white trash weekend

Today is one of those days when I want to take my commute out back and shoot it (it’s drizzly, so 270 is a parking lot and I got to work a half-hour late). I’d like to take my car out back and shoot that as well, as it’s been giving me nothing but grief lately. Over the past two weeks I pumped $2000 into it (a large part of which went into the exhaust) and yet it still failed emissions testing last week. And it still rides like shit. And the check engine light is still on. It’s like this angry little orange eye that glares at me accusingly from the dashboard, acting as though I’m a neglectful car owner or some such nonsense.

I ended up unexpectedly going home to Lebanon this weekend. I learned on Friday morning that Saturday was when a group of us were supposed to have a You Can’t Do That On Television marathon. My old friend Kelly (with whom I’ve recently reconnected on Facebook) somehow managed to snag the entire series on DVD (it was basically a bootleg copy culled from old videotapes), and we were going to sit around and watch the whole shebang. This was going to be awesome, because good god did I obsess over that show back in junior high. Due to some miscommunication, though, I didn’t realize our gathering was supposed to be this weekend, and I couldn’t postpone it because our old friend Kendra was going to be in town for this, and Kendra rarely gets back to Lebanon since she lives several hours away. The only thing on my weekend agenda was working on freelancing, and I was happy to kick it (and my hermit lifestyle) to the curb for a bit.

So on Friday night a group of us went to this sleazy dive bar in Lebanon that attracts drunken scumbags and has white trash karaoke every weekend (and as an added touch of class, they also aired the STD Power Hour on a corner TV: Rock of Love and Flavor of Love). It was great fun, especially since it involved lots of bad karaoke, messy drunkenness, crotch-grabbing, splits, scumbag mating rituals, and the like (none of which was done by me—sorry!), but the downside was the smoke. I’m allergic to cigarette smoke and it doesn’t take long for it turn me into a heaving mess. And now that all Maryland bars and restaurants are smoke-free, I’m especially sensitive to smoke because I’m just not used to it anymore. Breathing through my mouth on Friday night (like some half-evolved beast) helped to keep the worst of the nausea at bay, but my eyes were really burning and my stomach started flipping a bit toward the end.

Shawn, Brad, and I were the only people who drank no alcohol at all, so getting everyone home required some careful maneuvering, but we did succeed in the end. I only got to bed at 3:30am and didn’t get much sleep, which means I felt like crap on Saturday, and the YCDTOTV marathon never took place because we couldn’t get in touch with Kendra and Missy had to sleep off her hangover. However, I did go to Kelly’s house for an hour or so to watch two YCDTOTV episodes, which was really cool. In the afternoon we met up with a buncha friends—a clusterfuck of lesbians and freaks, if you will—and piled in two cars to drive to the roller derby in Lancaster. Missy’s parents met us there as well. It was just as fun as the last derby tournament I attended (in November 2007) and I managed to avoid getting rammed in the teeth by a wayward roller skate while sitting on the same floor where the competition was taking place.

After the derby we went bowling in Lancaster. I’ve only gone bowling, like, twice in my life, so my performance was less than stellar and I lost the first round by a landslide. By the second round I was so angry at losing, I began slamming the ball into the lane, and that did the trick—I bowled two strikes in a row. Basically I swooped in at the last minute and won the round by an impressive lead (and yes, I did resort to using bumpers toward the end, and yes, that’s a form of cheating, but who cares? That old adage about cheaters never prospering is bullshit). My favorite part of bowling was eying the trash around us and also ogling the hot guy bowling next to us. Messy brown hair? Check. Geek-chic glasses? Check. Tall and lanky? Check. Too socially inept to even make eye contact with him, much less say anything? Check.

Also, while bowling we gave ourselves roller derby names, and that’s what appeared on the scorekeeping monitor. Kendra = Ginger Ninja, Travis = Ash Tre (since he can’t quit the cigarettes), Missy = Mennonitemare, Shawn = Shawniqua, me = Jenocide, Ang = Angel of Death, Kelly = Special K, Kelley = BGK (Big Gay Kel), Deana = Deanasaur.

On the way home Kendra got a flat right as we were passing through Mount Gretna. Pitch-black woods surrounded us on all sides, and changing the tire was difficult for Travis because he had virtually no light (only a tiny penlight that Ang was carrying and the light spilling out of the open doors). We had to get out of the car (in case someone hit it when it was on the shoulder) and it was insanely cold for March, so we shivered violently while we stood uselessly on the roadside. Travis was able to change the tire but it took ages because Kendra drives a VW, and, as I learned firsthand last autumn, VWs have those anti-theft tires that are a bitch to change.

So we stood there on the shoulder, teeth clacking together from the cold, and a cop showed up. Then a second cop showed up. They gave us lots of light, which was a help, and chatted with us. They turned out to be amazingly cool. They asked us how we knew each other and where we were from, and we were like, “Well, Travis is from Arkansas, and he and Kendra met while living in Seattle, which is why this car has Washington tags, but they live in Virginia Beach now, and Jen lives in the DC area, and everyone else lives in Lebanon, and most of us met in junior high, but Shawn and Ang are cousins, etc, etc.” Ang mentioned that we had just come from the roller derby and they were so interested in it. They looked at the program and this season’s schedule, asked lots of questions, and were excited when we told them that the girls wear tank tops and shorty shorts. Since Shawn works for the city, they asked if he knew various Lebanon cops, and I piped in, “My uncle used to be the chief of police—Bernard Reilly” and they gushed about how great a guy and a great cop he was and how he died way too soon, and it was so nice because it reminded me about how highly respected he was and how cool a guy he was.

In the middle of this adventure Missy’s car sailed right past us, with everyone inside cackling madly because they thought they were seeing a drug bust. They saw two cop cars, a car with its trunk and all of its doors open, and they saw someone crouched on the ground (that would be Travis, looking for the part of the tire-changing kit that accidentally fell when getting pulled from the trunk), and so they thought they were witnessing some huge drug bust. No, it was only us!

I had to get up early on Sunday morning so I could stop at Wal-Mart (the Lebanon Wal-Mart is apparently and unfortunately the only place left on earth that still sells the cereal to which I’m addicted—Eggo Cinnamon Toast cereal) before meeting up with Papa for breakfast at 9am. Then I headed home and planned to do as much freelancing as possible, but not a lot got done in the end. I had a nice long phone conversation with Heather and then Mom stopped by for a visit and took me out to dinner before heading home to PA, and I was just so freaking exhausted from lack of sleep, I could barely focus on work. Plus I started falling ill with something, and that sure didn’t help my ability to quickly churn out work. My badass immune system is valiantly trying to fight it off, and it may win in the end, but for now I’m really dragging. I ended up going to bed by 10pm the past two nights, which is something that never happens. C’mon, immune system...don’t let me down, girl!


song heard most recently before posting:
Evermore—Neil Diamond