Last weekend I took a trip up to the Finger Lakes in New York to hang out with my aunt and uncle, check out some wineries, and generally get so drunk that you could wring out my liver and make 100 proof liquor.
Lucky for me I saw a shooting star that night, and that shooting star was a planetoid-sized piece of frozen space-dookie that the universe had chosen to hurl at me for some unknown reason coughhumpingcorpsescough.
Mokie and his Imported Wife of Dubious Origin left at about 6 pm and would arrive to the house in New York well before we would. ACWF and I left at about 8:30 on Thursday night, not exactly relishing the 6 hour drive, but happy to be able to take some time to relax over the weekend. I was also happy to be able to stop every hour or so and sample various types of mystery jerky from grimy buckets near the cash registers at off-brand gas stations with names like Minit Stop, Kwik Fill, and in the German section of Pennsylvania, Gasstoppo.
After a few hours of driving we found ourselves cruising through that rural section of Pennsylvania where the porn stores outnumber the roadkill (that would be every section of rural Pennsylvania. Take that you Amish bastards.) and that’s when the cop decided to pull me over. This won’t be one of those blog posts where there’s a whole bunch of bitching, and conniving, and trying to explain why the cop was a donut-sucking pig-fucker cut from the same cloth as the sodomizing blue-meanie in Pulp Fiction. I was speeding, and I deserved a ticket, and I was thankful that he knocked the charge down. I’m not going to relish paying it, but the man was just doing his job.*
We got to the house at about 2 am, and were ready to turn in. 300 miles of asphalt under your ass tends to have that effect. Unless you’re into that sort of thing, then I guess you would pretty much be ready to walk off your six-hour erection. It was freezing outside so we piled on the blankets in the bedroom and went to sleep.
Sometime around 7 am on Friday the power went out. This wasn’t such a big deal because the house was still warm, and because we could put our food outside in the 20 degree chill. The problem was that the water for the house was pumped in from a well, and the pump was electric. So we had no heat, and no water, but we had lots of beer, and a giant freezer outside keeping the beer cold.
Eight hours later we were drunk, the house was colder, and the toilets were so filled with horrible concentrations of human excretions (poo-poo and wee-wee for those of you too lazy to get a thesaurus) that the downstairs toilet’s water had been crested by the fin of the “great brown toilet shark”. We knew we had to do something, so we took all of our drinking water and dumped it into the toilet tanks in order to flush them. It was hard to say whether the solid waste poking out from a sea of urine was better or worse than the thick and soupy leavings that resulted. (Oh, if you’re eating lunch right now, you should probably skip that last paragraph.)
At about 7:30 pm we called the power company and were told that the power would come back on by 8 that night. We were overjoyed, and kept on drinking.
8 pm came and went. 9 pm came and went. At 10 pm we all went to bed, drunk, cold, and not looking forward to facing the toilets in a pitch-black bathroom in the middle of the night.
We woke up the next morning, all hoping that the power would be back on. A quick check of the breath condensing in front of our faces revealed that the temperature inside the house was at or below 45 degrees. We weren’t sure because the thermometer inside the house only went down to 45.
So I called the Motel 6 in nearby Ithaca, and they agreed to forcibly insert their 40 dollar full-day room rate charge into our tender little chocolate-starfish wallets (that was an odd metaphor), just so we could have the pleasure of showering. Lucky for us, it started to snow when we were driving to Ithaca and just as we were about to arrive in downtown Ithaca, Mokie’s car went into a skid…
Part 2 at some point.
*And I bet as soon as he was done writing me a ticket he went back to his barn to let a cow “milk” him while he smoked confiscated crystal meth and ate a dozen donuts while watching WWII era propaganda films.
