You Snooze, You Lose

So one of my kids is going to a writing camp down at a North Carolina University.  I come up with the brilliant idea to drive her down.  So we get up early on the Saturday of 4^th of July weekend and from Northeastern PA get on Route 81 and start heading south.  I really shouldn’t complain because the weather was beautiful and the highway was very do-able…but I will anyway.

We’ve been driving on Rt. 81 for nearly 7 hours straight (one gas/bio break…which I guess in my case is a redundant phrase).  I can’t remember the last time I drove 7 hours straight so I’m pretty beat.  We finally get off 81 and start heading east.  In the back of my mind I’m thinking, “We maybe have another 45 minutes to go.”  I finally look at my MapQuest instructions and they tell a different story.  There are multiple 29, 32 and 40-mile segments that remain.  I have another 3 HOURS to go.  Forget about having the wind completely taken out of my sails; immediately a combination of depression, frustration and exhaustion sets in.  We arrive at our hotel, almost 10 hours to the minute from when we left.  I’m completely toast and will eat anything that’s put in front of me.  (That last phrase will produce immeasurable damage as this story progresses)

I spend the next day getting my daughter moved in and eating extremely greasy fried, really “butter-laden” foods.  Now you combine that with the fact that if I leave my zip code and drink the local water, my digestive track goes into a complete state of disrepair…trouble can’t be far off.  Next morning I’m back in the car driving up to Annapolis to do some fishing on the Chesapeake with a good friend from college.  Naturally I wait too long to get on the road and I run into traffic around DC and Baltimore.  As I sit there cursing myself, I hear a gurgling in my stomach begin…not a good sign. 

Without visible damage, I arrive at my friend’s house late in the day.  His wife, he and me go out on his boat and have a great time taking in the sites on the bay and maybe we down a couple of sociables.   We then pull up to a restaurant on the water…consume a couple more beverages and a fantastic burger & fries.  The burger might have been cooked in the same oil as the fries but I wouldn’t know, I’m back in the state of mind where if you put it in front of me…I’ll eat it.  We get back to the house and I have one more responsible beverage (mind you we’re on the water the next day around 5 AM to pull in monster-size Stripe Bass!)  I take a Zantac “Ha, like that’s really going to help” and go to bed at a reasonable hour…and that was the last reasonable thing that happened to me for the next 18 hours.

I woke up around midnight with cold sweats.  My digestive track is feeling like I’m the runner up in the national jalapeño-eating contest.   You know you’re in trouble when you get to the bathroom and you can’t figure out if you should be driving the porcelain bus or sitting on it.  Scary thoughts of a dual effort start to run through my mind but I fight them off.   This goes on for hours with no relief at either end.  Finally around 4AM I make the call, it’s time for the Woodbridge two-finger jam.  With a small amount of relief I head back to bed to see if I can get more than an hour of sleep.  No such luck.  About 5 minutes after I lied down, I heard the garage door opening under me.  My friend Brian is heading out to get bait.  He comes back about 20 minutes later with bait, sandwiches, and two massive coffees.  One is for me…what a good friend.  As much as I needed the coffee, as the toothpicks I wedged under my eyelids were about to buckle, the thought of pouring hydrochloric acid down my throat into my ulcerated stomach was frightening.  Time to Man-up.  I grab the coffee; quickly swallow about five large gulps (think of those episodes on a Survivor when the challenge is to eat nasty hunks of squid that have been sitting out in the sun for a couple of days.)  Almost immediately I feel a rumbling, probably not unlike the rumbling that the inhabitants of Pompeii felt when Vesuvius was about to erupt.  I put down the coffee, re-thank my good friend and excuse myself to a remote bathroom in the house.  I won’t be too graphic, but if I could have scheduled my long awaited colonoscopy that morning, I definitely could have killed two birds with one stone.  (It’s a been there and done that kind of thing…if you’re of the right age, you know what I mean)

So I emerge from the bathroom, a lesser man, but much better for it.  We pack up our gear, I swallow an Imodium AD, and we head to the marina.  On the short ride over, Vesuvius begins to rear his ugly head again.  It’s about 5:30AM and no one is in sight.  My friend can sense that I’m struggling a bit and just before we shove off he says, “Last chance to hit the head…pointing to the marina bathroom.”  I consider it for a second but didn’t want to hold up the fishing operation, so I say, “No, I’ll be fine.”  Nothing further from the truth could have been true.  We’re about 100 feet from the dock and I get a significant wave of gastronomic pressure that causes me to reconsider my captain’s offer.  But now we’ve pulled away and to go back would be an even larger gaff.  So I soldier on…praying that the modern technology built into Imodium will prevail.  We go about a ¼ mile and now I’m close to a panic stage…but again to turn around now would be a such a slap in the face to fishing etiquette and manhood in general, that’d I’d rather jump overboard than ask that question.   (You really have to pause and wonder where my priorities in life are.)

Now we’re miles out, we drop anchor and I have no choice but to go with “Mind over matter.”  (There was an old episode of Star Trek where these small alien creates would attach to your neck & spine and inflict such severe pain that you’d go out of your mind and shortly there after, die.  Spock get’s infected but because of his superior Vulcan mind, is able to hold the pain at bay…every once in a while getting an excruciating wave of pain that he needs to concentrate on to control…this is what the day was like.)

So we get to what seems like a good spot , bait up and cast off.  We have three poles on the boat with us.  Two are in stanchions, and one is laying on the back seat.  My friend is now towards the front of the boat and I happen to look at the smaller pole lying on the back seat.  It’s in motion and starting to fly out of the back of the boat.  I yell to my friend, “Brian, the pole!”  He grabs the pole and battles in a 24 inch Stripe Bass.   You may ask, “Steve, why didn’t you just grab the pole, you were closer?”  And here in lies where the title of the story comes from…”You Snooze, You Lose.”  And as things usually work…I caught nothing the rest of the day.

P.S.

Once Brian hauled in the bass, fishing boats from out of nowhere surrounded us.  One about 40 yards away caught about 10 fish the size of Brian’s in a matter of 40 minutes…I finally said to Brian, “What do you say we pull up the anchor and ram those &@#$%ers.”

The Juicer

Health Tip of the Week  - Never Buy a New “Juicer”, immediately go out and buy $93 of fruit and vegetables, test out most of it in one sitting, and take your dog for a long walk.

We're not talking about the old one-amp unit from commercials of years' past.  We're talking about today's technology, a Quad Core 6.7 GHz Engine that can produce enough power to light up half of Scotland.

So the unit arrives and we rush out and buy what I believe is the required $93 dollars worth of fruit and vegetables to power the unit.  People at the King's supermarket thought we were crazy.  We get home and now the problem is:  Where do you store $93 worth of fruit and vegetables?  This problem quickly liquefies. As we get caught up in the excitement of juice-amania, we decide to try it all.  We're mixing carrots and apples and pears; blueberries, strawberries and pineapples.  Then, why not all together.  Then papaya, mangos and celery.  Then again, why not all together.  We’re having a great time with our new toy.  Eventually we finish.  At this point my molars are swimming and my eyeballs are orange, we're on a Major Juice High.  My wife looks at me and says, "Ya know, I think the dog needs to go out, and I don't think he's had a walk all day."  I think to myself, “I’m so juiced up right now, I’m probably like two steps away from becoming the Incredible Hulk…and I don’t need the Gama rays.  I could probably walk half way around the globe with all this healthy stuff running through my veins.” 

I grab the leash, and naturally being the good neighbor that I am, I grab a small blue doggie cleanup bag, just in case.  Only because I have a digestive track that will someday be donated to the Smithsonian…you would think that at the very moment I touched the blue bag that something would have clicked in my head,…but unfortunately nothing did, and I walked out the door.

So I get about 3/4s of a mile from my house and start to feel some pressure, unmistakable pressure.  I take a couple more steps and it hits me.  I’m in real trouble.   

The feeling was kind of like the movie "Training Day," where towards the end, Denzel Washington leaves Ethan Hawke, the rookie, with the gang members whose job it is to kill him.  They manage trick him into giving them his gun and when he realizes he's done, it was one of those terrible hopeless sinking feelings.

There’s now an unholy war going on in my lower quadrant.  Even the dog’s senses are on overload, I’m sure I’m imagining it but I could swear he was giving me a look that said something like, “What were you thinking and what just happened to the atmosphere?”

But like Ethan, under a lot of pressure, I decide not to give up.  The downside is way too ugly.  And I don’t want to have to move out of the neighborhood.

I turn and head home.  I'm making decent time, but mentally beating myself up the whole way for being so sensible about drinking more than my fair share of $93 of juice.   You see the rest of my family had enough with just part of one cup of each brew.  I naturally didn’t want this life giving nectar to go to waste, so I'd finish theirs.  I did cut myself some slack because at one point during one of the juicing experiments I almost asked my wife, "What do you think would happen if we put an onion in it?"

I'm getting close to home and thinking, "Okay, I can do this.  Just hang tough... real tough."  Then disaster struck.  I look ahead and see a neighbor coming towards me and he’s walking his dog.  His dog is a dog that mine really likes... which happens to be just about every dog in the neighborhood.  Our dog is a Golden Retriever, and if he weren't a dog, he'd probably be mayor.  My neighbor is a nice enough guy but can be kind of chatty.  Trying not to be rude (in more ways than one), I engage in what I hope is a short conversation of un-pleasantries.  At one point he looks at me and can see that a trickle of sweat is streaming down both of my temples.  He asks me, "Steve, it's 37 degrees outside, and you're sweating - are you OK?"  I tell him I probably have something very contagious coming on, and better be on my way. 

Of course as we get back to our yard, my dog decides he needs to go.  I look at him as if he's stuck a knife in my back.   In desperation, I throw the blue bag at him and tell him to clean up after himself. It's every man or dog for himself at this point.  I race into the house….

I’ll only say this, I’ve brought new meaning to the technical term “Systems Purge.”