THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE (SO FAR)

Alright...we've ALL had shitty days. Everyone yelling at us, nothing going right, dog doesn't want to lick your balls for some reason, probably because she's an uppity little BITCH who has her eyes set on the Great Dane down the street who ...who...who...

.....

............Oh shit ... you guys are still here....

So anyway ...

Here's the worst day of my life. It's not so much one BAD thing happening as so many LITTLE bad things happened all in one day. Nothing changed my life forever ...and it doesn't hold a candle to some other Diaryland stories, but it's my story dammit, and I've been telling it for almost 20 years, so sit yer whiny ass down and READ IT!!!

...I'm sooooo macho when I wanna be...

It was a Friday in the summer and I was 19. My girlfriend was in the hospital, recovering from getting her tonsils out and I had to work that day at Opryland.

Usually, when things were slow around Opryland, me and a buddy would duck into one of the arcades and play video games. On this day, our supervisor caught us and sent us home and to come back on Monday to see if we still had jobs.

Which sucked, but hey ... I had the rest of the day and the weekend off. Them beans be cool.

My buddy Greg decided that since my girlfriend was in the hospital and couldn't monpolize my Friday night, I should spend a wild night with the boys like old times.

Cool beans again. I can hang with the big dogs. I ain't whipped just yet.

....But first...can we stop by the hospital? I have a stuffed animal I have to give the old ball and chain.

We stopped by the hospital and my girlfriend was still asleep from the operation. Her mom was there and thanked me for coming. I told her I couldn't stay but when my girlfriend woke up, here's a stuffed animal for her.

Her mom discretely tried to inform me that my girlfriend had SPECIFICALLY asked for me to be there when she woke up.

Uhhhh...yeah right, sure...here's that animal...gotta go, crazy lady...I'll see you both bright and early tomorrow...

BANG! Out the door like a fuckin' cannon.

Guess what...the next day...my girlfriend was FURIOUS. God...I've never seen her so mad. She said she woke up and I wasn't there and her mom told her I had gone out with the boys and she cried all night. She milked that for months afterwards, believe me.

...That gal was one manipulative little schemer. Someday, when I have the balls to detail that relationship, I will. Granted, it'll take the whole month of April to tell the story, but dammit....you're worth it.

Greg and I go and pick up the rest of the guys who are already drunk when we get them in the car. We end up with six drunk guys in the car, ready to raise a little hell on a Friday night.

Whooohoooo.

We drive and drink and drink and drive (This was in 1981, before drinking and driving was found to have caused accidents). Before you knew it, you've got 6 drunk as hell teenagers on the road, out in the middle of Bumfuck Egypt (Population: 6 drunk teenagers).

(DON'T WORRY .... this doesn't get tragic...just strange...)

A couple of the guys decide now is as good a time as ever to steal some road signs for our dorm rooms back at college.

Call it karma ... but something was just screaming "NOT COOL" to me.

We let two of the guys off at a crossroads near a stop sign. Their goal was to get the sign down while we drove down the road a mile, turned around and came back to pick them up.

Total time...4 minutes max.

That's the plan Stan.

I stay in the car with the three other guys. We are on an old gravel road that none of us had ever been on before. There's no lights on the road except for the moon and stars.

WAAAYYY out in the boonies.

While driving down the gravel road, with nothing else around for miles, a pair of headlights suddenly flash in the rear view mirror.

We hadn't seen another car in quite a while. So Greg panics and floors it, thinking it was the cops. Why, he thought it was the cops, I have no clue. I chalk it up to being 19, drunk and paranoid as a mother fucker. You draw your own conclusions.

He just KEEPS speeding down this gravel road for nearly two miles, trying to lose the "cops".

We're going over these hills at 60 mph and I happen to see a sign that Greg doesn't see.

A "T" sign. Meaning you have to either turn left or right once you come up over this last hill.

You have to turn left or right up here Greg...left or right... LEFT or RIGHT YOU STUPID SONOFABIIIIIIIII.......

At that point, I decided to conduct an impromptu science experiment.

My results?

If you kept going straight at 60 mph, you wind up flying off the road, hitting an embankment, plowing through a barbed wire fence and landing in a cow pasture with a herd of cows 20 yards from you in the middle of the fucking night in the middle of fucking nowhere, mooing.

The cows were not impressed.

COW NUMBER ONE: "Aw shit. Another carload of fucked-up kids again."

COW NUMBER TWO: "Look, as long as this batch doesn't try to tip us over or fuck us like the last carload, I ain't sayin' a fuckin' word."

COW NUMBER THREE: "Amen brother. That one crazy asshole wouldn't quit sucking my teats even after I stepped on his nads. I hate those sick Kentucky bastards."

Once we realized everyone was okay ... oh who am I kidding? We knew everyone was okay because they were all screaming "FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!"

See ...if you get in a wreck with a buncha drunk guys, there's a code. If you can cuss, you're gonna live. When drunk guys get in wrecks, we don't look to see if our passengers are okay, we just scream "EVERYONE CUSS!!" and that's like "I need a show of hands!" Whoever screams "FUCCCCK" back is probably hurt, but they're gonna live.

Don't believe me?? Then why is it every time you see that video tape of Christopher Reeve falling off his horse, you don't hear the audio???

Because Superman was screaming "MOTHERFUCKINGSONOFADOGLICKINGWHOREBASTARDCOCKBITINGSEMENSUCKINGSMEGMASCRAPINGFUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!" while he laid on the ground. It was so loud, the audio portion of that tape has been erased permanently. Rumor has it, that those that HAVE heard the audio portion instantly died and went straight to Hell from all the profanity. Yes...it's THAT bad...

Anyway ...Christ...this is getting long...if I break it up, you're going to read both entries anyway ...so I'll just finish it here.

Look...go get a drink and pee. I'll wait.

OH! While you're up ...can ya stick a tape in the VCR and tape Seinfeld for me? It's the one where Kramer thinks Newman's a turkey!

Heh. A turkey. That wacky Kramer!!

That's a guy who deserves his own show! That Kramer fella! He's a hoot!!

(Once again...that was yet another of my cyber impressions...that one being my Aunt Rosie from Illinois while suffering from a slight case of bronchitis)

AND NOW...BACK TO OUR FEATURE PRESENTATION!!

We get out of the car and drunkenly stumble through a mine field full of cow shit. One of the guys, Paul, slipped and got shit on his jeans, which he tried desperately to scrape off with twigs and straw. He just smeared it more into his jeans, the drunken bastard.

We realized the car would need to be towed, but we were out in the middle of nowhere. And this was way before the concept of an automobile actually having a phone inside it was ever born. Yep. No cell phones. In fact, most of us still rode dinosaurs to work.

We began walking in the direction that we had came. As it turned out the imaginary "cops" that led us on a wild goose chase, turned off miles back. They weren't cops...just country bumpkins.

We walked for about a mile before we ended up at a shack of a home. The door was barely on its hinges, the porch was falling in, the shingles were ancient memories ...this place was a rat infested shithole.

And hopefully...a rat infested shithole with a phone.

Pop Quiz, Hillbilly Jim ... It's after midnight. You live out in the middle of nowhere and four drunk teen boys show up at your doorstep. What are you gonna do?

You're gonna pull a gun on 'em, ain't ya?

Of course you are.

Finally, after explaining that all we wanted was to use the man's phone and then we'd leave, he put his shotgun down and let us come in.

Okay...inside...there was a girl with Down's Syndrome. She looked to be about 16 or so. She was laying in the bed next to the phone and just moaning, with her mother sitting on the bed fanning her. This girl had what looked to be a horrible fever and was just staring at us with her eyelids fluttering and flies swarming around her, while my buddy called a tow truck. We all stood there, swaying in our drunken state and not saying a word. I was getting the creeps ULTRA bad.

Relatives from other bedrooms started coming out to see what the commotion was about. They had no doors on their bedrooms, just single bed sheets hanging up like curtains. It was a buncha brothers that looked like mechanics that wouldn't think twice about fucking a squirrel. And you could hear women back in the bedroom saying "What's happening out there?"

I remember how hot it was in there, all the windows open after midnight and it was just scorching. No breeze, no fans...just humidity. And a crying Down Syndrome girl laying on a bed with flies all over her.

We left the house, thanking them for letting us use the phone and not killing us and walked back to the car to wait an hour for the tow truck.

Five minutes after getting back to the car, some guy with a trailer hitch on his truck saw us sitting on the side of the road and said he'd pull us out for twenty bucks.

EASILY the best twenty bucks any of us had ever spent.

Ten minutes later, we FINALLY get back to the crossroads where we had left our two buddies in the field nearly an hour earlier.

They were pissed. But everyone was glad we were all okay and EVERYONE was ready to go home.

Go home.

Not run into a police barricade with flashing lights and road blocks set up.

Go HOME. Home, James. Do not pass Go. Get me, these empty beer cans and these stolen road signs as far away from those cops as possible please.

We had no choice. We couldn't turn around.

We pulled up. The cops peered into the car, but didn't ask anyone to get out. They looked at me for a long time.

Finally, they just said "Go."

Six drunk bastards exhaled, the car then smelled like Milwaukee and we fuckin' WENT, babe.

We finally got back to the mall where our cars were parked to find that three of the guy's cars had been bashed in the windshield with rocks.

Mine wasn't touched.

All my buddies were pissed off and swore revenge on the vandals who did this.

... Of course, they were bitching about vandals as they loaded their new road signs in their trunks.

The day was MUCH WORSE living it. The fear of death, jail, pissing off the girlfriend, losing my job...all of it came in one long day.

Ah well. I guess you had to be there.

But aren't you glad you weren't?