The Undoing of a Man

I could have sworn that I posted something here like 5 days ago about how I promise to post more, bit by bit. I guess that was just a glorious fantasy of my thoroughly exhausted mind.

Friends, compatriots, angry mob of people standing outside threatening me with disembowelment if I don't blog soon...I have indeed been to the ends of the earth. I have traveled to the northernmost limits of where any human could reasonably and willfully want to go in April, far to the East to the shattered lands of the former Yugoslav republic, and as even as far as the McDonalds down the street for some midnight french fry action. Oh you know it.

Part of the reason for me bitching out on this digi-literary (digirary) endeavor is that I was in foreign countries for the first two weeks of April. The reasons for the rest of my universally lamented absence from the blogosphere aren't quite as legitimate, but I guess I'll try to come up with some excuses or something. I guess my most compelling reason is that I've really gotten out there in an incredible way, and all of my time is spent experiencing experience. I have had a phenomenal April so far, and I have no intentions of letting the last leg (called a "slutspurt" in Danish, as you may recall from a previous post) of this month break the mold that I have cast around it in unbreakable plaster.

I think I will begin recounting my adventures in reverse order, because the details ("deets," in case anyone I know would dare to be a Twitter user and an acquaintance of mine simultaneously) are simply too fucking juicy. The events beginning on Saturday and continuing through today have thoroughly defined my past few days on this green earth as the single most pride-obliterating stretch of time in my life. The hours of the past few days have been fixed to one another in some sort of horrifying weave of misery and shame, each stitch another vicious affront to my dignity that may, in fact, be the death of me. And yet this devastating tapestry of woe into which I have been spun is so truly awful that it can only be hilarious.

I am, of course, exaggerating, but the combined embarrassment of the past 48 hours in particular forms a sufficiently massive enough moeity that science, or this blog, must address it as something in its own right. The events begin the night of the 24th, a Saturday, when two mysterious bruise-like phenomena appeared below my jawline and, in what will prove to be a nearly fatal flaw in but a few paragraphs, above my collar. Since my wardrobe is distinctly lacking in any sort of turtle-necked apparel, I was to suffer the shame of this scarlet letter throughout the weekend and into this yet-young week.

Fast forward to Sunday morning, around oh-nine-hundred hour, when I'm awoken by an SMS saying "let's hammer mill it up dude!" Now, this is exactly what it sounds like -- we were to bike around 10km to visit a medieval water mill used to power an enormous hammer, which was in turn used in its hey-day to forge the barrels of the King's rifles. Now it's used by the finest of Danish line-chefs to forge eggs and bacon for intrepid travelers, which we aimed to become and reap said brunch-ly bounty. But before we even get to the mill, disaster struck.

Exclaiming to my friends, "hey check this Danish mount I'm about to do," I confidently stepped onto the left pedal of my bike with my left foot, launching it forward with the intention of vaulting my right leg over the seat and onto its respective pedal. But woe was to befall my leg on its be-doom'ed arc over the seat of this abomination of Danish bikemanship. With the bike still rolling, my shorts became entrapped by the snaring grasp of some arbitrarily placed plastic bits under the seat cushion. With my pants caught in the dastardly clutches of my inanimate adversary, the momentum of my leg carried this chain of events to its logical and horrifically embarrassing conclusion -- the sundering of my favorite pair of lower-body garments.

This was no ordinary tear in my pants -- this was a rending of untold proportions, a hip-to-hem fissure exposing the true frailty of my mortal soul. With that, the tides of this Old Man and the Sea struggle between pants and bike seat took an alarming turn. Now inextricably trapped inside my shorts, the seat of the still-rolling bike lost the upper hand, but my shorts' thirst for vengeance would prove fatal to what remained of my pride. Trapped on this rolling machine of mortifying hatred, I toppled like so many Titans in a film starring Sam Worthington, the hard ground delivering the final and mortal blow to my dignity. This was the first awful thing that was to happen to me on Sunday.

25 kilometers of biking later, my noble steed decided to begin dying slowly. First I lost third gear, then second, followed by the shifting mechanism popping off of the wheel cap, causing the remaining unattached gears to create a horrible grinding sound everywhere I biked.

So there I was, with two giant hickeys, ripped shorts and a broken bicycle, utterly and terribly vanquished. I suffered greatly at the lashing tongues of my classmates today, even my Danish teacher was eager to point out the blotches on my neck that seem even now to outline the very topography of my humiliation.

Would I do it again? Absolutely.