Dad goes viral for journal entry about eating a bad egg: ‘Timeline of disaster’

A father’s egg-ceptional journal entries are getting some well-deserved internet love.

On March 5, Sam Eames posted a two-page spread of a journal entry by his father, Dave Eames, on X and it quickly went viral, garnering 6.4 million views.

“From my dad’s journal. His experience after consuming a vile, small egg,” Sam captioned the post.

The pages document Feb. 28 for the father of four and describe the chilly weather in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, where he lives with his wife, Kelly Eames, a win by college basketball team the Green Bay Phoenix, and the pièce de résistance: a not-so-farm-fresh egg that launched his digestive system into a day-long battle.

“Sam joined us for ‘breakfast for dinner’ as we watched the game. I made us some fried eggs, but one egg was suspicious ... small, spoiled & stunted …,” wrote Dave in a journal section titled “Bad Egg,” complete with an illustration of a small, suspiciously colored egg. “I ate this little one and paid the price.”

On the next page, Dave drew an extremely visceral image of his “Horrible Night”: him vomiting his stomach contents into a toilet. “OH MY GOD!” the speech-bubble-slash-vomit-cascade reads.

“I knew I was in trouble after eating the bad egg … a night I won’t forget!” Dave wrote in the entry, adding that he also had “tremendous pain” in his calves and feet from cramping.

Dave’s entry is filled with fun details, like the tiny, bad egg sitting angrily in his stomach as well as a “Timeline of Disaster,” marking his experience from the meal to stomach pain, nausea and several bouts of vomiting. He wrote that he spent the next morning recovering, while his wife took care of him and his dog Hobbes stayed close.

Online, people responded positively to Dave’s journal entry, praising him and his family, as well as sharing their own experiences with both journaling and expired foods.

“omg he should make comics or kids books omg his journaling style is so cool 😭😭,”  wrote one X user.

“This reminds me of when I ate a green carrot. It was small and tasted bad, but I told myself, ‘vegetables are supposed to be green and taste bad. It’s fine,’” posted another. “Bad food poisoning hit that night before an exam the next day. I hope your dad is ok, he is a great artist by the way.”

“reminds me of this comic my niece made,” wrote someone else, sharing their niece’s very relatable drawing about her “bad terd.”

“I would purchase this journal zine,” wrote another, to whom Sam replied, “he won’t even post em lol but i agree.”

Thankfully, the response to the bad egg entry convinced Dave to start his own X account on March 6: @DaveDrawing1965. He already has over 10,000 followers.

Although the Eames family is spread out across the country, they keep in contact through a group chat, which is where Dave first shared the bad egg entry. Sam laughed along with his three siblings, Jack, Will and Bailey — then had the idea to post it online.

“I thought it was a cool entry. I had posted a couple in the past and my friends seemed to like them. I thought this was a particularly funny one,” Sam tells TODAY.com, adding that this was the first one to really take off. “I’m not surprised people enjoyed it. I think they’re awesome.”

Dave, who owns and operates custom sign shop Fossil Forge in Missouri, adds that after Sam posted the journal entry, he provided him with a play-by-play the next day, describing it as a “flame-thrower” that had taken off.

“It’s important to me to find 30 minutes where I can sit and make marks on paper,” Dave tells TODAY.com. He says he has been keeping a journal for the better part of 40 years, ever since a high school teacher encouraged him to start. “I filled it with as much weirdness as a teenage boy can do.”

On his new X account, Dave has already posted musings on ham sandwiches, his childhood bedroom and more — and for him, it’s all in a day’s work.

“People say, ‘Man, how do you have time to do that?’ and I’m like, we all have the same 24 hours,” Dave says. “The reward is amazing because now I can pull 1995 off the shelf and flip through that and see how much I’ve grown — or not grown — and see where I was at certain stages of my life.”

“He’s as good a father as he is an artist,” Sam adds.

What did the entry for the day after the bad egg saga look like? Well, he provided it to TODAY.com, and in it, he drew himself and Hobbes walking in an austere landscape. It’s a moment of appreciation for the people in his life who took care of him while he was sick. Dave says that now he can look back on that page years from now and remember that feeling.

“It’s gratifying, almost like tree rings, where you’re counting the rings of your life and you start to realize how quickly it passes, which can be a gut punch,” Dave says. “But also, you hope that you’ve left behind you a legacy of really good humans that you’ve raised, and you’ve made a mark on the city you live in. To me, that is the best payment ever.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com