Hello Darkness! The Official Blog of Helen Keller

Continued...

Unfortunately, you may get cornered by the intrepid traveller who feels badly you missed out on hearing the Second Big Report: the food. People feel inclined to tell you about what they ate. This could literally bore the paint right the fuck off of cars. From across the street. While they’re moving. I hate this part the most. As soon as somebody launches into describing an island delicacy, I secretly hope that the US Navy has been screwing around with the Philadelphia Experiment and that a Destroyer is going to time-warp into the building. I would rather hear the chorus of screams from people fused to the deck of a ship in a mad science experiment gone brutally wrong than hear about caramelized pineapple. I may even leap aboard before it warps out again. But then I’m dashed back to reality. Such a miracle probably wouldn’t even put a hiccup in the traveller’s tale of the interesting things they discovered in their salad. And heaven strike you mercifully dead if the resort happened to have some sort of festival night. Now you’re going to have to hear about the buffet too. “There was fish and corn and rabbit and beef and ribs and pig and apples and bacon and crab and fries and asparagus and…” BOOM! Aneurysm. But the worst is still to come. Much like after dinner itself, dessert comes next. You’re going to have to summon the mental strength to endure the most tortuous detailings of small tarts, cakes and mousses. One of ‘em had strawberries on it! Get ready to hear about how they looked! My god what a good description of the tart! It’s like I ate one myself, but with words! Yums!

The arrogance needed to describe the food is astounding and even more astonishingly, doesn’t seem to register with the person. They never in turn ask me what the fuck I ate over the course of two weeks since they were gone because they don’t care. They don’t care because it doesn’t matter. It’s boring. Try it yourself tomorrow. Walk up to anybody and begin to tell them in minute detail about the bowl of cereal you just ate. See those blank stares? They’re because of you. You could try to blame it on them having watched Ellen, but probably not.

But hey, you’ve survived the food description, you must be halfway through the forest. Not so fast Winona Ryder, we’re going to have to check your bag. The Second Big Report has an appendix; the drinks. Now there’s an entirely new list of horrible things to hear. Lucky you, shito went to an all-inclusive resort and drank just about everything he could before his liver failed and was shit out in what the hotel maid described as, “the bloody black tar of the devil, but in a bowl!” Here’s another tip. Whatever liquor they have down there, you can get here too. You didn’t need to travel 2500 miles to drink tequila and grapefruit juice. You didn’t need to waste a whole lot of time in the air to get an umbrella in your crushed-ice banana-vodka smoothie. You can go to the Dollar Store and buy them. Shit, you can save some money too by just buying one little plastic umbrella and…reuse it in your drinks! Drinking on an island isn’t anymore glamorous than drinking here. Unless it’s Dummy Matt wrestling a hobo in an alley for the last few drops of peach schnapps each Friday night; that’s just never a good scene.

The finale plus bonus tomorrow! Only at the Comment Corner