Mountaineering State of Mind

Posted by John:

So I spent the whole of last week in Shitstain, West Virginia doing a jobsite observation at a large hospital project that has been under construction there for the past two years. I don’t want to fall into the stereotypical West Virginia jokes because I don’t think it’s that bad of a state. It’s quite scenic and I know several West Virginians and they’re all fine, upstanding people. Granted, they all moved away from West Virginia as soon as they could, but that’s neither here nor there. This particular place I was visiting wasn’t necessarily a destination I’d recommend, but it wasn’t terrible per se. If I were to describe the place in a few words I would say that if God exists he’s definitely forgotten about this particular town. As an example, the woman working the counter at the hotel had the most tragic haircut I’d ever seen. In fact, it was four haircuts in one and all were outdated by at least two decades. She had the old school, fluffy bangs along with a poodle poof/beehive-thing on top, then a mullet in back with the most glorious perm this side of 1984. I couldn’t stop staring at it but I also couldn’t wrap my head around it. It’s like when Conan used to be on the air he would occasionally do celebrity mash-up photos where he would take two or more celebrity photos and turn them into one singular hybrid monster celebrity. The whole point was to take the celebrity’s worst features without any attempt to actually blend them together to make them look good. That was pretty much what this hairstyle(s) was. I was going to feint admiration and ask where she had her hair done, then I was going to sneak out in the middle of the night and burn that fucking place down for the safety of the rest of humanity.

At any rate, this story isn’t about West Virginia or haircuts. It’s about a horrendous week spent on a construction job site. As I’ve said before, rule number 1 on a job site is, don’t be a douche, so that was my top priority the moment I set foot out there. In fact, my whole strategy was to be like a ninja and encounter the fewest number of people possible. The less people you encounter the less opportunity to do something douchey. Fortunately for me this was an absolutely massive building with seven floors and hundreds and hundreds of rooms, so it wasn’t difficult to strategically avoid contractors anywhere I went. Therefore, all I had to worry about was not leaving any evidence of my presence. Unfortunately, that proved to be easier said than done.

My job was to make sure all the sinks and toilets in the entire facility were operational. I’m talking hundreds and hundreds of sinks and toilets. It was the same shit for 4 straight days: walk in a room, check for hot water at the sink, flush the toilet; walk to the next room, check for hot water, flush the toilet; walk to the next room… Holy shit I wanted to stab myself in the eyeball with a plastic fork, it was so horrible. So on my first day there I wandered into one room, turned the sink on to let it warm up then turned my back to go flush the toilet when I heard the sink cough, sputter, spit, then I turned back just in time to see the water erupt from the faucet, hit the sink bowl, then launch into the air like a goddamn geyser. Apparently there had been a lot of pressure built up in the pipe and by opening the faucet I released all that pressure. I rushed over to shut the sink off but the damage was already done. Water was dripping from the ceilings and walls and puddling up all over the floor. And there I was, my face and shirt soaking wet. So what did I do? Got the hell out of there of course. Then I went to hide in a room somewhere else for 20 minutes to let my shit dry out. Now I’m going to write in my report, “Sink in room 7124 not functioning properly… PS – Mop up floor, walls, and ceiling.”

Plus, do you have any idea how often you have to pee when you’re constantly checking sinks for hot water and flushing toilets? Like every 30 minutes. You might as well walk around with your hand in a goddamn glass of warm water. And the thing was, there was a strict rule on site to not use any of the toilets. A few weeks ago when the plumbing started to get up and running all the construction workers were sneaking off to remote parts of the building to take huge shits wherever they could. You can’t blame them; can you imagine being on a construction site for two years, taking all your shits in a dirty-ass porto-pot after hundreds of other construction workers? The first time you’d see an actual toilet would be like seeing a French prostitute after spending a year out at sea. But the thing was, not all the toilets were operational yet. So these guys were going, dropping huge deuces, and then the fucking toilet wouldn’t flush. This was happening multiple times each day. One of my coworkers was unlucky enough to be on site a few weeks ago and he walked into a room and nearly passed out from the smell. Being the curious critter that he is, he soldiered through the toxic odor to discover the source, which as you can expect was a massive unflushed turd in the toilet bowl. It was so huge and disgusting that he naturally took a picture of it with his phone. He then showed me the picture and I nearly passed out just from the image. Now, a lot of you probably find this pretty appalling, and if you do you likely have two X chromosomes. If you don’t have two X chromosomes you probably have a picture of a huge turd on your cell phone right now. I’m not kidding ladies, ask your significant other right now if he has a picture of a turd on his cell phone and he’ll confirm it. Just don’t ask to see it because dudes don’t take pictures of just any old, average, run of the mill turd. No, it’s likely the most disgusting turd he’s ever come across, human or otherwise. Hence the picture on the cell phone. In fact, I’d venture to say that the guy who thought of putting a camera on a cell phone had one day walked into a stall in a hole-in-the-wall shit bar and unwittingly stumbled upon a massive unflushed turd and thought to himself, “Holy shit! This is the biggest turd I have ever seen! If only I had a camera on my person right now!” In fact, the person that produced said turd was probably like, “Holy shit! This is the biggest turd I have ever produced. I’m going to leave it so I can go get a camera,” because he knew that any guy that stumbled upon that masterpiece after him would never flush it, opting instead to take a picture of it. You think I’m making this all up just to get a rise out of you, but seriously, ask you boyfriend if he has any pictures of turds on his phone right now. Ask him. Personally I have a picture on my phone of the biggest pile of dog shit I have ever seen, which was left in my yard by the neighborhood stray dog nearly 2 years ago.

Now, getting back to the construction site, there was obviously a pretty simple solution to this issue of taking a shit in a toilet then finding out it doesn’t flush – you flush the goddamn toilet before you sit down to make sure it works. If it doesn’t flush, just go on to the next one (In fact, I’m pretty sure this is what Jay-Z’s new song, “On to the Next One” is about). How retarded are these guys? But the other, much larger issue in my opinion was, there wasn’t a single shred of toilet paper in the entire building, obviously because the toilets weren’t fully functional yet and the owner of the building didn’t want to encourage people to take a shit. So what the hell were these guys wiping their asses with? That must be why most construction workers wear sleeveless shirts. The shirts didn’t start out sleeveless, but if you were taking a shit somewhere and suddenly realized you didn’t have anything to wipe your ass, what would you do? Probably sacrifice the sleeves on your shirt. I’d also be willing to bet that most construction workers don’t end the workday with their socks either. At any rate, the issue with the contractors taking shits in non-functional toilets was obviously a pretty big deal, hence the rule that everyone was forbidden from using any of the toilets on site. As you can imagine that was a huge inconvenience to anyone that has to take a piss every 30 minutes. At first I honored the rule and would walk down 7 flights of stairs to the porto-pot, then walk back up 7 flights of stairs. Then 30 minutes later, down 7 flights of stairs, then back up. After doing that a few times I was like, “Screw this shit, I’m not training for a stair walking competition here. I’m using one of these goddamn toilets.” So I found a bathroom in a remote corner, flushed first to make sure it worked, took a leak, then got the hell out of there. Believe me, it was worth the risk.

A while later I had worked my way down to the 6^th floor where I saw three plumbing contractors frantically rushing about, “Where is the leak coming from?”

“I don’t know, it’s above the ceiling here somewhere…”

“Wait, it’s coming from a toilet up on the 7^th floor!”

“The 7^th floor! No one should be using any toilets anywhere! How is it leaking???”

Holy shit if the leak wasn’t coming from the exact toilet I had used not more than 30 minutes earlier! I’m not making this up. You can imagine the panic that gripped my bowels at that moment. Can you imagine what would have happened to me if those contractors had found out I was the one to use that toilet? Dear God, I would have been drawn and quartered then they would have used the sleeves of my severed arms to wipe their asses.

But how did that happen? I was flushing every goddamn toilet that in that entire goddamn building; how in the hell did the one toilet that I actually took a piss in start leaking into the ceiling of the floor below? How??? I have no idea.

So what did I do? Got the hell out of there of course. I went to a remote part of the building and hid in a room for 20 minutes to let things blow over. Now I’m going to write in my report, “Toilet in room 7378 leaking into ceiling of 6^th floor… PS – If you find a navy blue sock in the waste pipe downstream of the toilet in room 7274, it’s not mine.” 

Survivor: Imbeciles

Posted by John

I’ll tell you what you shouldn’t do – take the 6 AM flight through Orlando the day after Memorial Day. Inevitably the plane is going to be full of a bunch of goddamn snot-nosed kids on their way to Disney World who are so excited they’re about to puke, or in at least one case, shit themselves. When the kid in the row behind you stops kicking your seat just long enough to say, “Daddy, I tooted,” go ahead and get the barf bag ready to go as quickly as you can because “toot” is about as accurate a description as calling the Deep Horizon Oil Rig disaster a “boo-boo” as the smell of toxic kid-shit, so thick you can feel it in the back of your throat, emanates through the airplane like crude oil through the Gulf of Mexico. It’ll also become evident that the father of a kid who just shat its pants on an airplane in mid-flight is about as helpless at mitigating that disaster as a bunch of overly compensated oil engineers are at containing oil that’s spewing into the ocean.

Then inevitably the flight out of Orlando will be full of a bunch of goddamn snot-nosed kids with entertainment hangovers, still coming down from their week-long sugar highs, and smelling like they’ve spent the last few days bathing in kid-filth and bacteria with a bunch of parents who have long since lost their ability, their will, and their diving right to discipline their children.

In short, if you’re like me it will be an absolute living hell.

But that’s neither here not there.

We had some friends come to visit us this past weekend for the holiday so we took them kayaking west of Nashville on the Harpeth River. For those not familiar with the area, the Harpeth is one of the main waterways that flows into the Cumberland River, and one that flooded the worst a few weeks ago. Admittedly as we were heading to the kayak/canoe rental place the thought occurred to me that we’d be seeing some of the aftermath of the flood but I was entirely unprepared for what we actually saw. For beginners the rental place had been under 12’ of water, lost 5 of their transport vans, along with $10k worth of canoes and kayaks, and that was after they had already recovered 52 canoes somewhere downstream. You can’t help but think that some douchebag in west Tennessee had 200 canoes wash into his backyard and was like, “Well shit, this must be a message from God! I’m gonna open a canoe rental business. And you know what I’m gonna call it? Tip-A-Canoe! Look, it’s already written on the side of all the canoes!”

Once we got into the river and started paddling the damage was even more evident, and more jarring. It looked like someone had gone along both banks and just ripped all the trees out of the ground, roots and all, and laid them back down. Any tree that was able to hold on for dear life was still bowled over and stripped clean of its bark and leaves. Just as an example, there are mile markers all the way down the river so you know how long you’ve been paddling. I was keeping mental track of how long it took us to traverse each half mile just so I’d know if we were making good time or not. At one point we passed the 39 mile marker then a really long time lapsed before we finally passed the 38.5 marker. I couldn’t imagine that we had slowed down that much but then just another 200 yards away we passed the 38 mile marker. The river had actually ripped up the tree with the 38.5 marker on it and carried it 200 yards shy of a half-mile down the river. Unbelievable.

And it wasn’t just the destruction to the trees, it was the amount of debris everywhere. And I mean everywhere. There were cloths, tarps, boards, sheets of plywood clinging to the branches of the still standing trees, 30 or 40’ above the river. In some instances there were smaller trees stuck in the branches of larger trees 30’ above the river.

Towards the end of our trip we passed under an old steel railroad bridge where an entire section of it had been blown out by the surging river. No shit, an entire section of steel bridge was just ripped away like you’d peel the top off an aluminum can. They’d already gone in and repaired the bridge – with three massive steel i-beams.

Normally the Harpeth in that area is just a lazy Class 1 river, which is mainly just flat water with very little current to it. By and large it was like that on Saturday for us but there were a few spots where some downed trees had created a makeshift dam that forced the river to neck down into a narrow channel, and as all of you that passed your Fluid Dynamics class know, that can significantly affect the velocity of the water. At one point in particular there was a large sandy island in the middle of the river that split it in two. We chose to go the right only to find one such dam had narrowed the river to just wider than two kayak widths. Even then it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal except as we got closer we realized someone ahead of us hadn’t it made it through the gap and instead had run their canoe into the dam and capsized it. Then we realized it was a family of four – father, mother, and two small boys. The mother and boys had already made it to the island but the father was chest-deep in the water trying to wrestle the current to free the canoe from the tree branches. I maneuvered my kayak to shoot the gap between the dam and island and as I did I looked over to see the small boy, crouched in the fetal position, crying his eyes out saying, “I want to go home!” then I looked to the father who had the look of a deer in headlights and I just thought to myself, “Sweet Jesus, we have a Survivor Imbecile on our hands here!” I quickly paddled over to the island and jumped out of my kayak in time to see my buddy, who is an accomplished kayaker, approaching the dam to offer his assistance to the guy who, like an imbecile, reached out to cling to the side of my buddy’s kayak, instantly capsizing him and his kayak.

“Sweet Jesus, you fucking imbecile!” I screamed out loud in my head as I ran over. My buddy was able to collect his kayak and swim over to the island then turn back and jump in the river where we helped to dude free his canoe and get it over to the island, where the little boy was still in the fetal position crying, “I want to go home!!!” I looked over to the mother who was lamely trying to comfort him with this stupid look on her face and I could only think, “Dear God, you’re a fucking Survivor Imbecile too! What made you think you could take your kids canoeing on a river that had just flooded 4 fucking weeks ago???”

Once we got the Imbeciles straightened away we returned to our kayaks where my buddy pulled out the cooler that contained our Subway eat fresh sub sandwiches, turned it upside down, and watched the river water just pour out of it. I immediately started looking for the sharpest rock I could find to go murder that sonofabitch imbecile who had capsized my buddy’s kayak and ruined our Subway eat fresh sub sandwiches we’d packed for lunch. Four hours on the river without food? We were going to need to find some wire and fashion makeshift fishing poles to catch some fish, or set some traps along the banks to catch whatever frogs, snakes, or rabbits we could, then I’d need to gather some dry would to start a fire with the flint I’d brought along but in the meantime we’d need to scavenge for beetles, salamanders, or grubs – anything to hold us over and give us the vital protein and vitamins we needed to survive. It was going to be tough but by keeping our wits about us we’d be able to make it through alive.

Fortunately for the imbecile, my buddy pulled the subs out and remarkably they were not ruined, as they were safely contained in the plastic bag. “Thank God,” I thought, “I didn’t want to have to dig a bunch of shallow graves in this island to dispose of the imbecile’s body and the three imbecile witnesses.”

After we ate our Subway eat fresh sub sandwiches we set back out on the river and finished the trip without further incident. I have no idea what happened to the Imbecile family though. For all I know they’re still on the river somewhere. For fuck’s sake, who takes their family out on a river four weeks after the worst flood event in recorded history? Who does that? And who does that who hasn’t already extensively studied, contemplated, and written about survivalism? Who does that? Goddamn imbeciles!