September 29th 3:33pm - A Circus of Brits

Email to a friend: So listen to the characters I've met here. I left the Aussies about two weeks ago in Leh and went with the Brit and a few others back to Manali (the Amsterdam of India where I lost my life with the five twenty-year-old Brits). The Brit is a twenty-two-year-old physicist getting his PhD in liquid crystal technology at Oxford. He severely broke his hand when he was masturbating at the age of fourteen. He is a juggler and card trick master as well as an expert crystal ball maneuverer. He and two friends (also physicists from Manchester) went through twenty-five grams of opium in two days. He likes role-playing as foreplay, particularly in cat apparel (the man is obsessed with cats). He dabbles in guitar and slept with a prostitute in Thailand. One of the other Brits is indescribable at Devil's Sticks, hoola hoop, and the harmonica. The other is on my level with especially crazy skills- in that we have none - but he is generally under the influence of alcohol or drugs. They are all basically hilarious pharmacies.
We were with another Brit traveling alone who can't spell for the life of him, has a heavy heavy accent to the point that he sounds Scottish, and plays guitar and sings. I'm trying to get a guitar at the moment to travel with so I can learn some skill! I just want one skill. In Manali we climbed down waterfalls and tried to fish in the rivers. Well, by trying to fish in the rivers I mean one of the Brits bought some hooks and short stretches of fishing line. We watched him and smoked spliffs while he tried to catch fish with a dead worm on one of the hooks. The river had as many fish in it as Paris Hilton has morals. I left the afore-mentioned Brit circus to go to Dharamsala with a Danish guy we were all hanging out with. He has such a hot body one of the Brits started referring to him as "Viking."
He's on some crazy spiritual journey enriching his life. He plays guitar, practices yoga, and is learning Hindi. We share a flat with a German who is a very skinny six-foot-six and typically sings and dances around. He always has a smile on his face and though he hasn't spoken English in ten years, somehow is essentially fluent. We're in McLeod Ganj near Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama's residence, and I love it here. India attracts hilarious people like my life attracts klutziness and disaster!
Friend's Response:
Epic.

September 26th 6:18pm - Dale Earnhardt

The ride from Manali to Leh was as pleasant as receiving sticky stretchable body parts for an eighteenth birthday instead of the precisely requested digital camera.
For a month and a half before her eighteenth birthday one of my friends had explicitly entreated her parents for a digital camera. At soccer practice the day before her birthday she proclaimed to the twenty-two players and three coaches her delight at receiving a camera. The following day, we inquired after the camera model. She reported that her parents had given her colorful, stretchable body parts instead. A sticky orange hand, a blue foot, a yellow ear.

Conversely, the return drive from Leh to Manali was as effortless as passing my high school French final: the entire exam was in English. This is why, after three years of high school French, I know as much of the language as an English toad.

The bus to Manali was warm with triple-capacity bodies. Three passengers had been assigned the same seat. The driver seated foreigners in chairs and Indians in the aisle. The bus farted a lethal diesel cloud and jostled and jolted through the mountain roads as crooked as Quasimodo's back. Body heat radiated from the aisle as effectively as a radiator. My jacket, yak wool socks, knit beanie and fur-lined mittens were as beneficial as genital warts.
The bus arrived in Manali past one o'clock in the morning. This was as inconvenient as camel sex. Much of northern India ceases activity at ten at night.
Three Brits, a Dane, a Sweed and I located the sole taxi willing to drive us two kilometers up a hill as curveceous as Jennifer Lopez. Taxi Man demanded three hundred rupees. Three hundred rupees, about six US dollars, can purchase half a bicycle. It can also buy a bottle of rum and two hundred cigarettes. Naturally we refused and offered one hundred and fifty. He slurred, "Three hundred only."
Laden with backpacker's packs, backpacks and guitars, we shuffled away with the speed of a bear in two sets of handcuffs. This usually results in the driver/shop salesperson/hotel receptionist ambling after and dropping the price. Taxi Man rotated his bloodshot eyes and continued conversation with a circus of Indian men.
We looked back as hopeful as Bambi, realized three hundred was his price, and conceded.
We bulldozed bags onto the roof, and the two guitars and six foreigners jostled into the jeep. I had harnessed the waist strap around the roof rack but knew my pack was as secure as a closet homosexual.
We corraled in the car for seven minutes before Taxi Man finished holding his male friend's hand and climbed in with the pace of a drunk snail. Before he reversed, a policeman stopped Taxi Man and questioned him. They shrieked at each other. I felt like I witnessed a bar fight.
When we questioned the officer if there was a problem, our driver turned around and said, "Friend, friend." They seemed as close to friendship as Paris Hilton and the Pope. Taxi Man's initial reluctance at driving had evidently altered to die-hard determination.
As Policeman probed him, Dale Earnhardt accelerated away towards anything that could kill us. We narrowly circumvented collisions with a metal pole, fifteen hundred trees, a house, three stores, and a metal fence. As we hurled around a hook in the road, my pack kangaroo-bounced from the roof and whacked the window. Five accented voices roared for the driver to stop, that a bag had fallen from the roof. I laughed. Dale Earnhardt hastened forward. Upon my assurances that the bag was bound, the foreign screams ceased echoing. Dale spittingly screeched that we were bad foreigners and shouldn't yell. He removed his hands from the wheel to masturbate his forehead.
We should have known that he was drunk.

September 20th 4:30pm - Code Red

A six-year-old with Down Syndrome would have deigned day two of our Ladakhi trek from Likir to Lamayuru leisurely.
We tramped through thirsty earth and across sweeping rock-strewn terrain with chinchilla-sized sacks. I was as prepared for our patrol as a Neanderthal would be for his first cell phone combat. I mobilized for our four-day trek with money, one shirt, one fake North Face jacket, and a water bottle.
When my monkey got a nosebleed on day two, I had no pads, tampons, or any material modifiable for evading the panty painting. My ovaries obviously ignored my overtures to arrest my leaky basement for a few days until we returned to Leh and our luggage. I'm persistently afflicted with a weeping womb at the most inopportune times: on twenty-hour flights and buses, the second day of treks, Valentine's Day. My fallopian tubes are as rebellious as a sixteen-year-old pregnant pastor's daughter.
Once, the flourishing emerald and jade flora of a town materialized from the monotonous tawny terrain. Hope flavored my thoughts like a chocolate village mirage. Maybe someone would have tampons, pads, toilet paper, or an extra shirt for sale. The closest item the town had to feminine products was a bag of Lays potato chips.
I decorously folded the plastic bag five times and situated it in my underwear. Every step screamed scrunched plastic bag. I felt like a miniature grocer resided in my underwear constantly crackling grocery bags while positioning items.The Aussies and Brit were as supportive as a pretend parachute. The Brit broadcast that a beloved alcoholic drink is called "Time of the Month." The Aussie variant: "Bitch on Rags."
When we arrived at a Lamayuru guesthouse, I assailed the female owner like a football defensive lineman pass rushing.
"Can I possibly get pads or tampons somewhere? I'm on my period," I pleaded with the rapidity of a desperate woman.
The plastic panty lining was as absorptive as my brain after mention of the words "V8 cylinder."The question mark fronting her face reflected a frog's comprehension of Arabic.
"Um, period. Bleeding women," I stated, repeatedly pointing at my vagina.
Her expression was as blank as my travel journal.
"Once a month, women bleed. Blood. Do you have anything for bleeding women?" At the word "blood" my hands exhibited a cascade from my baby-maker that would be more appropriate for the biblical Red Sea surge.
I contemplated displaying my shark bait underwear.
"Oh," she exclaimed, "Woman blood."
"Yes! Woman blood," I replied with the jubilance of a boy whose balls just dropped.
My bliss was as brief as Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston's engagement.
"Nothing here."
"No shop with something for woman blood?" I whimpered like an injured dog.
"No, nothing."
After a frenzied foray against every individual and shop I located, I determined that she was right, there was nothing for woman blood.
I clawed a pillowcase like a rabid bear, rolled the fabric into provisional tampons more befitting a sumo wrestler's diaper, and elbowed them up with Batman backbone to hinder the crimson wave.
It occured to me days later that I could have folded the fabric into pad-like pieces instead of struggling for seventeen minutes to expel the stopper from my vajayjay.
I vowed from that moment that my bag would boast tampons instead of snacks and they would transform to companions as constant as God is to the pope.
Days after we terminated the trek an Indian Robin Williams informed us that we had completed the Sham Trek. Seventy-five-year-old women and blind men tour the Sham Trek.

September 19th 6:09pm - Lethal Rectum Roar

Three Aussies, the Brit, and I determined to do something productive with our days: trekking. I was as titillated as if someone had given me a baby for a day's diversion. I'm beset with babies like I'm obsessed with chocolate-covered strawberries and couldn't recall clutching a kid since I blacked-out in Laos and regained consciousness carrying a Laotian child. I was apparently under the impression that I was babysitting. Day 1 of the trek: mini-bus from Leh to Likir. No trekking.
The five of us departed the bus in Likir, I with the grace of a tranquilized flamingo. I wobbled with my waterbottles and backpack and bucked into dirt dregs. My astoundingly bad balance constantly confuses me, as I have American football defensive lineman legs. In seventh grade, my thirteen-year-old acne-afflicted male infatuation referred to me as "Kankles," and "Thunder Thighs."

Ladakh's arid desert orbited like the obstinate ocean. Reverberating sand dunes stretched, and in the horizon, a snow-spiked mountain range amiably reared. Our guesthouse overlooked the golden Buddha of Likir's Gompa. The bathroom window viewed the Buddha as superbly as if Siddhartha himself had stipulated where to shit.
Common to many Ladakhi guesthouses, our communal eating area constituted floor cushions and low wooden tables ringing the room. A Goliath-sized gold-gilded stove dominated the center of one wall, and the shelves behind paraded with piles of pots and pans as impressive as Cleopatra.
It was in this seated ecstasy, the hostess' happiness and her family dominion, that Wrist Breaker Wanker let loose a lethal fart.
The rancid and repulsive smell penetrated nostrils and affixed itself in nose hairs. The stench resembled a consumed rotting cadaver that had festered for months in his anal cavity before exploding from his anus like a torture device. The Brit's butt bomb saturated souls seconds before our hostess entered with chai tea refills.
Her nose crumpled at the rectum roar's stench. Tears gathered as she struggled not to catapult the tray and careen from the room roaring like a wounded lion. The Brit's poop fumes were so repellant that he did the only thing he could do.

"I am so sorry. The smell... I'm just sorry. I'm... uh... having stomach problems," he said, as serious as global warming.

Her response: "Wear a sweater. Stay warm."

September 16th 3:14pm - Leh's ATM

Twenty-five minutes after my toilet tumble, the Aussie and I still reposed in the State Bank of India's ATM line. The only other ATM in Leh was broken, and the inside of the solitary bank resembled Tienanmen Square. She stood while I sat, slouched on the concrete sidewalk at her feet like a disparaged dog. Every five minutes, when she advanced a step and I rolly-pollied forward, my body rebelled against me. I had already dry heaved into my lap three times. Women clad in red and gold plastic bracelets and bright orange and pink saris behind me mother-hen clucked. Western-dressed Indian men stared at me like I was a prostitute because my shoulders weren't covered. I was well aware my utterances echoed those of a dying bovine.

After slumping and shuffling on the searing sidewalk for an hour and a half feeling like a leper, the Aussie and I reached the bottom step as rapturous as if we had met a mermaid. I envisioned a plate of fillet mignon, garlic mashed potatoes, and grilled butter-smeared asparagus beckoning to me from the ATM kiosk. We progressed to the front of the line. I drooled. The Indian Army man at the machine exited as we entered and looked at us with liquid laughing eyes.

"The ATM machine is broken," he informed us.

"Noooooo," I replied and rushed inside to discover the screen's static state with the words, "ATM temporarily out of order. We apologize for the inconvenience," mocking me. There was no fillet mignon.

Indian Army Man announced on the steps to the thirty-four Indians and Westerners in line that the machine was broken. Everyone lifted and leaped forward, eyes hungry and hands open. Impatient thrusts from the crowd behind impelled me and Aussie forward. A lime-armed salwar kameez compressed my dwarf breasts, a sequined jootie trod on my heel, and I inhaled a sweet-scented black braid of hair. My gag of a ruminating retch was the only thing that triggered retreat.

Aussie and I jammed our bodies in and through the crowd. If someone stepped too close, I disconcertingly dry heaved towards the offending person. We had waited almost two hours in the sweltering, humid heat. The sun had settled on our bodies and baked into my head. My body's loath towards me paralleled the time I fell in a prodigious pile of elephant excrement at the circus.

September 15th 6:02 pm - Indian Toilet Round Two

Indian toilets vary as much as eccentrics at San Francisco's annual Love Parade.
Last year's parade possessed drag queens, seventy-year-old hippies, detonated druggies, babies, crocked college kids, flustered foreigners, toddlers, spouses on stilts, masochists with needles through nipples and string connecting nipples to penis clamps, families, and Halloween-clad teenagers.
Indian toilets engross "Open," aka wilderness as inviting as the Grinch, swarming sidewalk urinals, concrete-floored rooms, holes in the ground, and Buckingham Palace-like marble-floored Western bathrooms.
Ladakhi toilets constitute dirt-floored rooms with a hole in the soil, midget-sized dirt mounds, and a shovel in the corner. The discharges amass many feet below. After relieving oneself without toilet paper or access to water, a shovelful of dirt dispenses down the hole. This harvests human waste compost.
After a night of Paris Hilton indulgence with The Godfather beer (as stated on the bottle: Alcohol Content: between 4.25 and 8.25%) and Old Monk Rum (the rum bottle's label subsumes a smiling aged monk), I felt as composed as when I drunkenly stumbled through Bangkok with one sandal last year.

My head spiraled like butterfly sex and my ability to stand was inhibited like my 20/400 vision. Basic human functions, such as speech, proved as difficult as refusing to sing karaoke when drunk.
I stood in the ATM line feeling like a suffocating three-hundred-pound cat. We had shuffled forward four steps in twenty minutes. An eternal line of military men, Westerners, and Indian males loomed in front of me. The line was as intimidating as Aladdin's Jafar.
"Water. Toilet," I murmured to the female Aussie I waited with and crawled across the street towards the refuge of a restaurant.
The waiter handed me a bottle of water and motioned around the corner for the toilet. I shuffled down the stairs and drifted to a decrepit stairwell that looked like something out of I Am Legend. I stepped over cables and tread through wires. Every third step had crumbled away like my dignity.
Stammering over the staircase reminded me of modern art I saw at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain in 2007. Sections of a collapsed concrete flight of stairs had been erected on the wall. It was entitled "Stairway to Heaven." If I had access to a crane and The Hulk's muscles, I too could be a renowned artist exhibiting in a world-famous museum.
Four wooden stilts supported the bathroom several feet above the ground. I pitched inside and projected the door shut with the strength of my cousin's three-month-old son. Sweat sprinkled into my eyes and my vision wobbled like an oversized baby's head. I crouched, contemplating if a picture of my bare ass next to a sculpture's exposed derriere would qualify as modern art in the Guggenheim. I have such a photograph from my most recent Las Vegas extravaganza.
Urine ushered from my vagina with the urgency of America's current economic state and my brain swooned like an inebriated fly's flight. My right foot slipped from the side of the opening. My leg plunged into the hole and my torso fish-flopped into the dirt. The sudden movement coupled with my hungover state induced me to gag and memories of an interview three years ago accosted my brain.
Similarly hung over, I interviewed for a position with the Admissions Office as a University Ambassador. Fifteen minutes into the interview I flowed from the office and to the toilet, where I experienced a charming counterpart combustion of torpedo vomiting and Montezuma's Revenge. Somehow I got the job.
Recollections of my calamitous but career-oriented self a few years ago contrasted to my current state made me question my life like Mother Teresa. With fresh urine stains on my shirt, my arms in dirt, and one leg down a toilet hole, my life was looking as auspicious as that of the homeless man I regularly pass in San Francisco holding the sign: "Ninjas kidnapped my family. Need money for karate lessons."
After dry heaving for forty seconds, I consolidated my strength, and, feeling like a wounded hippopotamus, hefted my body from the hole. I collapsed in the dirt and rested for three minutes in the fetal position as pungent odors of excrement and urine attacked my nostrils.
When I subsequently straggled out the door, through the battered stairs, and across the street, my Aussie companion looked at me like I had just asked her to partake in a crack-accompanied four-some.

September 10th 5:17pm - Story Time: Wrist Breaker Wanker

During the journey from Manali to Leh, we bonded like concentration camp survivors. Over dinner the Brit, Aussies and I recounted the drive, otherwise known as Satan's amusement.
"I cried," the Brit admitted with Ghandi's honesty.
"I thought we were going to slide off the cliff. I began writing my will," an Aussie added.
The conversation progressed to sex.
Two topics are always available in India: sex and bowel movements.The Brit recounted that when he was fourteen, he severely broke his wrist while wanking. This seemed as feasible as a future career as a leprechaun lord. He showed us the surgery scars.
Stories of sex on trains and planes ensued, including a cut penis and a sex attempt.
"I don't know how I cut my penis, but when I got an erection, the blood pumped into my penis and volcano-erupted. There was blood everywhere. I was so drunk I kept accusing this girl I didn't know of being on her period. I told her to stop bleeding so much... it was a one-night stand," another detailed.
Somehow we sped to significant others and dating.
"If I was to speed-date, first I'd ask if she could lay an egg, what size it would be, what color, and what it would hatch into. Then I'd ask her favorite animal, then, her second favorite animal," Wrist Breaker Wanker declared.
Yoshi is his favorite animal. Over the successive weeks we discovered that Wrist Breaker Wanker is a twenty-two-year-old physicist getting his PhD in liquid crystal technology at Oxford. Role-playing as foreplay is ideal, particularly in cat apparel. His cat obsession straggles behind his Yoshi infatuation. He's a master juggler and crystal ball maneuverer who is incredible at card tricks and dabbles in guitar.
"When I retire, I want to breed cats," he informed us, as serious as the atomic bomb.

September 7th 9am - Part 2 Manali to Leh = Snowstorm

Our caravan continued with the persistence of telemarketers.
The two-wheel-drive Traveler Jeeps persevered through the three-foot snow until they slid from the road like vehicles on ice skates. Once the glide generated, the automobile reversed until the wheels wedded with the snow-covered concrete cleared minutes before. The three vehicles trailing reversed in a four-car retreat that resembled ducks doddering backwards.
One man materialized like Harry Potter and with a Neanderthal shovel, spaded the snow from the path until the jeep found a foothold. The jeep drove for six feet before spilling from the street again. Harry Potter would reappear, shovel and disappear, only to manifest five minutes later. His shovel doubled the prized possession of a caveman and looked like the metal had been fastened to the wooden shaft with string.
In two hours we progressed two hundred meters. The Indians were apparently under the impression that a bulldozer and chains were unnecessary. Our passage over the 16,020 foot Baralacha Pass made as much sense as Slyvester Stallone naming his son Sage Moonblood.
Although my sheer pants provided as much warmth as an icicle, I adjudicated that as I wasn't afflicted with explosive diarrhea or barking bloody feces, I was as happy as an orphan adopted by Oprah Winfrey. The other passengers didn't share my enthusiasm.
The French remained immersed in their blanket, the Brit was reduced to an infantile state, and the Aussies were so assured of our impending death that one of them deemed it logical to smoke a joint in the snow to tranquilize himself into a soothed state. Instead, as we skidded over the snow towards the edge of the cliff, he assumed the cracked character of one with Paranoid Personality Disorder.

When our driver desisted driving at eight o'clock at night, I asked what was happening. Earlier, while we had sat like perplexed dung beetles, he had exited the vehicle for twenty minutes to have a conversation and for ten minutes to relieve himself. He replied that we were staying the night at this tent community.
"Excuse me, but can we please get our bags down from the roof? A few of us have sleeping bags," the French female requested.
"Ya, I actually have a shirt with sleeves in my bag," I said.
"No, bags stay on roof," he said and then stalked off like Hitler.
The Brit cried.
We crept into what looked like a circus tent to discover a stove and sleeping areas.
"Blanket," the Brit said and thrust money at the owner. He burrito-wrapped himself and then pronounced, "Chai," between shivering lips. The rest of us relapsed in conversation while he curled into the fetal position.
The next day the snow shifted to desert and our progression was impeded by road blockades and detours instead of arctic conditions more suitable for polar bears than Westerners. Our journey, originally supposed to last seventeen hours, endured for thirty-two.
We later learned that the pass closed as we were on it.

Weeks later, on the return ride from Leh to Manali, the Brit self-medicated himself into a semi-comatose state with a deluge of drugs, including Valium and Ketamin, a horse tranquilizer.

* Published on Bootsnall.com in October 2009

September 6th 3:20pm - Part 1. Manali to Leh = Snowstorm. I Expected Desert

I was as prepared for the journey from Manali to Leh as my parents were for my birth. When I was born, they hadn't had a baby shower, my mom hadn't had Lamaze classes, and my dad was intoxicated from a Christmas party.
As I entered the jeep at two o'clock in the morning in sandals, see-through Aladdin pants, and a tank-top, the man who took my luggage said the seventeen-hour drive to Leh would probably be cold. I told him not to worry, I had the skin of the Hulk, and I'd manage.
If the man had just said the word "Snow," I might have prepared myself as if I were climbing Mount Everest. However, I slipped off my sandals and fell asleep in the front seat of the jeep as content as if I were Barbie.
I awoke three hours later to snowflakes ambushing my feet like the Japanese bombarded Pearl Harbor. I thought Leh was surrounded by desert. My uncovered toes resembled eggplants. Replacing my sandals was as productive as sleeping in a one-on-one meeting. Which I have done.
I reconnaissanced the range and resolved that the driver's window was open because he was using it to see the road. Solidified snow and withered windshield wipers obstructed his vision as effectively as a lion laying across the hood of the car.
In the seats behind me, two Aussies adorned in five layers of clothing were shivering like three-year-old baboons bathing in glacier water. The Brit's lips were grapes and his body was as immovable as London. All I could detect of the two French was the blanket they had over their heads. The Israelis were incapable of speech but repeatedly paraded their fingers from a Nutella jar to their tongues.
The Traveler Jeep had no four-wheel-drive and our driver had no chains.
By leering through my window, the driver's open window, and the frostbitten windshield, I gleaned that three feet of snow screened the road, we were one jeep in a caravan of four, and sheer cliffs surrounded us. To my left was an extreme incline and three feet from the right side of the road was the edge. I couldn't conceive the ground. Apparently the driver was under the impression that proceeding through the Abominable Snowman's land without any blizzard apparatus for vehicles was a good idea.
When he halted between two wooden shacks our driver departed without instruction. Anchored to our seats, we regarded each other with bewilderment paralleling my first experience with a banana.
When we emerged from our igloo, my feet submerged in snow like Britney Spears' self-esteem after she shaved her head and attacked a paparazzo with an umbrella.
I scuttled with my fellow frozen sufferers to the nearest doorway and catapulted myself onto the nearest bench with the lithe of one who accidentally triggered a tyrannosaurus tranquilizer into their trachea. We were in a home that ostensibly converted into a restaurant during the day. Beds at night became seats in the day.
"Hypothermia," the Brit moaned with tears in his eyes as he sat down, sounding more like a woman in labor than a trim twenty-two-year-old.
"Frostbite," I replied as I felt feces festering.
When I requested a toilet location, I was told "Open."
"Open" indicates that there is none. "Open" embodies wilderness. "Open" means you're shit out of luck.
As I contemplated whether I could prolong the inevitable excrement another four hours when I surmised our next stop might be, one of the Israelis entered with a smile and a pair of yak wool socks in his hand.
Without words, the Aussies and I dashed out the door, through the snow, and across the street to the only other shelter in eyesight. The Brit hobbled in and railed rupees at the proprietor as we completed our purchases. He didn't speak. I put on the socks with Michael Phelps speed and we clumped back to our chai.
Forty-five minutes later we still hadn't seen our driver. He had been spurring through snow and reeling roads for ten hours. We concluded he must be sleeping. After four rounds of chai and an hour and a half he reappeared like the grim reaper. He nodded towards the jeep and trudged off.
As the Aussies, French, Israelis, and Brit filed past me the excrement congregated in my body, threatening to blaze like the Big Bang. I bound behind the building to find sheets of snow and no barriers to bend behind. Panicking like a schitzo as my anus leaked liquid waste, I lowered my loose, transparent Aladdin pants and perched near a concrete step.
Poop projected from my ass with the force of a sperm whale's ejaculation. I couldn't cease the deluge any more than I could speak Mandarin, interpret Arabic, and dream in Japanese simultaneously. I sighed with the contentment I would convey should I scrutinize a hot air balloon in the shape of a penis. I looked around for toilet paper. I distinguished with dismay that I was on the back deck of the house. There was snow and a leaf stack. And my hippopotamus-sized stool sat three steps from the backdoor. The jeep's honk honed in my ears. I launched some leaves over my discharge, stoned some snow into my posterior, and duck-waddled to the jeep, my socked feet shoved into my sandals and cold creeping through my bottom.
Ten minutes later I observed discoloration on my right pant leg.
I had excreta on my pants and sandals, melted snow in my underwear, and wore a tank-top in a snowstorm.

* Published on Bootsnall.com in October 2009