Ever fall victim to one of your friends saying something like “dude get over here, you have got to try this!?”  This phrase is particularly dangerous if everyone is drunk and or high.

I’m a big fan of  “dude, you’ve got to try this” antics, but like to hang back and watch some other dude try it first. This is mostly because I have lots of experience with the dudes I hang out with and, frankly, just the fact that they are friends of mine to begin with is a big red flag in judgement. Not all “dude” moments are dangerous (most are), but what makes them “dude” worthy is the potential for awesome.

There have been leaps from cliffs into poorly scouted rivers, overly ambitious bike jumps, multiple explosions, amateur stunt driving, questionable skateboard ramps and obstacles of all nature, zip lines and rope swings over deadly crevasses that a dude must try. However, the single weirdest moment was what I’m going to call “The Electric Eye Hot Tub Experiment.”

I have no idea who discovered this or how, but it involved a poorly grounded hot tub, a human eyeball, and a tongue. Stay with me on this. Someone figured out one evening, while consulting with Jack Daniels, that if you stood outside of our friend’s hot tub in a puddle of water and you licked the eyeball of someone in the hot tub, that person could see the universe. Or a very close simulation brought on by an arcing electric current.

S’cuse me while I lick your eye…

When I showed up to the party it was deep in the “dude” phase and everybody else at the party had already seen the face of God plus a closeup of someone’s tongue, and I was duded into trying it. I jumped into the hot tub and had my girlfriend stand in the puddle and lick my eyeball. Twice.

The sensation of electricity coursing through your optic nerves into your brain is really something. I will go on record as saying it’s probably not a good something, but it’s definitely a weird something. It was like looking into a lightning bolt…or maybe having lightning shoot out of your eyeballs, only without the dying part.  And of course as soon as another person showed up it was “dude!, come here and let me lick your eyeball!” On the licking end it was tingly, but not unpleasant.

It never occurred to us at the moment, but occurs to me now, that we probably should have told someone that there was a water/electricity combination going on that probably indicated an unsafe situation. But then if they fixed it we wouldn’t be able to lick eyeballs and unlock the mysteries of the universe. And we were SO CLOSE to finding the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. So I think we were preserving a possible miracle there.

I can’t wait til my boys go through the squirrely phase of being a “dude.” We came up with this kind of shit and we didn’t even have an internet! Coming soon… fire arrows and getting shot in the face with a spear gun!