I have a friend who we shall call Vodka. I’ve already talked about my former roommate named Vagina, and I have a blog, so it is inevitable that I should also have a friend named Vodka. I scoured the interwebs in search of the picture that really ought to be our “friendship” picture on Facebook, but it has vanished with her hacked account. It’s a picture of four (empty) Smirnoff bottles (all different flavors!) sitting on her patio table. We spent a lot of time out there in what she dubbed “the summer of vodka.” This was before I was a willing beer drinker and Vodka was bound and determined to make us hate vodka. She won that battle. However, calling her vodka is my own (insignificant) way of exacting revenge. But it is ineffectual since I’m pretty sure she would support this as her alias.
Anyway, Vodka has a smart boyfriend who is getting his master’s degree at an engineering school located in another middle-of-nowhere town south of my middle-of-nowhere town. Vodka invited me down for this town’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade on Saturday because they apparently make a big deal out of it. Reel Big Fish played, so I guess I can’t declare that statement false. (I should also say, in Vodka’s defense, that she had never experienced it firsthand and invited me on the basis of what she had heard about it.)
So I got up at holyfuckingstupidearly on Saturday morning (7:30!) to drive down a predominantly two-lane highway connecting my nothing town to her new nothing town. I had the misfortune of being behind a school bus for twenty insufferable minutes. I hate two-lane highways like nothing else. On the one hand, when they are empty, you can get away with serious speeding because these roads tend to be low on traffic enforcement. Of course, you have to know the road well enough to know where the bends are, unless you want your impatience to become your death warrant. Generally speaking, though, these roads tend to be very slow-moving because people who don’t know these roads or aren’t comfortable with them feel the need to drive ten under the speed limit. And piss me off. (This what I actually believe they are doing because I am self-centered and believe all forces of the universe exist solely to help or impede my progress/happiness. This is clearly an impediment.)
One of the BIG DEAL aspects of the celebration is the fact that they paint the roads green. For Vodka and I, this calls to mind images of a bright green street. In reality, it looked kind of like a band of 5-year-olds took that pale green sidewalk chalk and dragged it along the street. And then had their hard work rained on.
This is not exactly the most promising of beginnings, but the big show is the parade, not the street. So fine. The green-street vision we had is probably a bit of a financial/logistical hurdle and the street did have a green-tint to it. We let it pass.
Except they opened the parade by asphyxiating us with green smoke. It felt like the air had turned into chalk for a good two minutes there. Probably the same shit they used to color the streets.
The actual highlight of the parade came shortly after this moment, when a woman tried to steal one of the giant beach balls the Pepsi people brought with them. They are big fucking balls. (ha!) She was standing in front and seemed to believe that she would be allowed to just hold onto it. One of the Pepsi girls was all, “Uh. No.” And then the woman tried to chase after it. And tried to steal the other one. And grew very very angry as her efforts were thwarted. Vodka got a great picture of this woman. I, unfortunately, can’t find her in any of mine. But it was easily the best part of the whole parade.
It wasn’t until half-way through the parade that I thought to ask if there was a reason I had seen several Mario characters and a Mortal Combat float. As it turns out, the theme for the parade was classic video games. As I said before, there is a pretty decent engineering school in this otherwise insignificant town (for this, I give it more points than my otherwise insignificant town. Also, they have an interstate, which we do not. In my mind this is a passageway to better places and therefore further legitimizes their otherwise insignificant town.) Based on my stereotypical ideas about what makes an engineering student, I am of the belief that this theme should have been epic for them.
As Vodka’s boyfriend rightly pointed out: “Isn’t this an engineering school? Shouldn’t there be some really impressive shit happening on these floats?” (I have placed this in quotation marks as if it is actually a direct quote. It is not, because my memory is not that good. You should know that my blog is filled with such scandalous deviations from fact. There goes my journalistic credibility.)
In spite of how nerdgasm their theme was and the epic skillz they are supposed to possess, I was unimpressed. The teams behind the Duck Hunter float and the rocket that shot actual fire (but whose game I can’t recall, because I didn’t get a picture. I want to stay Star Fox, but I think that’s inaccurate.) were clearly the only people who actually went to class and learned things. Useful things, like how to entertain me in a parade, of course. However, by the time these decent floats came around, I had already given up on taking pictures, so the best float I have a picture of is this one:
As we neared the end of the two hour parade, I began to whine to Vodka like a five-year-old dragged on unpleasant errands and ask her when it would be over. The rest of the day was a significant improvement. I had to drive home, so I remained sober and occasionally danced in place to a beat in my own head that did not match that of the music playing around us while they drank. And Vodka marveled at the magical carnival food available from stands everywhere we went (this is the best part of large events in small-towns).
While we’re on the subject: I dig tacky overdone decor. To me, Christmas trees done in a tasteful, 2–3 color all-matching motif, are a disgrace to the holiday. Give me a thousand colors and shitty hand-made children’s ornaments and lots of tinsel and awesomeness. However, the one thing that I do not support is dying food. Actually, that’s a lie. Sometimes I even support that. However, on no level does dying food (or, more importantly beer) green make it appealing to me. My instinctive reaction to food/drinks that are green is DO NOT CONSUME THIS.
Other than the fact of me jumping/dancing around like a fucking loon (typical) and the excellent surprise of Reel Big Fish performing (I was previously uninformed about this) the day was fun but uneventful. We observed a number of profoundly unfortunate fashion choices (heavy wooden wedges with shorter-only-with-tennis-shoes boot cut jeans, and a not-really-in-stellar-shape girl sporting a bikini top, underwear, and a garter…it was 50 degrees out…) and Vodka ODed on green food coloring and enjoyed some delicious meat on a stick … In spite of the lack of design brilliance demonstrated in the parade floats, the day was a success.