Nike: “Hey Dion, wear this jersey, skate around, and say these lines. We’ll pay you this amount of money [holds up a full sack tied with a rope, with a large dollar sign on it] ”

Dion: ” k. “

It was a “day” surgery so they were booting me out before noon the next day. Slightly before the boot was applied I figured it was time to man up and try to swallow some of those pain meds because I didn’t think they were going to let me take the IV morphine home. That was easy enough to arrange. I was brought a bottle of red liquid and a medicine cup.

Read (time consuming considering the morphine), pour, and then build up the guts to try to use my throat to swallow. I felt like a bad pilot. I kept aborting and coming around for another approach. When I finally did attempt the swallow everything went wrong. There was alcohol in the liquid they gave me. That hurt more than a little on the back of my healing throat. That alone wouldn’t have been story worthy but only about a third of it got down the throat. My sinuses felt like they caught on fire and the rest of the medicine came out my nose. It became immediately apparent that I needed to relearn to swallow.

The next week I got my wisdom teeth pulled.

Five weeks on liquid food. I could have cheated but I was good. I wouldn’t have been for much longer though.

Wow, who would’ve thought? Another UND alum (myself) was going to with too much booze/sex angle. Although mine had a much more positive ending that didn’t involve my Similac leaving my body. There are just so many oddly horrible stories I’ve compiled in my 26 years… well mostly in the past 7-9, to be honest.

-We could go with scary bad, like the time I agreed to go to the major-league ghetto in Dallas at 1AM with a hot UT co-ed so she could score some nose candy. Of course, I did not partake, but for some reason the logic existed in my mind that if I went with her I’d have a shot.

-Funny bad, like how my lesbian friend kissed me to settle a bet with her girlfriend, and I got slapped when I tried to go in for some tongue action.

-Classy fail, like not being able to afford drinks at a fraternity brother’s wedding (keep in mind we were still in college). So my friends and I set up shop outside the church’s rectory parking lot with a trunk filled with our own beer and liquor… Drunkeness, embarrassment, and vomiting ensued.

-Just bad, like puking in a dormatory washing machine. Please note: no clothes were inside, I’m a better man than that.

The sad part is that I generally consider myself a classy, good-natured, cautious, and fun individual. It’s just like once a year or so, I throw everything out the window in some very questionable decision-making.

Also Justin, more kitten, please.

-I parked in a spot reserved for USPS employees. So I grumble and try to catch up with my friends. We get to the place, which turns out to just be a small office near the port authority bus terminal (aka, crackhead grand central), where the woman explains his car is now in the Bronx, mine is still being towed, and we both owe them around 300 bucks each. We decide to call it a night and just come back tomorrow for our cars, so we go grab some food and get on the train.

Of course it couldn’t be that easy, because as soon as we got on the subway we are joined by a gigantic, obese homeless guy wearing slippers and horrible bandaged, cracked, bloody feet. He smells like ball-sweat and urine and vomit wrapped up in a bundle of filthy clothes. And of course, he had to be a screamer. We’re sitting there politely trying to ignore him and hold our noses until we can switch seats, and what starts off as a low moan turns into just indiscriminate yelling. He was carrying on an argument with some imaginary person, sometimes just leaving sentences half finished, and looking around the train to see if anyone was paying attention to him. Naturally everyone was staring at their feet.

We switched cars and eventually saw him get into an argument with some other homeless woman, probably his partner in some capacity since many of them work together, running scams or acting crazy to draw sympathy.

This story is trailing off and I ruined it by breaking it in half. I guess there’s no home run ending here. The grand summation is, I thought my friend was an idiot for getting his car towed, and then I did the exact same thing. I became a change-monger for a little while and learned how to manipulate people into giving you money. I got charged a shitload of money and got punished for losing my vehicle by having to listen to some crazy bum yowling in my ear.

A few years ago a friend of mine drives into Manhattan by himself to see a band play. He’s a total idiot. He couldn’t find a place to park, and is too cheap for a garage, so he leaves his car right in front of the main entrance to a ritzy hotel on 8th avenue in the midtown area. Needless to say the car was towed within minutes, and he didn’t even get into the show. So he calls me to come and pick him up.

I live in the Queens/Nassau area so it’s only a short drive. I grab another friend and a few minutes later we’re driving around trying to meet up with him. He really doesn’t know his way around the city so we tell him to meet us near Penn station, and then lead us to the impound yard or whatever.

I drop my buddy off to look for the lost friend, and then drive around the block to kill some time while he looks for him. Then I realize my phone battery is dead, and I have no way of finding them. Ultimate needle in a haystack situation. I can’t double park because the traffic is insane and I can’t get out and look for them because of the sheer number of people milling around. So I quickly grab a parking spot, run down the block to Penn and start looking for payphones. Unfortunately, I left my wallet in the car and have no change.

So with no other choice, I found myself asking passers-by for spare change. The roles were reversed! I was one of those creepy people with a wild story! If you’ve been to new york you’ve probably been approached by a guy who will first apologize for his stuttering problem, and then explain that he is trying to get back to new jersey, he has a dollar fifty and needs a quarter to buy a ticket, or some other long song and dance to get you to give up your change.

I tried this same approach, I would go up to polite looking white people and explain “Hey! I’m not homeless or anything but I’m trying to find my friends and my phone is dead and I don’t have any quarters and..”. I quickly realized that this doesn’t work. The same way I hate when the scammers with fake stutters tell me a wild story, these people just wanted me to shut up and get away from them. I eventually just started showing people my dead phone and straight up asking for a quarter, which people were way more responsive to.

So eventually I get enough change and manage to get my friend on the phone, they gave up on finding me and just started walking in the direction of the impound place. So I leave to get my car, only to find MY car is fucking missing now, because I parked in a spot reserved for US

SDC: My question is, who had the audacity to ask him to wear the jersey? I don’t know one person who had him on their short list of Canadian D-men.