Is your life boring and uneventful? Are you sludging through your day with nothing to keep you on your toes? If so, I have the key to adding excitement and uncertainty to your life:
Selassie’s Revenge!
Like you, I used to have a boring life. A three-mile jog was just thirty minutes and eight seconds of exercise. A date was simply getting to know someone for two hours in a pub. A lesson was a ninety minute snoozefest, marked only by occasional attained language.
But that all changed after coming back from Ethiopia with a persistent stomach bug. Selassie’s Revenge is like other popular intestinal-based Revenges, such as Montezuma’s and Pharoah’s, and encompasses all the fun of shitting out your soul while praying to a God you no longer believe in to mercifully take your life. Now my days are dotted with occasional bouts of excitement and horror.
Selassie has turbocharge those boring activities. A three-mile run is a panicked, gut-clenching twenty-six minute sprint, filled with desperation-induced hallucinogenic visions and epithets that would make my grandmother disown me. A date with a woman is like a gameshow of embarrassing questions, such as: Why are you sweating so much? Really, you’re going to the bathroom again? Who is this Selassie you loathe so much? And more!
A lesson taught while suffering through a disturbingly timely bout of Selassie’s Revenge gives your students all the fun of watching you dance, turn white, and grip onto things in order to hold on to your bowels (and self-respect) as though it was a lifebuoy in the mid-Atlantic. And when students chat with you after class, they get to hear you mutter apocalyptic terms brewed of insanity and systemic shock.
Everybody wins.
And don’t let people tell you that Selassie’s Revenge is a simple bacterium that attacks your intestine. Because anyone who has suffered through it knows it has a brain. That’s right. A brain. In addition, Selassie is sadistic. He knows when I am going jogging. He seems to really know when I have double-knotted my jogging shorts. He knows the second I have left my building and seems to hang around in the hidden corridors of my large intestine just waiting for my lesson to start so that it can give me ninety minutes of pure excitement.
Still, while I am suffering through a bout of Selassie, I reminisce about Mother Ethiopia and her toilets. A duel with Selassie in Ethiopia was enhanced by squatting over a hole in a metal shed next to a water bucket and surrounded by excrement and curious wildlife. So now I am thankful to be in an actual bathroom. I can truly say that a bathroom, a toilet seat, toilet paper, and the relative absence of animals and other people’s poop really puts Selassie in perspective.
It’s the little things.
Take my advice, folks. Spice up your boring and uneventful life with uncertain bowels and an occasional battle against your own intestines. You can thank me later.
