It's 4:40 pm, December 31, 2018, and I have just stumbled on to a new genre of writing - it's called Ironica. You know, like erotica but instead of the expensive bouquets of roses that you pick up at the corner in front of the funeral home down the street, you grabbed a handful of those roses that you eat instead of smell. Anyway, I thought it was important enough to make a public service announcement about, so there...I think I will have Emily Deschanel's little sister, Zooey, be the spokesperson for the commercial, she seems like a reputable candidate for the Ironica campaign.
So it's New Year's Eve and you are on your way to the most conveniently located Whole Foods to look for some nice boxed wine to bring to the party that you got invited to for the night. It is a friend of a friend's party, nothing that you are too familiar with and no one that you have ever met other than your friend and let's be fair, y'all are more like just work associates who didn't want to be the only ones in the office on the first day back at work in January when you are all gathered by the water cooler and gabbing about the standard water cooler talk topics without a crazy story about how you went to the most amazing New Year's party of all time...it would be the equivalent of going to school on the big day of Share and Tell and forgetting to bring something to share and tell about so you just have to improv about the time that your brother almost road his Huffy off a lil cliff while attempting to pull of an insane 900 which turns out to be a much more fascinating story than Cindy's water color drawing of a pony that was the valedictorian at Harvard which would be a great Pixar movie (if anyone at Pixar is reading this, you can email me for the deets - I'll take my payment in the form of gift card).
Alas, you and your "friend" show up at the party and it appears to be more of a carnival than a party but I guess you could call a carnival a party, just on a bigger scale and with more cotton candy vendors than shots of cotton candy flavored Smirnoff. It is a circus tent setting (sort of like The Greatest Showman but with less star power and impromptu singing) and there are elephants, like way more elephants than you have ever seen in person other than at the zoo and people are riding them like they won't remember the face of everyone who rode them and maim their poor faces with their tusks when they are taking a nap behind one of the bevy of cotton candy vendors. There is also lots of cool looking tapestry, the type that you might find in a college dorm room or an antique store in Sedona, Arizona or in a dorm room at the University of Arizona. There are people playing beach volleyball on indoor courts of sand, people playing putt putt on a swanky mini golf course (as well as way too many people who are making up the gallery and yelling at the ball to get in the hole which seems a little more ridiculous once you realize that they are yelling it at an orange ball; that sort of resets the stakes for the whole situation, you know, like when you sweep all the pieces of the Monopoly game on the floor in frustration after losing only to remember that you didn't have any money riding on the outcome of the game, it was just supposed to be a fun board game with your grandparents while you are visiting them at the Old Folks Home) and regular sized people playing chess with giant pieces. The crazier folks are having intense pyromaniac battles with Roman Candles while the more calm individuals are watching on and praying that an errant shot doesn't go right in their eyeball.
"Welcome welcome, my what beautiful visitors we are so fortunate to have!" A lady who is dressed and painted like the NBC peacock addresses you and your work friend with a colorful smile and a parade float type of wave, worthy of one of the lead floats at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. She is carrying herself like she is still waiting for an ETA on the end of her Ayahuasca journey.
"Hi, Susan, uh what's going on here? I thought this was going to be just a little get together with you and Stan and a couple of your friends from Pilates, maybe play some Pictionary and break out the seven layer dip if the night took us there, but this, this...this is like stumbling upon one of the seven wonders of the world on your way to the gym. This is one of the most incredible things I, or anyone for that matter, has ever and will ever witness." Your work friend replies in the midst of a spate of confusion and wild bewilderment.
Just as your work friend finishes his sentence, an acrobat swoops in from the ceiling with a tray of shrimp samples, almost as if she was listening in on the conversation and waiting for her cue for food.
"Thank you...not just for this, but for everything." You say to the acrobat, immediately wanting to walk back your eager forwardness for fear of coming off as overly desperate in your appreciation of not just this surprise New Year's Eve circus party, but in all of life itself and everything it has to offer, in its wondrous, Big Fishy kinda quaintness. You used to wonder what the Plain White T's were talking about with their Wonders of the Younger, circusy themed album but now you think that you have got it all figured out...everything is more marvelous when it is circus related.
"You are welcome...you are always welcome... You too, cutie, I like your bow tie, it looks like you work for a catering company on the Moon." Susan tells your work friend before flashing you a look of acknowledgment, regaling you with a kind backhanded compliment and giving you a lil wink of approval.
You turn around to see that they are shooting the newest edition of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition on one of the indoor beach volleyball courts and you are like, that is pretty boss too, this carnival party just keeps on getting more boss...next to that, Charles Barkley is announcing a heated round red robin style pickle ball tournament (so the winner gets a lifetime of endless steak fries, you know) much to the delight of the evergrowing and evergrowingly buzzed crowd and the NBA hall of famer just called an eighty seven year old woman's form, "More turrible than my golf swing...taking pickle ball lessons from her would be like if the Abominable Snowman taught you how to surf - her atrociousness has propelled her to the status of a folklore legend, so in some ways I am impressed and proud to bear witness...By the way, in a weird turn of events, Bear Witness is the name of the dubious Grizzly bear (who perhaps had a pawful too many of the wrong batch of indigenous mushroom caps) who first reported a sighting of a Yeti in the upper Yukon Territory after the wintry beast stumbled out of a tricked-out outhouse with a half empty roll of Charmin Ultra Strong (or half full, it all depends on your poospective...that one was for all you toddlers out there who probably shouldn't be reading this - just give the iPad back to Mom and Dad now, it's for the best for everyone) in tow under its big ol' hairy armpit." (Who needs deodorant more than the Abominable Snowman? I never thought I would say this but...Old Spice you are really dropping the ball...it's not that Old Spice has that great of a reputation, it's more that I just never thought that I would care that much about the deodorant wars or have that much invested in their illustrious marketing campaigns or even have the opportunity to say that and now that I do, I want to thank all my family, friends and teachers who have made this journey possible for me, especially all you gym teachers who made Old Spice not just a luxury but a necessity, you know who you are *cut to a middle aged man with a whistle around his neck walking ominously across a deserted tennis court at dusk while carrying a torn open sack of multicolored dodge balls and hurling them at the camera, delivering each one with more velocity and intensity than the last until he finally drops the camera operator in a heap of tears, finally melting in a puddle of exhaustion, then the scary middle aged gym teacher smiles at the camera and pulls a fresh stick of Old Spice deodorant out from behind his back before he applies it with force to the armpits of an unwilling executive producer who would rather have stayed off camera which is pretty much the main reason why they went with the producer route instead of the onscreen talent route, also there is the clause in their parole that states that they cannot appear in deodorant commercials which is a weird parole clause but a parole clause nonetheless...Parole Clause is actually Santa's illegitimate burnout half brother who went to junior college to play tennis and never left junior college or learned how to play tennis but got pretty good at ping pong so that's something, that ain't nothin' to sneeze at, he ran the table in King's Court at more than a few keggers over the years so that's a pretty cool story to bounce your grandchild on your knee and tell them about (when they are nineteen and the vice president of their fraternity, but still, it will be a special moment of bro bonding for the both of yous.*) You turn around even farther to see that the ringmaster of ceremonies is doing the limbo underneath one of the elephants. You turn around even farther yet and realize that you have transmogrified into an owl and can turn your head all the way around (even going so far as to complete the first ever 900 Skull Spin) so you tell your work friend that the party is a hoot and retire to your favorite tree stump with a satchel full of Tootsie Pops, a bright fresh outlook on life and a newfound affinity for woodland creature clip art.
Buy Chris's books SPONGE CAKE & WHAT'S IN THE FRIDGE? on Amazon
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