegetables, and I’d suddenly discover that I was nude. Oddly enough, it wasn’t really the nudity that snagged my goat. What scared me amidst those dreams was never the possibility that my clothes had been miraculously stolen from off my person while I checked mangos for freshness. Oh no. What scared me was the dream-realization that I’d probably been naked ALL DAY and that it was at just that moment that I’d recognized the breezy fact.

Like I was the last one to get the New Clothes* joke I had played on myself.

Me [picking through some onions]: hmmmm, these seem a bit dry to me but- wait, why is the tip of my dick suddenly so sharply cold- OH SWEET JESUS I’M NAKED AS A BEE!

Elderly Woman next to me [picking through lettuce, then pretending to drop something on floor near my feet]: Oh I think I might have dropped my squash down here! Just looking for… it’s… oh. Never mind.

Me [with building fear]: Squash?

Elderly Woman [with obvious disappointment]: Nope. Baby carrot.

Me [breaking into a full-on sprint toward exit]: IT’S COLD IN THE VEGETABLE SECTION!!!

I find it especially entertaining when these flubs-in-judgment float from out my slumbering mind and make their way into my every day. Keeps shit interesting.

Last Friday, in the continued pursuit of life-balance, I took a mid-day 100 degree jog around the lake on my lunch break. That’s fucking right. On my lunch break. 100 degrees outside. Because wanting to feel superior and intelligence rarely coincide.

Due to my general tendency to be ill-prepared for everything, I had not bothered to make sure that I had proper shorts cleaned for the job. So, the morning of the run, I tossed a bathing suit onto my pile of sweat-fun-stuff. I get jungle-wet when I exert even the slightest amount of physical effort, so it stood to reason that a bathing suit would be just as appropriate as anything else imaginable. After all, it’s designed to be soaked in the ocean. And that’s pretty much what was likely to happen during my run. Except that instead of water necessary for the maintenance of life and weather on earth, it would just be approximately one gallon of sweat from my crotchal region.

The trails around Lady Bird Lake (That's still not sticking with me, as I need the Town Lake reference. Town Bird Lake? Tird Lake? Perhaps just “Bird”) aren’t yet finished, and don’t play nice with joggers/cyclers who are running the south side of the river and want to cross Congress or 1st to rejoin the north side trails. There are no paths down to the waterfront tails just yet, unless you want to double back along Cesar Chavez and dance with crushing death through a construction site or cut through the TGI Friday’s at the Radisson (pretty much the same as a construction site), sweat-panting like a rabid dingo. Realistically speaking, you’re pretty much stuck at street level until they forge those new paths down to the river’s edge.

Which caused me to take a detour through downtown, up Congress toward The Capitol. I was less than excited about the diversion, but took it with as much dignity as any human being on the verge of dehydration and kidney shut-down.

The lunch crowds on Congress’s sidewalks are virtually impenetrable. One has to be willing to cut and slice between lunch mates as they waddle from their chosen eatery back to their cubicle’d office. That, and there’s a billion tourists as you close in on The Capitol.

Must be killer to vacation in Austin. We got bats!

It reminded me of the marathon relay, except no one tried to give me water or cheered me on, and the smell of rancid feces on select street corners was far more pronounced than I remember from that race.

As I trudged my way north on the bricked walks of our city’s center vein, I began to take notice that the hordes of tourists I was pushing upstream against were delighted to see me coming. Elbowing each other and high-fiving. But I couldn’t make out the source of their entertainment. Was it my bright-red face? My two-bit trainers, weight-worn and browned by trail dirt? The sounds of derelict health trying to fool itself?

I’m sure those elements of the production helped, but I was waving a far more blatant flag of general entertainment.

Apparently the absorptive qualities of standard bathing suits differ greatly from that of standard running fare (or in my typical case: basketball shorts, which is what I prefer), and in fact they are designed to repel moisture for the most part. Supposedly so that the bather won’t be chaffed and molded by continued moisture exposure after visiting whatever water source.

What this meant to me and my gallon of teste-sweat, was that there was a rather dark set of water-runs going down both of my legs which was not being evenly absorbed by my shorts, giving off the rather unarguable appearance of one slobbering, gasping, pasty grown man falling uphill, having quite sadly urinated all over himself.

Hell, based on the fact that I couldn’t feel the lower half of my body by that point in the jog, it could very well have been urine. Maybe not even mine. But considering how close I was to irreversible dehydration by then, most signs point to it being the tears of my overheated manhood.

By the time I took a second to check out my groin for a possible reason behind everyone’s fascination and excitement, I was a mere block from The Capitol, already through most of the crowds, at which point I yelled out “it looks like I just fucking pissed myself!” Just in case anyone at the nearby bus stop cluster was legally blind or had been too busy to notice the Niagara development on their own. Awesome.

Like I said, I believe these situations keep things interesting. If not for me, then for anyone else who is bothering to pay attention.

*After all, we’re always The Emperor of our dream kingdoms, right?