Sunday, March 14, 2010

Rat pact?

Nguyễn Trọng Tuyển in Phú Nhuạn district, Saigon
(photo by Sarah Grant)

I'm lucky to know people who travel to Southeast Asia. While I've spent several months in Thailand, my friends and colleagues from graduate school have committed themselves to academic work in the region. This means that I, and you, are privilege to a new kind of gross. I don't know if it's the chokingly hot weather, different health standards, exploding populations, or what, but there is some great gross stuff in that part of the world. Of course there are also areas that are painfully clean, like the Siam Paragon mall in Bangkok, one of the fanciest malls I've ever seen. But what you see above is the carnage of a mass rat death. Who knows if these cunning scavengers unwittingly nibbled on some poisoned pork or if they died at the hands of an angry shopkeeper with frying pan (I can't help but picture a cartoon person running around chasing a smiling cartoon rat). Either way, they have found some peace together, at the foot of this dusty tree. I look forward to more gross stuff coming from Sarah in Vietnam, and from Luke and Kelly (of the condom canal) from Bangkok. Remember: take your camera with you all the time so you don't miss golden opportunities like the one pictured above. And send the pictures to me at grossstuffinla at gmail dot com.

Monday, March 1, 2010

Will somebody bury her already?

21st/Stout/Broadway, Denver

There's something horribly, horribly wrong with this Barbie. Last week she was dirty and naked, sure, but this week her proportions are all wrong. Look at her enormous face. Her eye is bigger than her hand, probably even bigger than her feet that have since been ripped off. Someone stole those shiny red Converse hightops I was so admiring last week. They must've found a shoeless Skipper down the street, clean enough to salvage. The snow has melted on the ground around Barbie, but it still clings to her greasy hair. The sash that was lying near her last week is now loosely wound around her torso. But my god, that eye. It will haunt me.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

The morning after the saddest night on earth

21st/Broadway/Stout, Denver

It's not terribly gross, aside from the gutter grunge covering Barbie's body, naked except for her red Converse hightops. Her feet are coquettishly turned in, like a Catholic school girl. Her wild mop of blond hair cloaks her features, floating around her head in a tangled, filthy mass. The sash from her dress lays next to her, just within reach of her gnawed little fingers. Poor Barbie. Poor, poor Barbie. I like to imagine that she's not dead, just sleeping. Yes, that's it. She's just sleeping.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

Eulogy for a headless dog

I originally posted this about four years ago. Something about the pumpkin reminded me of it, so even though there's no accompanying photo, I thought I'd repost it anyway:

Yesterday morning I awoke to a smell not unlike my dogs' anal glands. I thought to myself, wow, Peaches certainly was munching her ass this morning. Strange that I didn't hear her.

I fed the Peach, leashed her, then took her out front to begin our walk, as I do every morning. I stepped out onto the front porch and noticed that during the night a ripped-up towel and what appeared, from a distance, to be a chunk of carpet, had appeared on the front lawn. Peaches and I decided to inspect the items closer. Yes, that was a towel, covered in dirt and discolored from bleach. But the carpet revealed to have bones sticking out of it. Peaches slowly began to inch her body close to it, as though she was going to roll in it. "No Peaches!" I pulled her back just in time and she begrudgingly sat on the sidewalk while I continued to look at the boned carpet and towel.

It was then that I noticed a hole that had been dug up by some sort of animal during the night. Suddenly it all came together. Several years ago someone must have buried their dead dog under the tree. For whatever reason they decided that burying it one foot beneath the surface of the ground, wrapped in a towel, was hygienic enough. In the heat of Wednesday, however, the stink of the rotting animal, which had up to this point been kept decently preserved under the shade of the tree, began to fill the air, beckoning the nighttime scavengers to unearth the mystery. The scavenger had either chewed off its head and left the rest of its body for me to dispose of, or...

Perhaps the dog never had a head and was buried under the tree to end a curse! Maybe the dog was roaming the neighborhood, chasing kitties and scaring children, and a witch told my neighbor with the American flag that the only way to destroy the dog and its endless wanderings was to bury it under a tree on a hot summer night!

But probably not.

So Peaches and I left the corpse and continued on our walk. When we made the circle back to the house the smell was so overwhelming that I found myself trapped in a convulsion of gags. I could barely make it up the front porch and into the house. However disgusted I was by the odor, I knew something had to be done. Sure, I could leave it for the neighbors, but the smell was increasing and filling up the house.

Breathing through my mouth, I got the rusty shovel out of the side yard and approached the corpse. The dog must have been a terrier of some sort, judging by the size of its body and tail. I assumed that a corpse would be light, considering the creatures that eat its insides and the time it had under the ground to turn into earth. But this thing was so heavy that I wasn't sure if I'd be able to keep the body from falling off the shovel as I carried it around the block to the dumpster.

After several minutes of failed scooping, I managed to get the body mounted on the shovel in such a way that it was balanced, and I covered it with a black trash bag to avoid questions on my way to the dumpster.

Grunting and panting, the shovel extended straight out in front of me, with the tips of the bones sticking out from under the trashbag, I stepped off the sidewalk to let a jogger pass me, wondering what the scene must look like: it's 7:30 in the morning and a woman in Business Casual is carrying corpse on a shovel down the sidewalk.

I turned the corner into the alley and avoided eye contact with a man walking toward me, who glanced and frowned at my bundle on the shovel. Now I had to figure out how to get the lid of the dumpster up, without risking losing the body from the shovel. Delicately I lowered the body and set the shovel on the ground. I got the lid off the dumpster to rest against the wall, then picked up the shovel again. Since I'm pretty short and the dumpster is pretty high, I didn't know if I'd be able to thrust the corpse over the lip. Certainly I did not want to see what the underside of the body looked like.

Slowly I raised the shovel, tilted it, and the body sank into the trash, covered by the black trash bag.

I didn't bother disposing of the tattered towel or filling in the shallow hole with dirt.

I kind of regret getting rid of it before taking time to examine it. If I were braver I would have dissected it or set it aside where I could watch it decompose in peace. Instead, the headless dog will be buried among all of our useless crap. But I don't feel guilty about disrespecting the dead. The dead are beyond that.

Smash + rot + snow =

Logan and Maple, Denver

Winter overtook autumn approximately two months ago, but winter is unable to fully undo everything that autumn creates. One such thing is the pumpkin. No matter how much the squirrels gnaw on the pumpkin (and believe me, they gnaw), no matter how many bored youths smash the pumpkin against the sidewalk, no matter how many drunks leaving the bars at 1:55am swerve to hit the pumpkin, the pumpkin lives on. This pumpkin has certainly survived a dozen or so snowstorms; I just happened to walk by on a day when all was melted. The image probably doesn't make your stomach turn. It doesn't mine. But the pumpkin is displaying some very significant signs of pure rot. Its pale orange guts are oozing out the top, while the sunken skin is bleached white from the sun and snow salt. Parts of it are black from rot, and the rot is spreading. Much like the puke spot on the wall at Vermont and Sunset, I'd like to watch the long life of this pumpkin's death, until it melts fully into the ground or someone scoops up its liquefying corpse and takes it to the dumpster.

Monday, February 15, 2010

H1N1 all up in my face

20th and Emerson, Denver

Ahhh, hospital country. It's like a vacation in the city. In L.A. I lived just blocks away from Kaiser Permanente, Children's Hospital, and Hollywood Presbyterian. This is a major reason I'd see so much Gross in that neighborhood. My neighborhood was haunted by abandoned latex gloves, bloody bandages, and, near Good Samaritan downtown, freaking TEETH. In Denver my normal walks don't take me near any hospitals, though I guess Denver Health isn't too far away. However, the other day I was walking on the other side of town, near Denver's equivalent to my L.A. hospital arcade, when I came across this little reminder of flu season. The last time I got the flu--probably in 2006--I ended up going to the hospital because my fever wouldn't come down below 104 for several days. They made me wear one of these masks while I sat sweating and shivering in the waiting room. I can only imagine the sickly person who tore this mask off while stumbling through the neighborhood in a state of feverish hallucination. Once again, I wish I had a portable lab (and any skills whatsoever as a scientist), and I'd test the crap out of this mask to see what disgusting diseases and viruses it's harboring.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Winter drumstick

17th and Race, Denver

Ah, the ever elusive Winter Drumstick. I might have had something clever to say about it, but now I can't stop thinking about how weird it is that we refer to a chicken's leg as a drumstick. Wikipedia reveals that we use the word drumstick in reference to the wooden things that we use to beat a drum, a type of ice cream cone, the leg of poultry, a chewy candy, a vegetable, and a film from 1955. What do these things possibly have in common that would give them all the same name? I guess it doesn't matter. What does matter, however, is this uneaten piece of fried chicken, caught in the act of sloughing off its formerly crispy breading all over the cold, dirty, slush-covered sidewalk. I almost ran over it, as you can see, but stopped in time to appreciate it. Who knows how long it had been on the sidewalk. In L.A. that thing would be eaten by the wild beasts (dogs, cats, pigeons) in no time, but here in Denver it's relegated to a slow decay, made even slower by the cold weather. If I had the choice, I'd choose to be the ice cream cone.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Better than a snow cone

3rd and 72nd, NYC

Finally, a photo from the East Coast. Once again, Sarah Grant came through and photographed this stunning puddle during a very cold weekend in New York City. Manhattan and the boroughs seem to have much less grass than Los Angeles (aside from Central Park, of course, but dogs aren't allowed on that grass as far as I remember), so there is always a good amount of dog feces on the sidewalks. Dogs will go out of their way to pee on the rare living thing, such as this tree. As you can see, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of dogs peed on this tree over the course of several days. There are so many layers to this frozen block of piss that we could excavate it for archaeological evidence of what people were doing, oh, a week ago. We can see that many people back then rolled up some sort of plant in thin paper and lit it on fire. We can also see that they manufactured small sharp pieces of wood, perhaps for removing food from their teeth. There may also be some chewed on pieces of some sort of rubber-like product, some sort of "gum." I can't tell for sure though; I'd wanna really get in there to find out for sure.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

The pretty lady's landing strip

2nd and Grant, Denver

Ever since I heard a doctor describe g-string underwear as a bacteria superhighway, I've had a new found respect for such undergarments. Not only are women and men who don the thong enduring the feel of a permanent wedgie (I really hate the word wedgie, by the way), they are also putting themselves at risk for a host of bacterial infections. All this sacrifice, for that special bare-butt look. Admirable. This frilly pink g-string, found on a residential street on an average February afternoon, had high hopes. It thought it was destined to live a long life in someone's butt crack. Perhaps she was an attorney, a dental hygienist. Maybe this was her first g-string, and she giggled when she saw it on a clearance rack at K-Mart. The hopeful g-string was put into a basket, covered up with a pack of toilet paper and a dustpan, until she got it home and tried it on. First she tried on just the panties. Then she added a pair of jeans cut low enough in the back to show it off. Dancing in front of the mirror, she sang--but not loudly enough for her roommate to hear--"Let me see that thong! That thong-th-thong-thong-thong!" That thong was happy. That thong thought it had found a warm crevice to spend the rest of its life in. Little did that thong know that it was a novelty, and it would be taken off in a drunken expression of personal freedom.

Friday, February 5, 2010

She's Gross, but not gross

Wikimedia Commons

What kind of city is this? I can walk for twenty minutes in any direction from my house and not see anything gross. I'm trying--honest, I am--to update this blog more regularly, to deliver to you, my readers, repulsive photos narrated with imaginary dialogue between inanimate rotting things and me. However, it's hard to keep it rolling here in Denver. Yes, the hot dog in the puddle was gross, and I saw some green vomit the other day (phone was dead, so no photo available), but for the most part this city is uncomfortably clean. So instead, I present you with a photograph of Terry Gross. You're disappointed in me; I can tell. No, it's cool. But I must keep posting. I'm asking you, who is reading this right now, to stop stepping over that human shit on the sidewalk, quit turning your face from the dirty panties lying despondently on your neighbor's lawn, and start photographing! Send to me at grossstuffinlaATgmailDOTcom. Bitte. Por favor. Si vous plait. I beg of you. I need your gross, and I need it bad.

By the way, while writing this post I remembered that somewhere on my phone is a photo of panties. I'll post more soon.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Getting my "dunk" on the olde fashioned way

17th and Steele, Denver

Hardcore Gross Stuff fans may be disappointed in this find: yes, it's only a half-drunk (half-drank?) 40 oz bottle of Olde English HG 800. At first I didn't see the other zero after the 80, and I thought it was a clever way to refer to the element mercury, which is the 80th element on the periodic table, and has HG as its symbol. But finally a google search yielded the plain truth of this beverage's name. I found this bottle perched happily in this plant in front of a pretty nice looking apartment building across from the park. I'm sure it's just like all other malt beverages. It probably gets you drunk reasonably quickly, and leaves you with a pulsing hangover. I'm curious why the person who set it in the planter decided to leave it half finished. It doesn't really strike me as a sipping beverage. I found some great reviews of this product online, and since the sight of it probably isn't making you ill, I owe you something.

I'd like to thank spigglenut for this poignant review:
"F-YEAH BABY - WE CAN DO THIS. THE 8-BALL DELIVERING WHAT COUNTS - F'IN 7.9% ABV IN THE MIDWEST (BUT JUST 5.9% ON THE EAST SIDE CAUSE THATS WHERE ALL THE LITEWEIGHT WIGGER WANNABEES LIVE). GETTING MY DUNK ON IN STYLE EVERY FREEKING DAY VIA THE 8-0-0 AND IM UNSTOPABLE WHEN ITS TIME TO HIT tHESTREETSS LOOKING FOR tHAT UNDERAGE SNAPPER."

Yogurt says:
"Nasty stuff. I had some about ten years ago and I almost puked after one 22oz bottle."

daddy253 write:
"shit takes care of the hang over."

And finally, Rusty the Pelican's review:
"This shit is bad. Very, very bad. Metallic, astringent, chemical-tasting . . . ugg. I don't even want to call this malt liquor. It's a poor attempt at HG. I probably should have drain-poured it, as I woke up with a mammoth hangover - the kind where I have to squint in order to even drive. Fuck OEHG. 1/10. Paid $2.69 for this dogshit at some Polish liquor store on the far northwest side of Chicago (Miskas?)."

I knew I should've taken the bottle home and finished it off.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Seven Piles of Gold

Near Sunset Junction, Silver Lake/East Hollywood
(photo courtesy of Sarah Grant)

There are a few of us in the world who are very concerned with what's happening at the Offering Circle these days. Since I no longer live on Lexington near Virgil, I send out scouts to spy on the contents of the Circle. Sarah Grant, who often works on all her smarty-pants anthropology of food scholarly stuff at Intelligentsia, is one such ranger. Unfortunately there were no treats in the Circle the last time she went to check, but she did find this beauty: seven shiny piles of shit. There is so much shit in that neighborhood that I rarely photographed it, but I think this strip of shit-covered grass indeed deserves credit. There's so much shit that at the vanishing point of this scene I believe there is one barely visible tiny pile of shit, marking eternity as refuse.

For any Angelenos who want to check on the Offering Circle, please do and email photos to me at grossstuffinla@gmail.com. The Circle is on the north side of Lexington just west of Virgil in East Hollywood.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Pig 'N a Puddle

6th and Grant, Denver

This delicate saucisse was out for a stroll under the winter moonlight, rolling over fresh piles of soft, pristine snow, when it thought it saw from afar a hand to hold (it). As this salchichita approached the buzzing lights of the Blockbuster, it realized what it had seen was only an illusion of hope, of love. Before it could scream, it was grabbed by the glimmering teeth of a Golden Retriever and ripped apart. As it lay dying in an icy patch by the dumpster it thought back on its short but full life, and it regretted only one thing. "I have loved," it thought. "I have laughed. I have gazed upon the lights of a refrigerator, a freezer, and briefly, now, the moon. The only thing I regret is that I never had a chance to feel the cool water of the ocean on my intestine casing. I never learned to swim." Well, little buddy, you're swimming now. You're swimming now.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Poop-a-roni

West Wash Park, Denver


...the San Francisco treat! Except, this pile of gross isn't from San Francisco, it's from my very own kitchen here in Denver, Colorado. What started out as a tasty, if fattening, Japanese Javanese Curry (confused? see the photo below), ended as a pile of one of the grosser things I've left sitting on the table over night. And why are there so many pieces of silverware on the plate? I confound myself, sometimes.

Bangkok Condom Canal


Near Wat Borommaniwat, Bangkok

Here we have another special photo from Southeast Asia, this one from Luke Schmidt, scholar of Thai Buddhist temple murals. Bangkok is a great city. It really is. Some people give it a hard time, calling it the armpit of Thailand, saying you should leave Bangkok as quickly as possible on a north or southbound bus. These are probably the same people who hate L.A. because they've never gotten out of their cars to actually walk around in the perfect weather. They may also be the same people who live in Boulder and hate Denver. Or, they may be people who just hate the Gross. I understand. The Gross can be tiring, I'll admit it. One of the reasons I started this blog is to form a more peaceful relationship with the Gross. I was irritated at how disgusting human beings are, but instead of wallowing in my disgust, I embraced that part of human nature and now I write about it and photograph it. Digression! Sorry. Anyway. Condoms. So if you look closely at this photo you'll see lots of little rings floating in the canal. Yep. These are condoms. Lots and lots of condoms. Was it a Bangkok orgy? A disgruntled prostitute dumping out the contents of her purse? A creepy old American guy, doing creepy old American guy things?