This morning it was 50 degrees outside. A brisk wind was blowing. I stepped outside in my towel to where my shower is. With a flourish I dropped my towel and exposed myself to the elements. Woohoo! My flesh crawled and I beat my chest like the great red albino sasquatch. GRRRR! My testicles tried to crawl into my body out of sheer horror. After a moment I turned on the hot water and jumped under it. Ahhh.
Old man winter snuck up a little early this year. I thought I would have at least another month before it started to reach these temperatures.
Did nothing worth noting last night. Worked a little bit on my costume that I am going to wear down at Ibar on wed night. I don't have time to make a robot so I am going as something else. Not as kewl, but still fun.
I loafed on the couch for a while with some Doritos and a beer and tried to watch a really stupid movie I had happened to flip on. It was about a dance teacher that was going to teach a bunch of inner city detention students how to ballroom dance. The students were of course a careful mix of black, white, Spanish and Asian. None of them actually seemed to do anything that looked like they would earn detention. And naturally they loved learning how to do the foxtrot and it made better kids out of them. I finally flipped it off in disgust. In reality the dance teacher would have had a cap busted in his ass the first day.
Speaking of movies, I was thinking about bum-pants today. You know what was nasty? In the movie 'The terminator' when the dude first appears nude in our time, he steals a pair of pants form a bum. Can you imagine how nasty a pair of crusty piss stained bum pants would be like? And he wore the damn things the whole movie. That's gross.
I CAN SMELL YOUR CRUSTY BUM PANTS
For no reason I was talking to a friend the other day about dirty stained mattresses, and we discussed different places we had seen such nasty mattresses. One of the most memorable in my recollection came from a greasy little character named Vinnie Gitto who briefly shared an apartment with my friends TJ and Brian. His bedroom was composed simply of a pile of dirty clothes strewn about, bits of garbage, and a bare jizz-stained mattress shoved in a corner that he used to pork dimwitted girls that he dragged in from who knows where. I recall peeking in the bedroom and back peddling from the smell. As I recall neither TJ or Brian lived with him again.
When I went to RIT there were a series of tunnels that run underground that led to access to other buildings without having to go out in the snow that lay there ninety percent of the year. There was a storage area there for disheveled mattresses. All the dorm rooms got these thin blue plastic mattresses. You would think it would be impossible to stain plastic mattresses, but once I went through the tunnels and they were piling up a bunch of unusable mattresses against the walls for either storage or termination. So I walked by a virtual gallery of mattresses stained with a thousand different sorts of organic juices. Some of them were so bad you could almost make out the former occupant like the shroud of turin. It was truly the master set of stained mattresses.
Shrug. That's all I have to say today.
2026 Update
Time machine's dialing to October 2006, where Ed drops a towel, howls at the wind, and takes us on a tour of stained mattresses.
Ah, 2006. A world where a man could step outside in a towel, scream at the wind, and then blog about it in exquisite detail before anyone could pull up a video of a more impressive sasquatch. A few things have shifted since. That movie he 'flipped on'—now the algorithm would have him pinned as a ballroom-dance tragic within forty minutes, and he'd never escape. The bustling personal blog has been replaced by the group chat and the subscription pile; his post would exist as three angry voice notes and a photo of the stained mattress, probably auto-uploaded to the cloud. The dorm mattress itself: at least the thin blue plastic slab had a tangible, awful biography. Today's memory foam topper just absorbs your sins silently. And as for the bum pants—we've moved from crusty stolen trousers to fast-fashion haul videos where the stains are pre-installed by the factory. Progress, Edward. Glorious progress.
“2006 Ed, after sniffing your way through that gallery of discarded dorm mattresses, did you ever worry that your own blue plastic slab was developing a shroud-of-Turin portrait for the next tunnel explorer?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: So, Beelzebubba, you had to go and ask that. Yeah, I thought about it, usually right around 2 a.m. when I was lying there trying not to think about what exactly was soaking into that blue plastic. I mean, the thing was already mystery-stained when they issued it to me, so I figured I was just adding another layer to the archaeological record. I did try to be careful, kept a towel down, you know, the usual. But there were nights, let me tell you, after a long winter and too much cheap beer, I'd wake up and think, 'Well, that's a new fossil for some poor bastard in 2009.' I like to think my portrait would be less Shroud of Turin and more like a Rorschach test, which is fitting, because I was a mess. I never went back to look, though. Some galleries you just don't revisit.
