Stay With Me On This

I’ve now had a good month to recover from my birthday, which did not suck nearly as much as I feared it would, which made me nervous, as a fully joyous Tink birthday fulfills at least ninety-five percent of requirements for the apocalypse. It did, however, maintain at least some aspect of Suck, thus safeguarding the survival of mankind for at least another year.

The festivities were originally planned for an evening at Margaritaville, because nothing says We Are So Glad You’ve Been On Earth For Twenty-Eight Years like bottom-shelf tequila and an $18.95 pile of tortilla chips. The Swamp, catching wind of this, immediately invited an entire convention of twenty thousand construction engineers to partake of our world-class tourism screwage industry.

Twenty thousand people. Twenty thousand. Clearly I’m increasing in cosmic significance, as I’ve gone from requiring one man to ruin a birthday (“I feel kinda bad, having to end things today…”) to necessitating the population of a medium-sized suburb.

The local news media was actually advising the locals to stay away from the attractions area, which is what we loosely refer to as the part of town with the densest concentration of large stupid foam hats for sale. You can imagine that we year-round citizens of The Swamp hugely appreciated this; after many months of whining over a post-9/11, recession-slammed, non-shuttle-launching, quad-hurricane-affected economy, the media has been begging us to blow our enormous Florida paychecks on such necessities of life as a beanbag Goofy doll appearing in the guise of crashtest dummy. But oh, now that the almighty construction engineers are in town, we’re not supposed to love on our own creepy anthropomorphic souvenirs anymore. I’m sick of this type of thing and I would totally move to Nebraska if it didn’t suck even worse over there.

Margaritaville was therefore out, seeing as it was crawling with people pounding the walls to find a stud rather than pounding the vodka to… okay, so it wasn’t tremendously different from the regular crowd. Fine; I welcome the challenge to uncover some semblance of originality in this town. So I seized the opportunity to gather with my dear ones at an intimate, unspoiled café free of chain corporate banality and tritely labeled appetizers.

So when we got to TGIFriday’s, I ordered an appletini and a plate of Baco-Bonanza Potato Skins and watched the world go by in all its diagonal red and white lines. Then, I went to the bathroom. Then, I discreetly informed the waitress that I was celebrating a very special life milestone. Then, she brought me a free sundae, on the theory that if I were preoccupied by fudge it would be more difficult for me to scream “IT’S MY BIRTHDAAAAAAAAAY!” at the her every time she passed the table. Then, I went to the bathroom again. Then, we went bowling, only we really didn’t, because we got to the lanes and the shoe guy was all, “Well, we’re doing Total Utter Sucker Bowling right now, which costs $27.00 for three games, excluding shoe rental and ball use and scorekeeping rights, but it’s totally worth it, because, see, if you knock certain pins down in a certain combination, you can win, like, four million dollars, and it’s all completely legitimate,” and we were like, “Uh, no,” and he was all, “But why?” and we were like, “Because we’re not idiots” and left.

Man, you know what? This was supposed to be a brief lead-up into a completely different post, and lookit, here we are at the near-600 word mark, with a point nowhere in sight. I’ll try again tomorrow.

considering ritalin at: blondechampagne@hotmail.com