Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 1/14/22

Urine Trouble Edition

The Administrator regrets to inform you he will be out of the office on an extended sojourn through the Southern Oklahoma Forbidden Zone on secret bunker business, followed by a long-range extraction to rescue the Director of Bunker Operations from the Central Texas Wasteland.

In other words: Co-Habitation is imminent.

It’s official: we are adorable.

Expect a number of protocol changes in the coming weeks, followed by a completely rewritten Standard Operating Procedure Manual (S.O.P.) for D.B.L. (daily bunker life). These S.O.P. adjustments will be sweeping and comprehensive, and while some may be slight (such as the optimal temperature of the bunker at all times), others may take some re-training to implement (such as the correct way to fold a shirt).

There will also be an extensive purge of surplus and unnecessary supplies, sundries, and general clutter that has become an overlooked and somewhat accepted part of bunker life in general. All told, it will be several months before things return to baseline operating standards, but everyone here in administration is confident that these changes are for the better and will make everyone happier as well as improving their overall quality of life.

The Gamma Chamber, 2.0

My recording booth/broadcasting pod set-up continues apace, hampered only by the number of hours in any given day and an uncommon urge to not rush thing, lest they can’t be undone later. Once completed, there will be podcastery, as well as the occasional untethered video upload. Also, audio narration, as I have been approached to do some book-on-tape kinds of things. This will ensure a more professional end product, requiring far less manipulation to sound good.

In Other News...

For those of you who read the saga of my tumescent scrotum with a mixture of horror, fascination, and glee, you’re in luck! You’re in for a treat! You’re in big trouble, now! We’re going to talk all about my first visit to the urologist. However, I know some of you out there are only here for the dog pictures, so I wrote this paragraph as one big ol’ massive content warning. If you don’t want to read about my F.T.S. (formerly tumescent scrotum), or see the word “urine” typed far too many times in a row, or any other thing involving the male anatomy, please skip down to the A/V report from the Division of Media Review and be thankful that there are no pictures for what is about to follow.

Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Stay Close (Netflix)

Harlan Coben has moved into what appears to be a permanent residency on Netflix. They have a deal with Coben to produce 14 movies based on his novels. There are currently six mini-series or movie-ettes or whatever that bear his name—none of which, I want to point out, feature his hilarious, sarcastic, wise-cracking and fast-talking sports agent, Myron Bolitar, which begs the question: who keeps greenlighting serious and somber Coben books and ignoring the Bolitar books?

Stay Close is the latest serious and somber Coben project to drop, and it caught my eye because of Cush Jumbo, formerly of CBS’s The Good Fight, getting to act once again in her native British accent. But hidden in the cast is Eddie Izzard (remember him?) doing a good turn as a washed-up lawyer. If you are getting the idea it’s a British production, you’d be right, and all of you anglophiles will undoubtedly enjoy it for the BBC 4 vibe it gives off.

On the eve of getting married, a mother of three with a cozy suburban life decides to revisit her past haunts one last time, and that sets off a chain of events that criss-cross and threaten to unravel the cozy life she’s built for herself. There’s also a missing person case that starts out small and then gets bigger and bigger as the story unfolds. Are the two related? Will the world-weary cops on the job manage to solve the mystery and manage their own personal problems?

As suspense thrillers go, Stay Close is initially a very pedestrian affair, with a lot of coincidences that just happen to line up and create the series of unfortunate events. There are a few surprising twists and turns, however, especially when Ken and Barbie show up.

Ultimately, the sub-plots and its various characters are all closely tied together—so closely, in fact, that it’s a wonder they haven’t bumped into each other sooner. The murder-y stuff, when it finally shows up, is well-done and managed to keep me guessing until right before the big whodunnit reveal. The original mystery and its twists and turns is what managed to elevate the rest of the subplots, which, I think, teetered on the brink of sinking into Lifetime-TV Special-Emotional Freakouts. Imagine the horror, if you will, of a mother who doesn’t tell her child everything! She keeps secrets about her past from her kids! Oh My God! How will they ever work through it?

Thankfully, there’s enough violence and death to make those thrashings seem about as petty and silly as they really are. Overall, this is decent enough for what it is, with a few surprising and entertaining twists. Stay Close only eight episodes, so you can bail halfway through if it’s not doing anything for you, and not feel guilty. But I think if you can get to the end of episode four, you’ll like where it ends up. Cautiously recommended.

The Dark Side of the 90’s (Vice/Hulu)

A ten-part docu-series (and I cringe at having to type that word) about, well, the 90s, broken up into easily digestible and singular topics, like Beanie Babies (I’m not kidding), Reality TV, Grunge Music, the birth of the Internet, Baywatch, the arrival of Fox as a television station (it’s not what you think), and the death of River Phoenix.

Each episode gathers together a few scholars and luminaries and even a couple of eye witnesses to discuss the importance of each topic. Archival footage (shitty quarter-inch tape) is liberally spliced in, alongside stills, and the voice-over is all done by Mark McGrath (yeah, from Sugar Ray). The art department did the best job of all, with the distressed fonts, torn-edge borders, and the weird and discordant color overlays. The series looked authentically 90s.

I am confident in my 90’s trivia skills, having lived through it all, but there was stuff in every episode that I didn’t know/was shocked to learn. And some of the stuff they covered, or rather, the way they got into the topic, was refreshing. For instance, when discussing 90s music, the word “grunge” comes up and then bam! We’re talking only about Nirvana. For the grunge episode, they started with SubPop. Little stuff like that kept me tuning in. They made smart choices for who to talk to.

That being said, this series comes off like a more salacious version of the CNN “Decade” series, only, they’re not wrong, really. It’s almost as if Vice wanted to obliquely say, “You know how messed up everything is right now? Well, it all started in the 90’s, and we didn’t do anything about it then, soooo...” But heavy-handed storytelling is not something one usually associates with Vice, so clearly, I’m just projecting my own tumultuous 20’s onto the broad shoulders of pop culture. Yeah. I don’t think they are wrong, mind you, but after ten hours of being clubbed over the head by it, I was ready for something, anything else. Maybe you shouldn’t binge this series, but I would definitely recommend it.

Peacemaker (HBO Max)

One of the least-interesting super heroes from the Charlton line of Silver Age super heroes is finally getting his due (not that anyone ever asked for him to actually GET his due). If you thought John Cena stole every scene he was in during last summer’s surprise sleeper Suicide Squad, well, guess what? The team that brought you that is back, and we are the better for it.

Troma alumni James Gunn is the brainchild behind Peacemaker, which picks up right after the Suicide Squad movie ends. From here we follow Christopher Smith, aka Peacemaker, as he is shanghaied by a new team of covert operative to do more covert operative stuff, keeping him in check with the explosive device put into his skull by Amanda Waller.

This is a funhouse mirror of the comic book character, but honestly, it’s not much of one. A guy who wants peace so bad he’s willing to kill for it is an insane idea, and that absurdity is the lens through which the whole series is produced. Along for the ride is The Vigilante, another “guns for peace” kind of guy, one of the many characters DC created to try and compete with the Punisher, to no avail. And we also get another long-slighted minor Charlton super hero from the same batch of second-stringers that gave us Peacemaker (I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t seen the trailer yet).

It may seem harsh to call these characters second stringers, but they were. I love Steve Ditko, completely and unapologetically, but even he couldn’t make Blue Beetle and the Question stick around (though they did for longer than most). These characters’ greatest claim to fame is being the literal inspiration for Moore’s Watchmen. The Comedian, by the way, was based on Peacemaker.

So, now that you have some context, this series is as violent and as transgressive as Gunn’s Suicide Squad; irreverent, slapstick, and darkly humorous. It’s tonally similar to The Boys, if that helps you out. I suspect you’ll know where you stand on this after the first three episodes. Me? I am all in. It’s a twisted show that makes me laugh. There’s a joke in the second episode that nearly wiped me out. I wonder if it was an ad lib. If it is, they aren’t paying John Cena enough.

In Other News...(Continued)

Now that all of the tourists and amateurs have left, let’s talk about my penis.

I have previously shared the saga of my tumescent scrotum on my other blog, which many of you took great delight in. If we’re being honest, I found a measure of relief in writing about it. I mean, one of those links above has the phrase “Hindenbergian Tallywhacker” in it. Come on! You’re not ever going see that phrase on McSweeny’s website, I’ll tell you what. But I never went into real detail about my day-to-day operations. Needless to say, you get one last chance to back out before I start talking about downstairs plumbing stuff.

Okay.

Here we go.

Some Backstory About my Penis

One of the side-effects of my morbid obesity was that my penis was overtaken by my pannus. That’s the apron of fat that has covered my torso and waist. Specifically, the fat apron has grown around the penis, creating an effect not unlike that of a snapping turtle disappearing into its shell.

This makes urination something of a chore. I can’t stand up to pee—I haven’t been able to do that in years. Instead, I have to sit down on the toilet and use the front of the seat to hold back my pannus back long enough for the, ah, sword to clear its sheath, and then we can commence with the chipping of the porcelain.

This has been a real drag, for years. At one point, I was too heavy to do even that—the turtle would not be coaxed out—and I’d have to stand, straddling the toilet, my hips rotated out, ass back, so I could pee out of the opening, straight down into the toilet. If I sat down to do that, the urine would shoot out through the gap between the seat and the toilet bowl and go everywhere.

I’ve had to clean my own urine off of so many bathroom floors, I feel like Courtney Love.

This is a problem that has gotten better in the past year. It’s not gone yet, but it’s much easier to, ah, pull the car out of the garage, and do my business. The reason is simple: far less pannus to block the penis.

These bladder infections have been a real test for me. I’m already self-conscious about everything south of the equator as it is, but now, with these recurring infections, I keep having to provide a urine sample. They want me to pee in a cup. Were I able to stand, this would be a no-brainer. But I can’t do that; I have to sit down, and unfortunately, there isn’t a good way to sit down, hold a cup under my junk, and fill it up.

Let’s look at this from a tactical distance. My penis has to clear the chamber in order to fire accurately. Otherwise, it’s like putting your thumb over the end of the garden hose. That means, I’m leaning forward slightly on the edge of the toilet seat, and that lever action is what keeps my participle dangling. The most direct access point, the space between my legs, is blocked off by the pannus. That damn pannus.

I do also have two free hands, and while the configuration isn’t optimal, I can, and have, held the open container under my carcass, and more or less collected enough urine to fill a cup. It’s messy, really uncomfortable, and embarrassing, but I can do it. Or so I thought.

After my last infection, they made me take some CT scans, looking for, I don’t know what, exactly. That was before the holidays. This Monday, they sat me down and told me the results. “We found several cysts,” she said.

“Cysts?” I repeated. In my head, though, I was now playing out the scene in The Cannonball Run where Jack Elam as Doctor Van Helsing tells two cops why the ambulance is driving so fast through New Jersey.

On my kidneys, it turns out. One of them? Hemorrhagic. That’s medical-talk for “it’s got blood in it.” This is now elevated, and I was sent to a specialist. A urologist, to be exact.

My Inaugural Outing to the Urologist

I didn’t know what to expect, but I was told that they would make me pee in a cup. This was not misleading. They ask for urine at the urologist the same way the nurse takes blood pressure at the doctor’s office. Everyone gives them urine. It’s what they do.

Nevertheless, I was somewhat taken aback by the lady bringing me into the inner sanctum and handing me the cup, with zero fanfare, and gesturing toward the bathroom door. No dinner, no drinks. Just drop some liquid gold and move along. Fine, whatever.

I did my usual contortions, hampered somewhat by the urgency with which I needed to go, and the performance anxiety of being in a new place, with new doctors, and not knowing anything that was going on. In short, snappy the turtle wasn’t interested in checking out the world outside of his shell.

Unable to leverage my penis with my pannus, I attempted a last measure, which was to grab my formerly-tumescent scrotum and pull it back, which gives Mjolnir room to swing free, unencumbered by Thor’s giant goats.

This almost worked. I got things mostly out. Mostly. But now I’d been dicking around for several minutes and I really needed to go. So I positioned the sample cup, entirely by feel, and tentatively let fly.

There is no sensation quite so disturbing as peeing on yourself. I’ve never been stung by a jellyfish, but even if my foot was swelling up to the size of a tetherball, I’d be standing there, urine running down my leg, screaming in pain, thinking, “Well, this feels weird.”

I missed the cup. Completely. With warm urine trickling on my hand, I valiantly moved the sample cup and tried again. I heard it hit the plastic this time, but as it turns out, that was a glancing blow off of the side, and it sent urine spraying across my wrist.

I peed on the seat. I peed into the gap between the seat and the rim, causing urine to run down onto the floor, where my pants promptly soaked it up. I peed everywhere but in the cup. When I was through, I hauled up the soaked plastic cup and looked; there were about four drops inside, and I guarantee those were drippings from my balls. There’s no way I put four drops into the cup. I know this because I could see the urine everywhere else in the room. If I’d had a black light turned on, it would have blinded me.

I had to take off my pants and run them in water under the sink, and then blot them dry with handfuls of paper towels. The cup containing four drops of urine sat on the back of the toilet seat the whole time, taunting me. I used an entire roll of toilet paper cleaning the bathroom up. I mean, I was in there twenty minutes.

And no one came to check on me.

By the time I made a reappearance, walking bow-legged because my pants were still damp with...let’s go with water...the nurse took the cup from me and pointed at the exam table. “I need you to lie down on the table,” she said, all business.

“No,” I told her. I didn’t know what was coming next, but I was sure it was going to suck.

“I’m just going to check your bladder to see if there’s any urine in it.”

“Fat chance,” I said. I started to tell her about what had happened, but thought better of it.

“It’s an ultrasound,” she explained. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“Okay,” I said, and begrudgingly laid down. She put the jelly on the thingie and snapped a couple of pics. “Looks good,” she said. “I’ll just go check this sample and then the doctor will be right in to see you.”

“Sample,” she said. Four drops. I wanted to say, “If you need any more of my urine, there’s probably still some on the ceiling.” Something told me this was not a joke-y kind of doctor’s office.

When the urologist showed up, he didn’t offer to shake hands. Wise move. We had a long discussion, wherein he asked me a barrage of questions and kept thinking out loud when he got the answers. “Okay, it could be blah-de-blah,” he’d say. “We’ll need to go in with a telescope through your penis and look at your bladder to confirm.”

Um, no. I explained that I was going to have a panniculectomy in a few months, and I wanted to keep the invasive procedures to a minimum if possible.

“Well, those symptoms, it COULD be Prostatitis,” he said. “We can treat that with antibiotics.”

“What about those cysts?” I asked.

He made a face. “They’re less than a centimeter. There’s nothing I can do with them. You’re not even...” he searched for words. I gave him one.

“What about the hemorrhagic one?”

“It could be hemorrhagic; I can’t tell. It’s so small. I mean, I can’t even...”

“So I don’t need to worry about the cysts?”

“No, don’t worry about them,” he said. “There’s physiologically nothing wrong with you.”

Tell that to my turtling penis.