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togetherwearerobots · 11 years ago

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Expired Tuna Melts And The Alternate Dimensions They Create

We are living in a very specific timeline that I created when I was 11 years old. Some call it fate. Some call it bad luck. Some may call this an act of God. And while I hate the idea that an invisible celestial deity was cruel enough to make life very difficult for me on purpose, I suppose adding a proverbial watchmaker spilling nacho cheese on the gears of time makes it easier for people to peg their problems on somebody else. Luckily for me I have more of a spine than that.

1995

CAMP CAMPBELL: SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS

When I hear the words “Science Camp”, it isn’t necessarily something that I would immediately compare to a negative experience. In fact, when I first heard that all of the 6th graders got to go on a camping trip up in the mountains and learn field-level basic biology all week, I was thrilled. Not only was it a chance to go camping (which I always liked), it was a chance to escape the unpleasantness of my home life at the time. I remember Mrs. Durbin handing us our camping pack lists and I remember being very excited. But by F period, the outlook had become very grim. According to the 7th graders, whom us 6th grade rookies shared PE with, Science Camp for our school was effectively a concentration camp with safety goggles. It was rumored to be the exact opposite of fun. It was Kamp Krusty meets Auschwitz.

And they were all right. It totally wasn’t fucking fun at all.

The food was horrible, the cabins were tiny and packed to the gills with 5-6 double bunks per room, a curfew was strictly enforced, the public shower stalls were filled with dirt clods and spitballs, there was a DAILY QUIET TIME… who on fucking earth makes a bunch of 11 year old kids lie perfectly still an hour a day before dinner? Camp Campbell does. And of course I got assigned to a cabin full of all the boys at school that I either didn’t know at all or absolutely loathed. The counselors were all short tempered college students who hated kids; they were all clearly there because they were hording their shekels for Lollapalooza tickets. By daybreak of the second day, 110% of us wanted to go home. Everyone was covered in dirt, mud, mosquito bites, and a fine coat of resentment that was invisible to the naked eye.

Fast forward to the end of the week. 20,000 camp songs and 50,000 field assignments later (which we all got graded on, as we found out eventually), we finally skidded into the end of the week. I had done ok, relatively speaking. I didn’t get my ass kicked by anybody, I didn’t get poison oak, and I brought enough mosquito repellant to recreate WWI trench warfare. As a matter of fact I didn’t do all that bad up to this point all around in my young pre-teen inauguration. I wasn’t popular, but I had friends who looked out for me and such. More on this in a bit.

Lunch hour rolls around, and everyone is excited to go home. Any hint of scientific education was tossed out about 40 confiscated Walkman’s ago, and we were all willing to bet this whole week was a ploy by the PTA to get the kids out of the house while the parents went about having sex on places other than their beds for once to spice up their Potemkin marriages.

Nobody cheered, probably from malnourishment, but we were all collectively thinking the same things… One more day of this shit before they cram us all into giant yellow busses and roll us back down the hill tomorrow morning! Back to civilization! No more shitty food made in military grade vats! No more prison rules! No more stuck up counselors who think yelling will make us obey them faster!

We all sat at our hard unforgiving benches, “enjoying” our last meal, which happened to be tuna melt. For whatever reason, this particular helping of tuna melt tasted extra good. To this day I still can’t quite explain it. Perhaps psychologically I was so excited to go home, that I could have eaten dog shit in theory and been stoked. Sometimes I wish that life was more like comic books or cartoons, because if that were the case, this whole batch of tuna melt would’ve had a sickly green color to it. Or better yet, it would’ve glowed nuclear lime green, and Homer would be around in a radiation suit picking it up with a pair of pliers. As I found out later on, it was definitely a little expired.

In any case, I was scarfing these terrible sandwiches down. I even went back for seconds. My cabin mates were all relatively horrified, and after lunch I figured out why.

I was ready to head back to my cabin and start packing up, when all of a sudden my douchebag counselor yelled

“GRAB A PONCHO, A DAYPACK, AND COME RIGHT BACK. NOT DONE YET.”

It was time for the “traditional” 4-mile hike to close out the entire camp. And by traditional, I mean it was mandatory. And by mandatory, I mean that the kids who didn’t want to participate were rounded up to clean the entire camp. I would’ve preferred cleaning the entire camp.

My stomach sank.

If I knew that we’d be going on a death march into the woods almost immediately after lunch, I would’ve just stuck to the partially frozen fries and watered down KoolAid. And for whatever reason, I only peed when I went to the bathroom before meeting back up with the pack. I guess my food hadn’t fully digested yet.

MILE 1.5

The hike was supposed to be educational. The counselor at the front of the pack was yelling a bunch of asinine information about the woods at us, as we trudged along the trails and cursed the underfunded Unified School System for not booking a cooler camp.

About an hour into the hike, I started getting The Gurgle. Many historians will look back on this day as The Great Tuna Melt Revolt of 1995. The Gurgle had become increasingly more intense, and I began the poopy pants dance as I nervously walked along, wondering angrily why it had to happen halfway into the hike.

MILE 2.8

After a long, uncomfortable length of hike, I had enough of prairie-dogging. My gurgles were really loud, to the point where it was audible to people near me. I couldn’t take it anymore.

I ran up to Brian McHitler, Sci-Camp Gestapo, and pleaded with him to let me go back and find a bathroom.

“PFFT. YEAH, I’VE HEARD IT ALL BEFORE. DON’T YOU THINK I’VE BEEN DOING THIS LONG ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT YOU’RE JUST TRYING TO DITCH? IF YOU REALLY HAVE TO TAKE A DUMP, DO IT INTO THIS GARBAGE BAG.”

…. A garbage bag. He held up a giant empty garbage bag and tossed me a toilet paper roll, which was met with the laughter of every junior higher in existence, including every girl I had a crush on within 50 feet of me. Fucking Christ, they have TV shows about how awkward being in jr high is, and none of that shit even comes close to how fucking painful it was for me.

“TAKE YOUR TIME, BUDDY. HEAD DOWN THE TRAIL TOWARDS THE BACK OF THE PACK AND LEAVE THE GARBAGE BAG THERE. ONE OF THE CLEANUP CREWS WILL COME GET IT LATER.”

Could you imagine that guy’s job? Picking up bags of poop left by tired children. He must have been the one creepy college dropout that nobody liked except when he brought weed and LSD back to the staff lounge and made brownies and punch on the first and last day.

Already humiliated for being laughed at, I slowly trudged down the path until people weren’t visible. I looked down at my garbage bag, and my toilet paper roll, and I tried my best to make a makeshift toilet with the nearby trees and rocks. Not happening.

About 2 minutes or so go by, I thought to myself

“There is no fucking way I am taking a shit into a garbage bag in the woods. This fucking sucks.”

So I gave up, squeezed Chernobyl back up my small intestine the best I could, and trudged back empty handed. To my credit, I did pretty well, I really did. I held out as long as I could, and tried staying in the back of the pack at all times. I politely listened to Counselor Assy FapperBottom talk about the plants and how to perform cunnilingus on deer and fucking bullshit like that….

MILE 3.2

And then we hit the home stretch. Almost there! 1 more mile! I had never wanted a clean toilet so bad in my entire life. I was going delirious. It got to the point where I would have settled for a horrible toilet, at a ballpark with a dead body still on it.

I felt the whole day turn bright white, I felt the ground beneath me crumble into oblivion. I thought of every hit song on the radio that I liked, to try and take me away from what was about to happen. I thought about my Super Nintendo back home.

And then, all of a sudden, I felt all 22 ounces of tuna melt and french fries fill the entire back end of my Hanes Husky Fit Briefs. I was really amazed at how high-pressured it was, and how quickly it expelled from my doomed sphincter. Like a high powered firehose full of beef stroganoff. Or a potato gun full of chocolate syrup.

Or Mary Poppins getting caught in a jet engine.

The astonishing part was, nobody noticed. So now I had to hike an entire mile back to the campsite and figure out how to do it without anybody noticing that I’d shit my pants. I busted out my poncho and immediately put it on. Genius. Sure it looks suspicious, since it was cloudy with 0% chance of showers…. But it totally fucking worked.

Nobody could see that I’d filled my pants with my own feces, and it hid the smell pretty well too. A couple of friends would come up to me here and there and asked if I was ok, that I was walking with a slight limp, to which I always dismissed and said that I’d catch up with them later on in the trail. This was effective for the most part until we hit the downhill slope back to the camp, and everyone started running.

After a while people around me began to notice the smell. But since there was no evidence, I just kind of brushed it off along with everyone else, in agreement that YEAH TOTALLY the camp sucked ASS, and that it even SMELLED bad, like a broken sewer line almost. Yeah, totally, why is that lingering smell of shit so prominent?? Someone must have farted real bad.

We finally made it back to my camp. By now my entire backside had shit smeared all over it. We’re talking my legs, my ass, and maybe even parts of my lower back. I didn’t know what to do. So I started crying. I walked back into my cabin, because the counselors made us all go back to our cabins before checking into the bathrooms to ensure fairness of shower privileges. I pleaded with Brian TwatBot 3000 to see if I could just run to the bathroom ahead of everyone else.

“NOPE. GO GET YOUR GEAR AND THEN HIT THE SHOWERS.”

Tears streamed down my face as I got back into my cabin, and nobody could figure out a) why I was crying and b) why it smelled fucking awful. Even up to that moment, nobody fucking knew that I’d shit my pants. As sort of a last hurrah, I decide that hey, maybe I can crawl into my sleeping bag and change out of my soiled clothes and hurriedly run to the shower and not have anybody notice that I’m covered in my own human waste.

That plan backfired as soon as I unzipped my sleeping bag to get back out.

There was SO MUCH SHIT all over my sleeping bag, my mattress and the floor. I imagine if Mr. Peanut was caught in an orgy with the California Raisins and they were all brutally murdered by Jason Voorhees using a lawn mower, that’s what the crime scene would have looked like. Everyone either began throwing up, laughing, screaming, or all of the above.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go back and put that on camera, and maybe add a soundtrack to it. I wonder what I’d play?

The counselors could not stop apologizing, especially Brian HitlerFace. They all knew what they had done. It was a death sentence for any junior high kid, really. I was going to go home, and I was forever going to be branded as the kid who shit his pants at Science Camp. To their credit, they made some drastic changes to their bathroom privilege policy and food prep standards after I was gone.

But the damage was done. 7th grade was the year where no girls would talk to me, where I got beat up almost on a daily basis, and my grades were almost as bad as the depression that came with the result of being bullied for an entire year. All because I ate too much tuna melt at science camp and shit myself.

NOBODY let me forget about it. Thus, the alternate timeline we all currently live in was born. And the ripple effect it’s had on my life, and reality as we know it are unimaginable in quantity.

IF I HADN’T SHIT MY PANTS:

I probably would have had a less oppressive experience in junior high. My parents wouldn’t have shipped me off to a private Christian school the next year. I would not have made any of the friends I made over the next 5 years at that high school. I would not have fallen in love with my high school best friend, and then broken up with her after college was over. I would not have dropped out of college halfway through, and would not have taken a job at Home Depot and done a bunch of drugs. I would not have become roommates with all kinds of fucked up weirdos like prostitutes and gay porn stars. I would never have moved to San Francisco, maybe (debatable).

I would have been an entirely different person, with an entirely different set of friends, and maybe even a different career. It is a safe argument that I would probably not even be in this corner of the globe… and maybe in some other timeline, I am writing this entire blog about how HAPPY I am (pfft, yeah). Maybe I am broadcasting from Brooklyn or London or Toronto or Chicago or Seattle or Moscow or Tokyo, instead of San Francisco.

I wonder if I would have still pursued art as a profession. What if I decided to go into voice acting, like I’d always wanted to? Or what if I just dropped everything and hitchhiked across the country and then ended up somewhere and started working? Who would my friends be? Would I end up meeting any of the same people that I’ve met now in this current alternate timeline, be it from school or work?

The truth is, I think I would be even MORE miserable if I had successfully shit into a toilet at Science Camp in 1995. It would be a very dull reality without any of the things I have experienced, it would be a CRIME if I never got to know the people who’ve come around in my life and have either become brilliant memories in my polka dot past, or presently have become some of the most beautiful friendships and relationships I have ever experienced in my entire life thus far.

So to the alternate-actual-alternate reality version of me out there who didn’t shit his pants in 1995 science camp, I salute you. But I bet you are nothing like me at all.

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