American Dreams May Vary

I want to take a moment here just to thank everyone who has written in recently with suggestions about what sort of drunk I should become. Though I’ve never even had more than one beer in a single sitting, I’m really looking forward to becoming the drunk I always thought I could be.

Anyway, it’s official: I’ve decided I will be the Explaining Drunk. Yes, while a meaningless mid-season Red Sox game plays over the bar, I will respond to a barely attractive real estate agent’s idle question about why Fenway Park still has a manually operated scoreboard with a lengthy history of baseball itself, covering ten full decades of America’s pastime, eventually making an awkward segue into an absurdly over-detailed description of the sport’s rules and techniques, both common and obscure (“See, here comes a double switch….now, what that means is…”), and I assure you that none of my occasionally slurred words will even be heard by the pained woman after the third agonizing minute of my rambling. Yes, when the new girl from the office, who is ten years younger than me, lives with her boyfriend, and has no visible interest in me at all, asks at the Christmas party if those brownies are low-fat, I will launch into a tortured, seemingly endless, scientifically invalid explanation of what causes the human body to gain and lose weight (“Don’t let anyone ever tell you it has anything to do with calories…see, calories, babe, are essentially just heat…”) as nearby onlookers at first nod politely but slowly extricate themselves from the train wreck of my verbose lecture, which I naturally will mistake for a sort of innovative flirting. When, at that same party, a co-worker innocently asks me how things are going up on the third floor these days, I will take a lusty sip from my seventh vodka and tonic and bore them into a state of stupor by explaining at crushing length the essential principles of sales as described by the industry’s founding fathers (“See, a true visionary, I want to tell you, was Drucker…”), and I will then pass out for exactly forty seconds, and upon waking I shall deliver my masterful coup de grace to Janet from Distribution as she grudgingly drives me home: a sixty-five hundred word magnum opus of an explanation, delivered in response to the simple question, “Should we take D Street at this hour?”, of the planning and development of the city’s roadways since the city’s birth and the back-room political dealings that alter, improve, and hinder their maintenance (“A well-planned city has three components, Janet….okay, first, you have to have….you have to have infra-structure. And then….second….you have to have….it’s design. And then, and this is most important, don’t ever forget this, you have to….you have to have synergy. You have to have synergy.”)

Indeed, I will be not just a Talking Drunk, but an unabashed Explaining Drunk, combining my fondness for meaningless historical trivia, the deluded sense that I’m smarter than everyone else, and a desperate eye for females who I think become more and more impressed by my boundless intellect with every syllable that drops from my whiskey-tainted breath. It’s going to be a heck of a spring, folks. Thanks again for your support….and let the training begin!