Someone’s Subconscious is so Snot Saturated that it’s Seeping out My Scalp

Thanks to a recent story over at Bee’s Musing’s, I’ve got boogers on my brain. I don’t mean that in a literal sense – although I have had stuffy enough of a head lately that the boogers may have actually escaped the boogery zone, the place where all head phlegm is quarantined, and rubbed themselves up against the gray matter up in there. Regardless of whether my recent bought with the sniffles has made it so little blobs o’ mucus get all touchy feely with my cerebral cortex, there’s no denying that I figuratively have boogers on the brain.

The first booger was a little green nugget that’d lodged itself in my cranium long long ago thanks to my childhood next door neighbor who had the misfortune of having a runny nose for the entire seven years I knew him. Eddie Mayer, known to the other kids in the neighborhood as Booger Ed, is forever burned into my mind as an eight year old misfit with a gelatinous strand of green goo hanging from his nose. Somehow that kid was able to dangle his snot drop just millimeters from his lip, without it ever breaking, dripping, or actually entering his mouth – all seemingly while he was painfully unaware of its existence. Seriously, you should have seen this kid, he would play baseball, football, soccer, or basketball, and that oopy loogilicious snot would just dangle there, blowing in the breeze like a kite tail when he ran, never breaking, never fully dripping, as if it were an actual extension of his body. I even recall him once emerging from a swimming pool, snot still in tact, and shaking his head like a hair model in a Prell commercial. That snot strand had as much luxurious shine as Marcia Brady’s teen model hair, and as Ed shook his head, that booger moved with a bounce and wave that you’d swear he was using conditioner on it. It fwapped and flapped along with his shaking head, and like some sort of extendo-boog, it grew in length as he shook, but shot right back into it’s dangling above his lip place when he stopped. “Huvvuvvuvvuvvuvvuvv,” was the sound the chill running down my spine made every time that booger waggled itself at me.

Around the same time in my life, I hung out with a kid named Mitchell. Lil Mitch was not your typical eight year old. He marched to the beat of a different drummer, and that drummer didn’t have a drum, instead he had one of them big buckets the street kids like to bang on, and in place of proper drumsticks, this drummer had a potato masher and a dead raccoon’s severed leg, and in lieu of actually beating on the drum/bucket, this drummer whapped said drum/bucket against the side of his head repeatedly, but with a pretty nice rhythm. Mitch had his own ideas about what was cool and what wasn’t, and those ideas rarely correlated with anyone else in the entire universe. When it was time for the neighborhood boys to play baseball, Mitch would build elaborate hamster tube villages in his basement. When it was time to all go to the park, Mitch would decide he’d rather stay inside and learn Japanese. Nevertheless, we liked Mitch, so we’d often go ring his doorbell and see if he wanted to come out and play. On one such occasion, Booger Ed and I were the ringers. We walked up to Mitch’s front stoop, rang the bell, and waited. And waited. Then we waited. Knowing full well that Mitch was in there somewhere, we rang the bell again. Finally, Mitch opened up. I wish he hadn’t. I wish my lifelong mental pictures of Mitch were the pure and innocent ones of him digging a trench around his backyard or deciding that no matter what he was going to catch himself a squirrel, but no, he had to open the door that day, and he had to open the door with an unbelievably large booger resting oh so gently on the underside of his upper lip nestled in a little puddle of saliva. It was impossible not to notice, and even more impossible to ignore. This thing was huge and it was staring at us. It takes a lot to disgust a kid who people call Booger Ed, but even Booger Ed was like, “damn, that’s a big freakin’ booger on you lip, Mitch,” only he didn’t say it out loud, instead we both stared at it like it was speaking to us in some fiendishly hypnotic boogerese language, saying things like, “I’m so big and boogery that I have my own zip code,” and “don’t you wonder how I got here and why I look quite a bit wetter than I have any right to look.” Then, just then, just as Bartholomew W. Booger was about to spill his guts and tell us his life story, Mitch’s tongue shot out like a gnat seeking toad and pulled that booger right into his mouth. “Hrlugghrlrgghhg” was the only thing that could come out of my mouth when Mitch swallowed and asked, “What’s up guys?”

In my high school days, the gold medal winner of nose gold disgust goes to my friend Stan, who had a habit of picking his nose while driving. Now he wasn’t a terribly good driver in the first place, having totaled three different cars by his 19th birthday, but he found that concentrating on the depths of his nostrils made him focus on the road more often. As you can probably guess, there were several reasons I was uneasy about getting in a car with Stan, but on occasion, I found myself there in the passenger seat. Refreshingly, or disturbingly, or both, Stan was very open about his hunt for nasal oysters. He let you know exactly what he was up to, almost like a sportscaster’s play by play of the events: “Stan gets to the second knuckle, sure that a beauty awaits him some where in the left nostril. He’s reaching… reaching… I think he’s got something… No. It has evaded him; he’s pulled the pointer finger out. Is he giving up? No, he's not!!! Oh, look at this ladies and gentlemen; he’s gone to the pinky. Oh my goodness, this man will stop at nothing, a pinky pick. I don’t believe it, a pinky pick. Folks, you are witnessing snotlunking history here.”

While Stan enjoyed the hunt, he did not eat his prize, instead he proudly mounted his catch for all to see – sort of. Any prize Stan was able to pull from his face; he’d wipe underneath the driver’s seat and proudly proclaim, “Add that to my collection of nose goblins. Wish I could see what happens after I sell this car. I bet they get crispy, someone drops a quarter, reaches underneath and gets all scratched up.” “Whhhhhuuuwwwaaattt,” was the noise that erupted from my esophagus. So, take heed if you’re driving an ’86 or ’89 Camero, a ’91 Thunderbird, or a ’96 Saturn, there may be nose goblins under your seat.

The final boogtastic event I feel compelled to disgust you with was just a few short days ago. Allow me to set the stage: My brother-in-law’s basement football sanctuary. Sunday. Four TVs all tuned into gridiron mayhem. All my football loving friends wrapped up in football games they normally wouldn’t have cared one iota about, except… Fantasy football scores scrolling across the lap top computer. Discarded beverage receptacles, hot wing remnants, and that last slice of pizza that no one will take all beginning to stink a bit over in the corner. Three highly energetic toddlers enjoying the action, the camaraderie, and throwing Legos at one another. My team down by a handful of points, driving down the field, ready to score. My nephew, with the head cold of the century, excited to see me excited, wandering over with a disproportionately big smile on his little face. “Touchdown,” I yelled. “Achoo,” the toddling snot machine countered. In case you’re not getting the idea: me + mouth wide open + him + sneeze directly at me = the wettest slimiest most voluminous glob o’ snot you could possibly imagine landing right on my tongue.

There was no noise for that. I couldn’t yell. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t even vomit, although I wish I could have, because the bile would have probably disinfected my mouth. Natural acids are the only thing that could have done the job effectively. I’m not sure all the SOS pad scrubbing fully did the trick.

I told you earlier that I had boogers on the brain. It was a figurative statement, but now that I think about it, maybe my nephew sneezed a bit harder than I’d initially thought and got one or two through my skull and there’s a glob of the green stuff all mixed in with the grey matter – maybe it’s Bartholomew J. Booger’s great-grandsnot that’s up in there. Either way, “Hrlugghrlrgghhg.”

Waggle and fwap your way over to humor-blogs.com to vote for Bartholomew, and be sure to check out my guest post over at A Guy's Guide to Oprah later tonight.