This I Tell You Brother

If you don't read the previous blog, this will make less sense than usual. So, really, just read it.


While you two sober up, we allow you two to sit in the vineyard gardens. It’s lovely there: the sunlight dappling the grape vines, the quiet only broken by the gentle buzzing of the bees at the nearby beehives, the friendly vineyard dog. The very friendly dog. Buster, the nine month-old Labrador retriever with the crotch fetish and the submissive peeing issue. I don’t care where each of you is on the subject of pets. But if we address this now, you should never turn to your mate and say in a hurt voice, “But I thought you LIKED dogs!” If Buster checking out your undercarriage and baptizing your shoes doesn’t bother you, you can safely be called a dog person. For a small additional fee, I can arrange for the barn cat to spring unexpectedly into someone’s lap and claw-bat viciously at any attempt to pet its rump.

Everyone feeling sober after the wine tasting? Good, because you have a room reservation for the night up at a quaint cottage in the mountains. The front desk closes at dusk. The sun is heading towards the treetops.

Race, daters, race.

Learn how the driver handles narrow mountain roads when the possibility of sleeping in the car grows with each passing minute. Learn what sort of relationship the passenger has with The Creator as the car careens up the twisty two-laner and careens around a succession of logging trucks hauling what seems to be the entire Adirondacks.

Race, daters, race.

Arrive at the bungalow court with minutes to spare. Grab your key and head for the restaurant. Discover the restaurant is closed. Ask the desk-clerk where the locals eat. Learn that in the thirty-seconds it took to discover the restaurant was closed, the desk-clerk has evaporated. Cobble together a dinner from what is in the car: a fine repast of Tums, damp Cheetos, the last Slim Jim and a bottle of Clamato juice. Neither one of you drinks the Clamato juice.

[As provisioners of this exercise, we keep a can of Clamato juice in the car for just this moment. We have yet to replace it.]

Finally, you two are in your room. Perhaps, even through the rigors of the day, you have grown to find each other attractive. Perhaps you find each other extremely attractive. Perhaps you just want something pleasant to happen in this day. Well, whatever licentious thoughts you’re having you can just leave in the car with the clam juice. We’re looking for a person who can take you through your life, not through the night. And to keep you two focused on this larger goal, may I introduce the people in the cabin next to yours? Today, these people attended a wedding for friends in the clearing down by the waterfall. It was a lovely wedding, sweet and solemn. The people in the next cabin are compensating for having behaved like little angels all day by drinking a hearty mixture of peppermint schnapps and Robitussin. Here’s a favorite phrase of theirs:

WOO-HOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They have a few other choice phrases as well but they are all too obscene to render here. They also seem to have lots of hobbies, including:

1.) Smoking what they would call cigars but others would call used gym socks soaked in kim chee,
2.) Urinating against the wall of your cabin,
3.) Offering to kick each others asses. The women seem especially fond of this one.
4.) Vomiting on to your porch.

There is a phone in your room but the front desk-clerk has long gone back to civilization. Now it’s just you, your not-exactly date and your new friends the Visigoths. Watch closely how your companion handles this. Does she demand that you “Do something!” even though you’ve just heard them kick down an outbuilding because they thought it was looking at them funny? Does he say wistfully, “If I had a gun...” leading you to believe that he has only two gears, using a gun and wishing he had a gun? Does he negotiate with them, offering them Clamato juice? The car? You? Does she wait until they’re defiling a tree and burn down their cabin? Trust me; you need to know these things.

Eventually, dawn arrives and the Visigoths fall asleep, possibly resting in preparation of a later marauding attack on the Boy Scout camp down the road. You both sneak out, but not before discovering the outlets in the cabin were installed during the Metric Outlet Great Leap Forward of 1975, thereby leaving everyone without a hair-dryer, forced to go into the world without product and a flattening brush. I’m making sure you both have all the information you need.


Next time, we finish our Marathon. Frankly, I'm having entirely too good a time torturing them, but I fear they could start invoking the Geneva Convention.