The relationship between chili peppers and my scrotum has always been a difficult one.

It got off to a rocky start back during grad school, when I was making vegetarian tacos in the nude. Having crumbled a bunch of hot dry chili peppers into a bowl, I absently reached down with the same hand to scratch an itch. The magnitude of that action did not sink home immediately; it was a good ten seconds before I even registered the dull heat radiating from my ball sack, another five before I realized that said heat was increasing, and verging on actual pain.

I have no clear recollection of what happened next. When I came to I was standing in the bathtub, cradling my scorched balls in a saucepan full of cold water clenched between my thighs.

I learned an obvious lesson that day. I learned another one, decades later, when the safety on the pepper spray in my jeans pocket worked its way loose and discharged a stream of mace into my crotch. There was no pain. There were a few moments of ball-clenching terror as I waited for pain that I knew was imminent, but the only real impact was a rusty stain that spread far enough to ruin my “Wanted: Dead Or Alive” Schroedinger’s Cat t-shirt. The take-home message from that experience, so I thought, was that pepper spray had an expiry date, and this particular tube— a gift from a Republican brother who’d hoped it would serve as a gateway to semiautomatic weapons— had gone harmlessly flat. I would not be able to gratuitously spray local cops in the face after all.

I didn’t throw it out, though. For some reason it found its way into the pocket of my thermal vest, where it lurked for years, forgotten and untouched. Until last night.

Last night I was out for dinner at a local Cajun place called Southern Accents. I was visiting a friend I see very rarely, a lady from the Yukon who makes her living unearthing ten-thousand-year-old hunting artefacts from the ice up there. There are bears in the Yukon, apparently. Grizzlies are the ones famous for charging, but black bears can eat you too; they just kinda circle in gradually, closer and closer, like sharks. When you douse ’em with pepper spray, Val assured me, you have to literally paint their faces red with the stuff before it has any real effect.

Pepper spray, huh? And suddenly my hand’s in my pocket, feeling this little cylinder of harmless and impotent ex-pepper spray. I remember being doubtful that pepper spray could turn a black bear red. I remember thinking the pigment wasn’t that intense.

I remember firing it onto a napkin to see for sure.

It cleared out the whole top floor of the restaurant. The other patrons stuck it out longer than the staff, who fled pretty much instantly (I would not trust the staff of Southern Accents to run lifeboats during a nautical emergency). By the time Val and I got downstairs (we were being nonchalant, in the hopes that nobody would notice), everyone was coughing uncontrollably around the bottom of the stairwell, their eyes streaming. I remarked on the irony of a supposedly Cajun restaurant laid low by a bit of pepper. Our server did not laugh. We tipped her anyway.

There’s really only one take-home message to this story; this is the kind of post that will start showing up if I listen to those of you who want me to branch out from my usual sciencey musings and start showing you my soft furry underbelly. This is what personal anecdotes look like. This is why you do not want me talking to you on Twitter, or Facebook. This is why there are no moods, ads, or cutesy fucking icons on this ‘crawl.

Let us never speak of this again.