1 post tagged “adulthood”
To best express the degree of dead-tiredness I'm feeling today, I'm going to view my weekend through the lens of the fairy tale.
Once upon a time - always a good fairy tale start - there was a rebel yuppie named Palinode who, as he approached his 35th birthday, thought he could behave like a twenty year old and not get punished for his pains. I'm not talking about modern-day Myspace twenty year old behaviour, but old skool stuff - drinking the beer and being up for the dawn, that kind of thing. His behaviour didn't even consist of smoking the pot or committing the petty larceny. You might wonder what kind of lame-o Palinode was at twenty. But don't bother. He shifts paradigms in his sleep, that's how crazy cool he is.
Anyway. Early on Saturday evening, rebel yuppie Palinode and his Ladyschmutz attended an engagement party at a friend's house. It was one of those all too adult affairs, a backyard natter featuring homemade salsa and a bug zapper. Everybody sat around in the backyard, drank beer and spoke softly, with the exception of a heavyset bearded man whose insistence on polysyllables and casually spliced-in Simpsons references suggested an affililation with the Society for Creative Anachronism. Palinode discussed arts policy with a theatre guy. Schmutzie talked about personal awakenings and life changes with a mutual friend. Eventually the hostess got drunk on Smirnoff's Ice (which the bearded man declared to have an "ill-defined berry flavour") and started wrestling with one of the guests for fun.
By ten o' clock the party had winnowed itself down to only a few guests (Mr. Creative Anachronism was still there, booming out opinions on "the only good episode of Beavis & Butthead"). At that point Palinode had a vision of himself in the near future, writing the evening down as a kind of mock fairy tale, and grew tired of the form. He thought, "Why would I write up my night like this? How can I legitimately make fun of the SCA guy when I end up sounding like him?" He switched to first person. But first he got the fuck out of there, cut short the deteriorating adult fun portion of the night, and hied him and herself to the nearest bar.
Eventually we ended up at the Strange But Workable Hybrid Tavern, a neighbourhood Irish pub that transforms into a dance club on Saturday night. Most of the music playing was popular when I was twenty, so maybe that's what persuaded me to stay. And stay. And get up and stumble around, sit down heavily and wonder where my friends went, only to find that I was sitting with them but a little too sloshed to notice it. The crowd thickened, girls pulsed in and out of the bar, guys began to congeal on the front deck, bumping against each other and getting more and more frustrated with the close space and lack of sexual success. More girls were sucked in through the front doors and onto the dance floor, leaving more guys alone with each other, pint glasses in one hand and a fist in the other. A fight broke out between eight or so guys in an impossibly narrow space between our table and the wall. It was a single lurching mass of bodies, fists and elbows surfacing and plunging. Schmutzie was caught on the edge of the fight, pressed into our table. An elbow caught her on the arm as a friend grabbed her hand and hauled her across the table.
The fight broke apart of its own accord, the participants scattering out from the edges and leaving a bunch of pissed-off drunk kids wondering what had happened. The lights had come on in the bar and the dancers were leaking out into the street, bringing with them an exhalation of sweat and booze and pheremones, like a pickled armpit - a sexy pickled armpit. We decided that 2am was too early to shut the night down, so we decided to walk to Abigail's and light a fire in the backyard. Schmutzie had had enough, so Mr. Head and I dropped her off at our place.
My wife is an eosophobe, but I love the movement of night into dawn, even with the tacky dewiness that coats everything around 4:30 in the morning and the buzz of fatigue behind the eyes. I like watching silhouetted objects slowly take on depth and colour as if the objects of the world depend on light for their existence, slowly unfolding into three dimensions, until a peak becomes a roof, a stripe becomes a wall, and a Rorschach splatter against the sky unfurls itself into a tree. I walked home at five in the morning, accompanied by two jittery blonde girls yelling and singing and doing cartwheels in the bright empty streets. I was supposed to be their escort, but in truth they preceded me, bounding ahead on their way home.
The next night, of course, my schedule was so thrown off that I could barely sleep. I passed in and out of a doze, light fitful sleeps in which I dreamed of lying in my own bed, and the light of a clock that dimmed as dawn drew near again. Today is definitely my time to pay.
