Requiem For A Doubleyou Tee Eff

About a fortnight ago, I came home after a fairly long day of work (hey, growing E. coli and squinting while moving extremely small volumes of liquid back and forth takes a lot of energy) to find my roommate with his door closed but lights on. I thought nothing of it because it was nothing out of the ordinary. I stepped into the bathroom to find a 12mL plastic syringe with a gigantic metal needle sitting in the sink. The sink was splattered with a viscous, dark red fluid and the syringe was partially filled with the same.

“Oh Jesus Christ, he’s a junkie.”

But wait. A 12mL syringe is far too big, almost laughably big to be using for the purpose of injecting oneself with heroin or cocaine or speedball or whatever else Al Capone was so good at peddling. Observe, a 12mL syringe:

It’s like one of those syringes in cartoons that Dr. Bugs Bunny uses to shoot antibiotics into Elmer Fudd’s ass. Like so:
 

You fill that baby up, you could kill Keith Richards, bring him back to life, and kill him again. And that’s saying a LOT, because Keith Richards is a modern medical phenomenon, having somehow accidentally discovered the secret to immortality with a mysterious mixture of questionable cocaine-to-alcohol ratio. I’m pretty sure that he’s a walking, breathing mummy at this point. For the sake of discussion, let’s do a totally unbiased scientific comparison.

Exhibit A, young Keith Richards:


Exhibit B, Keith Richards today:
 
It’s like I’m playing those damn “see you if you can find the 10 differences between these two pictures!” game in Highlights For Children, and I’m losing miserably. Hx: Goofus and Gallant taught me everything I need to know about common decency and basic social skills. I guess I never really paid close attention, or else I would’ve known better than to irresponsibly exclaim certain statements about feces and phalluses in the workplace.

My word, that was quite a tangent. To the point: having known my roommate, BetterThanViolin, for eight-plus years now, I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell that he could be a junkie. So how do I explain this horse tranquilizer-sized syringe?

He walked in and hurriedly mumbled, “Oh dude, I’m just refilling my printer ink cartridge. Don’t worry, I’m not a junkie or anything like that.”

Hmmmmmmmmm.