The Drunken Blog

I know my mom reads my blog, but I don’t think my grandma does, so I should be OK in writing this. This past weekend (please note, this was originally written back in August) it was my grandfather’s 80th birthday, which means that his children and grandchildren from across the country congregated to celebrate this calculated event. But as with most birthday parties, there was an ulterior motive for their gathering – deciding whether or not my grandmother (who divorced my grandfather years and years ago) and who lives alone, should continue to live alone, or if they should put her in a home.

Apparently cooking steak in a toaster oven isn’t considered normal.

Anyway, on Saturday night most of the family congregated at the hotel where my mom was staying. We chatted for a while before we figured that we finally had to head out, the problem was, nobody knew where the restaurant, Flaming Pit, was located. One of my uncles offered to put the name of the restaurant in his GPS unit and see what came up. I told him that would not wield valid results as it would probably give directions to the gay district. Zing.

Luckily one of my other uncles knew where it was and gave everybody else directions. Well, whenever there are group caravans like this I always like to race and beat everybody else there. It’s simply an affirmation of my great driving abilities when I arrive first. What I failed to realize, however, was that the sooner I got to the restaurant, the sooner and longer I would have to hang out with my blind grandfather.

Needless to say, I was the first person there. Luckily my uncle showed up about the same time as I did (even though he left before me!) so I wasn’t by myself for very long. Dinner took longer than I thought it would, but about the time you would expect for 20 people. I tried to do a juggling act of drinking enough alcohol to be sociable and yet not drinking so much that I wouldn’t be able to drive home and go out drinking even more that night.

Before I made my early exit I noticed that one of the carafes of wine that we had ordered had gone completely untouched. I had been drinking beer that night, but if I wasn’t driving I definitely would have gone for the gusto and attempted to leave no alcohol behind. I suggested to my mom that we ask for some sippy cups (i.e., cups that had lids on them, not actual sippy cups) and pour the wine in them. We mentioned this to the waitress but she would have none of it. She told us just to take the entire glass carafe as long as we “promised” to bring it back. She brought out some saran wrap and some tin foil to avoid any splashing on the way home.

I took the carafe of white wine and I was gone.

I drove thirty minutes home only to be greeted by quite possibly the best way that anybody can ever be greeted after a long day of whatever – there was a party going on in my place. I guess it wasn’t actually a party per se, but Jake was there and so were five other girls. Awesome. Having been through the adventure that was a family gathering, I made myself a drink. What I should have realized was that since I had just driven back from Maryland that everybody would assume I was sober enough to drive everybody that night. Unfortunately, I was that sober.

Whereas normally I would have had about 3 more drinks before heading out, that night it was just the singular drink, which I only drank because I had already poured it. However, I did have fun forcing my newly acquired wine down the throats of these five girls. The carafe held about 4 man-sized glasses of wine. That is to say, it filled four bigger than average wine glasses pretty much to the top.

We were kind of in a hurry so we didn’t wait for all of the wine to be finished; instead we brought a solo cup with some wine in it which I had the pleasure of chugging once we got to the Ballroom. As we were walking in Jessie told me that she intended to dance with me. Now, I have nothing against dancing, but I do have problems dancing with the girl that my roommate is hooking up with. It’s a bit of a moral quandary, so instead of dealing with it, I told her that us dancing together would not be happening.

She, however, was not content with leaving well enough alone and more or less zeroed in on me any time she saw me on the dance floor. Eventually she found another poor sap to dance with her and it looked like she was having a grand old time trying to make Jake jealous. Making Jake jealous is analogous to streaking at an NFL game, you don’t know that it’s happening until the commentators mention it, and even then you still can’t actually tell that anything is going on at all.

I didn’t hear the commentators mention any streaking going on that night, but I’m pretty sure the two did have a private “huddle” that night.

Other posts by Justin

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 11:43 am and is filed under grandma, friends, observations, family, Jake, Jessie . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.