Of Parties and Pig Explosions

Newsletter 2024-11-11

It was a disastrous start to what was supposed to be a great weekend. Friday was Halo Day. It’s an annual tradition where my friends and I take off work to play video games together from the comfort of our own homes, all while gorging on a menu that looks like it was written by five-year-olds who won the lottery. If there’s ever something in a grocery aisle that you look at and think, “No, that’s too indulgent,” you are legally, morally, and spiritually required to eat it on Halo Day. It’s a mystery why my clothes don’t fit right afterwards. The remote nature of Halo Day is key. No one should be burdened with the emotional labor of changing out of their pajamas on the best of all possible made-up holidays. Then again, all holidays are made-up. It’s not like you can dig a hole and discover one in nature. If you could, mining for Halo Day would be like striking gold. The real treasure would be the friends you made along the way and also the food comas afterwards.

This year, there was a snag. My friend Greg in Chicago had to attend a funeral in Indiana the day after our annual celebration. He planned to spend the night at our house after Halo Day and drive to the funeral the next morning. Since he was already going to be here, we invited over everyone else as well for our first ever in-person festival of video games and gluttony. That Saturday was also Waffle’s birthday party. That would draw in many of the same friends we hosted on Halo Day plus most of our family members. In one weekend, nearly everyone we knew would pass through our house. Clearly our home needed to be spotless. Unfortunately, the pigs also had a vote. They always cast their ballots for chaos.

I spent the week leading up to Halo Day panic cleaning like I’d never panic cleaned before. I vacuumed, dusted, or washed practically every surface in the house. I even took care of the pig room. They’re clean animals, but somehow their sleeping space ends up as dusty as a coal mine. I should check on what they’ve been up to in the backyard. They better not dig up another Balrog. I took each of their dozens of blankets outside, shook them off, and ran them through the washer and dryer. Then I dusted and vacuumed their room, including under their large, heavy rubber sleeping mats. After that, all that was left to do was clean the front porch. That’s where I sowed the seeds of my own destruction.

Our jack-o-lanterns were falling apart. We didn’t have as many this year as in prior seasons. It was just one of my many failings as a father. Long will my children remember the year we carved a mere twelve pumpkins. The first six were long gone. Several warm, wet days brought on the mold faster than usual. I had tossed them to the pigs the week before. The pigs always treat them as a fine delicacy, no matter what’s growing on them. That makes Lola nervous. She’s afraid I’m going to make the pigs sick. I have no such qualms. When we first got Gilly, the breeder warned us about the delicate constitution of mini pigs. She said we should only feed them species-appropriate food pellets and possibly some greens. That was it. In practice, these things are walking garbage disposals. I’ve repeatedly witnessed them eat literal garbage. Nothing delights them more than when they slip past me and knock over a trash can. They also eat dog poop. I’ve never seen them actually consume it, but either they gobble it up or we have dog poop-stealing gnomes who strike in the middle of the night. It’s for the best that I’ve never caught the pigs in the act. If I had, I would have gotten rid of them years ago. Even my love has its limits. We’ve had our dog, Niko, for sixteen years. In the eight years before I had pigs, our backyard was full of dog poop. In the eight years since Gilly arrived, there’s been virtually none. It must not be that tasty. The pigs don’t lunge for it the second it hits the ground, but if a turd sits in a spot for a day or two, it will disappear. I’m not going to complain. As disgusting as it is to think about, it’s the only helpful thing the pigs do around here. It’s about time they started pulling their weight.

Given all that, I wasn’t concerned that a mushy pumpkin would upset the pigs’ dainty tum-tums. They’ve been eating decaying gourds for years without incident. Besides, they have the world’s most powerful noses to keep them safe. They won’t ingest anything if they detect the scent of something disagreeable on it. That’s why they eat literal poop but turn away from peppers, both sweet and hot, and potato skins. I trust the wisdom of their biology. I give them all the gross stuff I want to get rid of. If they eat it, great, and if they don’t, I scoop it up a day or two later and throw it in the trash outside. It’s a good system. At least it was with two pigs. Lately, though, we’ve had a new guy. Leave it to the rookie to mess up everything.

I wrote in my last newsletter about how Onyx is on his way out due to his most recent bathroom habits. He’ll likely end up back at his original owner’s home after the fire damage is repaired. The completion date is slated for the end of February. We’re trying to find a nice goat farm with a warm barn where he can hang out until then. For the moment, he’s still confined to the backyard and the pig room at the rear of the house. He’s sad, but he’s still a pig. Food will always bring him temporary joy. On that front, Gilly and Luna have been great educators. Onyx ignored apples and watermelon until he saw the other pigs eating them. It was the same process with pumpkins. He wanted nothing to do with them until he watched the other pigs dig in like the orange globes were cocaine and they were bears. He devoured the first batch last week with no issue. The second batch was more questionable. As I went to toss the pumpkins over the railing of the porch Wednesday, one of them fell apart in my hands. Instead of the usual black dots of mold, it had thick, gray fuzz. I hesitated for a moment. Maybe I had finally found something too gross even for a pig. Then I shrugged and tossed it to them anyway. I figured their built-in threat-detectors would keep them safe. I went back inside, completely unaware of the avalanche of consequences I had set in motion. RIP my floors.

Like all recent pig emergencies, this one unfolded when I left the house for ten minutes to run an errand. I drove a few blocks to pick up pizza. I’ll die before I pay even one penny for delivery. When I left the house, everything was in order. When I returned, chaos. I was greeted by the oddly tangy odor of pumpkin wafting from the back of the house. The door to the pig room was closed.

“The pigs had diarrhea,” Lola said. That poor woman. The pigs have had every one of their recent bodily fluid malfunctions in the brief windows when she was home and I was away. Thankfully, her report was inaccurate. It wasn’t pigs, plural; it was just one hog having problems. And it wasn’t diarrhea; it was vomit.

I owe all of my readers an apology. In many previous newsletters, I’ve claimed that I hit rock bottom. All of those instances were lies. Actual rock bottom is cleaning up mounds of moldy pumpkin pig vomit when you should be eating pizza. I can’t say with complete certainty that Onyx was the culprit, but all of it was around him. If the other pigs got up and threw up in his sleeping spot to frame him, there would have been a ruckus. They squeal at each other all the time over far less. They get along exactly as well as my kids. I scooped up orange goop and threw the worst of the blankets outside to deal with later. I did my best to sanitize the situation with Clorox wipes, which are my catch-all solution to most problems. If only they could fix my personality. Afterwards, I closed the door to the pig room so I could finally have dinner. If you thought any of that would diminish my appetite, you don’t understand me or pizza.

After self-medicating with greasy cheese, I decided to put off deep cleaning the pig room for a second time until Thursday morning. Our first wave of guests wouldn’t arrive until Thursday night. They were coming early to help me move TVs and hook up Xboxes for the main event Friday. I thought I would have enough time to make the house suitable for human habitation before then. Wednesday night, I chose to procrastinate. Full of pizza and denial, I went upstairs to hang out with Lola. That kind of quality time is the only thing that keeps her from leaving me when the pigs do something absolutely disgusting inside the house. Subscribe to my newsletter for more marriage-saving advice. Tip one: Don’t rescue pigs.

Around 11 p.m., I came downstairs for a refill. On the way, I was struck by the smell of rotten pumpkin. My heart sank. The odor was worse than before. Perhaps my cursory cleaning hadn’t been as effective as I thought. Full of fear, I pushed open the door to the pig room. My earlier cleaning had been fine. The problem was that Onyx had gotten sick again. The portions were biblical. If Moses had called down a plague of pumpkin pig vomit, Pharaoh would have immediately let those people go. In case you were wondering, rotten swine puke is not a welcome addition to date night. I went into the basement and grabbed a bucket and a plastic sand shovel. Both are now in the garbage. I scooped and washed and scooped and washed and scooped and washed some more. Then I scrubbed my hands like I was a surgeon and went to bed. It was not my favorite night of pig ownership.

The next morning, I sanitized everything with bleach, but only because I didn’t have a permit for fire. All the blankets went back through the washer and dryer. Everything got vacuumed and deep cleaned for a second time. The window to the pig room stayed open all day. There were no additional rounds of vomit. Onyx has been fine ever since. By the time the first wave of people came over Thursday night, the smell wasn’t detectable. That’s what they said, anyway. Truthfully, they probably all noticed but didn’t want to mention it lest it cost them a chance to eat my snacks. It ended up being a great weekend. We played Halo most of the day Friday. We even won a few games. I assume we were up against people who didn’t have hands and had to hold their controllers with their elbows. That afternoon, Lola stepped away for three hours to bake Waffle a custom Squishmallow cake. It was a sight to behold at the birthday party Saturday. I’ll leave you with pictures of it to cancel out all the horrible mental imagery I’ve implanted in your brains.

Here are some bonus pictures of our Halo setup on Friday because that was the best part.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James