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<\/a>From BIUL #5.<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n
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I barfed a\u00a0lot<\/em> as a kid. I wasn’t the only one, either; I always had company in the grade school nurse’s office. I don’t think we as a people had totally figured out what to feed our children in the 1970s; parents were relatively cavalier, and supplied their offspring with whatever was handy between job shifts. Once, at a sleepover party, I toasted a marshmallow for a S’More over a Tiki Torch. I spent the entire night painting the toilet with puke.<\/p>\n Vomit was so ubiquitous when I was in school, the janitor kept special pink dust in his closet that reeked like wintergreen urinal cakes, and made barf easier to clean up once tossed upon it. When I sang in church choir, a girl in the row in front of me barfed on the back of a girl’s head in front of\u00a0her<\/em>, and even though the girl who barfed was escorted to the bathroom, the girl barfed upon<\/em> finished the hymn, with a big pile of barf on her hair. This is like 35 years ago, and I\u00a0still\u00a0<\/em>think that’s the most hardcore thing I’ve ever seen.<\/p>\n On any school field trip to New York City, you would see barf. Not on our bus, mind you; on the filthy, gum-speckled sidewalks of the Big Apple. Commuters and New Yawkers would breakfast at some rat-infested pretzel or wiener kiosk, walk a few blocks breathing a bouquet of bus exhaust and piss mist, and before you know it\u00a0BLEFFFFF<\/em> all over the pavement. Drivers would kick open their car door and do a Jackson Pollock on the hot asphalt. I’m not exaggerating, folks. It was a long time before NYC did anything about the endless piles of dog shit, too, and catching a whiff could easily buy you a ride on the porcelain bus.<\/p>\n Despite the preponderance of Old Salts on my dad’s side of the family, I do not possess “sea legs”. I am a landlubber. I live in a land-locked region, by choice. The oceans of this planet are organisms beyond our true understanding. Plus, we have poisoned the living shit out of them in the past quarter-century, and they hate us. We can’t breathe in them, they taste horrendous, and they’re all crammed with terrible monsters. I admire my relations’ ease of dealing with the seas, but I myself am a complete milquetoast when it comes to boats, sailing, or fishing. Ten minutes on the ocean in a boat smaller than a cruise ship, and I am hurling and staggering about like a half-dead foal.<\/p>\n A high school chum of mine once went whale-watching, with his family. He told me that when they returned to their chairs on the boat deck, after observing whales at the railing, someone had left a perfect pile of barf on one of the seats. You could buy rubber vomit for pranks back in the ’80s, and if it didn’t curl up at the edges (thus proving its falseness), no one would go near it. There were “barf scenes” in mainstream movies like\u00a0Stand By Me<\/em> and\u00a0The Witches of Eastwick.\u00a0<\/em>I sincerely believe that we used to think puke was so funny because we had to deal with it so regularly.<\/p>\n A huge percentage of early\u00a0Garbage Pail Kids\u00a0<\/em>cards depicted vomit. It became a series trademark. It even made it into the god-awful, unwatchable Garbage Pail Kids Movie,\u00a0<\/em>in 1987, with (who else?) “Valerie Vomit”.<\/p>\n