Boom. You're Done.

Faced with the chilly temperament of the big city after a heated workweek, I spent my Friday night playing volleyball with a group of 80’s ladies and embattled weakened warriors. I joined the Recreational Sand Volleyball league on Meetup.com, and they invited me out for a Friday sandstorm. After impressing 100% of the people there with my skills in the first few minutes, I spent the next two hours demonstrating to them that their faith in me was misplaced. My court flailing and failing dusted their eyes with sandy irritants, and my clumsiness left one lady with a bruised everything after I pinned her and her boyfriend under me in a midcourt display of stinky instincts.

I was able to repurchase some rapport, if not some credibility, when I opined that “the net just pinched my nipples.” Someone asked if I meant that my chest had hit the tape; if my nipples had brushed against the net. I replied with “Whatever you want to call it. Brushed, pinched, tweaked… The net just action-verbed my nipples.” By personifying the net and making it out to be a spindly beast with careless hands and a deviant sex drive, I was able to take the focus of my inadequacies. I like to think that my court name is IED (Improvised Explosive Device), but I know a few people would be delighted to swap “device” with “douche bag.”

Like a sandy little frog, or camel toad, I hopped to Wisconsin’s apartment to shower before heading to downtown Raleigh to meet Zhang it! and Joe (the Taxidermist). Zhang it!, who had sworn off Carbamas the weekend before, was doing a Carbama when I walked in. Joe had taken a cab to Raleigh (30 miles and $85) and was put in handcuffs twice in two different taxis. Joe’s pitbull was drinking vodka, water, and lemon slices.

We got dropped off and made a pretty straight line toward a bar called the Ugly Monkey. At the door, they tried to charge us $1 to become members, but I said I didn’t have any money, and Zhang it! told the bouncer that I was a member and that he was my guest for the evening. So we ended up inside, and I ended up with a membership and a sharpie I stole from the bouncer. I would call him incompetent, but it was the same guy that wouldn’t let me in with my work badge back when I forgot my license. Once inside, I began to mark Zhang it! up and down with marker, telling him that the cap was on. I marked every poison ivy spot that I could find, which added up to a lot, which resulted in a Zhang it! with a zillion tiny black X’s. We began to spread the rumor that he had Sherpes, a sharper, more permanent, STD.

Sitting on the sidewalk at the end of the night, listening to Zhang it! talk to someone irrelevant on the phone, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a near shoot out. Joe had managed to press roughly on a passing taxi driver’s buttons, apparently by jostling his crotch in the taxi’s direction. The driver started screaming at Joe, Joe was saying something New Yorkish (actually, it was “Boom, you’re done” over and over), and Zhang it! was giggling like a Hello Kitten stuck in a blending machine.

On the walk back, we came across a group of empty husks rustling with their tops off. About eight guys were gathered, gesticulating and threatening to hand out beatings to each other. I snatched a nice shirt off the ground, and we kept walking.

When we got back to Joe’s simple complex, Joe grabbed a mini-gargoyle from in front of a neighbor’s place and put it down next to a door a bit further down the hallway. Zhang it! was trailing a bit behind, probably still kicking it like a cicada into his cell, when he noticed Joe setting down the ‘goyle. I can only assume Zhang it! thought it was Styrofoam, because at that instant he sprinted unabashedly toward the squatting gremlin, and booted it as hard as he could. It moved about two inches, and Zhang it! went sprawling and howling first into a wall, then to the dusty expanse of unkempt flooring. Then, like a outcropped cherry hiding in a forgotten drawer, he rolled into a ball and waited for a night light or a dark spark. I typed out the following text and forwarded it to ten people: “Zhang just kicked a gargoyle.” I woke up trapped under a flood of concerned responses. Zhang woke up to Joe’s pitbull peeing on his bloody sock.

Last week Chris Lethal, my housemate, asked if he could use my red lunchbox. I said “sure” in the kind of way that most people say “no.” After an awkward moment, he told me that the lunchbox was his. It was suddenly clear to me why he had taken it from my room several times and set it on the kitchen counter. I had thought, “Hmm, curious,” and chalked it up to excessively polite behavior. As it turns out, he was taking it back for himself, but I was packing it and stealing it before he could get to it in the mornings. When my Grandma was alive she used to tell me that the early bird gets the worm, which was an excuse for us to go to BINGO before dinner and stay until after my bedtime. Back then, I had ink all over my hands from marking her B-19’s, and now I have ink stains from a night out spreading Sherpes. Early birds may get the multi-hearted dirt snakes, but the lovable, clueless sasshole gets the zippered red lunchbox.

Deep Posits in Diver City

Reclyning, a recycled orphan stuck in “washed up” cycle, giving double the blood at triple the pleasure. Plasma, endemic to my veinity, drains into a machine from my left arm, while with my right I scroll through my phone looking at Oddly Enough, a news feed with strange stories from around the world. I’m still giggling (see My Experience Last Time), because giving blood puts me in a drugged state. I see a great story, it tickles me, so I call out to Zhang it!, “They discovered a new species of dinosaur in Croatia!” He responds, wondering if they called it a Zhangitasaurus. “Of course not,” I replied, with just the right tone of irk, “it’s a CarbamaRaptor!” Still giddy, but now all the nurses know. They eye me with a suspicion usually reserved for vegetarians selling lien pork; it’s like borrowing against the piggy bank…

I call Zhang it! the CarbamaRaptor because he is absolutely addicted to Irish Car Bombs, a type of alcoholic beverage. He drinks little else, even uses it with cereal. I am four hours from getting on a plane and ice is tiptoeing through my body; my blood is swirling and being dissected of red cells in a procedure known as Double Platelet donation. My head is still spinning and I am recovering from Decompression Sickness. It has been a rough day in Diver City:

I was on call, charting the chat lines with glossy confidence. Suddenly, my entire team is up and marching, shrinking into the distance. Over a shadowy shoulder, as an afterthought, I hear “Wes, meeting in building 5, ten minutes.” What what what what what can a man do, when on a call he can’t drop with a talker he can’t stop? I feel like a bucket with no mop, sliding up a mountain with no top. I become brusque with the custom here - not hearing the customer - and I am off the phone in just under ten minutes. I race to the right place, forgetting my laptop, rapturing their meeting in like a postscript apocalypse. Not only is there no seat for me, but the man who hired me, the man who decided to bring a Finance major to an IT company, is sitting in the corner with his daughter. Apparently it’s bring-your-precious to work day, and all I’m holding is the doorknob.

As I pull in a pilfered chair from a nearby cubicle, I notice that the man leading the meeting isn’t my manager; it’s his boss. The meeting picked up steam while I lost credibility, and soon the leader stood up, snapped shut his laptop, and was off. I started to stand up, but no one else moved. It was time for the Diver City townhall. Dr. Powerline, my “hiring manager,” takes over as the diving instructor. Keep in mind that at this point, I still have no idea what the meeting is about, and I am confused as to whether we are actually adjourned. Dr. P is quick to shock, “Wes, since you were late, why don’t you give us your definition of Inclusion and Diversity?”

No. I can’t do this. I shun situations like this. There is a reason that I always stand with my back to the wall; I can’t be stabbed in the back and I can’t be snuck up on. I wasn’t sure which this was, but I knew it was one of the two. My mind, my greatest curse, whispers to me, Tell him you’ve always thought Diversity is the city where divers are born. I will absolutely not do that. I am not dumb, neither dim nor uneducated, but whatever I am has shrunk into a conch shell and conked out for the afternoon. Say it. Say Diver City is a great place to be a kid. Diver City is where Greg Lugayness was born. Instead, I say the following, verbatim: “I think inclusion is being part of a team. Like, knowing you are on a team and that everyone has your back. Or, you have their back. Knowing you can count on someone else… And diversity – well, for example, I went to school at Michigan. We have 13% Chinese people.” I should have said Diver City.

Dr. Powerline visibly regretted hiring me, then went on to give an awesome presentation about diversity at our company and how to foster ideas from dissimilar cultures and backgrounds to make a difference in the marketplace. I went on to fish a knife out of my pocket, and continually jammed it into the nearest socket in an attempt to destroy what my parents should have never created, me.

So, it was with great relief that I reclined on an uncomfortable cot with a needle hovering over my left side like a shard of some tasty spacechip. I watched it slip into something more comfortable - my arm -and laughed at the nurse. A concerned look only made me laugh harder, and she asked if I was on laughing gas. “I’m a diver,” I said. She asked no more questions.

Zhang it! had to leave early, because they missed his vein, hitting ivory. This caused quite the commotion; no one likes an angry CarbamaRaptor. The nurses escorted him out with oatmeal raisin reasons. Wisconsin and I sat the table, content in our colossal loss of blood, eating Oreos and sipping apple juice. We discussed death and cars, and the death of cars. I had only just taken my car into the shop, the judgment being that it had weak bones; the frame was about to snap. Afterward, I took a shot of milk to commemorate its loss, and to care for my own brittleness. The repairman asked what I was going to do with the beast. It took me less that a second to reply, “I think I am going to take it out to the woods and shoot it.” He thought this quite intriguing – the personification (and slaughter) of transportation – and walked back into his shop, howling about it with his mateys.

Wisconsin and I then jetted to the airport, walked the plank to our departure, and were off to visit Michigan: home to millions of people and the birthplace of Gracelessness. But I heard she had a French father and a British mother; you can’t help where someone is born.