A Timeless Lesson

Last night I went to a bar for a friend's birthday party. When they closed, those of us who were left (myself and two people I don't know) decided to go to another bar a few blocks down. The clearest memory I have of that second bar is me trying a clumsy, absolutely terrible come-on line with the bartender. I don't even know why I did it, I don't recall considering her all that attractive.

Anyway, that's not the point of this. The night wore on, and I decided to go home. Outside were a couple guys talking about going to yet another bar. All of them were complete strangers to me, but that didn't stop one of them from asking if I wanted to go too. I said I did, because it seemed like the fastest way to get past these guys and to my car.

One of them, I think the one who asked if I wanted to go, said "I'll go with you, then." Great. Now I've got this guy I don't know who wants me to drive him to a bar that I didn't even want to go to. So I decide to find a way to shake this guy.

I had parked around the corner on a side street, and as we rounded the corner I saw that my car was the only one still there. I pulled out my keys and was about to unlock the doors when I suddenly realized that this guy doesn't know me from Adam, and therefore has no idea what my car looks like. So I started looking around, swinging my head in an exaggerated manner and slurring "Where's my car?" I was too drunk to act well, but that didn't matter because he was too drunk to notice.

He started looking around too, for some reason. Then he realized what he was doing and asked me what my car looked like. I decided to play up the drunken angle and responded "I can't find my car." I even pulled out my keys and started pretending to hit the unlock button, like I was waiting for my headlights to go off. I remember thinking that was an incredibly clever move.

At about that point I discovered that I had a real problem: my house keys were gone. My car keys and my house keys are on one of those key rings that can be pulled apart and separated. I must have done so without realizing it at some point when I was holding my keys. So I turned around and started looking for my keys, and saying so repeatedly. The guy didn't seem to interested in my lost house keys, he was more concerned with when we were getting to the bar.

Somehow, I managed to break away from him while searching for my keys. There's this line of stunted, gnarled trees along the bar, and I ducked behind them to hide, standing in about two feet of snow while wearing clothing inadequate for the weather. This is the kind of thing that seems sensible only to children and drunkards. Or drunk children.

I started making my way towards the back of the bar. My intention was to slip into my car and get away, my lost keys forgotten for the nonce. As I shuffled through the snow, I discovered a planter behind the trees when I tripped over it, losing my glasses.

I don't remember saying anything when it happened, but I must have, because as I was picking myself up, I heard a voice from the other side of the trees say "Did you find your keys?" You've gotta be kidding me.

I informed the guy that now my glasses were missing as well, somewhere inside a snow drift. I stood there, shining my cell phone around to see if I can spot my glasses, knowing it was futile. The guy starts asking me again when we're leaving, completely unsympathetic to my plight. I resorted to responding to everything he said with "I can't find my keys" or "I can't drive without my glasses." The second statement was a flat out lie. I can drive just fine without my glasses, assuming I don't have to scrutinize any street signs while moving. The guy still wasn't getting the hint.

You may be wondering why I didn't just tell the guy to go away. I don't know either.

I was standing by a fence that separated the parking lot from another one at this point. The snow was so high that it came up to about my chest, and I could see people looking for their cars and stuff. I had decided to try a new tack in getting rid of this guy, so I leaned over the fence and started making noises like I was being sick. Again, I didn't do a very good job, but the other guy was so drunk I probably could have just stood there saying "I am throwing up" and he would have bought it.

I'm not sure if it was that, or the sight of a police officer talking to a couple people in the parking lot that did it, but the guy finally scrammed. So I decided to accept the loss of my keys and glasses, jumped in my car, and got away before the guy changed his mind and came looking for me again.

About ten minutes later, I realized I was lost. Well, "lost" isn't the right word. I knew exactly where I was, I just couldn't figure out how I got there. I must have turned at some point without thinking about it. The shock of suddenly finding myself about two miles in the wrong direction sobered me up a bit, and I decided to go back and try to find my keys and glasses.

I pulled back up next to the now deserted bar, and trudged through the snow back into the hedge or treeline or whatever, falling a couple times. I spent a good long time looking around the vicinity of the planter for my glasses, with no luck.

Then, as though hit with some divine inspiration, I plunged my hand into a seemingly random bit of the snowdrift, and my fingers closed around my glasses. Wiping the snow off them and putting them on, I felt like I had experienced a small miracle. I turned around and headed back to my car. When I stepped out into the street, I heard a clink of metal. Looking down, I saw that I had kicked my house keys. I stopped right there, looked straight up into the starry sky, and gave God and whoever is the patron saint of drunken fools my heartfelt thanks.

The moral of this story is: If a stranger asks if you're going to a bar, keep walking.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Get thee to a nunnery

A few years ago, I played around with a short story featuring two British characters. When I was done, I showed it to a guy I know who lives in England, and asked how I'd done with the dialect. He said that it was pretty accurate, except that they sounded Victorian. I puzzled over that for a while, I've watched quite a bit of British television and movies, and I thought I had made the idiom correct. Then it occurred to me: with the exception of Harry Potter, all of the English literature I've read was either Victorian, or set in that era. Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, et al.

It's been said often enough to become trite that "England and America are two countries separated by a common language." Alongside it is a quote I saw in an Orson Scott Card book (I don't know if it was his or if he borrowed it) that went "English-speakers are the only people who can't read Shakespeare in their native language." He was writing his works about 500 years ago, and that makes me wonder about the future evolution of our language. I haven't been able to decide if the explosion of world-wide communications in my lifetime has caused the rate of change in this language to speed up or slow down. That's probably something best left to linguistic experts, but I get the feeling that opinions on the matter are probably divided and will be for some time to come. I guess I'll wait till I'm 60, go back and watch stuff from when I was a kid, and see how archaic it sounds.

But going back to British-English versus American-English, I haven't had many chances to have a face-to-face conversation with anyone from across the pond, which is a bit of a shame. I can only think of one time when I had several conversations with anyone from England, and I can only think of one time when he said something that confused me. There's probably others, but I only remember the one. We were talking about something, I can't remember what, and he asked me if I was talking about "the Pakis." I asked for clarification, and he explained that he was talking about Pakistanis. From the way he had said it, I took the word for a racial slur, and found out later that it is. My knowledge of world relations is woefully small, I had no idea that there was enough emnity between England and Pakistan for there to be a nasty way to refer to them.

On a similar note, I have an on-line friend who lives in Norway, but learned English somewhere along the way. I have no idea how he sounds when he speaks English, but he writes rather well. I assume he must have learned English from British sources, as he uses words like "bloody" occasionally. There were a few times I decided to test how good his English was by engaging in Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness in an attempt to catch him up. Funnily enough, the one time I did get him to ask for clarification was unintended. We were discussing weight loss, and I told him about the time I dropped 15 pounds when I stopped drinking pop. There was a slight pause (if such can even be registered in IM format), followed by "pop?" Who knew that all I had to do to confuse the guy was slip into colloquialism?

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights