Every once in a great while when I'm out for a run, some smartass will honk his horn at me or shout nonsense as they zoom past. "Hey, way to run, douchebag..." or "WOOOO! Muthahfuckaaaaaaaahhhhhh..." Sometimes it startles me and briefly breaks my concentration, but I usually shake it off and continue on my way without putting much more thought into it. Typically they're teenage punks hiding anonymously behind the wheel, secure in the knowledge they were already a block down the road before I could look up to so much as determine the make and model of their car, much less see their faces. One warm summer day a few years ago, I was jogging along the sidewalk, when an older sedan coming down the street from the opposite direction made a left turn onto the street that I was approaching. The driver, a young man in his late teens or early twenties, looked me square in the eye, raised his middle finger toward me, and kept it defiantly extended as he sloowwwly rounded the corner. He didn't hide behind a mask or escape velocity, but laid it all on the line right then and there as if to say, "Hey, guy running down the street. I don't like the cut of your jib. Up yours! Oh yeah. That's right. I'm giving you the finger. I don't have a reason, and I don't have to. I just don't like you. You see my face, see my car, and could even write down my license plate number if you want to be a bitch about it, but I don't care. Fuck youuuuuuuuuuuuuu..." So years later, I still salute you and your gigantic balls, random slow car driving finger giving guy. With all of my fingers, not just one.

The free item in question is a $1500 treadmill, and the home is my home, suckers! Tuesday I ran home over lunch to accept delivery of my brand new NordicTrack Elite 2900 treadmill. After over 4 years of a couple thousand miles or so of 200+ lbs of abuse in the form of me, the old one still works like a champ (I ran 3 miles on it Tuesday night), but a minor crack in the frame prompted a warranty repair technician to deem the treadmill "unrepairable" and I was allowed to select a replacement. This is proof positive that an extended warranty on a treadmill is worth every penny!

I had assumed that the delivery would involve at least getting it inside of my house, but no. The truck backed up, and the lone driver was the only soul in the cab. He lowered the tread with a lift on the back of the truck, wheeled it into my garage, and said, "Sign this." Damn. Somehow I had managed to get the old treadmill into the house on my own. The only part I remember is a treacherous trip down to the basement with the treadmill box resting on my back as I slowly slid on my ass down the stairs. Yeah, that wasn't happening with this one. The box was significantly bigger and weighed about 250 lbs. Maybe it was my imagination and it was the same size as the old one, but obviously I'm not as willing to risk pulling a groin muscle as I was back in those days. I like my groin unpulled, thank you very much. Unless money changes hands or something.

Thankfully my brother was able to swing by later that night to give me a hand. We slid, tipped, lifted, pivoted, and grunted the thing into my kitchen from the garage and decided we were best off taking it out of the packaging since the box was so unwieldly. The bulk of the weight was in the frame, so we took that down first. We hauled the rest of the smaller parts down, dusted our hands, and he headed home. Since I had lifted weights and ran a few miles on the old tread while I was waiting for him to come over, the move took it's toll, and I was too wiped to mess around with assembling the damn thing. I left it sit.

Last night I began the arduous task of piecing things together. The directions said it was a two man job, so I knew it was going to be a pain in the ass. Truth be told, my experience in that situation is that two people make it easier, but if you have some coordination, you can do it yourself. In other words, I was screwed. There was a whole lot of rod A goes into hole 17, connect wire 52 to upside down crank joint 29.A-17x, then chuck a hammer through a neighbor's window in frustration. The directions were somewhat murky, but after a few hours of tedious labor, a couple of false starts on attaching the control console, and a lot of sweating and swearing, I plugged it in, and it chirped to life. I broke it in with a nice 4 mile run.

We'll see if this new one holds up, but you can be damn sure I'm getting the extended warranty on it!

Since my LASIK surgery a little over a week ago, I have very closely followed the timeline set by LasikPlus. This is my vision we're talking about, and I'm not going to take any risks. For the first week, I religiously took the antibiotic and steroid eye drops 4 times a day, slept in the funky goggles they gave me to avoid the chance of rolling over in bed and accidentally ripping open a corneal flap, and I avoided strenuous activities, including my workout. Sunday I began the process of easing into some daily physical activity by going for a nice, long walk (I can't run for another couple weeks, as I'm supposed to keep sweat out of my eyes). Monday I was lazy and skipped. But yesterday was quite nice out, so on my lunch break, I did 4 miles, part of which included a serene lakeside path of which I was previously unaware. On top of that, I walked the 1.5 miles to the polls to vote that night, then walked well out of my way of the path home to stop at a store to buy a couple of ingredients for the chocolate chip bread I had planned to bake in my bread machine. All said, I probably walked a total of 7 to 8 miles yesterday.

At 72 degrees, today was a highly unusually warm day for November in Minnesota, so again I decided to seize advantage of the weather by taking a little stroll. However, this time I wanted to maximize efficient use of my lunch break by including an errand of stocking up my lunchtime soup supply. I quickly google mapped the nearest grocery stores and supermarkets and wasn't surprised to learn that my normal noontime grocery stop, the Lakeville SuperTarget, was nearly 3 miles away. Obviously that's much too far of a walk to fit into under an hour. Ah, but there was a "Superette" about 1.5 miles from the office. Perfect! Except what the fuck is a Superette? Obviously it's not super at all if they need to downgrade with the "ette" suffix.

"What do we call our new store, Emma?"

"Well, Frank, we aint shitty, so I reckon Shittymart weren't right. But we ain't all that super either, so t'weren't no Supermarket neither. I dunno. Superette?"

"That was a whole lotta unnecessary words, woman. Just file the paperwork and get back to holding me back from my dreams."

In other words, I expected nothing spectacular, but it was a destination that would take my inquisitive ass through a part of Lakeville I had not yet explored. I was sold. To the Shittymart--er...Superette! So after wolfing down a bowl of soup, I hoofed it outside. I wandered and soon made my way past the bank, the oddly located adult gift store, warily made my way through the parking lot of the bustling truck stop, and was on the straight road for the Superette. Except this wasn't exactly the back street I was expecting. It was a narrow two-lane highway with a few feet of shoulder for the treading. Not exactly pedestrian friendly. But I had already walked quite some distance to get this far, so I decided I would press on and be very watchful of the oncoming traffic.

And I walked. And walked. And walked. The landscape became more rural and remote. Finally I began to realize that I surely had walked a fair stretch more than 1.5 miles. Meanwhile, trucks, cars, and motorcycles whizzed by within a few feet of my precious, precious right hip. "I need that hip for walking! Please don't hit me and break it, fast-moving cars," I thought to myself. I decided I'd press on just a little farther and soon saw an old store sign with a Pepsi logo in the distance. It just had to be the Superette!

I marched forward past the blatantly truant teens buzzing their ATV's and dirtbikes through the ditches and the 10 acre hobby farm for sale ("No horses!") and at last was at my destination. I'm not sure that the "ette" was a strong enough suffix for how far below the grade of "Super" this store really was. The store looked like it had been there since at least the 60's or 70's and the inside confirmed it. There was the unmistakable smell of layers of dust and dirt inside. The smell immediately reminded me of walking into a dirty farm implement store with my dad as a young child. This Superette probably started as one of the only places for miles and miles that the then rural population could buy milk, meager produce, and toiletries and had never been dusted once since it opened.

I greeted the elderly man behind the counter and headed to the coolers at the back of the store. I was thirsty and needed a cold beverage. I wasn't in the mood for bottled water and still eschew caffeine for the most part, so I grabbed a Sierra Mist Free. Given the condition of the store, I immediately checked the expiration date. Hmm...October 23rd, 2006. Expired but it's not like it was milk or cottage cheese, so I was fine with it. I scanned the shelves for soup but only found a paltry selection of Campbell's condensed soup and three varieties of Campbell's Chunky. I usually take Healthy Choice or other lower sodium varities, so I balked and moved over to the candy aisle. Well, well, well! M&M's with Dark Chocolate. And with a 2007 expiration date no less. Sold! I took my purchases to the counter and attempted some friendly banter with the old man as he rang me up, but I soon realized he was deaf as a post and couldn't bless him with any of my witty repartee above his stock replies of "Huh?" and "What's that?" I paid for my purchase and left the smell of dirt and death for fresher air.

When I had left the office, it was breezy and somewhat cloudy. But now the wind had died down and the sun was more than peeking through the coulds. It was actually feeling rather warm. I began to feel beads of perspiration roll down my forehead. No! My precious eyes! Must keep out the sweat! I obsessively wiped my brow but briskly trudged forward full speed ahead, as I didn't want to abuse my lunch break by taking too much time. God damn was I out in the middle of nowhere! In fact, I twice heard gunshots in the distance. In certain neighborhoods of Minneapolis, you would assume it was a drive by or a murder-suicide bringing a tidy end to a tumultuous thirty-year marriage, but I knew that I was far enough out in the boondocks in the middle of deer season that I was bound to hear a rifle blast here and there.

Now I was really starting to get warm and sweaty. I'm in reasonably good shape from all of the running and walking I do, but sinking down into the sand and gravel of the road's shoulder was taking its toll. And now I was getting seriously worried about how long it was going to take me to get back to work. I began considering thumbing a ride from one of the endless stream of passing trucks but had visions of being traded into an underground network of white slavery. Not a good idea. Thankfully I eventually saw the sign for the truck stop in the distance. The end of my journey was now within reach! I dodged tractor-trailer rigs in the truck stop parking lot again, marched past the adult gift store and peered unashamed through the window, and was on the home stretch for the office. I made it!

Thankfully, my desk is in a corner and somewhat secluded from my coworkers, as I was sweaty and not exactly smelling my best. The lessons learned? Superettes are not super, Lakeville is still surprisingly rural, and when you walk several miles after taking a greasy dump that forced you to wipe your ass bloody and raw, you come back with a little bit of a limp.

After limping around for over three weeks with an ever increasingly infected and swollen toe, last night I took matters into my own hands and removed a small corner of my big toe's nail, including a portion attached to nailbed. Owie. My suspicions were correct--I simply had one bastard of an ingrown toenail. It hurts slightly today, but feels far better than it has in weeks. In fact, I just got done punishing my treadmill with 6 miles of kickass speed intervals (I know I should have run outdoors on a gorgeous night like tonight, but I didn't want to get 2 miles from home and realize my toe felt like it was going to fall off).

Why not go to the doctor? Let's see...pay a $20 copay, waste probably 3 hours of an afternoon, taking time away from work, only to have him...cut off a corner of my toenail to remove the ingrown portion. I know what I'm doing. My track record with this toe is long and sordid, and long ago a doctor removed 2 portions of the nail permanently, scraping the root from the bone (it wasn't painful but fucking unsettling as all hell) to mitigate the risk of further ingrown nails. This is the first such nasty ingrown business I've dealt with in probably 10 or 15 years.

So now I'm footloose, fancy free, and am so upbeat that I could almost smile at a child. But I won't.

Normally I'm not a big fast food hamburger joint type of guy. I lived on BK, McD's, and pizza in college and in the year following college. But my ass was gigantic--literally. A year after college, I weighed 295 lbs. At a little over 6 feet tall, that's a lot to love (i.e. I was a fatass).

Blah, blah, blah, long story short, I realized the err of my ways and learned the joys of regular exercise and healthier eating habits. That 295 lbs became 185 lbs. Now several years after adding weightlifting to the cardio and a few too many DQ Blizzards here and there, I am not quite that skinny anymore, but I'm at a good, steady weight.

These days, while I might grab a chalupa at Taco Bell once in a while, my adventures in fast food land are rare outings. For example, I might eat at McDonald's 2 or 3 times in a year. I still love the hell out of their breakfast menu, so on a rare Sunday where I'm up around 6 or 7 (I'm usually a nightowl), I might celebrate life by running to McD's a couple miles down the road. I like to get myself into some sort of bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit situation accented with a breakfast burrito or two.

But once every couple of years or so I get a very distinct craving. I must have a Filet-O-Fish. Nothing will satisfy this craving but one of those deep fat fried square fish sticks on a bun, topped with a melty slice of shitty American cheese and way too much tartar sauce. It's like going home with an ugly girl from the bar. On any other night, any other day, there's no way you would want to get your hands on that train wreck. But at that moment in time, she is perfection.

Last night was my Filet-O-Fish night. I had plans that were cancelled, so I decided to get a long overdue haircut and pick up a couple double (I said double) Filet-O-Fish sammiches and fries. I was disturbed by how enormous and heavy the bag was. I felt like I was carrying home a couple hardcover books from Barnes & Noble. Perhaps my eyes had been bigger than my stomach.

Once home, I dropped the bag, and it landed with a thud on my coffee table. I was about to pack my gut with the equivalent of a Michael Crichton and a Dan Brown. Oh, and did I mention I'd also bought a medium chocolate french silk pie Blizzard from DQ? Add a cookbook from the annoyingly perky Rachael Ray in there, too.

I chomped on a few still hot and fresh fries while I opened the first box. I was taken aback by how incomprehesively perfect the sandwich looked. I mean freakishly perfect. Like it was ready for a photo shoot for a Filet-O-Fish print ad. The bun was a perfect golden brown. It was round and plump without a single crack, tear, or blemish to be found on its surface. The two filets were aligned with precision, with tantalizing dollups of tartar and melted cheese peeking provocatively from beneath their glutenous protector. To hell with the aesthetics! I bit in. Oh, God! I was in heaven.

One throwback to my chunky days--savoring is still not my thing. I plowed through that first sandwich like Starr Jones through an unattended birthday cake. Fries. More fries! Oh yeah! I then scarfed the second sandwich with equal enthusiasm. This was, at that very instant in time, what heaven tasted like. I threw the boxes an bag in the trash, polished off my Blizzard, and collapsed on the couch as if I'd just put in a 12 hour shift digging graves in the blazing sun. This is how life should always be. Content, satisfied, and full, but not so much that you need to hurl.

I watched a couple Tivo'd episodes of Monk, toddled off to bed burping tartary fish burps, and drifted into the ether, never once feeling that need to hurl.

I was surprisingly motivated after work tonight. Worked out for an hour, looked at the time, and decided to take advantage of having most of the evening ahead of me. My two main objectives were to get a haircut and get the bulb for my headlight bulb replaced. I noticed this morning on the way to work that it was out. One fucking thing after another with the car, but more on that later.

Mission 1: Haircut--status: word to ya mutha. I lost my regular hair cut lady, Jesse, (I refuse to call her my stylist, as my testicles would resent me for days) when she left Cole's in Eagan after having her (and I presume her husband's) baby in June. So I've bounced around between 3 different gals there, all of whom have been ok, but not "Jesse great". The one who cut my hair tonight gets a thumbs up. I'd go back to her. Perhaps my new haircut lady has been found?

Mission 2: Get headlight bulb replaced--status: Yup. Bloomington Acura, of the Broken Rear Window Incident fame, is open until 1 am weeknights. Ever since the aforementioned incident, they have been extry customer service oriented when I stop by. Though some of that perception in tonight's case may simply be due to the outgoing, friendly nature of the guy who took care of my paperwork. And thank God, the RSX is still under warranty. 5 years/50,000 miles covers even rinky stuff like wiper inserts and wonder of wonders, bulb replacements. Good fucking thing too, since it would have set me back $40! And only $12 of that was for labor. Damn! When I had my shitmobile Ford Exploder, I'd just go to Napa, pay like $6 for a bulb and do it myself.

I was told it would be about an hour wait, so being in a restless and and quite hungry, I set in for a freezing walk to grab dinner at the Boston Market a few blocks away, just off of 494 and Lyndale. I wanted someplace where I could get some nice green veggies with my meal, and that was just the ticket. By the time I got there, I thought my goddamned ears were going to fall off of my head. I restored warmth to my body with a cup of decaf coffee. Too late in the evening for the fully leaded stuff.

The wind was mercifully to my back on the return walk to the dealership. A couple free cookies and half a cup of decaf later, they had my car ready to roll. Dude who handled my paperwork was back, and his level of friendliness was approaching almost uncomfortable levels. He hovered over me as I signed the bill and my credit card receipt happily chatting away. Shook my hand both before and after I signed everything. Um...ok. I like friendly, but I could have stood for him to back down from his 8 to about a 7. He wasn't completely overbearing, but just a little over the top. Incidentally, a 10 would be if he'd put his other pinky finger in my butt while shaking my hand. That's just too friendly...but call me sometime.

But my evening wasn't quite through. The car wash this time had ripped off my cheap little wide angle mirror I'd stuck on my driver's side mirror. Eh...it's a $2 mirror from Target. It's stayed on for 3.5 years and was bound to fall off eventually. So I stopped at Target on the way home (it was 10:30--gotta love holiday hours!), found a similar, but slightly bigger mirror for $3. Nice. But on the way out the door, I found $2 on the ground. Nicer.

So much more on the damn car though. Just regular maintenance type stuff, but it all seemed to need to get taken care of NOW. Just before Christmas. Perfect timing. $368 for new snow tires I bought online at tires.com. And it'll cost me about $70 to have them put on and balanced. My 40k mile service is also due. That'll set me back about $200-$300 if I recall. My brakes are squealing so those need to be looked at, and my battery is getting a little droopy (I think it's the battery anyway--Acura wanted $20 just to test it when I can get that for free at many auto parts stores).

Um...no, probably can't get away with that.

Sometimes my own will power amazes me (though other times it just plain lets me down!). Today I was dragging ass. I could not get to sleep last night for the life of me. I suppose I should preface this with some background about my unusual sleeping habits and arrangements...

My house has three bedrooms, one of which is my home office, the others my guest and master bedrooms. The last couple of years, I've taken to sleeping primarily in my guest bedroom. The bed is smaller than the queen in the master beedroom, but the mattress cradles my back like a fat guy would cradle the last Egg McMuffin on earth in the seconds before he wolfed it down with a glass of bacon grease. Plus the bedroom is darker and quieter, as it faces my back yard, as opposed to the street (ok, the cul-de-sac). I've also found that having left my alarm clock in the master bedroom, I'm forced to drag myself out of bed and walk across the hall to turn it off each morning. It's more than 95 percent more likely that I'll actually be awake for the day instead of just rolling over and hitting snooze 3 or 4 times (seriously, I did the calculations on my Speak n' Math!).

Ah, but the mix gets stranger. In the last 2 months since starting my new job, I've also found myself frequently sleeping through the entire night on my couch in the living room. Think about it. It's late. I'm tired and falling asleep on my big, wide, overstuffed, comfy couch. Why get up, stir up my juices the same way that getting up to turn off the alarm clock does, then lay restless in bed? Fuck that. If you're tired, sleep where you are, man!

Come to think of it, my pattern did change during the 7 months in there that I had a real, live girlfriend (everyone I know was as shocked as you are that any woman would put up with me for so long! ). When she stayed over, we would sleep in the master bedroom. Bigger bed=more room for 2 people. And of course, she only had the one bed when I stayed at her place.

Digression mode complete. Last night, I couldn't sleep. I tossed. I turned. I curled. I straightened. I dipped. I thrusted. Wait--what story was I telling again?? Ah, yes. I couldn't sleep. The bed wasn't doing it, so I went back to the couch. Hmm...no Egg McMuffin-level cradling, but perhaps the way the fat guy would cradle some grapes or an apple. Not an Egg McMuffin, but it's food, and it'll have to do. Oh, and personally, I like breakfast burritos and sausage biscuits, about the only McD's food I can tolerate anymore.

As the clock raced past 1 am, I finally slumbered. I have no clue how much time passed, but eventually, I awoke to whiz. I headed to the guest bed after that and slept until I was flipped over and anally raped by my alarm clock at 6:15 am. I had set it 15 minutes early to get a jump on traffic with the forecasted layer of snow and ice on the roads. My ass and ears still throbbing, I took my vitamin, brushed my teeth, and hopped in the shower. I was the walking dead.

I lollygagged and took 25 minutes to get ready. On a good day, I can be out the door in 20. On a highly motivated day, I can brush, shower, and dress in 15. I'm obviously not of primping stock. I checked the traffic map online, and it already was looking grim. A lot of telltale red. Shit.

It took me an hour and 10 minutes to get to work for fuck sake. Though that included the 10 minutes I took to stop and grab a mocha and muffin at Caribou in St Louis Park. I had brought my usual banana for breakfast, but I just needed a break from the road. I know, I know. It's not like a 6 hour drive to North Dakota, but all the stop, go, slow, go, stop, gas, brake, honk, skid, go, twirl, and parry for that long just got to me.

I did the best I could to get through the day. I downed Diet Dew left and right and even spent a ghastly $1.50 on a tiny-ass, fruity little energy drink out of the vending machine downstairs. By 2 pm, I'd realized I wasn't going to make it to 4:30 or even 4. I would hit the road at 3:30, avoid traffic, and come in early the rest of the week and leave late on Friday if I have to.

The commute home was a mercifully short 30 minutes. After skipping my workout last night, I was bound and determined that I would not skip tonight. I hit it with everything I had. Thirty minutes of weights and right to the tread. I managed to squeeze 6.3 miles out of myself in an hour and 2 minutes. Hell, there are days I can't squeeze 4 out of myself on a full night's sleep. The brain and body make for a mysterious partnership at times. How else can I explain the 11.5 miles I ran just a couple Fridays ago?

And now, it's approaching 9:30, I'm exhausted, and will no doubt crash early tonight. I'm thinking this is a couch night.

Friday night was an odd one indeed. After work, I decided to take full advantage of what surely one will be the last relatively warm (55 degrees) evenings we will have this year by going out for a run. Right off the bat, I had a good feeling about it. I had energy, I felt loose and limber, and I was totally into it mentally. I ran 11.5 miles, blowing the hell out of several of my previous personal bests. And I know it was 11.5 miles because I mapped my route just now. *grin* I ran from my house in Eagan, up to Cliff Rd, down Slater Rd to where it turns into Burnsville Parkway in Burnsville, to County Rd 11 and back. Not bad, especially considering there are some long, steep-ass stretches on that route!

So I got home, completely jazzed about what I'd just done, bragged about it to a couple people online (what a dork I am!! *grin*) and hopped in the shower. I was fully expecting to just make some dinner, and settle in for an evening of watching tv and relaxing. It had been a long week.

As I finished getting dressed, the phone rang. It was my buddy Kelly calling me to let me know our mutual friend Loren came down from Duluth for the weekend, and they wanted me to join them for hitting a few bars in downtown Minneapolis. They even had a hotel room at the Doubletree to crash in afterward. Not an unusual thing to do for them when they are determined to tie one on.

Hmm...now I had been bemoaning how disconnected I'd become lately from some of my friends with focusing on my new job, trying to reenter the dating world, and dealing with projects/troubles/gremlins at my house. Damn straight I'm in! I needed to loosen up and get some quality drinkin' time in with some old pals I hadn't seen for a few months (Loren I hadn't seen since our big kayaking/poker/guys' weekend back in July and Kelly since September).

I figured I would just grab an appetizer or something at one of the bars, so I didn't bother to make dinner before heading out the door. Had I known what was to follow, I would have grabbed a banana (literally, not in a euphemistic sense) or stopped at Subway or something on the way. By the time I got to the Doubletree, Loren and Kelly were already fairly well-tuned on Captain and Coke and vanilla vodka. I joined in, had a few drinks, and we hit the town. Now that is precisely the point where my stupidity kicked in. Not two hours beforehand, I'd finished running 11.5 miles. I had nothing to eat since lunch except a bit of chocolate pudding. I had no food in my system, what-so-friggin-ever. Genius, Jeremy. Pure genius.

Let me also preface the rest of this story by telling you that I am not a hard-drinking party animal by any stretch of the imagination. I usually just have a couple beers if I go out. But it seems like about once a year, almost invariably with Kelly and/or Loren involved, I get completely trashed. I don't want to give the wrong impression that I go out and get completely shit-faced on a regular basis. It's just not one of my life's goals to walk around in a drunken stupor.

Immediately after stepping out of the room, I was very vocal in my need to get food before hitting the bars. Kelly and Loren refused to stop anywhere because they are both jerks when drinking. Kelly's always a jerk, but he's a funny jerk. The kind of jerk you like to have around. Not an asshole jerk. Just a jerk. Loren is...well, Loren is Loren (I could write a tome on the psychology of Loren with an appendix of his sober and drunken adventures that you could squash a chihuahua with). Get jerk-ass Kelly and silly-ass Loren together in a room with alcohol, and you've got an interesting evening ahead of you.

From there on out, it was all downhill. I was now too drunk to find my way around downtown on my own without Kelly or Loren in the lead, so I could not venture out on my own for food. All I could think about was the little pizza place along 5th Street where we drunkenly wolfed down slices a little over a year ago at my brother's bachelor party. God, I would have blown a hobo for one of those slices right about then. Or at the very least get him drunk and roll him for the vittles in that little handkerchief baggie on the end of his stick.

Eventally, I was so drunk that I probably couldn't have ordered the food of my own volition even if we did stop somewhere that served solid sustenance. Each time I persisted in expressing my need for food, Kelly would hand me a jager bomb and say something like, "Here's your supper, bitch!" And in my drunken desire to not look like a pussy, I would down it of course. However, as I began to feel the room spinning and the nausea setting in, I decided to just keep my mouth shut and try to sober up. But it was too late. The damage was done. I stepped outside to sit down and get some fresh air.

It didn't seem very long after I'd stepped outside for some fresh air that Loren came out. He had been kicked out of the bar. "I didn't do anything!" he proclaimed. Loren never does anything. But he sure seems to get kicked out of bars for doing nothing with suspicious frequency.

At this point, it was maybe 12 or 12:30, and despite being an ass along with Kelly about the eating thing, he kindly led me back to the hotel and patiently waited as I sat down on a railing, planter, or curb or somesuch, put my head between my knees and proceeded to let forth a voluminous stream of pure, liquid vomit. Yummy. To the unsuspecting passerby, that trickle running across the sidewalk likely appeared to be someone's spilled drink, or perhaps rusty condensation leaking from an air conditioner, as there was not a single solid chunk in it to be found. 10.5 miles. No food. Hard alcohol. Bad. Very bad.

We got back to the hotel where I collapsed onto the pull out bed in the suite and liqui-puked even more into the ice bucket. Loren took it to empty it. What a guy. But for reasons known only in Loren Land, he emptied it into the sink, splashing it all over the counter when there was a toilet not 2 steps away.

I was out of it, but I drank as much water as I could. I kept getting up throughout the night to chug water, despite it hitting my touched stomach like a kick to the nuts. I knew I had to, or I'd be sick as a dog the next day. What seemed like minutes after I'd laid down (I didn't even realize I'd fallen asleep), I rolled over to find Kelly standing over me, flicking water in my face with his fingers and laughing his ass off. This was a reference to something I'd done to Loren when we all went to Boston last year. Ha, ha. Very funny. Fucker. I would have probably less perturbed had it been Loren doing it instead. He deserved getting some payback on me.

As it turns out, that incident probably occurred around 4 or 4:30 when Kelly ended up getting back to the room. He's still trying to piece together just what the hell he was doing until that late since the bars close here at 2 am. Loren had also gone back out to the bars until 2 am. I was completely unaware of the passage of time until about 9:30 am. Thankfully, my hydration instincts paid off, and I awoke to find myself feeling somewhat worked over, but functional. No headache. No furry tongue. Just a little delicate in the stomach and thirsty. I drank some more water, and went back to bed until a little before 11.

I showered up, brushed my teeth, got dressed, and hung around to B.S. while the guys got ready to leave. We parted ways, and I stopped at Starbucks for a mocha and a blueberry scone, the first substantial food in my system in nearly 24 hours. It wasn't nearly enough. I had a strong hankerin' for a Taco John's burrito. Not a Taco Bell burrito. Not a Chipotle burrito. It had to be Taco John's. But I had also talked with my friend Becky about hanging out that afternoon, so I gave her a call. Made more sense to drive straight over to her place in Woodbury than go all the way home and then to Woodbury. I arrived at her place around 1 pm. She offered up anything I wanted from her fridge or freezer, but that Taco John's burrito was sitting on my brain. I looked online, and there was one just a couple miles away. She humored my craving and sat patiently as I downed the burrito and potato ole's (kick ass little tater tot-like fellas like Taco Bell's potato sides USED to be).

That wasn't the end of weekend festivities, but this all was the most stupid and interesting part of it. Next time I'll just have a beer and some hot wings when I go out.