My friend Dave is here from Vegas. He’s berating me for not writing anything. Problem is, I’ve been having difficulties with words lately. None are good enough. Every attempt at composition comes out flat. This is damaging my sense of arrogant superiority. When he capped his tirade with “Go fuck yourself,” I knew I needed to get down to business and restart my keyboard molestation regimen. This entry is going to be pathetic and will likely involve lots of poop talk. You just make me think about excretion, Dave. This is your fault, not mine.

Last Saturday night I ventured into Chinatown. The foreigners weren’t sweating a visible drop, as if their bodies considered this punishing environment gentle and soothing compared to the climates of their genetic memory, memory that whispers to them of jungle steam, massive caterpillars, and dysentery. In order to emulate this dermal fortitude, I undertook an osmosis project. This entailed eating caustic stir fry and walking in sandals.

Lao Sze Chuan is Chicago’s most revered purveyor of Western Chinese cuisine. The food is dangerously spicy, inviting men of my pallor to gasp, sweat, and blush in culinary shock.

Mexican restaurants provide chips and salsa. Italian restaurants, bread. Here, in fiery schezuan fashion, I was provided a small plate of crunchy cabbage strips doused in pepper oil. This alone drove me through two tall glasses of ice water.

I ordered Chef Tony’s Dry Chili Chicken, a sauceless dish composed of dark meat chicken and several handfuls of red chili peppers. Sparse sprinklings of ginger chips and scallions wandered lonely within the acerbic concoction. In addition to providing my taste buds the tastiest, most wonderful Chinese (food) I’d ever eaten, it burned seventeen gaps in my formerly leather tough stomach lining, creating sprinkler holes for my gastrointestinal bile to tinkle out among my internal organs, reducing my guts to pickled weeping mush. On Sunday, I crapped out half my spleen and several spinal chips. My assring was dyed orange. I can’t wait to go back. I still have an appendix I don’t need.

Upon finishing the meal, I reintroduced myself to the outdoor floating bayou. In contrast to my meal, the ugly weather now seemed gentle. With my insides under inferno, my outside was nonplussed. What previously had been a punishing thick blanket of wet hot heat was now a serene caress.

I didn’t stop my assault upon my critical organs with that one meal. I devised a sequel last night by visiting Buffalo Wild Wings, a fine chain establishment that sells drums and wings at 35 cents a pop on Tuesdays. Their hottest level of chicken gutfuck baste is calling Blazin’. This glowing orange sauce is a progeny of pulped habaneros, and it lives up to its billing. This sauce made me feel like the red chili pepper damage was child’s play, an infantile gurgle compared to a sonorous protracted belch.

I ate two dozen of the greasy little nuclear hazards. Tiny droplets of sauce escaped into the air rush of my labored inhalations, peppering my lungs with little pinpoints of raging heat. All that Marlboro mucus dissolved, its liquid remains fleeing my lungs to coat my esophagus with a protective layer of wet tar booger paste.

All day today, my asshole has ruptured repeatedly, a punctured soup can leaking in spasm under the greedy lips of a homeless man. With the homeless guy being the toilet, of course. Okay, bad analogy, but I’m keeping it.

Tonight, I suppose, I should return to my regular evening diet of trucker speed and cheap beer. If I don’t, the orange leakage may spread down my legs like cheap tanning lotion. 5:52 PM - Bottle Rocket Fire Alarm