Last week was the company picnic and of course I did not attend. This is because I am somewhat of a misanthrope. In general, I do not subject myself to situations where the quotient of friends to non-friends is less than 1. I make exceptions if it's an opportunity for me to display my gift of song/skillz on the dance floor and if there's awesome free grub. Most of the time though the only place I like to go is home.
Small talk ranks high among things that I do not do. It's up there with sports and drugs. Sometimes there's no escape and there's just nothing to do but nod and smile and repeat the last 3 words the other person said. Over the years I have developed a coping mechanism that I call the Diving Bell and the Butterfly. DB&B is a memoir-turned-movie about a guy who used to be an asshole and then suddenly got paralyzed and lost all mobility and motor control except for one eye, and as a result had to retreat into his inner world of torment and imagination. It got some Oscar buzz which means nobody saw it, and it was doubly cursed since everybody spoke French, except for the main guy, who blinked his one eye.
Years ago, before I learned this important life skill, I was at a party at my friend's house and I was cornered between my good friend James and another person we went to high school with. At this point we had finished the grubbing part and moved on to the hanging out part so I couldn't break away to stuff my pie hole. From earlier encounters we had already covered the basics of catching up and discovered our divergent religious paths--she was religious, I'm not. at. all. So here we were, kicking back in the living room, she's trying to get a conversation going again and I really didn't want to participate and was trying to figure out how the F I was going to get out of this jam.
Similar to what you're supposed to do in bear attacks, I laid down and stayed down. But instead of pretending to be dead in a bear attack, I pretended to be asleep. This totally got me out of talking and I was congratulating myself on my own ingenuity but James who I was really tight with, knew that I was acting, and was fuckin pissed at me for leaving him hanging like that and so periodically would poke and prod me to show that he knew whassup and that I better fuckin stop playing and bail him out. As in the cases of bear attacks, if the bear comes and checks you out and starts pawing at you to check whether you're truly dead, you're supposed to roll with its punches and not let on that you're pretending. So I tolerated the violence that James was unleashing on me and stayed the fuck asleep. To this day he is still incredulous that I left him hanging as I did.
wow, you're talking of an *old* party. musta been in Arcadia.
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