Sometime in October I had an eventful few days that started with a trip to Firekeepers casino to play Texas Hold em at the cash table.  Unfortunately my companion and I were unaware of the fact that  there was a huge tournament going on that day and the ratio of average people to complete losers was at an all time high of at least 1 to 300.    In all honesty, if you are ever down in the dumps and need a self esteem boost just head to a casino, the only place filled with a higher concentration of burn outs is the DMV.  (or SOS if you live in Michigan). While the contingent of people who should have killed themselves decades ago and unburdened society is relatively high at a casino, as well as relatively depressing, it is overshadowed by the fact that people are allowed to smoke in the casino.  Michigan did a wonderful thing by banning the smoking of cigarettes indoors and I have no idea why they gave the casino’s a way around the best legislation this side of everything Trump has ever done.  Honestly, there are probably people who have no interest in gambling and go to the casino just because their wife won’t let them smoke indoors.

Ultimately my buddy and I were able to get seated together at a cash table and I had to take a look around and make sure there wasn’t a director or any cameras, I was almost certain Cocoon 3 was being filmed in the poker room.  I had three women at my table who had likely been in their “poker” prime during the second world war and I figured they would be easy pickings.  One of the old bags was wearing a T-shirt that at first my buddy and I thought was Bruce Lee’s kid as the Crow but ended up being Allen Rickman

who played Hans Gruber in the greatest action movie of all time, Die Hard.  Oh yeah, and he played some character in Harry Potter and it was him in that role that was plastered on the XXL sized T-shirt grams was sporting.  As luck would have it, I ended up getting a pair of kings and slow played them.  I kept bumping up the pot, but Allen Rickman’s biggest fan was not budging.  Finally on the river I hit a king and had a set, so I really bumped it up.  Wouldn’t you know it, granny had a gut shot straight and rolled my set of kings.    I lost another big hand to her and luckily for her our table got busted up so they could use it for the tournament and we were shuttled to a new table, because if she had beat me again I probably would have flipped the table on top of her and stormed off.  In the end I left the casino up $41, which on a typical day would be A ok by me, however the thrashing at the hands of Alan Rickman’s biggest fan left me feeling a little blue.

My next adventure took place the following evening and was a “pub cruise” with parent’s from my oldest child’s class.  We were hitting three bars on this adventure and this is what we were using to get to those three locations:

the people in the picture appear to be having fun don’t they?  Guess what, the picture must have been taken at the very beginning of the journey.  Now, going in to this thing I was well aware of how this was going to play out, I may as well have asked Rosie O’Donnell to rent a tandem bike with me.  Being the most in shape person in the group, I knew I was going to be the one doing the lion share of the peddling, normally I enjoy a physical challenge but only when I am dressed appropriately.  In this particular circumstance I was wearing pub crawl clothes, if I recall correctly some of which I picked up at Nordstrom rack specifically for my Friday night adventure. Between pub 2 and pub 3 is when it went really wrong, the alcohol mixed with my desire to always give 110% caused me to over exert myself to the point that I was sweating profusely and looked like I had just taken a shower.  After ordering my beer and sweating all over pretty much anyone between the bar and the door, I stepped outside in an attempt to cool down.  However, it was muggy and still quite warm out even though it was October. I’m genetically predisposed to sweating and when you couple that with an inordinate amount of body hair everywhere  but my head, it’s a recipe for swamp ass.

While the pub cruise was a three pub event we all decided to head to another local establishment so that I could savor my swamp ass a bit longer, and engage in some more mind numbingly dull small talk.  I can pretend I’m interested in someone else for maybe an hour possibly two, but when you throw drinks into the equation there is some type of algorithm that likely has me losing my mind when my BAC gets above .10.  Do I care about Shirley’s work stories?  No, but I enjoy having sex with her so I pretend.  Not having sex with any of the husbands and likely none of the wives on this pub tour so I really have no incentive to fein interest in their lives.  “Oh, yeah tell me another story about your kids, that’s great….. you do what for a living?  No, I didn’t ask what exactly that was so there’s no need to tell me because I will probably never see you again, why don’t you just let me use my imagination.  (funny true story, Shirley’s grandma who had Alzheimers kept asking me what I did for a living, after telling her for the twelfth time I was a barrister, sounds way better than an attorney doesn’t it? I decided to be an astronaut, didn’t phase her a bit and she continued to ask the same question)

The Clemson Syracuse game was on in the background and I ended up making it the foreground while I ordered Jamison on the rocks again and again and again, I slowly disengaged from the group.  It was a fun night overall, but an entirely different experience for Shirley “I really like that Jen! She’s my new best friend!”  They haven’t talked since.

The trifecta of my weekend was a doozy.  My youngest had taken a monster dump in our down stairs bathroom and clogged the toilet.  A true sign that our country is going to shit is the fact that it is almost impossible to find a decent plunger.  When I went to unclog the toilet the plunger caved in on itself rendering it completely useless.  Eventually it appeared that it was safe to give the toilet another flush to try and break up the clog all the while knowing that disaster could happen and that I should be prepared to shut the water to the toilet off.   I flushed and the water in the bowl filled up faster than an olympic sprinter gets out of the blocks in the 100 meter dash.  I immediately went to crank off the shut off valve but it was too late, toilet paper and poop spilled over the top of the toilet and on to the floor erupting on to a decent sized rug on the bathroom floor.

The most problematic thing, other than having to clean up my kid’s shit two years after he was out of diapers, was the fact that I had had to poop the entire time this was happening.  I have a list of things I fear, clowns, a zombie apocalypse, a female stand up comedy special, but what I fear most is missing my window to poop and never being able to poop again.  I haven’t googled this phenomena, but if it could happen it would likely happen to me due to the sheer pleasure I get out of dropping a deuce, and the pride I take in my regularity.  Every morning when I walk in the office between 8 and 8:30 I walk by my secretary and head immediately to the restroom for five to ten minutes.

Now I don’t recall my youngest eating anything out of the ordinary, and this isn’t the only time I have thought this, but how did that come out of there?  My kid has child size hands, feet, legs, arms (an adult sized head which comes from his mom’s side of the family) and also a child sized pooping system.  So, how is it possible that my kids dumps are adult sized?  They should be much smaller, much much smaller.    Should I be proud or should I be concerned?

“Little Jimmy just finished first at the math olympics for his school district.”

“Oh, your the guy with the bumper sticker, great, well take a look at this, doesn’t even seem like it would be physically possible does it?”