More Story Time

I haven’t been writing much because I’ve been pretty sick. But today it’s story time again…and in honor of the digestive issues going on in this house…
Once upon a time a lovely lady birthed two children with the weakest stomachs and worst gag reflexes you’ve ever met. Yes, my little brother and I. We gag, we throw up, we can’t keep our stomach contents to ourselves. We have this extraordinary sense of smell and we randomly throw up in the oddest places.
When we were kids there was this ice cream parlor our parents used to take us to. We ordered the largest milkshakes allowed and sucked them down like we had been starved for 4 days. We weren’t feeling so hot so we put our heads down on the booth seat and could eyeball each other under the table. We could see we were each getting a green hue about us and without warning we yacked like the pie eating contest scene in Stand By Me. There was a sea of strawberry and chocolate merging and swirling under our table like those meteorological pictures of hurricanes you see on the weather channel. My parents took one look at each other and all I remember is my dad saying “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
As you now know, I grew up on a farm and for some reason we had a grain truck full of rotten grain we had to empty. I imagine the smell of rotten grain must be similar to a decomposing corpse. It's awful. We shoveled one and puked two until it was empty. My little brother must have only owned one pair of boots because he had to wear them to school the next day and they had to open the classroom windows and everyone sat around trying to figure out who stunk the whole day.
People don’t understand why my brother and I can’t eat ham. My parents ordered half a pig once and decided to butcher it on the kitchen table. Being the diabolically weird children we were, we sat under the table while they did it and all I can remember is blood pouring off the table and pooling on the floor. I can’t even look at meat contained in that white paper without getting a little queasy.
My daughter requested I tell about the time my brother was hungover and he came down for breakfast and I asked if he wanted some half-cooked bacon, buttery buttermilk buckwheat pancakes and some slightly undercooked runny eggs and he bolted for the toilet without a word. Good times. Wonder why he moved away? Hmmm…
I could tell you a hundred stories just like these, but my ultimate favorite story is the time I took my brother shopping at the grocery store. We were in the meat department and I saw this cow tongue that was so huge it was sort of folded in half. I picked it up and made it talk to brother like a puppet saying things like “eat me” and “feel my taste buds” and other such nonsense. I’ve never seen anyone run so fast in a supermarket before. He’s too easy.
I called my brother last night and he was at the gym. He tells me he had to switch gyms to one even further from his house because the other one “smelled bad”. I don’t really know that a gym can smell good, but whatever dude.
We’re both blind as bats. Too bad we couldn’t transfer some of our sense of smell over to our visual sense. Actually, my brother probably just threw up reading this. Brother, may I offer you some Jose Cuervo?