It's been a while since I've experimented with preparing exotic meats. (Not like that.) So I'm planned on making some kangaroo sliders today, and some camel sliders later in the week. Unfortunately, I didn't bother reading the labels, and ended up making the camel sliders today, instead.

Comrade: I thought you were making kangaroo burgers today. Why did you decide to do camel instead?

Me: Uhhhh. Because it's Hump Day.

I was reading off one of my posts about canvassers to Comrade this morning, and I saw a comment from a friend that read: once, on a fifteen-minute break from work, i walked past a greenpeace girl while looking down at my phone. she asked me if i was 'texting about the whales.' i'm still annoyed about it.

We laughed, and a few minutes later, I received this text from Comrade:

​"Is your child texting about whales?
brb = belugas are beautiful
lol = living off land
smh = smooch more humpbacks
tbh = tight blowholes
stfu = shamu the flirty ungulate
tfw = totally fuckable whales
rofl = rub on flippers lovingly
idc = I dig cetaceans
btw = bang the whales"

Our flight home was filled with children (which I can't decide is better or worse than sharing a plane with the traveling cast of Grease, who ended up on a different flight out of Austin). There were the usual crying babies, and sleeping toddlers. Across the aisle from us was an eightish year old, and in the row in front of them his sixish year old brother.

I put my headphones on as soon as I saw children so I don't know how they were behaved during the flight, but as we landed, I took the headphones off and Little Six Year Old Columbus discovered the Atlantic Ocean at a volume the whole plane could hear. 

I didn't see what happened next, I just heard the dad say "Are you okay?" The mom say "Oh christ." and the six year old start wailing.

As the kid continued to bleat like a Trump supporter who overhears the word "woke" and doesn't understand someone was just describing leaving sleep, a teenager stood up too fast and hit his head on one of the overhead bins. He then made the most amazing pain face and started lip synching to the crying six year old. To an audience of maybe three of us. I laughed my ass off.

The six year old had to pee, but they were determined to get him off the plane first. He was listening to absolutely no one, so his mom snuck past him in the aisle as he screamed "STOP PUSHING ME!!!!" to no one.

Once off the plane, he kept shoving his brother as they walked into the terminal, occasionally looking behind him at us. "MOM. THOSE MEN WON'T STOP FOLLOWING ME."

"Ugh," his mother said, without turning around, "I'm sorry. He's malfunctioning and no one will give us a refund for him."

​We speedwalked the hell away from them.

Tonight's adventures that I Never Wanted: Adam & Comrade vs the scorpions in the swinger house.
​
Fuck your no shoes in the house rules, I am wearing boots to bed.

​If I find out one of you, my friends, is responsible for a local restaurant offering a Caesar salad with olives, hold the romaine lettuce, then the two of us are fighting to The Death.

When I was in elementary school, I belonged to an organization called Future Problem Solving Program International. Elementary school students were given a problem that might affect their community and they had several months to brainstorm solutions, and present their best researched, most creative solution to the problem. I went ALL IN to this group. There were five or six of us in the group, and I don’t remember the name or face of a single other person. All I remember is the moment when all my optimism and enjoyment of the concept of solving problems was replaced with the rage of UNFARINESS when we lost to the team that hosted the regional finals.

The problem we fourth or fifth graders were given to solve was: Acid Rain. It was the eighties and industry was as uninterested in helping our environment as they are now but society hadn’t yet guilted them into pretending they cared about anything but profits. Nobody was making rainbow versions of their logos for Pride Month, promoting diverse members of their staff during Black History Month or Womens’ Month or AAIPI Month, and nobody was telling you that you could cure the environment by using fewer plastic straws while they dumped thousands of tons of unbiodegradable waste into the ocean. They had slogans like “Coal. Fuck you, we’ve been killing children for generations, why do you suddenly care now?” and “The Republican Party. AIDS is a faggot disease. We miss slavery.”

I don’t remember any of the other schools’ specific solutions to the problem acid rain presented to their communities. I just remember they were all pretty similar. They involved talking with companies, making regulations for environmental impact. A few suggested mild protesting, and one even made potential protest signs. There were three or four schools that I thought might win. The fake sign school was my pick if we lost. But I couldn’t imagine us losing. Everyone else’s ideas were focused on getting companies to change their habits to help the environment. We had gone in a very different direction.

I can no longer find the research that supports this theory but I promise you it was real. In the mid-1980s, there was an experiment in wetlands that found that certain species of birds had something in their feces that reduced the acidity in water. So wetlands with higher percentages of these birds, the one I remember being The Black Backed Gull, had much lower acid levels in the ponds and rivers they lived near. So we came up with a program that bred these birds, who didn’t have large populations at the time and who didn’t have a noticeably negative impact on the environment, and made sure there were ample nesting areas for them.

Looking back at this, as an adult, I appreciate our creativity but I can also see why the judges weren’t super excited about our Save The Water Supply By Adding Bird Shit campaign. But, y’all there’s already bird shit in that water. What’s a little more, if we want less acid rain? These judges didn’t know that this solution was so, pardon me, Bird Shit Crazy that it was So Debunked by the 2020s that The Internet, which no one could have conceived of in 198whatever, didn’t even record the study’s existence.

During the competition, however, I was convinced we would win. We had spent so much time researching this, and we learned how to convince adults of this study because it took FOREVER to convince our adult coach to let us follow through with this idea. For some reason.

I really thought there were only two threats, the team that had fake protesting signs, and the school that had done the best job, imo, presenting the same Let’s Just Talk It Out And Make Sensible Environmental Laws tactic. Well, that team came in third. The fake protesting sign team came in second. We had done it. We had …

I don’t remember what school hosted this event. Let’s call it Privileged Cheaters Academy. Well, PCA didn’t just win this event, they won by a landslide. The score differential between second and third place was a hoarse whisper, Privileged Cheaters Academy won by an Air Raid Siren. And they were not graceful winners. One of the winning kids flipped off the second place school’s coach and was chastised in the mildest way possible.

I was sour. It only got worse when all of the scores were released. We’d come in last place. Not only had we lost to homefield advantage, every team that had presented the same bland Play Nice And The Law Will Make Acid Rain Completely Disappear In A Few Decades had positively annihilated our Bird Shit solution.
​
Shortly after the scores were posted, a local journalist took pictures of all the teams from some newspaper. They printed all of them. Even ours. Our picture, which showed one carefree, blonde adult, three or four smiling children with unmemorable faces, and me, wearing the tear-stained scowl of a super villain engineering his first Death Ray in his head.

Doordash: We've noticed you ordered a mixed greens, sweet potato, celery, and brown rice bowl. Would you like to add a corn dog rolled in Hot Cheetos?

Me: No. What?

Doordash: A corn dog rolled in Fruity Pebbles?

Me: Ewww. No.

Doordash: What if we rolled it in ramen noodle seasoning packets?

Doordash: Hello?

Doordash: Hello?

​Doordash: Are you still there?

I'm always glad when there aren't just witnesses to when ignorance or absurdity surrounds me but there is someone there who can rightfully mock the experience with me.
On our way to gayme night yesterday, we were walking around Porter Square when a bunch of mid-thirty somethings were paced up just behind us.

Rando 1: "It was wild. I swear he was speaking Portuguese but it turned out to be Italian. I didn't even know they let Italians in there."

Uh-oh.

Rando 2: "I know, right? I was in Orlando and I went into a Chinese restaurant, and all the chefs were Mexican. It was Cuh-ray-zee!"

They were probably Cuban and/or South/Central American.

Rando 1: "I was in a Scwharma place, and I started speaking Arabic, and the cook just looked at me, and was like 'I'm from Minnesota.' Like, why would someone from Minnesota be cooking Middle Eastern food?"

Rando 2: "It doesn't even make sense to me. Mexican Chinese food?"

And then they walked into a building that I can only hope is an abattoir.

Comrade: "Oh my god. I went into a comic book store, and the guy behind the counter didn't even speak Klingon! It didn't even make sense."

Me: "I was having dinner at Disney World, and I went into the back to compliment the Chef and he wasn't even a mouse, he was human! I was like squeak, squeak, squeaaaaak, you know? It was cuh-ray-zee. Like, why would someone human be making mouse theme park food?"

Comrade: "I hate people."

​Me: "Me, too!"

As soon as I get into the Lyft:

"Nobody honks their horns like people in Boston. All day long it's beep beep beep. I ought to wear ear mufs. People do that, you know. They got their ear muffs on, their hoodie pulled tight, sunglasses on. How do they drive like that? I couldn't. Not me. Even walking like that. Staring at their phone. That's how you know God exists. Keeping morons alive since The Big Bang.

Nobody talks anymore. One of my sons does. He's a good kid. Kid, I say, he's 38. I got to name him. The other three, my wife named. She was a strong, Polish woman. But I got to name one, and I gave him The Best Name. Can you guess what it is?

You won't guess. Adam. Adam Clayton. "

Me: "Like the bassist from U2?"

Lyft Guy: "He's so polite. Thanks his mom for dinner without prompting. My other kids are good, too. Just outgoing. I had a woman from Iran in here on the way up from Providence. I live in Providence. I'm from Jersey, where people are from. But I live in Providence, and I'm taking this Iranian woman up to Logan, and she's so nice, and talking about how beautiful the sky is. And I kid with her. I kid l. We Americans are so ignorant that most people don't know the difference between Iran and Iraq.

She laughs because she knows it's true.

Hey, that sign says 'cocktails'. You never see that word anymore. It's always 'drinks' now. But 'cocktails' has class, you know. I don't even drink. I wasn't in the armed forces, and I didn't go to college so I missed out on that part of the culture. But I don't need it. I'm the life of the party anyway. My friends always say I should be a comedian. Right?

But I'm a Lyft driver because I'm here to Lyft your spirits. Get it? I made that up! You can't do that with Uber. You want to Uber my spirit? No, thank you.

Hey, I love that dirty-- is that The Charles?"

Me: "Yes."

LD: "Well, I love that dirty water Boston you're my home. Hey nobody has beeped at me since you got in the car. You must be good luck."

​Then he pulled over to my stop without using his blinker. Someone beeped at him. Justifiably.

The owner of the orgy house says "I mean, Everyone has sex dungeons these days. Has anyone renovated their basement in the last thirty years and not installed at least a sex swing and some chain link cages? But a sex foyer? I feel like I'm at the vanguard of the next big sex architecture movement. Just wait until these start popping up in the suburbs."
                                                                                                             
He gestures towards the walls, which are covered in photographs of penises and extremely hairy buttcheeks: "What do you think?"

Me: "Who's your interior dickerator?"

​Comrade kicks me in the shins.