One of the Dudes

This thing happens here sometimes where, for a night or two, I’m “one of the dudes.” Eric calls me “man.” Neil says, “Yeah, dude. Of course!” S says, “Hey, wait till you hear this one!” We make fun of each other. We keep score. We laugh too loud and too hard and too long and drink one too many and nobody gives a crap. It feels almost like visiting an alien planet where we both speak English, but verbs are conjugated differently and sentence structure has been replaced by gesture and wit.

Tonight, the goofy stocking-stuffer my parents gave me—FINGER BOWLING—turned out to be just the thing the crew needed. I waved the little tote bag full of 10 teensy pins and 2 glass marble bowling balls in the air, and Eric took action. “Finger bowling? Who needs fingers? What I’m talking about is a RAMP!” Then he set to taking apart one of the shelves in his garage to build said ramp across his kitchen counter top. Paired with Bic pens as bumpers and two packs of cigarettes (his, not mine) for a lift and we were set to go.

 I’m just so gosh darn serious and productive most of the time, that I forget to take the time to laugh. It sounds silly, but when you live alone and work alone and eat alone and grocery shop alone and read the news alone and…you get the point…laughter can actually be an easy thing to forget. When there’s no one there to pull you out of yourself, why bother? Why leave the landscape of your own mind in the first place? Why even remember to remember to do so?