The other day ACWGF and I were taking a walk around her neighborhood. I practically had to drag her out of her house, and I had been on a walking kick for the past few days. We had walked for about 5 miles around DC looking at monuments. And we had walked for about 2 miles to a New Year’s Eve party. I wasn’t, and still am not, done with my walking binge (not a bad binge to have though, eh?) so I dragged her out of the house to take a walk.
While we were walking, we started talking about how we hadn’t gotten on each other’s nerves the past week, even though we spent every second together. I mentioned in jest that ACWGF is consistently irritating to me, and I had been pretending she wasn’t getting on my nerves. As the look of stupefaction crossed her face, I could see that I was about to be the target of a razor sharp retort.
The retort never came, so I took the opportunity that had been placed in front of me.
“Wow. It’s like you were born without a sense of humor, and then had an artificial sense of humor from a monkey implanted into you, and your monkey sense of humor is kind of crap.”
That kept us laughing for a little while, until we came upon the treasure trove of comedic gold.
Garbage.
People had put out their trash from the holiday, and it gave us some idea of what they had been up to for the past few days. One trash bin was full of computer game boxes with titles like, “Dr. Polynomial’s Adventure in Mathtown” and “John and I, not Me and John: A Musical Romp Through the Grammar Forest” and “Audit! - The IRS Strategy Game for All Ages”. Boring.
One house, though, had a very clear story from its visible trash. There was an empty 1.5 liter bottle of Jack Daniels, the container for an Xbox, and the cardboard housing for the Dance Dance Revolution Dance Pad.
I imagine the on the way out of Best Buy, with the Xbox firmly tucked under one arm, and the Dance Dance pad tucked under the other, the father of this household was quite proud of himself. As he made his way across the parking lot, visions of Christmases past began to swirl through his head. He saw the Tickle Me Elmo from a few years back, laughing non-stop for days. He saw the Lite-Brite and thought back to the many times he would have to remove one of those brightly colored torture pegs from the soft flesh on the bottom of his foot. He thought back to the Pound Puppies and actually wasn’t too upset because it’s just a stuffed animal. But by this time he was deep in the liquor store and he looked down to see what his hands had been secretly caressing while he had been lost in his thoughts.
“Yes. This should get me through until I have to go back to work. This will be perfect.”
So he spent the next few days taking shots with every meal. He found a way to add Jack to everything- his cereal, his beer, his Jack and Coke.
By the final weekend he barely remembers setting up the Xbox, or the dance pad. Everything is working perfectly. Then that Saturday he wakes up and reaches for the Jack so he can brush his teeth, and it’s gone! He scours the house from top to bottom looking for something to get him through these last 2 days, and he settles on a mixture of rubbing alcohol and vanilla extract, with some red cooking wine thrown in for flavor.
He makes it to the recliner in the family room just before he collapses into a heap upon it. With his last remaining bits of sobriety he slurs to his child, “You make the pretty lights go for Daddy. Dance the lights for Daddy,” before he passes out for the next 33 hours.
