It was a normal Sunday morning. I was sleeping in because I was up late the night before. I could feel sunlight sneaking in around the edges of the closed curtain dappling my face with warmth. At precisely 9 a.m., however, a portal to hell was opened. A demon named Murray took the form of bacteria and entered my body where he proceeded to slice my stomach lining with a rusty flat head screw for the next 9 hours. He also turned everything in my intestines into a swamp with only one drainage point.
My small bathroom became my home; sitting on the toilet was my low-paying job. As a hobby I took up violently vomiting into a garbage can. Things I would recommend ahead of it include wrestling badgers, wearing underwear made of cactus skin and calling Comcast customer support.
I threw up so hard at one point red blotches appeared on my face. I looked like a rose garden had bloomed under my skin. The repeated convulsions left my ribs so sore I can't breathe heavy to make my weekly perverted phone calls to the nursing college annex.
At about the 4 hour mark I was begging for death from any god that would take my call. Apparently they were all on a golf outing together at Pebble beach because I couldn't get through even though I let it ring 2,324,231 times. Come into the 21st century and get an answering machine!
In the middle of hour 6 I hallucinated an 8 foot tall Barry Goldwater telling me "Relax, the duckies are OK." I responded with "Well now I know how the Dalai Lama felt the day his camel was repossessed." Music started so we danced until I threw up on his shoes.
When the six o'clock hour hit I finally felt better. My stomach was now rumbling from hunger. Murray had left my body and transmogrified back into Taylor Swift. I ate some crackers and later when I still felt good I ate some leftovers from dinner on Saturday. When I went to bed a few hours later all was well.
3:30 a.m. Monday morning, Murray makes his triumphant return. I am awoken by a garden rake being pulled slowly across my insides. I moved back into my bathroom apartment, resuming my pleas to all known deities and even a few I made up on the spot in hopes they were real. In the quiet moments, when Murray was taking a break to smoke a clove cigarette and write a pop song about a kitten, I realized my day in hell must be caused by something I ate and then like an idiot, ate again. This realization didn't make me feel any better and caused Murray to recall an anecdote about the time he and John Mayer got Chinese food in Denver at Yung Tung's House of Hunan which resulted in a song called "The Night We Shared the Hershey Squirts". Look for it on an upcoming John Mayer CD.
Thankfully this second bout ended after only 3 hours. Murray was bored and I was close to unconscious. I was able to pull myself together and even get to work on time. I can barely talk because my throat is raw, my ribs hurt every time I laugh or cough and I'm kind of afraid every time I eat something, but other than that I'm good.
