My Roomate Likes to Dress Up My Dog
Archive for December, 2009
Breakdown in Philly
I’m back from Thanksgiving in Philly, where I managed to wish Merry Christmas to like three Jews. You could blame this on my Minnesota upbringing, but really I just temporarily lost my mind.
I’m not very sociable. No good at cocktail parties. But I spent an entire week with the Manly Fireplug’s enormous, garrulous, and enormously garrulous Irish Catholic clan. Not one of them is an introvert. All of them love to talk. Nonstop. At high volume. At the same time. Get eighteen of them in a room, feed them booze and turkey, and measure the oncoming decibels. I now refer to them, collectively, as THE WALL OF SOUND.
Since I rejuice my batteries by hanging out alone most days, a full week of the WALL OF SOUND was a psychological experiment which my brain more or less failed by the fourth day. That night we went to the Fireplug’s 30th high school reunion, where I attempted to make small talk and act the charming trophy husband for three hours, all without the aid of seven shots of Jack Daniels. By the end I could only offer the same three or four sentences to each schoolmate, one of those sentences being, naturally, “Have a Merry Christmas.”
Day seven my motherboard shorted out completely, and I sat quietly drooling at brunch with THE WALL OF SOUND. Fortunately this was the kind of high class all-you-can-eat buffet type brunch, where everything looked like it was made on Top Chef, and so I just stumbled like a zombie from pork belly to paté to pineapple bursts without drawing too much attention to myself.
The Fireplug read my book on the plane, there and back. I hadn’t let anyone read it in two years. Just a few more small changes and I’ll let a few others read it too. So friggin’ close now, after 5-7 years of toiling over the damn thing, depending on your definition of starting point. Hopefully after a couple of days of solitude my brain will work again. If not the Fireplug can just stick me in a nursing home and sell my book to pay the bills. Or at least next month’s gas bill.
