It was just another uneventful weeknight -- if you could call any night uneventful in the presence of my then-roommate Steve. I had stopped questioning his motives for doing anything; I'd come to the conclusion that he was totally nuts. So it was no surprise then when, coming from the bathroom, I heard, "Dude... I'm going to freeze a turd."

A huge grin came across my face. It was disturbing, yet brilliant. Why had I never thought of that? I immediately jumped up to aid him in this endeavor.

He ran and got a Ziploc bag. I didn't really have the stomach to dig around in his freshly deposited load, and I certainly wasn't going to hold the bag, so I fashioned a turd-spear out of a clothes hanger. After a few tries to impale his logs, he managed to gut one through and drop it in the bag. At this point we had digressed to a grade-school maturity level, and were giggling deviously. He placed the bag in the freezer. That was that.

Cut to the next night. I had been having a toothache all week, but on this night it decided to really flare up. It was so bad that I lay on my bed just flopping around and moaning. The Anbesol was just not working at all. Realizing that I was in complete agony, Steve ran over to the neighbor's house, asking if they had anything that might help me out; he returned with the neighbor and what the neighbor described as an excellent herbal remedy.

Great, I said. Whatever. Just give it to me.

I've never come across the stuff since then, but it was like an extremely hot ginseng oil. EXTREMELY hot! I put a few drops on my finger, shoved my finger into my mouth, and swabbed the affected area a few times. It burned. A few more times. It burned more, but seemed to quell the throbbing toothache. But after repeating this procedure much more than I should have, my whole face was on fire. Tears were streaming out of my eyes and snot was flowing from my nose. I couldn't see a thing.

Now in extreme pain from the lingering toothache and the hot ginseng oil from hell, it was decided that I needed some ice to put on my cheek. The neighbor, knowing nothing about our antics the night before, ran to the freezer and grabbed the first frozen thing he saw. Of course, as bachelors, we had almost nothing in the freezer, not even ice cubes. But I didn't think about that -- he ran back and slapped something cold in my hand and I held to it my cheek, relishing the coldness of it. Suddenly Steve falls on the floor, laughing so hard he's crying. It still doesn't hit me. Then, in a moment of clarity, I realize that I'm holding a bag of frozen shit to my face. "What the hell, argggg!"

The neighbor, at this point, was totally perplexed -- he thought he had handed me a frozen steak. I flung the frozen bag o' poo across the room, not knowing whether to scream or laugh, and immediately thrust my head under the shower faucet.

I got stuck with the nickname "Shitbag" for about a month after that.

-- Jason