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Blogfest 2005 - Apr 18, 2005 - Printable Version
- How I Spent my Weekend
by Russell Tharp
I woke up in a cheap hotel, wondering what I'd done the night before. My head hurt, and my body reeked of rum and cheap cigars. I was an emotional basket case, and it looked as if I had managed to wreck my entire life in one depraved lost weekend. All I could remember from the past two nights was a long conversation with these hot Latino twins who both went by the name of Lily in a seedy bar in Havana, smoking Romeo y Julieta Churchills and drinking 7-year-old Añejo rum. I could swear that they were both my soulmates, and it didn't matter that neither one of them spoke a word of English. It wouldn't have mattered if we were speaking Orangutan, we understood each other perfectly. God, I never felt so alive as I did with those two senoritas. Hell, who knows, maybe it was just one twin, and I was seeing double from the booze. It did seem odd that they both had the same name, and seemed to move together like synchronized swimmers. Who cares, all I know is it was the best night of my entire life, or at least that's what the bellhop told me the next day. As I said earlier, I don't remember a thing. After they left (or she left....whichever), I had time to think.....why did I do it? Why did I insist on waiting until things were just right, quiet, calm, and peaceful, and my life was on automatic pilot, humming along smoothly, and then BOOM! Blow it into tiny little pieces, leaving a trail of emotional damage as far as the eye can see. I only hoped that I could somehow salvage the wreckage of my life, maybe find my way back to the States and beg for forgiveness, plead temporary insanity.
"Temporary insanity". I laughed out loud at that notion, then quickly stopped as my head threatened to explode from the pain of the past few days. I couldn't tell if the throbbing was from the liquor or the dozens of voices rolling around in my disjointed brain like so many numbers in a lottery barrel. One thing was for certain, there was nothing temporary about my malady, it was just a matter of whether I could keep it all inside, which I did most of the time, or whether it would finally explode in a spectacular display of hallucinogenic fireworks, which is apparently exactly what had happened over the past few days.
I knew I had to shake it off, and as I lay in bed, eyes closed, I tried to piece it all together. All I had wanted was everything, all I asked for was complete and utter bliss, all I lusted for was a cornucopia of triple chocolate decadent cake, one that I could devour all day, every day, and never get sick....or even full. It seemed like a reasonable enough request. But, in the end, the only way I could satisfy my own selfish longings was to hurt the very ones I loved the most, and that in turn simply made me miserable again. Everyone has the right to seek happiness, but not at the expense of the happiness of those around them. I had to re-evaluate my own desires, and decide to give up my dream of living the bohemian life of a tortured artist, drinking my self to death ala Hemingway while penning odes to lost love.....and fish. There would be no old man and the sea for this writer. There would be no more Lennonesque lost weekends for this tortured wannabe genius. I wanted to go home, to hold my daughters in my arms, to kiss my wife, to bask in the normalcy that I had only days earlier thrown away in a spontaneous fit of discontent.
I finally opened my eyes, half fearful of what I would find in my room.....had I wrecked my hotel the way I had wrecked my life? Would the vestiges of the past few days be strewn around me like so many fragments of my discarded sanity? God, if I can just make it through this, I'll never ask for anything again, I'll simply appreciate the things I have, and realize that if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with. (Why does THAT sound familiar to me? Oh well.) And, most importantly, would I ever be able to.....
What the hell! I'm at home, lying in my own bed. Was it all just a crazy neurotic, erotic, psychotic dream? I guess I'll never know, but I do know this - I'll miss the two Lilys most of all, and all the gang down in Havana. And why do I have this persistant image of a bunch of "little people" singing songs about witchs and yellow brick roads? Anyway, I'm home! Home! And this is my room - and you're all here! And I'm not going to leave here ever, ever again, because I love you all! And - Oh, Auntie Em, there's no place like home!!
And that's how I spent my weekend. I swear on the Gideon's Bible that I stole from the hotel nightstand that every word of it is true, except of course, for the parts I made up. (Damn, I'm so bored.....I wonder what there is to do next weekend?)
Author's note: This story is written as told to me by the Editor of the Faulking Truth. Sure, I spiced it up just a tad to make it sound more interesting (okay, I made most of it up), but do you know how pathetically mundane this guy's life really is? Well, do you?
(Editor's note: This is an entry from The Faulking Truth blog, ingeniously entitled "Blogfest 2005". If you'd like to waste more of your valuable time blogging, go to www.faulkingtruth.com/blog/ )
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