Man vs. Booze (and Dave)

As most of you know, Wifie and I recently took a trip from New York to New York with a quick layover in Seattle. During that lay over we were lucky enough to be able to attend a wedding and crash a party at Chad and Christina’s place.

I suspect I had a fair amount to drink because the whole lay over is somewhat hazy, although that in itself doesn’t mean much because yesterday is pretty hazy to me now and I didn’t have anything to drink. That’s just the nature of my life.

What makes me suspect I consumed alcohol, is a story I shall relate to you that occurred to me while sitting in the Washington/Dulles airport waiting on standby.

Though to be fully accurate, the story begins on the tarmac at Sea-tac the prior evening, approx 11pm, waiting waiting waiting to taxi to the runway and take off. But alas, this simple procedure was not to be executed as planned. Instead, there was some sort of “security breach” and much to my surprise it was not I who they pulled off the plane, as when there is a “security breach” it is usually I who has done something stupid to violate somebody else’s security. Usually by accident. Usually.

So I’m sitting there in seat 15B, beginning to unbuckle my seatbelt and getting ready to block Wifie’s wild punches as I awake her so that I can stand up to greet the SPD officer who is sauntering up the aisle, when lo! the officer saunters on by row 15, not even glancing at the astonished occupant of 15B half-standing with arms outstretched as if fending of a cloud of hornets (you try waking Wifie up some time, I dare you). It was not my fate to be detained this day, no Dear Readers, it was a young Ethiopian family of 3 that was yanked from this aircraft this day. They looked harmless enough, complete with irritated toddler in arms. Who knows whose security they breached. It was never fully explained to us, ignorant irritated passengers.

This really isn’t important though. I mean, it’s the beginning of the story, true, but its totally irrelevant. The point is that we were delayed from leaving Seattle by over an hour and as a result missed our connecting flight in DC, even though we were standing at the departing gate in DC a full ten minutes before the plane was scheduled to depart. The plane was sitting there too, twiddling its thumbs or whatever planes do when they wait at departing gates. But still, they would not allow us to board.

Woe is we. Very very woe.

So now we wait in line at the Uni-Ted customer “service” desk along with approx 40 other people who have been summarily dismissed from various departure gates as a result of delays, waiting patiently (at 7am, everybody looked more like zombies than functioning human beings) to meet with the one and only person behind the “service” desk. So after about another hour we finally talk to this customer “service” representative and are put on Standby. Yay. Did I mention the flight from Seattle was a red-eye? Yah, at this point we were so tired and out of it we basically couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for anger.

Now we are sitting in the really nice comfortable airport seating area and I am watching TV when I see this show come on that’s called “Man Vs. Food” and I’m thinking, “what the hell is this?” I have heard of food fights in which people fight each other by flinging food similar to the way apes fling feces, but I’ve never heard of a food fight in which food is the enemy to be vanquished. Can overpowering your entrée really be so challenging as to warrant a TV show? Standards for TV must have gone way down since I last subscribed to cable.

But it is at this moment in the story that I finally get to the whole purpose of this story: I suddenly have an epiphany, a realization, a memory comes back to me. I think “oh my gosh, that’s me! On the show! That was me this weekend, except I wasn’t battling victuals, I was exchanging blows with booze!” My show, of course, would have been entitled “Man vs. Booze.” and I have to add the “(and Dave)” because the moment Dave arrived at the party on Friday evening he said something like “Lance! you can’t drink. I’m going to out drink your sorry ass and make fun of you until you cry like a little baby. Hahahaaaaa” and then slapped me with a white glove he keeps in his pocket for occasions such as these.

Well, anybody who knows me knows that I do not take kindly to insults and I never back down from a duel. So I readily accepted his challenge and immediately passed out. That’s my recollection of the evening anyways, which came to me after suddenly gaining full consciousness for the first time that weekend while on standby at DC.

But please do not have pity on me Dear Readers. While I may have lost the good fight against booze that evening, I was told I did in fact defeat Dave. Okay nobody told me that, I’m just saying that. I have no idea who “won” and I suspect that we both may have lost something that evening. Perhaps our innocence. Maybe our integrity. Or maybe just the contents of Dave’s stomach (I didn’t evacuate my innards, I am certain of this. Not so certain about Dave however). But no mater, it was an evening not-to-be remembered except in the photographs that while likely start turning up on face book and add to the mountains of black-mail material that will prevent me from ever running for any kind of office.

The final score for this trip is in, and the winner is….

Booze (Dave) - 1

Lance - 0

Woe is me.