Young things mostly belong to themselves.

Pretty much all of my free time is spent trying to determine what has gotten itself lodged in my belly button. Whatever it is can claim responsibility for a disquieting odor. The smart money, at least for the moment, is on malignant lint but then again, the smart money was on Afleet Alex to take the Kentucky Derby, and I think we all know how that ended. Badly for George Steinbrenner, that's how.

Anyway, my first thought - and maybe yours as well - was that maybe my belly button has picked up an infection, excellent hygiene on my part notwithstanding. If that’s the case, identifying the offending infection is less important than eliminating it before it spreads to other, more visible parts of my midriff. Right? Right. So I poured half of a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide into me, into my umbilical crater, as a I lay shirtless on the bathroom floor in Joel’s ersatz apartment, a double-thimble-shot at a time, over the course of fifteen minutes, and called it a night. If you are thinking that prolonged content to the bathroom floor in Joel’s apartment is an unlikely candidate for Bacterial Infection Treatment of the Year, the only response I have for you is: Giacomo. You crazy horse, you’re too small to play football for Notre Dame. You're 5 foot nothin', 100 and nothin', and you have nearly a speck of athletic ability. Also, you’re a horse.

To go back to before my hilarious Rudy reference for a second, I would like to make a factual aside, if that’s okay. Normally when I use “turns of phrase” in my blog entries, they are just that “turns of phrase”, not a literal description of events. In this case, after my peroxide treatment, I actually stood up, looked at myself in the mirror, thought back on the last fifteen minutes, and said, out loud: “yeah, I think that’s a night.” If you have ever wept for anything in your hollow little life, dear reader, weep for the distressing extent to which this moment reflected the general status of my life at the time (two days ago).

I can tell, incidentally, even now, that I will have to fight the compulsion to title this blog post “navel gazing.” It will put up a fight, the compulsion. By now you know if I will have won against it, or if I have failed.

Anyway, the peroxide treatment was apparently a failure, because my belly button still smells like warmed over vinegar poured over a mound of granulated ass, like gravy over mashed potatos.

Here are a list of suspects I have compiled, a rogues gallery of substances that may have, unbeknownst to me, worked themselves into my navel:

Malignant lint.
Peanut butter.
Petroleum jelly with bits and pieces of rancid ham in it.
Ennui.

Anyway, I’m going to UHS now, with a student ID I borrowed from a new, concerned friend I made at Newbury Comics a few minutes ago. He was all "man, I really hope the new Sleater-Kinney album is as good as the pitchforkmedia.com review indicated" and I was all "don't stand so close to me; my stomach is vomiting pus."