Howdy folks. It sure did rain a lot last night. Had a little leakage in the back porch area, to my great chagrin. This old place is falling apart! It needs a man to come and fix her up and get her looking nice and swell. Unfortunately I am not that man. I have little aptitude for repair and maintenance, a fact which my good ol' dad reminded me of often as a child. My father also had little capacity for warmth and affection, and he favored the lash a bit much for modern standards of child-rearing. Let this cup of stale bargain-brand coffee I'm drinking right now be for you, Dad. My you have finally found that fish you were always looking for, though I hope you have more patience with your heavenly fishing buddy than you had with me. It's not my fault the fish aren't biting.
I went to a party last night. It was a work party, and Steve invited everybody; otherwise, I wouldn't have been invited, since I'm not very popular at work. Steve's house is one of those modern homes with shiny appliances and sliding glass doors. His wife is very pretty, and his children are nice, I guess, though they seldom moved from their self-appointed corners on the couch, their attention being captivated by the Ipads they held in their greasy little hands. Every once in a while Steve would stand in front of one of them and scream as loudly as he could, and they would just sit there, no reaction forming on their faces. "What I'd tell ya?" Steve said, like he'd just performed a party trick. I think maybe Steven and his children need to visit a therapist, but look who's talking! Gee-whiz, I'm a downer sometimes.
Later on during the party, Steve invited me and some of the guys back to his "man-cave." It's a garage with sports posters hung from the walls, and there's a pool table and a cheap mini-bar. "This is where I can be myself," says Steve to all of us, gesturing emphatically at the room around around him, the other men murmuring affirmations. I couldn't see what was so good about a smelly garage with a pool table, but to each his own. After a couple of pool games, Steve brought out what I thought was a cigarette, though it smelled like a skunk when he started smoking it. He passed it around, and it eventually found its way to me, though I didn't want to smoke it, since it smelled so foul, but I, being something of a wuss, partook in the offered smoke. "Hold it in," says Steve, as I'm smoking, "let it reach your lungs." I do as he says, and end up coughing violently, to everyone's great amusement.
The cigarette must have been some illegal drug, because I spent the rest of the party sitting next to one of Steve's kids, watching with fascination as he clicked Youtube video after Youtube video, the people on the screen speaking gibberish, the colors vivid and surreal. The drive home was peculiar, to say the least. There was a cat the size of a lion, and he was standing in the middle of the road, and though I was at least a thousand feet away from him, I heard him say "murroaww," clear as day. He disappeared as soon as the car reached him. It took hours to get home, but when I checked my watch, only fifteen minutes had passed. When I woke up in the morning, I found that I had eaten a pound of sugar. The stomach pangs I have had since have been unbearable. At least I was invited to a party.
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