Truesday: Just Fumes

But... less like most of you festival participators, and more like a swoll-up prostate’ed old man, I spent my daylight hours crying and recuperating in front of my tv, waiting to start the evening disaster all over again. Because in my mind, I’m eight-fuckin’-teen or something.

So while you and your friends who flew down from Cincinnati were out there at Zilker trying to sell Willie "some totally balls-trippin" ‘shrooms and fending off mortally-wounding sunburn, I was napping on my toilet after two solid hours of trying to convince my intestinal tract that the four ounces of water which remained running through my system were plenty enough to get the parade started.

No clowns though. No confetti. No trapeze artists blew through.

Fuck it. Who needs a parade anyway?

So I don’t feel I’m worthy of describing anything that I did at night because I didn’t participate in the main event. And this year, OH THIS YEAR, proved to have, beyond the rain on Sunday, the BEST weather and heat-ready facilities ever seen at the festival. Cool breezes under pleasantly overcast or pretty blue skies. Grass under feet. Misters and whatnot. Apparently I picked the wrong year to avoid the damned festival.

At least I didn’t have to suffer through another one of Ben Harper’s let's-get-high-and-then_______ sessions. He always loses me after let's-get-high, because that’s when I just go to sleep. Like I did on the toilet. Good times.

REASON 2. You’d think that at some point during three days of almost constant suckling on the pickled teat of Dionysus, coupled with protracted sleep depravation, that my mind would unhinge, then I would completely lose my shit and probably do something to cause a forced deportation (maybe mine, maybe I’d pawn it off, who knows)?

But no. Nothing of the sort happened.

Honestly, it was all pretty much garden-variety Friday-night self-destucto-antics: Accidentally knocking shit over. Climbing fences to pee on things. Staggering around and telling lies about how I once used communism to open a tin can of minestrone soup. Stock-typical stuff.

Seriously, compared to festivals of the past, this one was really pretty pleasant for me!

As best as my memory can dredge up, the only partially embarrassing thing that happened to me all weekend was having one of several bartenders, who was tired of seeing me all week, half-jokingly say, “okay Craig, this has to be said, and you’ve probably heard it before, but you’ve got a serious drinking problem!” Which, while obviously intended to be at least an all-fun (yet much-truth-in-jest) jab at my recent over-patronage of the bar, was improperly timed for a good joust because I was just fucked-up enough to be a hair beyond any possible wit. I had over-shot my drunken banter window, and was inching out onto that precarious and precipitous slope which inevitably ends with a muddied, whimperish crash of Winthorpe-eating salmon-from-inside-his-Santa-suit, on-the-bus, druuuuuunk.

My brain buffered the bartender’s words for far too long, and quite pathetically, I had no retort.

I just stood there, hovering with a quivering maw over the bar, surrounded by a thirsty bevy of other drinkers who stared at me like “check this shit, dude is in total denial. That, or he’s retarded.”

If I had had it, I totally would have started eating salmon through my beard right then. Just for effect. Something. Anything. There’s little worse than a vacancy in the place of a dangling-fruit, glove-slapped response to a challenge. But I had nothing to offer. Just fumes.

Beyond regard, I am pretty sure I can safely say that my person neither committed, nor was involved in, anything that would make your average nun wince. I passed the gauntlet unscathed. Without wound or scar. No mark of required repentance or any of that other guilt-related mumbo-jumbo.

My record for the weekend exists as ordered, golden, and utterly without incident.

Damnit. Damn it all to hell.