Rolling in Cleveland, hurling in Bohol

I’ve been on what is, for me, a bit of a traveling spree. A couple of months ago it was to the Bohol beach club, which I pretty much spent doing one of two things:

A: getting extremely hammered by open bars, and

B: swimming,

which, in retrospect, doesn’t seem to be the safest of combinations.

The trip there was pretty uneventful. This is all kinds of surprising, as by looking out the window of the plane we were on, you’d see a SIGN on the WEAK END of the WING that said - and this has to instill trust in our aircraft maintenance teams – DO NOT WALK PAST THIS LINE. Yep, yep, yep, the DO NOT WALK PAST THIS LINE-viewing people were maintaining the plane, which kind of makes you wonder if people who don’t need to be reminded to NOT BREAK OFF PARTS OF THE PLANE were something of a rarity.

So anyway, Bohol beach club. The operative word being beach, unless you’re one of those Hershey’s-lookalike-hills enthusiasts, in which case the operative word is Bohol, or one of those Cuervo aficionados, in which case the operative word is club… Hmmmm. Was that a paragraph?

But the point is, the Bohol beach club has a beach and a swimming pool, and it probably has other features. I don’t really remember that much, thanks to the booze, which is also, by the way, responsible for having my thoughts go from this…

“it’s-kind-of-ironic-that-beaches-are-a-sign-of-serenity-when-all-we-seem-to-do-around-em-is-drink-and-shout-people’s-names-while-calling-the-wrong-people-apparently …”

to this…

“man-I’m-conked-out-hey-look-CAMERA!-ow-HEY!-watch-it-my-arm-AGHH-that-hurt-you-oh-wait-look-flash-man-I’m-conked-hey-look-CAMERA!”

It was pretty cool. Or at least, as cool as things can be, when as experiences go, it was the first time I’ve thrown up in Bohol.

Or in an airport, for that matter.

Or in front of over a hundred people, for that matter.

Who happen to be officemates, for that matter.

So the point is, there are a lot of ‘for that matters’ when you don’t watch your alcohol while traveling, and you don’t avoid having to to HURL in front of RANDOM AIRPORT DUDES and OFFICEMATES who can and probably will TAG PICTURES of you.

****

So Cleveland had this open bar about a month back, and it was pretty cool. I don’t really remember much of it, thanks to some measure of getting hammered, and there being not very many things to remember, unless you count viewing the number of clinics there as something of a personal highlight.

There are a LOT of clinics in Cleveland. The place I was in was surrounded by clinics. The clinics outnumbered restaurants, shops, and parking lots three to one, which sounds logistically impossible but is apparently pretty normal there since nobody seems to notice. The Cleveland Clinic has a campus and a hotel, the Guesthouse. This raised a variety of concerns for me, namely:

What?

and…

Why?

but mostly…

So do people here catch the flu several times a day, or what?

So first I theorized that all these clinics were there in the off chance that LeBron James gets sick. There’d be, like, 200 clinics to choose from, although not much in the way of either parking or food, which may be something of a problem.

Still, this doesn’t make any sense, as I’m sure he’d be fine, with say, 20 clinics waiting for him, so I needed to make more reasons up. The reason eluded me right up to the point where I saw what Clevelanders had for a pastime.

One of the hosts called it “the human ball of terror.” It’s a set of metal bars shaped to resemble a bowling ball, not that there’d be a difference if they modeled it after a large basketball.

The goal was pretty simple. Find a way to have someone enter the ball. This person does not, technically, technically, need to possess a brain.

Then, you can have a bunch of people, apparently smarter as they know not to enter a metal ball, roll the ball against giant-sized pins. The objective was to see if they could get the pins to fall, bowling-style, and to laugh at the person inside, given that the person probably has smarts just below jailbird-Guess-models, who may also technically, technically, not possess working brain cells.

I got a spare with some wicked spin on the ball, and, by some miracle, didn’t need to drop by one of maybe ten clinics within two meters of the hotel. ‘Wonder how Clevelanders play football.