Quick mini-story from our canoe trip last weekend, while I work on a "canoeing vs. tubing" post:
My goal for Saturday, knowing we would be on the river for eight effing hours, was to get REALLY drunk. The stumbling, slurring words, texting your parents and telling them how much you love them and how much you appreciated your childhood, hitting on women old enough to be your grandma, harrassing small children, fistfighting dogs kind of drunk. And it was pretty much mission accomplished. We got back to the campsite about 6 pm, and I confidently strutted (read: stumbled haphazardly) to my tent to "take a couple hour nap, so I can keep going tonight."
Yeah. Next thing I know, it's pitch black outside, deathly quiet except the crickets...and about 2 a.m. Easily the hardest I ever passed out in my life. Whoops. So now I'm wide awake after getting a solid eight hours sleep, bored out of my mind, until finally I see Jen and CK get out of their tents at about 6, so I scramble out, eager for any kind of company. Turns out that 8 of the 14 in our crew did about the same thing as me, and we had all been sitting in our respective tents, wide awake for hours and bored out of our minds. It's too bad we didn't have some kind of a secret bird call, then we could've all hung out in the wee hours of the morning together. Such is life.
So since we'd been up for awhile, and to us it felt like about noon, and it's no fun taking down tents and cleaning and doing manual labor, and beer sounded kinda good....we started having a few Early Sunday Morning Cordials.
So fast forward a couple of hours. Now we're driving through the Bible Belt on our way back to Lawrence, it's about 9:30 in the morning, I'm eight beers deep going on nine, I haven't showered since Friday morning, wearing an "Ol' Dirty Bastard is my homeboy" t-shirt, still in my swim trunks from the day before, limping around on torn-up feet in old polka-dotted girl sandals I borrowed from Jillian (my sandals having been lost in the river the day before) and I mistakenly brought my Natty Light into the gas station with me. The gas station attendant gave me a look (understandably) and I assessed myself and ashamedly admitted to him, "I might be the biggest piece of shit in the state of Missouri right now."
To which he replied, "Nahhh I doubt it. It is Missouri, you know."
Well played, sir. Totally nailed it.
