This one is for Matt

I know, two posts in one day! Craziness. But I've been meaning to post this for about a week or so. And I promise this will not become a blog that simply posts Funny Things I've Read by Bill Bryson (FTIRBBB for short) but I know my friend Matt will enjoy this excerpt, and I suspect a few others of you will, as well.

Also from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid:

"...but then I was enormously stupid. I mean really quite enormously. I remember when I was about six passing almost a whole movie picking some interesting sweet-smelling stuff off the underside of my seat, thinking that it was something to do with the actual manufactured composition of the seat before realizing that it was gum that had been left there by previous users.

I was sick for about two years over what a grotesque and unhygienic activity I had been engaged in and the thought that I had then eaten greasy buttered popcorn and a large packet of Chuckles with the same fingers that had dabbled in other people's abandoned chewings. I had even--oh, yuk! yuk!--licked those fingers, eagerly transferring bucketloads of syphilitc dribblings and uncategorizable swill from their snapped-out Wrigley's and Juicy Fruit to my wholesome mouth and sleek digestive tract. It was only a matter of time--hours at most--before I would sink into a mumbling delirium and in slow, fevered anguish die."

Seriously. I'd pay good money to have written that. (But not to have lived it!) I now anxiously await Matt's inevitable use of the genius term "syphilitc dribblings." How will that ever be worked into normal, workday conversation, you ask? Matt will find a way.