Your Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad ...

Hello, welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool, in which we solicit your anecdotes for discussion next week, in return for our entertaining you. The entertainment begins with the illustration above, one of the finest characterizations by one of the most talented cartoonists who ever lived. It is Joe Btfsplk, drawn by the great Al Capp. Joe was a morose character who walked around the world having the worst day of his life, every day, while jinxing everyone around him. He even traveled with his own rain cloud.

That’s your challenge today. Tell us about your worst day (or week, or month). The trick is to make it funny. If you cannot do that last thing, you are authorized to find your second worst day or week or month.

Here’s mine. There was one specific day, but it requires some backstory.

One day, at work in 1992, wearing my best tan pants, I began to leak liquid out of my tuchus. I will not get too detailed, but it was something very oily. I felt fine, but the evidence was not ignorable. (This was not the worst day.).

So I put on a below-butt coat, went to a store, bought a new pair of BLACK pants and sturdy undies, which I generously padded with tissues, and waddled to my doctor. After questioning me intensely, doc diagnosed the somewhat humiliating but banal problem: I had unwisely eaten a crapload of peanut butter right from the jar. Bad idea. But just to be sure, and because it had been a long time since my last one, he did a comprehensive blood test.

Two days later he called me with the test results, which showed I had a serious illness. My liver enzymes had gone through the roof. (This was still not the worst day.) A couple of days later, further testing would show my disease was likely fatal. (This was still not the worst day.) I had fairly advanced hepatitis C, for which there was no cure at the time and whose final stages were particularly bad, involving a body process doctors called “feminization.” (Still not the worst day.)

Some time shortly afterwards, an interesting situation arose at work. I called a freelance writer I knew quite well, and whose work I respected, to discuss when she could come in so we would edit together a story I had assigned her. She seemed oddly hesitant, and it occurred to me why. News of my illness had spread through the writer world, and I sensed she was worried about being in a closed room with me. I laughed, and told her there was no need to worry; the only way she could contract this potentially fatal disease is if she had sex with me. She seemed reassured, and we set a date to meet and edit.

When the day arrived, she arrived, just as I was facing a deadline crisis. I apologized and told her she’d have to wait a bit. She did not like this, evidently. About a half hour later, when I was done with the crisis, she was no longer waiting. Instead I got a visit from a high ranking editor who reported that the writer had accused me of propositioning her, and we put the story on hold until the accusation had been Properly Investigated.

She was talking about that thing I had said over the phone.

I had never before, and would never again, be accused of harassment. Plus, I think you can see the inherent illogic of interpreting what I said as a proposition. If there were such a thing, it was an anti-proposition. But still, I had said something, a person complained, and The Post did the right thing. You investigate. For a while, the investigatee is under suspicion.

(This was still not the worst day.)

It would become the worst day in a few hours, when I left work, beset by problems, one of which could conceivably get me fired, and the other of which could conceivably get me dead. I was stewing in my own misery.

I was headed home, driving a car I had very recently purchased from a coworker, a very old Volkswagen bug. It was in terrible cosmetic shape, but ran fine. On route, I got stopped by a cop for some old-car violation. (I think it was a broken taillight, though I might be misremembering.) The officer shined her flashlight into my car and saw something Bad. No, it was not an open bottle of liquor. It was not a firearm. It was a hole in the floorboard on the passenger side, big enough to pass a football through.

I didn’t mind it. It was sort of cool seeing the road whiz by under you as you drove. The cop was not as delighted with it as I was. She checked my windshield, saw no inspection sticker, inquired why. I told her the truth: I was holding off until I got the floor fixed, because otherwise, it would never pass. I would pay a ticket promptly, I assured her, for my lateness.

Cop: “I’m sorry, sir, but I cannot let you drive it.”

Me: “What?”

Cop: “You’ll have to leave the car here. Do you have anyone who can drive you home? I’ll wait with you.”

Me:

Me:

Me:

“My wife, I guess.”

I would hereby propose a law that no person should ever have to call his or her spouse and say something like, “Honey, can you come and pick me up? This police officer insists. I’ll explain later. I’m in Rock Creek Park.”

So as I waited for my wife to arrive, I found myself contemplating my life circumstances, for the first time all together. Maybe spiraling into a horrendous death, maybe facing workplace discipline, all the while sitting alone in my filthy, pathetic $150 hooptie with a broken taillight and a toilet-bowl hole in the floor, all the while under the pitying gaze of a police officer who couldn’t help but notice that the guy sitting forlornly in the car was crying a little.

Definitely, my worst day.

(My problems eventually resolved. Medicine discovered a cure for Hep C. I learned it would cost $2,000 in welding to fix the car, so I sold it to another sap who naively felt he could weld it himself to the satisfaction of the Department of Motor Vehicles. (He couldn’t.) The Post decided I had not harassed; my only official punishment was a letter sent to me suggesting it is unwise and unprofessional to discuss personal sex in the workplace, even as a joke, even under non-harassing circumstances. I humbly agreed.)

So. That is your challenge today. Your worst day/week/month. You can even extend it to a year, if it is really good. Send your stories here:

And finally, today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

The Internet is aswarm with jokes about J.D. Vance’s alleged consensual affair with a sofa. Cruel jokes like this one.

The allegation is patently false. No such thing ever happened. Snopes has debunked it, and it was traced to an Internet troll who clearly made it up. The poll today:

See you on Tuesday.