Times Like These
Funnily enough the year I shat on a plate is the same year I got my shit together. And not just any old random shit on a plate. I'm talking some serious, did a food stylist shit on that plate, action.
It all started (and ended) at the Four Season Apartments in Norman, Oklahoma which is where I resided my junior year of college.
Fleming (of the infamous zonkey story) and I picked the Four Seasons for three important reasons.
1. It was close to campus.
2. It was furnished.
3. It was the first (and last) place we visited since we would rather spend the day drinking beer versus finding a place to live our junior year.
On hindsight this wasn't the most prudent decision considering we ended up renting a one, albeit very small, bedroom apartment.
Fleming and I had (have) been friends since we were in grade school. Tangent. We hated each other when we first met. I'm talking Green Goblin to my Spiderman kind of hate. At some point we became best friends, and that friendship grew into something akin to brotherhood considering I was an only child and he was an accidental third child with siblings who were grown and gone by the time he was ten.
We were close is my belabored point. Yet. And. Even so. That fucking apartment was too close for our comfort.
Especially in the bedroom.
Which reminded me of Wally and Beaver's bedroom in Leave It To Beaver. It had two twin beds that were literally inches apart. Which would have been fine if we were living a Leave It To Beaver life in said bedroom instead of Fleming getting all kind of beaver in a twin bed that was inches from my twin bed.
To be fair, I wasn't a picnic either. I made my fair share of noise. Only my noise wasn't the sound of hot college sex. I made pig noises. While I slept. Because of this weird throat scratch thing because of my horrible allergies and/or asthma.
So less than a month after moving into that tiny one bedroom apartment Fleming and I were on the hunt for a two bedroom apartment to call home. Considering it was September and Four Seasons was pretty much full and wouldn't let us break our lease to move elsewhere we had limited choices. Which is why we ended up taking the most trippy two bedroom apartment, dare I say, in all of Norman Town.
Fuck me this place was odd.
It was a combination storage room and one bedroom apartment that had been smashed together to yield the complex another two bedroom unit. Only no one wanted it which is why we ended up there.
The front door was literally so far down what most thought a dead end corridor that outside light (and fresh air) couldn't penetrate the joint so it always had this dank smell. The place was further jacked up by the fact that it only had two windows. And only one of them (in one bedroom) looked to the outside world. The other one was by the front door and faced the gloomy dead end corridor. The other bedroom (which ended up being Fleming's) was akin to a sensory deprivation isolation chamber when you closed the door and turned off the lights. Then, in addition to all that funk, factor in 1970s era furnishings. The place was interior designed by helter-fucking-skelter.
The thing is, in spite of the many pitfalls of the apartment, at first, we loved it. The rent was cheap (not much more than what we had been paying for our one bedroom) and Domino's Pizza was the apartment's manna. We're talking the Domino's of my youth here. At the height of their 30 minutes or it is free promotion. And our screwy two bedroom apartment down the dark corridor of dank was impossible to find. So far down in fact that most people would turn around before finding our door.
Which was hell for those poor Domino's Pizza delivery guys trying to get us our pizza in 30 minutes. They couldn't do it. Which wasn't lost on us so we went into an epic three day weekend Domino's Pizza jag eating Domino's for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Three days straight. FREE. At the end of the weekend we had eaten so much pizza we had amassed a man sized stack of empty pizza boxes.
For those curious about how we were able to trick up Domino's for so long. Our secret was doing research and realizing that three Domino's would delivery to our apartment. We'd then rotate calling each restaurant, switching it up, day by day, so as to try and not get the same delivery driver working the same time period (and thus knowing where our apartment was located since they'd delivered to it before.)
We should have paced ourselves on hindsight. But after our three day pizza bender the Domino's got wise, together, and put our phone number and address on a no delivery list.
Fuckers.
It was around the time we made this special list that the apartment lost its luster. For me at least.
But not before I shat on the plate.
You see BLOG reader we had a very good friend who I'll call K since that is the first initial of his name and he was quite literally a pre-Seinfeld Kramer type of guy. We had known K since our dorm days freshman year. K was truly a great guy, but the dude most definitely marched to the beat of his drum. To the point of being one of the most eccentric people I've ever know (which if you know me is saying a lot!)
K's big thing was this. He'd show up at our apartment (ironically enough he was one of the few people to ever find the apartment on his first try, without having to go to the main office and call us to guide him in) anytime day or night, unannounced. He never knocked on the door. Which we often left open (to try and get some fresh air and or natural light,) or unlocked.
K would walk in and head straight to the kitchen as if the apartment were his. Once there he would riffle through the refrigerator, usually ending up with a plate of leftovers, which he would put in our microwave while he poured a big glass of milk. Once the food was done he'd take it to the dining room table (which faced the living area) and sit there and eat.
Mind you he would do all of this, often, without saying so much as hello.
This didn't really bother us at first, because we both liked K. A lot. Eventually, and probably because that fucked up apartment was evil in a no natural light dank sort of a way and screwed with our mood, we became annoyed with K's behavior.
Finally, one day, after Fleming had been going on and on about K eating all our food (he was low on funds at the time) I suggested we give K shit.
Literally.
"Give him shit?" Fleming asked. "I don't get it?"
"He always eats leftovers. So let's shit on a plate and put it with some real leftovers and see what happens." I explained.
"Seriously?" Fleming asked smiling.
"Seriously." I said. "The only question is who is going to shit on the plate."
"Fucking A." Fleming said (which meant yes.)
After further debate it was decided that I should shit on the plate. I think, if memory serves correct, because Fleming had been having loose stools from his diet of Taco Mayo.
Which is how I ended up pinching a loaf over a chipped white plate in the bathroom.
Once done I carried the plate into the kitchen and added left over mashed potatoes, gravy (putting some over the shit) and corn, carefully arranging it so it looked like it was a plate of leftover meat loaf or roast beef once I had put Saran Wrap on it. Then I put it in our fridge, where it sat, for a day!
Flash forward and K comes into the apartment in his usual manner, going straight to the fridge, where he looks around, finally selecting the plate of shit which we can see from the living room where we were watching TV.
At this point, Fleming looks like he's about to have a stroke. Red to the point of purple trying to not lose it with laughter.
I'm much better under joke pressure than Fleming, and wanting to let it play out, I decided to go into the kitchen and give K shit as he was cooking my shit in a very, the best defense is a good offense, sort of a way.
"Dude," I said. "You got to quit eating all our food. Fleming is broke. We need to make this last."
"I'm hungry." K said as he took the Saran Wrap off the plate and placed it in the microwave.
"Don't you have food at your place?" I asked as he balled up the Saran Wrap which had a little a fleck of shit and gravy on it.
"No. We haven't been to the store in..."
I cut K off as he tried to compute how long it had been, "We were going to eat that for dinner tonight!"
K ignored me as he poured his glass of milk.
Finally he smiled and said, "Two months, we haven't been to the store in two months."
Then realizing what I'd said about it being our dinner he asked, "You care if I eat it. I'm hungry?"
DING
The shit was done. Literally.
K pulled the plate out of the microwave and took it to the dining table. Forgetting utensils he turned and headed back into the kitchen while I stared as heat billowed off my gravy covered scat.
Fleming pulled himself off the sofa and came over to the table to get a front row seat.
K, with utensils in hand, walked back to the table, gave us both a quizzical look, and sat down in front of the plate.
K, being K, ignored our scrutiny, and quickly scooped up some mashed potatoes and corn which he quickly shoveled into his mouth.
I nearly shit (Fleming might have) even though K had missed my shit by a few inches.
While he chewed his bite K picked up his knife and went to cut through what he must have thought was leftover roast beef. Only, as you know, BLOG reader, it wasn't roast beef. It was my shit. Which meant that K's knife slid through it as easily as if it were soft butter. But again, K, being K, ignored any possible warning signs he might have got from this oddity and scooped up a big piece of my shit quickly shoveled it toward his open mouth.
It was less than an inche from his mouth when the smell hit him.
"GODDAMN!" He shouted dropping the fork on his plate.
Fleming lost it. Hard. On the floor. Rolling. Me. I didn't do much better.
K watched us both, confused. After a moment he bent over the plate, getting his nose as close as possible without touching the food and took a huge sniff.
"GODDAMN!" He shouted for the second time.
We lost it again x2.
After we had quieted down a bit K picked up the fork and took one more whiff of the offending brown mass and said, "THIS SMELLS LIKE...LIKE...LIKE...SHIT!"
"No shit." Fleming and I said in unison without any sense of irony.
"It is shit!"
"GODDAMN!" K shouted for the third time.
It's a testament to how cool of a guy K was that he wasn't upset about the trick. In fact, after he got over the initial shock of almost eating my crap he thought it was funny. Over time he found it funnier and funnier to the point where he often told the story to people himself.
Unfortunately, and as I alluded at the beginning of the story, the apartment did not get funnier and funnier. Or cooler. It became The Overlook Hotel to my Jack Torrance if you dig that reference. I ended up hating that place. And spent what I'd say were the worst three to four months of my life there.
It started with my being blown up the previous Summer. When my burn healed what should have been the top of my right ear was pretty much fused to the side of my head which was problematic for wearing glasses not to mention that it looked bad. That Christmas break I had reconstructive surgery between the Fall and Spring so I wouldn't miss any classes. Beat down from that, upon my return to school, I entered the apartment to find that everything we owned in the furnished apartment had been stolen. Everything else that normally would have been stolen as well (microwave as an example) were not. I'm not Perry Mason, but fuck me, it felt like an inside job.
Depressed by all my shit being stolen and a particularly cold winter I got sick. Let it go. And then got really sick. My regular ear which wasn't wrapped up like the one that was healing from my skin graft got infected and swelled shut.
From that it spiraled out of control with me missing countless days of classes and developing what I think on hindsight was post traumatic stress from nearly being killed in the steel mill explosion that Summer.
I jest about being slow in real time. But seriously. Six months after that accident I was a head case.
The thing is, I didn't know who to talk to, or go to, so I sort of slogged my way through it. On my own. Slowly. As my parents dealt with their own shit (which would result in them selling my family home and moving out of state for the rest of what would be my Mom's life.)
This stuff is probably a BLOG post in its own right. The point, though, is this.
It was that year. My junior year of college. In that dank fucking apartment. I was nineteen. And I realized in a way that I had never realized before that whatever I was going to do in my life had to be done by me.
Not to imply I was alone. Or didn't have support.
It was the year I grew up and became what I feel was an adult. A year of great change. I became the man I'm still becoming if that makes sense?
Bottom line.
I got my shit together. Which is funny considering it was the year I shit on a plate.
For those few that pay attention to the BLOG title as it relates to Until I BLOG again...line. I was split on which version to use. So I did a v43 (me today) version as well as what I'm sure I would have picked in my v19 days.
Until I BLOG again (aboynamestu_v43)...I, I'm a new day rising, I'm a brand new sky to hang, The stars upon tonight .
Until I BLOG again (aboynamestu_v19)...I, I'm a streetlight shining, I'm a white light blinding bright, Burning off alone.
It all started (and ended) at the Four Season Apartments in Norman, Oklahoma which is where I resided my junior year of college.
Fleming (of the infamous zonkey story) and I picked the Four Seasons for three important reasons.
1. It was close to campus.
2. It was furnished.
3. It was the first (and last) place we visited since we would rather spend the day drinking beer versus finding a place to live our junior year.
On hindsight this wasn't the most prudent decision considering we ended up renting a one, albeit very small, bedroom apartment.
Fleming and I had (have) been friends since we were in grade school. Tangent. We hated each other when we first met. I'm talking Green Goblin to my Spiderman kind of hate. At some point we became best friends, and that friendship grew into something akin to brotherhood considering I was an only child and he was an accidental third child with siblings who were grown and gone by the time he was ten.
We were close is my belabored point. Yet. And. Even so. That fucking apartment was too close for our comfort.
Especially in the bedroom.
Which reminded me of Wally and Beaver's bedroom in Leave It To Beaver. It had two twin beds that were literally inches apart. Which would have been fine if we were living a Leave It To Beaver life in said bedroom instead of Fleming getting all kind of beaver in a twin bed that was inches from my twin bed.
To be fair, I wasn't a picnic either. I made my fair share of noise. Only my noise wasn't the sound of hot college sex. I made pig noises. While I slept. Because of this weird throat scratch thing because of my horrible allergies and/or asthma.
So less than a month after moving into that tiny one bedroom apartment Fleming and I were on the hunt for a two bedroom apartment to call home. Considering it was September and Four Seasons was pretty much full and wouldn't let us break our lease to move elsewhere we had limited choices. Which is why we ended up taking the most trippy two bedroom apartment, dare I say, in all of Norman Town.
Fuck me this place was odd.
It was a combination storage room and one bedroom apartment that had been smashed together to yield the complex another two bedroom unit. Only no one wanted it which is why we ended up there.
The front door was literally so far down what most thought a dead end corridor that outside light (and fresh air) couldn't penetrate the joint so it always had this dank smell. The place was further jacked up by the fact that it only had two windows. And only one of them (in one bedroom) looked to the outside world. The other one was by the front door and faced the gloomy dead end corridor. The other bedroom (which ended up being Fleming's) was akin to a sensory deprivation isolation chamber when you closed the door and turned off the lights. Then, in addition to all that funk, factor in 1970s era furnishings. The place was interior designed by helter-fucking-skelter.
The thing is, in spite of the many pitfalls of the apartment, at first, we loved it. The rent was cheap (not much more than what we had been paying for our one bedroom) and Domino's Pizza was the apartment's manna. We're talking the Domino's of my youth here. At the height of their 30 minutes or it is free promotion. And our screwy two bedroom apartment down the dark corridor of dank was impossible to find. So far down in fact that most people would turn around before finding our door.
Which was hell for those poor Domino's Pizza delivery guys trying to get us our pizza in 30 minutes. They couldn't do it. Which wasn't lost on us so we went into an epic three day weekend Domino's Pizza jag eating Domino's for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Three days straight. FREE. At the end of the weekend we had eaten so much pizza we had amassed a man sized stack of empty pizza boxes.
For those curious about how we were able to trick up Domino's for so long. Our secret was doing research and realizing that three Domino's would delivery to our apartment. We'd then rotate calling each restaurant, switching it up, day by day, so as to try and not get the same delivery driver working the same time period (and thus knowing where our apartment was located since they'd delivered to it before.)
We should have paced ourselves on hindsight. But after our three day pizza bender the Domino's got wise, together, and put our phone number and address on a no delivery list.
Fuckers.
It was around the time we made this special list that the apartment lost its luster. For me at least.
But not before I shat on the plate.
You see BLOG reader we had a very good friend who I'll call K since that is the first initial of his name and he was quite literally a pre-Seinfeld Kramer type of guy. We had known K since our dorm days freshman year. K was truly a great guy, but the dude most definitely marched to the beat of his drum. To the point of being one of the most eccentric people I've ever know (which if you know me is saying a lot!)
K's big thing was this. He'd show up at our apartment (ironically enough he was one of the few people to ever find the apartment on his first try, without having to go to the main office and call us to guide him in) anytime day or night, unannounced. He never knocked on the door. Which we often left open (to try and get some fresh air and or natural light,) or unlocked.
K would walk in and head straight to the kitchen as if the apartment were his. Once there he would riffle through the refrigerator, usually ending up with a plate of leftovers, which he would put in our microwave while he poured a big glass of milk. Once the food was done he'd take it to the dining room table (which faced the living area) and sit there and eat.
Mind you he would do all of this, often, without saying so much as hello.
This didn't really bother us at first, because we both liked K. A lot. Eventually, and probably because that fucked up apartment was evil in a no natural light dank sort of a way and screwed with our mood, we became annoyed with K's behavior.
Finally, one day, after Fleming had been going on and on about K eating all our food (he was low on funds at the time) I suggested we give K shit.
Literally.
"Give him shit?" Fleming asked. "I don't get it?"
"He always eats leftovers. So let's shit on a plate and put it with some real leftovers and see what happens." I explained.
"Seriously?" Fleming asked smiling.
"Seriously." I said. "The only question is who is going to shit on the plate."
"Fucking A." Fleming said (which meant yes.)
After further debate it was decided that I should shit on the plate. I think, if memory serves correct, because Fleming had been having loose stools from his diet of Taco Mayo.
Which is how I ended up pinching a loaf over a chipped white plate in the bathroom.
Once done I carried the plate into the kitchen and added left over mashed potatoes, gravy (putting some over the shit) and corn, carefully arranging it so it looked like it was a plate of leftover meat loaf or roast beef once I had put Saran Wrap on it. Then I put it in our fridge, where it sat, for a day!
Flash forward and K comes into the apartment in his usual manner, going straight to the fridge, where he looks around, finally selecting the plate of shit which we can see from the living room where we were watching TV.
At this point, Fleming looks like he's about to have a stroke. Red to the point of purple trying to not lose it with laughter.
I'm much better under joke pressure than Fleming, and wanting to let it play out, I decided to go into the kitchen and give K shit as he was cooking my shit in a very, the best defense is a good offense, sort of a way.
"Dude," I said. "You got to quit eating all our food. Fleming is broke. We need to make this last."
"I'm hungry." K said as he took the Saran Wrap off the plate and placed it in the microwave.
"Don't you have food at your place?" I asked as he balled up the Saran Wrap which had a little a fleck of shit and gravy on it.
"No. We haven't been to the store in..."
I cut K off as he tried to compute how long it had been, "We were going to eat that for dinner tonight!"
K ignored me as he poured his glass of milk.
Finally he smiled and said, "Two months, we haven't been to the store in two months."
Then realizing what I'd said about it being our dinner he asked, "You care if I eat it. I'm hungry?"
DING
The shit was done. Literally.
K pulled the plate out of the microwave and took it to the dining table. Forgetting utensils he turned and headed back into the kitchen while I stared as heat billowed off my gravy covered scat.
Fleming pulled himself off the sofa and came over to the table to get a front row seat.
K, with utensils in hand, walked back to the table, gave us both a quizzical look, and sat down in front of the plate.
K, being K, ignored our scrutiny, and quickly scooped up some mashed potatoes and corn which he quickly shoveled into his mouth.
I nearly shit (Fleming might have) even though K had missed my shit by a few inches.
While he chewed his bite K picked up his knife and went to cut through what he must have thought was leftover roast beef. Only, as you know, BLOG reader, it wasn't roast beef. It was my shit. Which meant that K's knife slid through it as easily as if it were soft butter. But again, K, being K, ignored any possible warning signs he might have got from this oddity and scooped up a big piece of my shit quickly shoveled it toward his open mouth.
It was less than an inche from his mouth when the smell hit him.
"GODDAMN!" He shouted dropping the fork on his plate.
Fleming lost it. Hard. On the floor. Rolling. Me. I didn't do much better.
K watched us both, confused. After a moment he bent over the plate, getting his nose as close as possible without touching the food and took a huge sniff.
"GODDAMN!" He shouted for the second time.
We lost it again x2.
After we had quieted down a bit K picked up the fork and took one more whiff of the offending brown mass and said, "THIS SMELLS LIKE...LIKE...LIKE...SHIT!"
"No shit." Fleming and I said in unison without any sense of irony.
"It is shit!"
"GODDAMN!" K shouted for the third time.
It's a testament to how cool of a guy K was that he wasn't upset about the trick. In fact, after he got over the initial shock of almost eating my crap he thought it was funny. Over time he found it funnier and funnier to the point where he often told the story to people himself.
Unfortunately, and as I alluded at the beginning of the story, the apartment did not get funnier and funnier. Or cooler. It became The Overlook Hotel to my Jack Torrance if you dig that reference. I ended up hating that place. And spent what I'd say were the worst three to four months of my life there.
It started with my being blown up the previous Summer. When my burn healed what should have been the top of my right ear was pretty much fused to the side of my head which was problematic for wearing glasses not to mention that it looked bad. That Christmas break I had reconstructive surgery between the Fall and Spring so I wouldn't miss any classes. Beat down from that, upon my return to school, I entered the apartment to find that everything we owned in the furnished apartment had been stolen. Everything else that normally would have been stolen as well (microwave as an example) were not. I'm not Perry Mason, but fuck me, it felt like an inside job.
Depressed by all my shit being stolen and a particularly cold winter I got sick. Let it go. And then got really sick. My regular ear which wasn't wrapped up like the one that was healing from my skin graft got infected and swelled shut.
From that it spiraled out of control with me missing countless days of classes and developing what I think on hindsight was post traumatic stress from nearly being killed in the steel mill explosion that Summer.
I jest about being slow in real time. But seriously. Six months after that accident I was a head case.
The thing is, I didn't know who to talk to, or go to, so I sort of slogged my way through it. On my own. Slowly. As my parents dealt with their own shit (which would result in them selling my family home and moving out of state for the rest of what would be my Mom's life.)
This stuff is probably a BLOG post in its own right. The point, though, is this.
It was that year. My junior year of college. In that dank fucking apartment. I was nineteen. And I realized in a way that I had never realized before that whatever I was going to do in my life had to be done by me.
Not to imply I was alone. Or didn't have support.
It was the year I grew up and became what I feel was an adult. A year of great change. I became the man I'm still becoming if that makes sense?
Bottom line.
I got my shit together. Which is funny considering it was the year I shit on a plate.
For those few that pay attention to the BLOG title as it relates to Until I BLOG again...line. I was split on which version to use. So I did a v43 (me today) version as well as what I'm sure I would have picked in my v19 days.
Until I BLOG again (aboynamestu_v43)...I, I'm a new day rising, I'm a brand new sky to hang, The stars upon tonight .
Until I BLOG again (aboynamestu_v19)...I, I'm a streetlight shining, I'm a white light blinding bright, Burning off alone.
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