Oh, lordy, lordy... did I make a mistake.
Yeah, I'm a cheap bastard. It may be part of why Lemons is so appealing to me. But I take it to extremes. Like when the wife tells me to throw out the moldy food from the back of the fridge -- I take it to work instead, scrape the mold off, and "Voila!" lunch is served! At last December's Arsefreeze-a-palooza, my team was going to shack up in a motel while I was going to shack up in the back of my Prius. This meant I had to fend for myself for food. Looking through the cabinets, I found some semi-recently expired freeze-dried backpacker's food, and thought "well, we have to get rid of this sooner than later..."
Sleeping in the back of a Prius in near-freezing weather isn't exactly the most comfortable option for a 6'0" dude. But I made it work. To keep warm I layered up: long underwear, flannel pajamas, then an Israeli IDF extreme cold weather jumpsuit. In this Michelin-man getup, I slithered into a flimsy Coleman sleeping bag and hunkered down for the night. In my belly was a half-cooked bag of sweet-and-sour chicken and rice from Backpacker's Pantry. It had required an unusual amount of chewing on various kernels of unknown substances, claimed to be "pineapples, carrots and onions". What it lacked in taste, it gave back in fill factor. I was stuffed like a fat chick in a cocktail dress at a San Jose nightclub.
I awoke at sometime around 3 AM with a stabbing pain in my gut. My sleeping bag was wet from all the condensation -- it was too cold to crack a window earlier. I tried to sit up but there's just no room in my little tin cocoon. I rolled from side to side, trying to find a comfortable position, only to be answered by a wet, baritone gurgling. The kind that usually precedes a gastro-intestinal explosion. I knew the clock was ticking, so I began weighing my options...
shit my pants in the comfort of my sleeping bag, or
carefully extricate myself from the sleeping bag (which requires some yoga-like contortions in the back of a Prius), waddle several hundred yards to the bathrooms in the freezing cold, peel off my jumpsuit (no trapdoor in this guy) and sit on an ice sculpture shaped like a toilet. I got goose bumps just thinking about it.
"Never gamble with a fart" is the age-old advice. Though this was running through my head, I seemed to be leaning towards the "shit my pants" option. It's just too damn cold outside. Even in the Prius, I could see my breath. I feared losing my dingus to frostbite. I kept rolling around, doing some new-age interpretive "dance of the worm", trying to work this demon out of my belly. Then came the moment of truth. The gurgle. The pucker. Visions of a chocolate fondue fountain, no, a class IV rapid in Willy Wonka's river of chocolate. I imagined having to clean out the Prius with a garden hose whilst wearing a hazmat suit. ...and did the lord have mercy on me, but it was just a fart.
Like the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, this fart was but a harbinger of the tsunami of hydrogen sulfide that was to overtake my poor little Prius. Being wrapped in a sleeping bag and a jumpsuit, this meant the tsunami's only pathway to destruction was via my hood. My nose was sitting in the front row, center, at the amphitheater of gastrointestinal distress, and my bowels would be playing a double-album. The odor raced around my sinuses like a good dose of wasabi at an authentic sushi bar. Even my eyes were stinging, watering, you'd swear I was just maced. But the pressure-relief valve was doing his job, and oh, what a relief it was.
I was able to fall sleep a half-hour later, despite a failed attempt to aerate my miniature execution chamber. The synthetic fibers that make up the Prius's interior seemed to be little hands that were quite adept at gripping grime, filth and odor. Too bad it was too cold to ditch the IDF suit... I just had to keep my distance from everyone, lest they think (rightfully so) that I was walking around in a fully loaded diaper. The drive home from Arsefreeze-a-palooza was windows-down, of course, and even that left it smelling of rotten eggs and dead babies. Which reminds me, I still need to borrow my buddy's steam cleaner. The missus still won't ride in my car.
