I had a fairly crazy weekend, romping around in the vast Ozark wilderness with my LARP friends. Well, okay, admittedly it wasn’t the wilderness, it was a farm, and we didn’t romp so much as hang out in one centralized location playing games and chillin’. This weekend was a nice break for me, it got me out of my house into nature, and, it got me out of my head and into a party.
The events of the day were pretty fun, including me being declared the champion of dizzy fighting. That basically means even if you spin me around in circles very quickly, I can still beat you up with a piece of fun noodle.
The only dark cloud in an otherwise sunny camping experience was a literal one. We had a pretty bad storm run through for about twenty minutes Saturday afternoon complete with torrential downfalls and 50 mph winds (that’s really fast for those of you using that new-fangled metric system). Even that wasn’t too bad, as I found myself standing underneath a pavilion, surrounded by the ladies watching my friends out in the rain holding down their tents to keep them from blowing away. It was quite a humorous sight.
As the night descended on us, I allowed myself to be peer pressured into drinking some of that super cheap wine they sell at Trader Joe’s (now in Kansas City). Strangely that peer pressure actually came from the friends that normally spend their time making sure no one makes bad decisions. It’s okay, though, because of their hopefully temporary changed in demeanor. I learned two very valuable lessons Saturday night.
1) Pinot Turns Me into the Rough Caricature of a Crunk Rapper
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- Yeah, Motherfuggin PINOT, BITCHES!
Now, as you can probably imagine, I’m the whitest guy in white town. On top of that I’m a pretty huge nerd, and though in the right circumstances prone to longwindedness, generally pretty much on the quiet side at parties. So, imagine the shock and amazement of my friends as I sat around a campfire and suddenly became Lil Jon.
My hands did as much of my talking as I did, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t go more than one sentence without dropping the f-bomb. Now, I’ve been around a campfire before. I’ve been around these people before. I’m fairly certain the only thing I hadn’t done before was drink an entire bottle of Pinot, pretty much single-handedly. Thus, I’ve learned that if I ever need to save the world under the guise of a generic crunk rapper, all I have to do is down some pinot first. It would probably still turn out about like this:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4-tg6XEKxA
2) Pinot is Incredibly Territorial, and Will Do What it Takes to Scare the Merlot Out Of It’s Area
Like an angry mama bear looking to protect it’s cubs, Pinot will viciously attack any merlot you add after it. The Merlot, a smaller, weaker animal, will run away as quickly as it can…. straight back the way it came. There is some warning, but not much. It just rockets out. On the plus side, it seems that the effect of the Merlot escaping is that it cancels out the crunk effect of the pinot. Which was good, because Crunk Matt probably would have gone from hilarity to annoying eventually.
Back to Sobriety and The Secret Lesson
It was fun to get outside my head and become a completely different person for a while. In the safety of a group of friends that pretty much guarantees that you’re not going to get killed by your own stupidity or the angry knives of random strangers, letting myself go was possible. I’m not that person though. I don’t really regret the experience, but, it’s not who I am.
I did however, thanks to the meddling of my friends come to face a couple of really important issues that I was holding onto Saturday night, and just let them go. It’s interesting how something as tiny as a joke can turn into a personal revelation when you have a safe environment to face it in and something suppressing your mental filters.
I guess that secret lesson is that you can be too smart, too rational, and too logical to actually realize that you’re over some emotional damage. It can take a night of being stupid to awaken that boldness that you’ve been searching for inside of yourself again.
Oh, and, one more thing: It is completely possible to sprain your ankle while going to pee. Take a pee buddy with you.