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That Which Does Not Kill Me Will Only Screw Up My Car and Make Me Puke, Apparently

It’s the ‘Good Hands’ blog.

Ok, if you’re paying attention here, you’ll see that I’m cheating a little with the timestamp.

(Somehow, I imagine that you have better things to do than track my timestamps, but I’ll confess, anyway. I’d make a horrible serial criminal, I suspect.)

So, it’s now just about noon on Monday, but this post will go out as having been written at twenty till midnight last night. Which is fair enough, I suppose. That’s when I started writing this post, but I erased what little I could manage to put down, and saved the post as a placeholder only. I did a similar thing on Saturday night, I’m afraid, and wrote that entry on Sunday morning.

I tell you this not to give you further insight into my scheming, sometimes-lazy psyche. I can’t imagine that you’d need more evidence of that after lo these many weeks. No, I mention it only as the first piece of evidence that I just had the most surreal, oddball, wacked-out weekend in recent memory. Or any memory, for that matter. I honestly can’t recall a weirder two-and-a-half day period. And so, for your enjoyment and/or bewilderment, I’ll tell you a few things about my experiences between the hours of about six pm on Friday evening and just before midnight on Sunday night. I call it the Sixty Hours of Unsurpassed Surreality. The events below all actually happened, though they’re not necessarily in order, either chronologically or in order of importance. Enjoy, if you can.

• Red Sox game at Fenway Park

As promised, the wife and I visited Fenway Park, for the first time since we moved to our new house. I’ve been to Fenway several times, so this isn’t so much surreal as it is just a new experience, given the tougher commute that we faced to get there. (For all that you could ever want to know — and much, much more — about my thoughts on Fenway Park, see my last post, all about the subject.)

Of course, the Red Sox did lose to the lowly Baltimore Orioles, so maybe it was a bit surreal, after all. Oh, and we got the tickets for free, so the game didn’t cost an arm and a leg to attend. That was spooky, too. Eerie, even.

• Dead battery after the game

As we were walking from our car — parked several blocks away — to the stadium, I saw an SUV with its lights on. We’d had a freakish rain shower on the way over, and I’d turned my lights on, as well. And I suspected that, just like this poor fool, I’d neglected to turn them off. I always do that when I have my lights on in the daylight. But, as my wife also pointed out when I mentioned it to her, the car always makes a ‘ding ding ding‘ sort of noise when this happens, and I always hear it and turn the lights off. Always.

So, since we didn’t hear the noise, we assumed that I’d remembered, after all, and we went on our merry way. Of course, we were wrong. I failed me, and then the car failed us both. We waited an hour or so for AAA to come and give us a boost. I can’t remember the last time that this dead battery brain fart thing happened, but I’m guessing that it was somewhere around 1998 or so. Weird.

• Car issues, part deux

Right after we returned to the car, and I confirmed that the old girl was quite out of juice, we got back out to find a pay phone.

(Yes, we both have our own cell phones. No, neither of us bothered to carry ours to the game. And yes, that probably makes us complete morons, at least at the time. But me more so, as usual. I knew she wasn’t carrying anything but her ID and a couple of twenties, so I should have thought of bringing mine. Eh.)

Anyway, as I was getting out of the car, I dropped my keys. Which rarely happens, but isn’t in and of itself so odd. But they fell just right, so that the plastic part of the car key attached to my key ring would hit the ground just so, and break off, releasing the key from its shackle. Which never happens. So now, I have a key ring with a couple of assorted keys and baubles, and a loose car key. Which, of course, means that I’m destined to lose said car key sometime in the next, oh I don’t know, twenty minutes or so. Bitches.

• Sustenance, or lack thereof

In case you might be interested, here is my total solid intake between about noon on Friday and … well, now, come to think of it, since I haven’t had lunch yet:

Burger King chicken sandwich and fries, dinner at Mexican restaurant (consisting of chips, salsa, empanadas, burrito, rice, and black beans), one untoasted Pop-Tart, one small Philly cheesesteak sandwich from a Fenway vendor, one small mug of ice cream

That’s one enormous meal, two small meals, and two piddly-ass snacks in seventy-two hours, if you’re keeping track of such things. Which I usually don’t, but it seems awfully odd. And strangely, I’m not really all that hungry now, either.

The BK meal is the real oddball in the group, too. The last time I ate at Burger King when I wasn’t careening through the drive-through during some many-hour trek across the country was… um… well, I don’t know when it was, actually. Back in college, maybe? Years ago, anyway.

So, how about the liquid portion of the diet, you ask? Or you don’t, but you’re still reading, now, aren’t you? Hah! Here goes:

Two Guinness, a large Dr. Pepper, small glass of milk, three margaritas, three Sam Adams lagers, and approximately seven glasses of water.

Given the above, I’m sure I must have shed some weight over the weekend. I mean, really, very little went into me for just about three whole days. It ain’t Atkins, folks, and more than about three weeks of it would probably kill you, but I bet it lightens your load over a weekend. Try it sometime, if you dare.

(Assuming you’re not the eat-like-a-bird, ‘no thanks, just a water and salad for me’, aspiring supermodel type already. In that case, you’d probably pack on a few pounds by actually having a real meal and a couple of beers.)

• Unfamiliar bodily functions

In the same day, I physically cried and threw up.

(I was going to write ‘threw up violently’, but there’s no other way, then, is there? No one ‘throws up daintily’. It can’t be done.)

Anyway, one of those things hasn’t happened in years, and the other isn’t exactly a regular occurrence in my life, either. (I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether you think I’m more likely to weep or lose my lunch. Choose wisely.) I won’t shock or horrify you by talking about either, except to say that the two things haven’t happened to me in the same day since — well, never. Okay, that’s probably not true. Probably, the two things happened on several days when I was an infant, since all they seem to do is howl and retch and poop.

(And for the record, I also pooped on the same day. So I pulled off the entire unholy trifecta. Go me!)

Anyway, I suppose you can also cross a couple of items off the food and drink lists, too, since some of each went swimming down the drain after my technicolor yawn. I can’t really tell you which, exactly, though my money’s on the Philly steak and ice cream, based on the time of occurrence, color, and, er, consistency. Oops — you’re shocked and horrified after all. I’ve said too much. Sorry about that. Moving right along, then.

• Throbbing and pounding, but not in a good way

I had the most dreadful headache this weekend that I think I’ve ever endured. Now, I hate headaches, and don’t get very many. But I can usually suffer through them, and manage to go through the motions of a normal day. Well, not with this one, pally. This one hit me at around eight pm, and by nine, I was in bed with the lights off, trying to squeeze the life out of my temples so they wouldn’t hammer my brain quite so mercilessly. Which, for the record, failed to work more or less completely. I finally managed to nap until 9:30, and again until 10:30, and then 11:00, each time waking with the same skull-splitting, jackhammering, brain-searing hell in my head. Finally, finally, I got to sleep again, and woke up at 11:30 with a mercilessly pain-free noggin. Since it still wasn’t quite my usual bedtime, I started this post, wrote a couple of lines of nonsense, and then went back to bed. No sense pressing my luck, in case that demonic head-in-a-vise bastard was still lingering around somewhere.

And that’s about it. Oh, there’s more, of course. There’s Shakespeare in the Park and six hours of painting and oh so very much more. But I think you’ve heard enough about my pain and frustration and embarrassment, so I’ll let you off the hook. And anyway, I feel much better now, in just about every way, so I really don’t want to rehash any more of the oddball weekend than I have to. I even snuck in some lunch while I was writing this post, so hopefully things are back to ‘normal’, or as close as my life can expect to get. Still, I thought you might be interested, in sort of a ‘look at the monkey in the cage’ kind of way.

So I hope that the tales of my Bizarro World weekend have amused you to some degree. Just not so much that I’d ever be tempted to go through it again, for the sake of writing another similar post. I love you guys, I really do, but I’m not goin’ through that again for nobody. You’ll just have to find another monkey-man, I’m afraid. I’ve given you all you’re gonna get from me.