You may not know Patrick Hughes, but you know people like him. He’s what they call a party storyteller.

You know the type: the guy whose drunken friends pester him endlessly until, with everyone at the party encircled and silent, he tells the gathered audience his stories of shame.

“Tell them the one about your lap dance from Sweet Dick Willie,” the crowd cries. “Tell them the one about cutting into your foot with a pocketknife!” or “Tell them the one about your ex giving you an anal vibrator!”

Then, standing there in his nerdy glasses and silly tattoos, he’ll regale his audience with downright shameful stories that range from crude to vile. And by then, they are both disgusted and completely hooked.

It’s exactly what Patrick Hughes, a UF alumnus, Satellite Magazine alumnus, blogger and author of the new book Diary of Indignities, wants to happen.

And, for the thousands nationwide who check his long-running blog “Bad News Hughes” for more of his memories of mayhem, it already has.
Hughes, who describes his appearance in his blog as “Elvis Costello after falling down a flight or two of stairs,” is no stranger to depraved behavior.

His whole life, he testifies, is one moment of crippling shame leading to another.

“I take cheap shots at people, but the underlying context is always that I’m the butt of the joke,” he said as he sipped sweet tea one Saturday at Satchel’s Pizza.

“No matter how cheap a shot is I’m taking at somebody, it’s always mitigated by the fact that I’m all too aware of my position in the universe as, really, just the lowest form of life imaginable.”

With the substance of a stand-up routine and the style of a fart joke, Hughes relives the worst — and best — moments of his messy life for our amusement.

(It is, and forever may be, the only life story to begin with “Oh, I just remembered — one time I made out with this retarded kid in church” and end, “With his penis.”)

But Hughes would never call his book a memoir. No, he’s not classy enough for that. Calling it a “diary of indignities” will do.

The scenes of Hughes’ shameless life play out on Gainesville sets that most UF students should know: Durty Nelly’s; the campus infirmary; Blue Springs State Park; Lake Wauburg. By the end of the book, out-of-towners will be able to recognize a Hare Krishna lunch or know to stay away from the Friends of the Library Book Sale.

That’s because Hughes, now 38, has lived most of his life in Gainesville, either as a student at UF, on the streets with other homeless punks, running a University Avenue record shop or, now, as an 8-to-5 technical writer for Exactech.

Though he’s already written two books, plans to write another soon and has experience writing for both jazz and metal music magazines, writing never really appealed to him when he was younger.

When he enrolled at UF, he had no major and few plans. But around that time, he ran into a friend — while drunk, of course — who worked at The Independent Florida Alligator and needed an assistant editor.

After Hughes accepted the position, a $25-a-month job that entailed calling bars and seeing who was playing, he wanted more.
“I said, ‘Well, can I have a column? Where I just write whatever I want without your dirty fingers interfering with my good stuff?’“
His editor agreed, and with that Hughes created Crank, a humor column he said would go on to become known around campus for its outrageous stories.

With his interest in writing piqued, Hughes joined UF’s College of Journalism and Communications and began to take his work more seriously… Well, a little more seriously. Between taking a picture of his ass for the front page and coordinating depraved acts in the office’s darkroom, he worked as an editor and met his deadlines.

It wasn’t until years later that his “diary” was created on a day now known as “Sad Taco Face Day.”

The story goes like this, he says: It’s nighttime. He’s just finished another day of mind-numbing work. He’s tired. He’s depressed.

But, alas, all hope is not lost. On his way home from work, he stops to pick up the one thing that may bring him joy, the day’s sole event he has to look forward to: an El Indio fish taco.

As he makes his way inside his room, tugging at his tie, holding his prized fish taco in his hand, he somehow – call it fate – smushes the gooey fish taco into his forehead.

“It’s always something new,” he said he remembers thinking that night. And over the following years, as his diary filled with undignified memories of Nazi-skinhead beat-downs, friends who fried feces, a whole slew of drunken mistakes and a messy polyp he named Polly, each entry became a way for Hughes to keep track of all the revolting stuff most would rather forget.

“People have to go through that stuff all the time,” he yelled. “And nobody talks about it. So I’m like, ‘ah, the hell with it.’ I’m going to make it as funny as I can, because it is funny and it is absurd. And everybody’s life is, you know, maybe not as bad as mine, but is jam-packed with all these crazy, terrible things that have happened to them all the time.”

Amid all the anal bleeding and drunken mischief, Hughes delivers slices of life that, despite their typically shameful endings, can be endearing. There are stories of triumph, of true love, of friendship, of loss – and though he may be wasted during most of them — these are memories Hughes would never want to forget. Through his writing, his readers are finding new ways to remember.

Hughes, whose skin is regularly splotched with a scaly, crusty plaque that comes from psoriasis, has written before about his lifelong affliction. As well as physical damage, psoriasis can also cause all sorts of emotional distress – some who have had it in the past have become depressed, disabled or have been unable to work. Others affected have committed suicide.

Using his honed skill of having things go terribly (and then laughing at them), Hughes has poked fun at the condition, at God for giving it to him and at snooty waiters who treat him like a leper.

In a way, this writer who seems to only make gross jokes and pimp his own pain can become a grief counselor.

“To this day, I still get e-mails from people who do a search for ‘psoriasis’ and somehow or another stumble upon my entry and they go, ‘Thank you. Thank you for writing this. This is the first time I’ve ever been able to laugh at this stupid skin condition I suffer with all the time,’” he says, a smile on his face. “That feels pretty good.”