In my very best attempt at a highly-skilled form of Japanese poetry, I will summarize last week in only seventeen syllables.
Meeting fried pecans
A lovely woman in bloom
Last-minute Incas
Now, for the unabridged traffic cam into last week's awesomeness, and its complete fuckery, too.
Like every year for the past twenty-five, I waited until only two days before Christmas to not just complete, but actually start my holiday shopping. This self-inflicted chaos usually results in liver damage caused by the bottle of whiskey I smash into my throat after subjecting myself to stores full of assholes who, just like me, curse for four-straight hours while we find only vacant shelves and occupied parking spaces.
However, this year I decided to venture out into the teeth of a winter storm. To my complete and joyous surprise, most people actually listened to the chuckleheads on television who told them to stay off of the roads. This left the parking lots empty, and the shelves nicely stocked from the night before. It was as if Santa Claus himself humped his fat ass bag of overpriced goods to the stores just before I walked into each door.
In years past, I looked like I was a contestant on fucking Supermarket Sweep, trying to plow entire shelves into my cart before the guy in front of me could touch a single item. (Seriously, about three years ago I went home with more than two-dozen mocha-scented candles. I'll be burning those chocolaty fuckers long after the sun dies out). This year, I could actually pimp walk my way down the aisles, not only picking exactly what I wanted, but also checking each item for even a speck of dust on its packaging. Crooked sticker? Fuck that. I'm taking that Monopoly game that has the price tag applied with geometric precision. Because I can.
The long and short of it is that I completed my shopping in record time, and with little hassle aside from the roads. To that point, what the fuck good is a plow truck that drives through six inches of snow with its plow raised, while it pours calcified tax-dollars onto the street like a trip down Willy Wonka's gumdrop highway? I passed at least four goddamn plow trucks that didn't do shit to mitigate the piles of icy death befallen all over the roadways. Assholes.
The week would get better, as I was finally able to spend some time with an amazing woman I met. Call me dumbfounded in what she sees in me. A lovely, intelligent, successful, beautiful woman with class and charm, who undoubtedly gets hit on dozens of times each day. But, then I come along. A vertically impaired, greying-haired, leaping gnome with a few bad jokes and a bottle of wine, and I'm going to Disneyland? Maybe there is a god after all.
We had dinner and shared a bottle of wine. It was an outstanding time. But then we decided to head to another location, to have another drink and enjoy some more conversation. Now, this is where it gets a bit odd. Never once in my life, and I mean never, have I ever walked up to complete and random strangers and offered them some of the food I was eating at that moment. I mean, I've been sitting at a bar with friends and offered them the rest of my pizza, but what ensued here still has me puzzled.
For a few brief minutes I watched an older woman (in a group of about four) plucking her fingers into a paper bowl full of some type of snack, in a nicer wine bar. I'm sure her intent was genuine, but she would walk over and begin a semi-lengthy discussion with us about these fantastic fried pecans that her neighbor made. Then, she'd take a napkin and dump these crusted pieces of shit into a pile between the glasses of wine that separated my beautiful company from me.
First, who the fuck just walks up and starts telling strangers a story about their neighbors. I don't even have the slightest clue who you are, let alone the artsy Joneses and their culinary genius that live next door to you. Second, I was having a nice conversation here, over a fine glass of wine, when you walked up and thought, "Hey, have some of these fucking nuts I've been digging my licked fingers into for the last thirty minutes. They're really good!"
The truly fucked up thing is that I ate one, because I didn't want to be rude. Me - not being rude. Mark it down. But that was bullshit. Don't offer strangers other people's crispy goddamn nuts. It's never appropriate.
Finally, I've started a war with autocorrect. For three days as I tried to communicate via text message, every ducking time I would type "I can," the ducking iPhone would change that shit to "Incan."
First, I'm almost positive that I have never once meant to say motherducking "ducking." When I type "fucking," I mean it. This blows my fucking mind. I've done everything I can to try and adjust the phone's exceptions to quit doing this, short of removing the actual word from existence. And the only reason I'm not doing that is because on the off chance I need to use the word someday, I'd be more mortified if I typed, "My goddamn friends took me to a gay strip club as a prank. There are penises flying just over my head. I have to keep fucking them so I'm not smacked with one."
Surely, that's the only time I'll ever need to actually use the word, "ducking."
And as far as the ducking Incas, they have been ruined for nearly a half of a millennium. Is it really common vernacular that they are so often mistaken for English grammar in the first-person?
"Incan go to the store;" or, "Incan be there around six;" or, "Incan make it happen."
No, they fucking can't. Most of the Incan decedents are shacked up in a village at the base of the Andean Mountains somewhere southeast of Lima, Peru; just trying to avoid being swallowed by a dinosaur-sized snake or bitten by a poison fucking frog.
Autocorrect's reindeer games did allow for some hilarity between a lengthy volley of text messages, but it would instinctively lead me to offering this amazing woman a CD set of South American flute music instead of the traditional flower at our first meeting. I'm not sure why she still talks to me after that. And, it may have set the bar a little high. A second date atop Machu Picchu might require a second mortgage.
Duck you, autocorrect.
