FLUSHED into Fearyland

I went on a weekend trip to see a lady friend, a beautiful, friendly, lady-like lady friend, about 1500 miles away.

It's kinda like one of those budding long-distance relationship thingies that have little hope of working out. But because there was such a strong initial attraction, you try to make it work anyway. (Maybe that's for another post!)

This reciprocal meeting (she's already visited me once) was for a family wedding (her family), where I knew virtually nobody, she knew everybody, of course. So I was the mystery man on her arm, the NEW GUY, the man whose name no one would remember and who was expected to remember everyone else's...

It was, in a word, draining. For those of you who don't know how a male brain works, it functions something like this:



Notice the size of the listening particle. I am absolutely horrendous with names, as I believe most guys are. I can, however, get by, simply by being exceptionally charming rather than tedious, and I have developed highly-evolved methods of not HAVING to actually remember people's names when I'm talking to them.

Anyway, I hope and believe you're getting my drift.

The entire weekend was designed specifically to take advantage of the obvious shortcomings of my male brain. My lovely female friend was very good about it, and kept mentioning for my tiny listening particle's benefit which of her 18 sisters was married to which of her 19 brothers-in-law, why niece No. 6 was taking her clothes off and who her parents were and why her mom -- a lovely woman -- kept asking me to dance at the wedding reception and why her dad kept cracking those jokes about how HE'D stay in the hotel room with me, not his daughter...

It was a stressful, if not enjoyable, weekend.

And what does all this have to do with a real bathroom that shows a man free-falling out of the floor to his apparent death, presumably after being flushed down the toilet of life?

Well, as much as I did enjoy myself, when you get the feeling you're constantly being poked and prodded and quizzed and you're in an unfamiliar place with strange people who all know the one you're with and are making jokes about how you're both going to end up together at some point, and you have no idea yet that that's what you want to do...you CAN feel a bit like you're being flushed down the toilet and into a free-fall to who knows what?