SO I GUESS VOMITING FOR NINE HOURS IS PRETTY METAL

I got home at about 1 a.m. on Sunday morning and my stomach started to hurt. I thought it was just indigestion, so I took a pill and went to sleep.

Then at 3 a.m., I woke up suddenly with that awful feeling. You know the one — GET TO A MOTHERFUCKING SINK OR TOILET RIGHT NOW.

I ran to my bathroom and I puked.

And then I didn’t stop puking until sometime around noon.

Oh, sure, there were little breaks in-between. I even feel asleep ever-so-briefly at one point. When I woke up, I was burning up, and the sweat had soaked right through my clothes. My father has had health problems and told me about hallucinations and fever dreams he had while in the hospital, but until this point, I’d never experienced one myself; but now I somehow became convinced that a) Living Colour’s Vernon Reid was in my room, and b) he was coming to kill me. Why Vernon Reid? I honestly have no idea. There is absoutely nothing sinister about that dude. But I kept trying to open my eyes, to turn my head to face him, and while I could get my eyelids to flutter a little, all I could see were brief flashes of my window — the lids just felt so damn heavy.

And then they shot open, and I had to throw up again. Splendid.

My esophagus has never burned so badly; hours and hours of stomach acid making its way back up my throat was taking its toll. And I had the worst dehydration headache of my life, far worse than any hangover I’ve ever experienced — ’cause anytime I drank some water, guess what? It came right back up within a few minutes.

I feel fine today, and I still don’t know what the cause of the illness was. Food poisoning? One of those 24 hour stomach bugs? I met a musician on Saturday night who seemed none-too-pleased with a negative review we’d run of his band’s most recent album; did he try to poison me?

[Note: I do not seriously think he tried to poison me.]

In any case, why am I sharing this with you? Well, for one thing, it was just an incredible experience, (even if, in this case, “incredible” is not meant as a good thing), and I just want tell as many people as I can about it.

But also because I was shocked to realize that I don’t own a single metal song with the words “vomit” or “puke” in them. In fact, off the top of my head, I can only think of one metal band band with one of those words in their name — Vomitory.

If I type the words “fuck” or “rape” into my iTunes library, I get literally dozens of results. There are no shortage of songs about decapitation and mutilation and all other manner of horrible acts.

But somehow vomiting is off-limits to the metal world.

Go figure.

-AR