vituperation

Yesterday afternoon, Robyn and I went out for dinner. While there, I caught something out of the corner of my eye that looked strikingly like this animated GIF:

Oh my God, I thought, and started to laugh. Someone’s doing a fucked up version of the “Running Man” in the middle of the Chinese restaurant.

I turned, still laughing, and saw that it wasn’t someone dancing. It was a man with a profound physical disability, simply walking across the restaurant with great difficulty.

Boy, that just sucked the funny right out of the situation.

However, there’s a little funny left in that I spent the rest of the meal feeling guilty for laughing, even though I wasn’t really laughing at him.

“Thank you,” I said, and took the change from the woman behind the counter. She nodded, and resumed packing chopsticks in to-go packets.

We walked out into the late afternoon sun to the car, full of Chinese buffet. As I pulled out onto Jordan Lane, I noticed Robyn fumbling around in her purse. She extracted a small strip of foil packets and offered them to me. Personal cloth wipes, each read.

“Want one?” she asked.

“No. Where’d you get those?” I asked, wondering what restaurant in Maine dispensed hand wipes.

“I took them from the doctor’s office. The Hooters wipes I ordered from eBay were too dry.” She tore open a packet, unfolded the little cloth, and rubbed her hands vigorously on it.

I thought about my wife buying Hooters hand wipes from eBay. I understood now what sort of person would buy Hooters hand wipes off eBay, and wondered what sort of person would sell such an item. Who has a box of Hooters hand wipes sitting around and thinks, hey, I’ll bet I could sell these on eBay?

A smart person, that’s who.

A second thought occurred, and I started.

“You stole those hand wipes from the doctor’s office?” I asked, aghast. Okay, mock aghast.

“They get them for free from the drug companies.”

“But you stole them!”

“That’s not the same as stealing.”

“Did you get them from the bathroom?”

“Yes.”

“Oh my God, you stole the weiner wipes! I can’t believe you stole the weiner wipes!”

“They’re not weiner wipes,” she said in a prim voice. “They’re towelettes.”

“They’re for wiping your weiner when you have to pee in a cup! You stole the weiner wipes!”

A moment passed in silence as I reflected on how I’d married a woman who would steal weiner wipes from the bathroom at the doctor’s office.

Robyn held her hands up in front of the air vents and flapped them energetically.

“I guess they weren’t meant for hands,” she said. “They’re…sticky.”

“I told you, they’re weiner wipes. Not hand wipes.”

“They’re hand wipes,” she said. She pulled the strip of packets from her purse and looked closely at it. “Oh.”

“What?”

She read the package to me. “Pre-moistened medicated hemorrhoidal wipe.”

She did not find this nearly as funny as I did.

“You used butt wipes on your hands? That’s even worse than using weiner wipes.” A troubling thought occurred to me. “You mean all these years I’ve been getting physicals I’ve been using butt wipes on my weiner when I pee for them? Gross!”

“Shut up,” she said. “It says here that they comfort, soothe, and cool.”

“Do your hands feel cool, comforted, and soothed?” I asked.

“No, they just feel sticky.”

It sure is nice having her back home.

Speaking of weiners, during a recent surgery a friend had to have a urethral stent inserted into his. He tells me the stent was the worst part of his surgery, which, having had a normal catheter once, I can understand. A catheter is considerably smaller than a stent, so I can only imagine the pain.

After the stent was removed he made an interesting discovery: air can get up the stent and into the bladder. Right in the middle of his first pee the stream stopped.

And he farted from his penis.

A real raspberry, to hear his rendition with his lips.

Then the pee started back up.

You’re welcome for that.