kind of a drunken superhero

I spent a good part of my early 20s getting hammered at Buzzard Beach, the dive bar that more closely resembles my imagination of a pirate ship than any other place I've been. I was kind of a drunken superhero - I could fall down repeatedly without getting hurt, drink upwards of eight shots without throwing up, and do really dumb shit without going to jail.

Here are some of my favorite shenanigans (the ones that aren't too embarrassing to repeat):

1. I came home hungry from the bar one night, so I cooked a frozen pizza. On my way to the living room, I dropped it face down on the carpeted kitchen floor. Without thinking twice, I grabbed a fork and plopped down next to my snack, scraping the pepperoni and melted cheese right off the carpet and into my mouth.

2. For a year I lived in a house in Westport that my former roommate and I still only call the "death house." While my previous apartment had a particularly nasty carpeted kitchen (see shenanigan number one), this house had a particularly nasty carpeted bathroom. Because it was already so nasty I decided to revel in it, and I would often invite my friends to come hang out in the bathtub to drink and smoke* with me. I passed out there on more than one occasion, oftentimes still clutching a half-empty can of PBR.

3. I used to steal from Quik Trip all the time: hot dogs, Slim Jims, Doritos, those processed beef and cheese combo packs that don't contain any actual beef or cheese. Hot dog thievery was almost too easy: you just put two (or even three) in the same container. The cashiers never question it, and five minutes later you're scarfing a free hot dog on the porch and chasing it with Crown Royal. Brilliant.

4. It was Halloween in the death house, and my friend K. showed up after hours with fake blood all over her face and chest. Deciding I wanted to look dead too, I dumped it all over my head. Then, deciding I wanted the whole "vampire" effect, I dumped at least a half ounce of the stuff in my mouth and accidentally swallowed. I immediately vomited on the kitchen floor. The next morning when my roommate got home from work, she came into my room and said, "Someone bled everywhere last night." There wasn't a hint of surprise in her voice.

5. In a nearly superhuman feat of drunken athleticism, I walked almost ten miles home from a friend's house at 7 a.m. because they were still sleeping and I felt bad waking them after drinking literally all of their beer the night before.

By Halloween of 2008, I had figured out how to apply fake blood correctly.

*I have since quit smoking, and I'm worried I'm becoming one of those awful, self-righteous former smokers, mainly because I just deleted the sentence "smoking is bad, bad, bad, and if you do it, you will die, die, die" and replaced it with this one.