Early Monday morning, around 5 am, I woke up unexpectedly. My ear felt murky and heavy and weird. I put a couple of my fingers inside and felt around. It was wet. All around.

I went to the bathroom to check it out. When I turned on the light, I saw blood all over my fingertips. Looking in the mirror, blood was smeared all over the left side of my face. My ear was bleeding profusely. This was clear.

I started dabbing it with toilet paper, hoping that it would sop it up, but it just kept bleeding. So I decided to go back to bed. Who cares if my brain was hemorrhaging, right? After all, I was tired. I had only been asleep for a little over an hour and I had to get up in a couple more. For some reason, it didn't bother me not knowing why I was dying.

Then I realized what it was... a zit in my ear had popped. More so, exploded. My ear was filled to the brim with blood and pus.

Is this gross to you?

The next morning, my mom cleaned out my ear with q-tips and hydrogen peroxide. The cotton on the q-tips were all black and gunky. Yay! Black and gunky!

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In an unrelated note (or a fiercely related note, if you please)... that night, at midnight, my friends DJ and Li'l Steve and I crossed the border and went to Zort's Fireworks in South Sioux City, South Dakota. (In South Dakota, fireworks are completey legal). DJ and Steve bought their fill of fireworks, but I did not. You see, I am not a fireworks man. They scare me. I can't even light a match without crying. In fact, the few times I tried smoking cig-a-rettes, I had to have somebody else light the cigarette for me because I was too scared of fire.

SIDENOTE: One time, in the winter of 1997, I tried smoking a cigarette and it made me throw up Chili. And I hadn't even eaten chili. What?

The best part about Zort's Fireworks was the weird Hong Kong-imported fireworks. They had really horrible/amazing translations - product names like "It's a Party Time," "Baby Boomers," and "The New York Thing." And they'd have really odd pictures on the box to represent the fireworks, too. It was generic photos of people in business suits, sitting in offices - sometimes looking stressed out. Why did the Japanese think this had anything to do with fireworks? They are so dumb.

They did, however, have the foresight to name one of their products after one of America's most-beloved cultural phenomenons. That's right. "Blond Joke." You heard me. One of the fireworks was named "Blond Joke."