#10: Piss Balloon
Don't get hit by the splash.
In my urgency to get the last email out the door I forgot to include the footnotes and made some typos. The footnotes follow, without context:
And it should be said that even if we take all of the White House's accusations at face value and for a second imagine that these were cartel members with a boat full of fentanyl or whatever, it’s still wrong. I can’t believe that we have to emphasize this: the United States military does not have the right to be judge, jury, and executioner. It doesn’t matter if they are foreign or American, in US waters or international, with drugs or just fishing.
This is fucking crazy. Come on.
Doing a search in the article “I'm Worried It Might Get Really Bad” for the word “capital” or “capitalism” returns zero results.
And boy am I glad that I did rush to get the “things might get bad” email out the door. Literally the next day that one guy got shot. The manure that’s flowed since has been torrential.
This is the danger of being a slow writer in the age of hypernormalization: by the time you put your thoughts together for one thing, it’s another thing. Then another.
We watched One Battle After Another last weekend. I enjoyed it.
hard times
Splash Back
A lot of my foundational years were spent across a cluster of apartment buildings in central Mississauga. My recollections of summers there are scattershot yet somehow always remembered free of any parental supervision. It’s hard to imagine now in this era of child paranoia that kids were once left alone to their own devices for entire days, weeks on end.
Nostalgics will point at that and think ‘oh what a halcyon and innocent time’. Oh no. No no no. To the east, in the big city, Toronto was having one of its most violent years in history: over a 100 homicides in 1991, a number since replicated but never matched in per capita. To the west, and all across the Golden Horseshoe of southern Ontario, a thick anxiety due to the schoolgirl murders – the disappearances and slayings of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French – lingered across multiple summers. Leslie was 14 at the time, found by accident by Paul Bernardo on the street in the night, alone, locked out of her house because she came home too late. She was three years older than me.
In this environment we’d sometimes wander for kilometers in the valley park, finding stashes of porn magazines1 and picking wild berries deep in the woods, until darkness came. My unofficial curfew was nightfall. The extended northern summer sunsets left that open to interpretation.
My memories of these years are spatial. I can recall, in great detail, a mental map covering roughly 6 to 8 square kilometers of central Mississauga. I can tell you exactly which convenience store, now decades out of business, had a King of the Monsters machine or where to find the prime berry picking spots. Yet, I have a hard time placing events temporally. Memories live on a zig zagging timeline. Conversations, and what was said? Completely lost to time.
My wife can attest to this. She’ll ask me about a chat I had an hour ago and I can’t repeat anything except the gist of it. The details get lost to me instantly; meanwhile she can recall, in great detail, every conversation and action that happened over the course of a night out. We are at opposite ends of some kind of spectrum. When you’re 11 words mean less anyway.
I remember one particular summer afternoon. It might have been 1991. Maybe 1992. I was at a friend’s apartment, one building over. There was a temporality to living there. Over the subsequent years many of my friends moved out of the tenements to houses or townhouses on the other end of town. In the 90s this luxury was still attainable for newcomers. Years later our family’s turn came.
There are three things I remember about R’s apartment, the combinations of which place it in that timeframe:
His SEGA Genesis. I was a Nintendo kid. The only contemporary SEGA Genesis I played was there: Sonic, Moonwalker, one of the Shinobi games, NHL Hockey (91). Probably Altered Beast too, which I loathe to this day.
The first porno movie I saw, a fairly softcore affair by modern internet standards, called, and this is not a joke, Crystal Balls. The plot involved a psychic.
Throwing water balloons off his balcony.
Water balloons were ubiquitous in those summers. They were the primary wetting object in those days just before the Super Soaker (they hit the market in 1991.) These weren’t the standard party balloons. They were painted militaristically to resemble grenades; kids doing age inappropriate Commando cosplay on the streets. How we started hurling them off his balcony I don’t remember.
Water balloons do not pop easily. The rubber polymers in balloons are remarkably resistant to compression and stretching. They usually need a good amount of outward pressure and a single point of failure for the whole thing to burst. If you partially fill a balloon with water it will just bounce off your target. If you throw it from 6 to 8 floors up not only will it bounce off your target it will also knock their snot out. The kid we were throwing at, whose name I can’t remember, we didn’t like, for reasons long forgotten, was receptive to avoiding splashes. He was not keen on getting welted. So the balloons got filled to their load capacity.
Stretched to the max by two litres of water, a balloon will guarantee a good explosion from a multi-story drop. The difficulty lies in getting it profuse.
The lip is where an overflowing balloon fails you. You have to hold the neck tight, while the lips kiss the faucet, and support the body to keep it from drooping from all the weight. If you lose your grip it’d drop and vomit all the water onto you in the washroom before you had a chance to chuck it at some forgettable neighbourhood kid. At capacity you need to be careful. It can go at any moment. It requires a skilled maneuver to detach the lips and wrap the neck around itself into a knot. If you fail to hold on tight to the neck water will start escaping, making it harder to tie. Or the neck will rip apart, also spraying you.
For 11 year olds this required two sets of hands. Filling was a delicate task. Carrying it from the washroom, across the living room, to the balcony was a delicate task. Chucking it over the balcony wall? Easy. The reward was a magnificent splosh2 and potentially the most traumatic balloon-soaking of his life.
Now R had a younger brother. The kind of second born that lives up to all the second born stereotypes. A mischievous little demon, one to two years younger, unburdened by good decision making. Somewhere in the process he decided to make a piss balloon.
I was not privy to the process though in hindsight I can appreciate the logistical challenges. Did he wrap the balloon around his dick? If so, how did he control the flow so that it didn’t launch the balloon into the toilet or, inversely, have it blow back onto his own self? Was the piss done elsewhere and transferred into the balloon? How did he avoid getting piss all over his hands? Or, even, did he? Was it warm?
That was not a two sets of hands operation.
Proud of his accomplishment, he took it to the balcony. Sploosh. It hit grass. No one, not even the disliked kid, got hit. A while later someone from the property knocked on our door and we got in trouble. Someone narced on us, likely a tenant driving into the underground garage, and the fun came to an end. As far as everyone knew it was just kids throwing some water from a balcony3.
But there was piss.
2025 is a gross, little, warm piss grenade filled by vile people with bad intentions. It’s already full of urine. It can’t be undone. It will burst at some point. You just have to make sure the splash-back doesn’t hit you on the way down.
It was the 90s.
His apartment was over a grassy area that was relatively inaccessible so there was no risk of hitting random passer-bys, just so we’re clear.
All this is true as I remember it: one random day that has stuck in my mind for over thirty years because of a single piss balloon.
Related Links
It’s been a few weeks. These might not be as fresh, see the preamble about slow writing.
The Stories We Tell - Graphic Rage with Aubrey Hirsch
Sep 10. A Substack comic
Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause (archive link)
Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in the aftermath, before the cringe, meme-generating interview with that loser Ezra Klein.
The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?
How Can We Live Together? - Boston Review
In 1962, eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell received a series of letters from Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, inviting him to a debate. Russell not only declined the invitation but replied quite generally that “nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us”—since “every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterized the philosophy and practice of fascism.”
What the Public Memory of Charlie Kirk Revealed - The New York Times
Trump was widely condemned during his first term when he called the white supremacists who rallied in Charlottesville, Va., “very fine people.” Now, Democrats and political centrists were lining up to honor a man who promoted the same Great Replacement Theory that served as the rallying cry for that march.
Around four months into the war on Gaza, scholars of genocide were reaching a consensus that what was happening in Palestine was a genocide, the crime of crimes, and I waited for the magazine to say so, too. I tried to talk to the editor-in-chief about using the word in our coverage, but he said he didn’t think it was a genocide. The word’s conspicuous absence led me to suspect that he had prohibited its usage among the editors. This was a notable exception to the accepted epistemology; a few months into the job, I overheard another checker cold call an addiction scholar to confirm that gambling was, in fact, addictive. But I did not have it in me to keep fighting.
You Can Just Show Up | Cogito, Ergo Sumana (July 11)
This is a few months old now and it has a kind of optimism, at the local level, that I find hard to square with current realities. I am a pessimist, though, and maybe I should move out of the shadows.
I remember an older woman who said to us, plaintively, "Do you have hope?" And we said: yes. And I asked: "do you want to borrow some of ours?"
Listen to this
estoc, a Philadelphia-based musician, released the album Are We Doomed to Bow to the Stupid and Cruel? on cult Shanghai label SVBKVL back in June. For no particular reason I’ve been listening to it again, especially “Scratch a Liberal”:
