January 31st, 2009
I take the skytrain to work and so every morning I walk down Quebec Street to get to the Main Street skytrain station. On Friday I nearly stepped in an enormous blob of vomit on the sidewalk, orangey and gooey (pizza?). I was sort of zoned out listening to some Nick Cave and thinking about my clients so I didn’t see it much in advance. The best part? The big black crow hopping around in the mess, selecting a particularly large chunk, and hopping off with it to eat.
AAAAAAAUGHH!!
I gagged and did that cat-about-to-barf “hurk hurk” thing, but managed to keep it down by sternly reminding myself that if I barfed into someone else’s barf I’d probably die.
Oh my god, did I ever tell you about the cat barf? OMG! Okay. When I first moved out of my parent’s house it was to a basement apartment in Chilliwack with my ex-boyfriend (different from last post’s ex). I had a cat, a crabby black creature called Midnight, who of course came along with me. My roomie also had a cat, a sort of goofy bimbo grey tom called Chip, but Chip didn’t move in straight away for reasons I can no longer remember. It was about a week until Chip arrived, and I guess the transition was pretty stressful for the little guy because he got terrible diarrhea for the first couple of days.
So on Chip’s second morning I got up for work (I was a gravedigger at the time – true story!) and was sitting in the kitchen eating a bowl of yogurt when Chip sauntered in and took a big, loose, runny poo all over this pile of newspapers that was against the wall behind me. God, the stench was terrible!
As soon as Chip laid the slick, my cat Midnight moved over to it and gave it a sniff: sniff sniff! And promptly threw up on the kitchen floor. Then Chip sniffed the barf, and started to eat it!
AAAAAAAUGHH!!
I’m sitting there with a mouth full of yogurt while Cat Excretions Opera In Three Parts played out in under a minute! Gargh!
The moral of this story is, of course, never have roommates.
Those are rough barf stories. Mine is perhaps somewhat lower on the ‘absolute grossness’ scale, but it has a certain je ne sais quoi, from the pure physical mechanics of the episode.
A grade school field trip. The obligatory fat annoying kid who over-indulged in crappy field trip concession stand fare. A long road trip back to school in a hot reeking school bus, full of twists and turns and bone jarring bumps.
By the time we pull into the parking lot, Fatty McGee is positively green with barfiosity, and near the back of the bus. The students all disembark, and Fatty is almost bursting. He runs past us, into the school and down the hall, making a beeline for the bathroom, as fast as his legs with carry him.
He almost makes it.
He hurls, a huge stream, nay river of vomitus projecting from his mouth with astonishing velocity. It lands all over the highly polished school linoleum, directly in the path of his futile charge towards the bathroom.
And then he barrels right over the vomit slicked lino. Sure enough, he bails, landing with a gargantuan, squishy thud in his own warm sickness, and is propelled down the hall like he was riding a barf soaked slip n’ slide.
He misses the turn in the corridor, and slams head first into the cinder block wall near the gymnasium. The head injury promptly induces seizure.
The young man suffered no permanent harm. Unless living well into his adult years with the nickname “Barfslide” might count as causing permanent psychological harm.
~I.
That is pretty gross! I think the worst barf story I have is from the old days with my last dog. She ate some cat poop in the yard and then vomited it up in the house. The combination of smells of dog vomit plus cat poop was vile. I mean, it was worse than when the other dog, who was sick, took a huge dump in the house requiring the purchase of a carpet steam cleaner. (I ran out to buy it while my hubby stayed home and shoveled up the mess.) Luckily, the cat poop vomit incident happened on the tile floor!