The Gift of the Magi

This post is well overdue, and I've been hemming and hawing about whether or not to just scrap it, or to just go straight to the best parts for one big post covering the time that I haven't been blogging over the past couple weeks, but I guess I might as well give it the full treatment, despite the fact that it's completely lost its steam..

I mentioned in my last post that I was going camping at Pillsbury State Park in New Hampshire, the State Park service having kindly fucked me out of $20 for using their website. Anyway, the camping trip itself was a much pleasanter experience than I would have been lead to believe if I had only used the internet. At least they didn't try to steal any more of my money. They did, however, strictly enforce a 15 mph speed limit on the campground, which sorta cramped my style. But it was "for the children" as the camp manager informed us every time she spoke.

M&D and I arrived at the campground early in the morning Saturday after about a three hour drive and we were to meet up with M&A and A&M for breakfast before going on a hike for the day. One of the highlights of breakfast, for me anyway, was some leftover pizza they had saved for me the night before. Even though it sat outside over night in the box out in the woods "decomposing." I am notorious for eating old pizza, so they knew that I would eat it, and why wouldn't I, because how can you not fucking love day-old pizza?? They all think it has germs and shit, but I say fuck that, I eat as many germs as I can to keep my immune system strong.

Our real breakfast was actually composed of eggs, homefries, chocolate chip pumpkin bread, and a shit ton of bacon, which I found to be particularly tasty when layered on top of the bread, because as anyone knows combining two awesome things like bacon and chocolate makes them exponentially more awesome. With fuel like that, we knew we would be ready for the day of hiking. We packed up some sandwiches, fruit, and water, covered ourselves with bug spray and sunscreen, and set off on the dusty trail. Actually it was more like a muddy, watery trail.

The hike was comparable to the Trail of Tears, Lewis and Clark's expedition, the Oregon Trail, and the Fellowship of the Ring's journey into Mordor, combined. It was hot, sunny, grueling work, we had no map and had to navigate plenty of puddles, save salamanders from the trail, and we even saw a snake eating a frog. After about an hour or so, we stopped for lunch, only to find that the mayonaise on the sandwiches had warmed nicely while packed in our bags, much to the chagrin of the greedy bastards who had packed two sandwiches.

After lunch, we hiked on for about another hour before we lost the trail and decided to turn back. On the way, we passed a little stream and decided to take a dip, after much discussion of leeches and giardia. I, of course, jumped in face first, like a real man, howling at the top of my lungs because the water was effing cold. I encouraged the other boys to splash the water on their balls first to help them get used to it, but as it turned out, they were significantly wimpier about the cold water than I was.

The swim had to be kept short, as there had been rumors of rain, so we hiked back to the site, got tents set up and cooked dinner. Everything was going fine, we were drinking beers and eating rare steak with our hands, when it suddenly started to downpour and we had to move everything under the gazebo, where we hung out the rest of the evening.

Eating commenced to drinking, which means Apples to Apples was played, and I actually won the game, since I am awesome. Considering it was raining about 2 inches per hour, spirits were high and it was mentioned more than once that what might be a better idea than sleeping in the tents would just be to drink up all the beer, and then when it was out, or when it started getting light out, to start drinking coffee.

That didn't actually happen, as later tents and cars were slept in, but the most important discussion of the evening took place after some 'Would you rather' questions. One of them was, Would you rather poop diamonds, or poop gold nuggets? Naturally, it was necessary to break down the relative merits of either side, considering size and pain to contrast with value, as well as having to wade through one's own feces to extract the gems. A. made a comment that she often sifts through M.'s poop, to which M. replied that he swallows little treasures for her to find when she sifts through his poop. That was when I realized what true love really is. It's like in the story 'The Gift of the Magi,' only it is about poop. When you love someone so much that you will sift through their poop, or someone loves you so much that they swallow gold or diamonds for you to find when they sift through your poop. I can only hope that one day I will find a love like that. And that some day, Hallmark will make a card that expresses such a beautiful sentiment.