spyfoxguy's New Writeups

July 23, 2009 (log)

2009-07-24T00:21:44Z

I hadn't been lifting for THAT long. The nausea was more a product of a Dark Chocolate Carnation Breakfast Milkshake that apparently had yet to be digested. As such, it was still capable of protest. The Meathead in me urged me to continue, shouting over an accumulating internal pool of bile.

The great thing about lifting for your own benefit (and not some team's) is that you take it just as seriously as you like. Gloriously spared any (self-interested) encouragements of a coach, I made for the bathroom.

And there I was, praying to the proverbial porcelain god. To date, I have gone my entire life (yes, that includes freshman year) without burning a drop of alcohol, and it had been a long time since I had hurled. Needless to say, I was a little nervous and a little excited.

Now I must fly in the face of the usual social norm of "sparing you the details." Said details are the reason I am writing this up. The puke, while meager in quantity, compelled me with its…

July 7, 2009 (log)

2009-07-07T05:11:52Z

Death makes angels of us all

And gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as raven's claws.

Ryan and I were flipping and flopping back to the break room, discussing Jim Morrison and The Doors. "Jim was an amazing poet," he remarked with casual authority. I agreed out loud, yet held something back. If only he knew...it was right above our heads! At that very moment! My mind's eye looked with a twinkle to the high, vaulted ceiling.

Allow me to explain:

In that break room fifteen minutes earlier, we had been doing the very same thing. I had brought John Densmore's biography to work, and Ryan, an apparently huge fan, had taken notice. After a bit of erudite and "far-out" discussion, my long standing conviction that Ryan is a pothead was all but confirmed (for the record, I'm not) and it was once again time to go back to guarding the lives of some chronically boring swimmers. At least "Riders on the Storm" decided to come on the radio…

Get rich quick (idea)

2009-07-03T04:59:15Z

It was like any other musty relic at a musty garage sale in the musty garage, but something about it grabbed his attention. With a flash of his eye he read the cover - displaying just the title, printed so proudly that it left no room for the author's name: "Get Rich Quick Schemes." As a long-time adherent to his faith, consumerism, he had often longed for a book like this. Things weren't going the way they were supposed to, and he needed guidance.

Seeing this ancient self-help tome priced at a dollar made him self-conscious: he would have to purchase it nonchalantly. Act natural. He could not allow his excitement to draw attention to the true worth of his serendipitous find. The wrinkly, kind woman running the bazaar gave him a wise, knowing smile at the nearby checkout, and he handed her his tender. He was still fighting to contain himself, so Washington had to return the smile for him.

He walked out into the sun and opened the book with a squint. On page one it read:…

Guinea pig (idea)

2009-06-29T00:52:07Z

So I buried my guinea pig yesterday. I took it pretty hard, relatively - that is to say I was the only one in my family who shed tears over our diminutive departed critter (we'll call him "Furball" because that's his actual name). I had something of a disturbing experience during the short grief period. It had to do with the timing of my crying. At first, I was just like the rest of my family members, making a few comments about "life" or "it happens," filling the gaps with a few sighs (made obligatory by everyone else's). But then the memories welled up: his tiny, warm weight on my chest as I lay supine, his inquisitive nose checking me for the millionth time as if I were unfamiliar. He would then perch immutably there, claws and paws clutching my t-shirt, always somehow ambiguous between the two extremes of petrifaction and relaxation (this is the default state of a guinea pig). It was only then, picturing this, that I started to cry. I quickly realized that this was all wrong.

I…