3 Awful Experiences Our Brains Always Remember Fondly

3 Bad Food

Humans and food have a curious and impossible to explain relationship. I imagine there was once a time when eating was as simple as rolling out of the cave in the morning and foraging for some berries. Maybe later you'd attack a gazelle with a sharp stone and you'd have meat for two days until it went off. Things were simple and A-OK.

Today you can choose to eat something that looks like a cupcake but is made of grease-infused wax and is loaded with stuff called polyunsaturated fats and hydrogenated oils and guar gum and phenylalanine. You don't really know what phenylalanine is, but we all trust that the guy who put it in the vat that mixed up the dough that produced 10,000 waxy double-packed cupcakes knows enough about phenylalanine to know that it won't kill us, and, all things being equal, somehow that makes that cupcake better. That phenylalanine is the difference between a sugary treat that tastes OK and a sugary treat that tastes like a moldy, spore-infused death bonbon that will kill us all with painful dysentery. So we should enjoy it.

"Ye gods, I shouldn't have eaten that hoagie. This opium oughtta help."

Because we as a species today are so willing to eat damn near anything so long as it looks and smells normal and not weird like bugs or liver, we do some terrible things to ourselves totally on purpose, totally willingly and totally aware of what the end result is going to be. For an awesome example of this, I present you with a single word that will elucidate my point better than an entire scientific thesis could: Sriracha.

I love Sriracha. It's my favorite hot sauce, and our world is just lousy with hot sauce choices these days. Go to the store and you'll see dozens of sauce brands. There are probably thousands available, and they come with classy names like Satan's Scorched Anus and Napalm Shits. And the names aren't even hyperbolic, they're accurate descriptions of the ingredients and/or effects of consuming the sauce. Still, I choose Sriracha because I enjoy the flavor as well as the heat. And every single time I eat Sriracha on anything, I pay for it on a cosmic level the next day. Never have I eaten a meal with Sriracha present when I was able to spend the next day skipping along my merry way like Dick Van Dyke in a Disney movie. No, the next day I wake up and I feel like someone took the mat from in front of the toilet and steeped it in an old mop bucket that perhaps Justin Bieber has pissed in, then left it sitting in the sun for a few hours, then took that mashed up bundle and jammed it into my colon. And that mass, that bulky, terrible thing, is now fighting for consciousness. It's pushing about inside of me, prodding and poking with the finesse of a medicated toddler trying to find its way to someplace new, and it's no good.

This came out of my ass. This exact, flaming pepper.

I lurch my body, which I can't even stretch, into an upright position into the bathroom, and I lament my poor choices for as long as it takes, while small beads of sweat form on my brow and my mouth involuntarily begins to salivate, attempting to wash away the discomfort and pain in the most feeble and desperate of ways. And I'll just be there, doubled over and frowning, alone, for a period of time that a man has no business wasting on a toilet when there are more productive things to be doing, wishing I wasn't such a moron, while it feels like my ass is slowly but very successfully developing pyrokinetic abilities.

If hot sauce isn't your thing, there's likely something. Maybe it's Taco Bell that sends you rocketing into a shame spiral as you munch away on that Los Locos goodness, or perhaps the buffet at Golden Griddle. Hell, maybe it's just the oversized bag of Cheetos you bought for everyone and then ate all by yourself. And when it's all done, you look at what wickedness you wrought and you swear by the heavens that never again will you shame yourself in such a gastronomic fashion. But you will. You will.

2 Bad Sex

Sex is one of the hardest things in the world to say no to when you actually want it. You see a lot of comedy based on the loser archetype trying to get laid and failing miserably; this is often portrayed by Jason Biggs. But the less played out story that is just so full of shameful comedy is the flip side of the coin that occurs when you can get laid, but you shouldn't. Man, is that rough.

In the moment, when you're controlled by your baser urges and maybe your judgment isn't all it should be, or maybe you're just experiencing some self-loathing, and you call someone you met on Craigslist and arrange a rendezvous, things can get pretty hairy, and that's not even a metaphor. When humans are at their sexual worst, all bets are off. And we've all known someone (if we didn't do it ourselves) who went home with just a beast of a human, some kind of sexual C.H.U.D., some boner Kryptonite that has no business, no right even, slouching its unclothed and lubricated frame toward anyone we care about. But we can't control our friends, and if you did it yourself, you know what state of mind you were in. There's no way out of it.

"Hey, ladies, they call me Keith. Keith Cunnilingus!"

In college I had a very good friend who had a habit of manwhoring around and was known to never turn down an offer for any kind of sexual debauchery. He willingly engaged in coitus with the sorts of people who had earned nicknames like "Bushpig" or "Ceiling Bear." Incidentally, that refers to what we imagined you'd think you were looking at if you were a little person looking up her skirt -- a bear clinging to the ceiling. That sounds horrible, I know, and it makes us sound like awful people, but it's worth noting that she was an awful person who once got in a fight with a girl who had cerebral palsy. We came up with the mean-spirited nickname only after we found out she had a toilet for a soul. And then after that my friend boned her. He was a bad man. On the inside, I mean.

When you wake up the next day after engaging in terrible sexinations, you generally feel like you've betrayed yourself and your ancestors and committed some crime against nature on par with humping a mule or a reality TV star. You'll make a promise to never degrade yourself like this again, to never lower yourself to the level of hump puppet for some kind of nicotine-stained gutter slug, because all of those after school specials assured you that you were a good person who deserves good things. But the next time your goodies start a-twitching and there's no one around, you'll probably go right back to slumming for anything willing to put its face near your crotch that doesn't have any obvious sores and seems to not be a hobo or something that lives under bridges and tests travelers with riddles.

I always secretly hoped that women made the same terrible sexual choices that men do, but the number of times I have slept with super hot models indicates that it's probably not on par with what men do at all. Despite that, if anyone ever wants to have some self-destructive, unwholesome sexings, please let me know. I'm happy to be one of your regrets.

1 Drinking

Drinking is where the paradigm of bad decisions comes from. If it wasn't for alcohol, we'd probably be living in a peaceful society full of flying Jetsons cars and benevolent robots right now and every single one of us would have a jet pack and a machine that makes whatever food we desire, and we'd all smell really good all the time.

Swearing off drinking is so commonplace that it's a cliche, but that doesn't change the fact that, assuming you're the type who's ever engaged in a late night of binge partying, you've done it yourself, and probably more than once. Everyone with a functioning liver enjoys a night of partying up until the exact moment when the alcohol in your blood turns against you and flows, en masse, toward a free orifice, carrying with it whatever other fluids and semi-solids are inside of you. After you forcefully purge your system of Kahlua and 7-Eleven taquitos, you'll sit against the wall while the room spins and trails of drool make their way from your mouth to your chest and swear to all the things you can recall at the moment that you hold dear that you'll never, ever do this again.

Naturally this means that, once you've sobered up and someone else invites you to a party, you'll take less time than it takes for a mouse to fart to weigh the pros and cons and decide that this time will be different because you won't drink nearly so much and you'll be right as rain as long as you remember to have a glass of water and a Tylenol after you pull back on a gallon of Thunderbird mixed with Kool-Aid. Then by midnight you're crying in the arms of a person you don't know about how you write comedy articles to mask your desperate loneliness and how you're not even sure your penis works anymore, it's been so long since anyone cared about you.

"I think I slept with Adam Tod Brown last night! Good God!"

To this day, I have deep regrets of an event I only remember in hazy, vague terms of shame and degradation. I was at a woman's apartment, and she decided to put on a porno. Have you ever been at a woman's house and she turned on a porno? Like of her own volition, no prompting or even perverse suggestion on your part? And, idiot that I am, I thought, "OK, let's just sit here and watch porno." And we fucking did! I literally sat there next to her and watched porno like an idiot, like it's actually interesting or fun to watch for its artistic merits. And then she suggested we make it into a drinking game. A shot of tequila every time ... I forget. I remember that I did a lot of shots, and she made me do two shots for every one of hers, and could this not have been a more obvious ploy? A blind guy on morphine could have seen where this was going. Not me. I drank and I drank and then it hit me. I was completely shitfaced, porn was on the TV, a hot girl was next to me, and I made a break for the bathroom.

I painted the inside of her toilet bowl like a power sprayer on a mission. It throttled from my insides like a whale breaching, desperate for air. I puked and puked, an assault of tequila and lime and salt, and then I tumbled to the ground at the base of the toilet and lay there. When I woke up, it was just after 6 a.m., and she was kicking me out because she had to go to work. It was the smoothest damn moment of my life, passed out next to her toilet, my mouth tasting of bile and stupidity.

That happened years ago, and to date I have never debauched that woman, never even had the opportunity again. Because of booze. Because of stupid alcohol. But I drank again. Many times. Even though I said I never would.