Puking, grabbing boobs, ruptured tendons...has it really been ten years?

Apparently the people who read my blog don’t enjoy “diss tracks” nearly as much as I do. That’s really not that surprising when you consider that I have an unnatural love for that sub-genre of music. It’s of little importance anyway since soon I’ll be back to spewing sports-related nonsense on a regular basis. By soon, of course, I mean in a couple of weeks when college football comes back home and the pennant races begin to really heat up. With the current dry spell in the sporting landscape (there is NOTHING to watch on the weekends) it ended up being perfect timing that my high schools class’ ten year reunion was this past weekend. To be honest with you, I wasn’t really looking forward to my reunion. In fact, if I wasn’t currently dating a girl whom also happened to graduate in the same class there’d be no virtually no chance that I would’ve even considered attending. It’s not that I’m too good for my former classmates (well, actually it is). Rather, this reticence to attend stems from the fact that I live in the town where I went to high school and see a large percentage of my graduating (or non-graduating depending on the person) class on a fairly regular basis. Ultimately though, the idea of my girlfriend holding my refusal to attend this event over my head for the next 6-12 months was not appealing to me and eventually led to my agreement to attend said festivities.

I’ve got to admit that I’m glad my girlfriend made me participate. Friday night was an informal gathering of our class at a local bar that serves as a reunion place of sorts over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Most towns have places like these where locals congregate when home from college and such. I figured this event would end up being somewhat sparsely attended and didn’t arrive until sometime shortly after 11. By this time the bar was absolutely jammed, primarily with members of my class. For the next three hours I chatted with a ton of people that I hadn’t seen in some time while still managing to be fairly anti-social (read: short, quick conversations with long lost “friends” followed by bad excuses for cutting a conversation short. These excuses usually had to do with alcohol and ended up getting me extremely drunk by night’s end.) I won’t bore you with too many details other than to say that my girlfriend ended the night by falling on her ass in the parking lot as we (and 20-30 other people) made our way to our respective forms of transportation.

Saturday night would be the official reunion. Earlier in the day, a friend of ours had a little barbeque for a small group of people. It was a nice gathering of people with many of our former classmates bringing their kids to show them off. I didn’t bring either of my kids to the bbq because they live in Memphis and don’t really know who their “daddy” is, but that’s a story for another time. Once Saturday night rolled around, it seemed like a night that was destined for a good time. One of my old roommates from grad school was coming into town and we had convinced him to attend the reunion with us. The way we (we meaning “me”) rationalized the whole scenario was that my old roommate (Federico) had actually never graduated high school. Thus, this would be his de facto high school reunion. You see, Federico actually grew up in between Colombia and America and ended up back in Colombia when he was 16. Though he was a junior in America, the Colombian school he attended wanted to make him a freshman. Instead of doing this, Federico’s mom arranged for him to purchase his high school diploma from another school in Colombia. I’ve never seen the actual diploma but it must be pretty good because it’s fooled both the American government as well as the admissions staff at the University of Florida. Fed has used this bogus diploma (along with its attached teacher comments) to join the Marines, become an Embassy guard in both Lima and Rome and (eventually) graduate from Florida. So, with that background in his mind, Fed showed up at my house on Saturday afternoon ready to hit up the reunion. Fed and I then set out to pick up my friends Kurt and Dave for the reunion and eventually headed back to my house to pick up the last member of our crew for the evening, my girlfriend before stopping by my local bar for a beer and a shot to loosen us all up.

We made it to the reunion by a little before 8 and quickly settled in. Fed decided to wear my name tag (with appropriately awful senior picture) and see if he could convince anybody that he was me (no.). The reunion went like most reunions go, I assume. Random conversations amongst people who aren’t likely to interact again for another 10-15 years followed by dinner, more random conversations and, of course, quite a bit of drinking. I’m not sure if it’s the lack of discernable activities at a reunion or the forced nature of it all, but what I do know is that there were an awful lot of drunk people (and fittingly drunk actions) by around 10:30 or so. In order to make this post wrap up a little more efficiently than most of my narrative driven posts, I’ll go over the rest of the evenings/weekends highlights in bullet form:

- Fed and Kurt had water balloons dropped on them by some kids staying at the hotel while they were smoking out on the deck of the hotel bar. Of course, both Kurt and Fed felt the need to enact retribution of their assassins. Going on a tip from somebody else in attendance, Kurt and Fed went to room 708 and proceeded to bang on the door and shout various verbal threats at the occupants of said room. Naturally, the occupants weren’t the offending parties, but a single mother and her child. As you might imagine, Kurt and Fed scared these two half to death and nearly end up getting arrested by the cops.

- A former high school teammate of mine, Phil, groped, not one but, two of our female friends in public. First, while discussing their children and her spouse, Phil reached around and grabbed my friend Becky’s ass. When Becky asked him what the hell he was doing, Phil responded (in full Ron Burgundy mode), “I just want to be around you and your nakedness.” Yes, he really said that. I wish I was joking. Secondly, during a conversation with Kurt’s ex-girlfriend Cindy, Phil reached into Cindy’s shirt and underneath her bra and grabbed her boob. As Cindy recoiled in horror, Phil leaned in to kiss her. When Cindy again recoiled and uttered something in protest, Phil (no more than 6 inches from her face) blurted out, “You’re a bitch! You’re a fucking bitch!!” I guess we should’ve known something was up when Phil was drinking wine straight from the bottle earlier in the evening.

- Later in the night a few of the non-graduates from our class decided to crash. Since I brought a Colombian with no affiliation to the school at all, I decided not to say anything. One of these people was a friend of ours named Damon. Damon is, more accurately, the brother of our friend Hunter. Damon has a drinking problem. Damon has a drug problem. Damon has had both of these “problems” for quite some time. At some point shortly after he showed up, Damon and Kurt were outside on the deck having a smoke. As they were talking Damon began to wobble a bit. At this point, Kurt leaned in to make sure Damon didn’t fall over. It was at this point that Damon lost control of himself and proceeded to wretch all over Kurt. To sum up, Kurt made numerous trips outside to smoke. On two of these trips, Kurt was hit with a water balloon and thrown up upon. Smoking is bad.

- As the night was winding down, Fed came to me with his eyes glassed over, clearly intoxicated. Because I’ve known Fed for many years I knew exactly what the wanted: my keys. When Fed gets drunk to a certain point, he cannot control his desire to sleep. This leads to an awful lot of Fed passing out in cars. He’s passed out in my car more times than I care to count. He does it everywhere, outside bars, parties, baptisms, wherever. The one problem on this evening is that we had already rented a hotel room. I, being the asshole that I am, decided against reminding Fed of this fact and let him go sleep in my car. When he eventually awoke at 4 am in my car, Fed had no idea where anybody was (in our room) and eventually hitchhiked his way home to my house where Erika and I would find him around noon on Sunday.

I eventually got to bed around 4 am. My girlfriend ended up going swimming in the ocean with some friends of her at about 5 am. Amazingly enough, she was not attacked by sharks, and found her way back to our room by 5:30 or so.

All in all it was a pretty enjoyable weekend. That is, until I woke up on Sunday morning.

With all the drinking I was doing I had planned to wake up thinking “Jesus, who hit my head with a ballpeen hammer last night.” Instead, my head felt fine and I awoke thinking, “Fuck. Who shot me in the leg last night?” Somehow, through the night I’d managed to rupture the plantaris tendon in my leg, though I wouldn’t discover this until I’d spent most of my Sunday in the ER. Apparently this tendon is fairly useless and doesn’t even exist in about 10% of humans but also happens to be quite painful when it does actually exist and rupture. I won’t bore you with too many details, other than to provide these links and tell you that I’m on crutches for at least a week and won’t be able to do much (if any) lower body activities (save for physical therapy) for the next month or so. As you might’ve guesses, I’m more than a little bitter about all of this. I’m in the best shape I’ve been in since I was 19 or 20 and play basketball at a local park 5-6 days week. Now, I have to try and not fall apart physically until I can at least begin to start some light running or stationary bike work in a couple of weeks. To say nothing of the city league that I have starting up in a few weeks that it looks like I’ll miss a nice portion of. Just think, none of this shit would’ve happened if I’d have just refused to go to my damn high school reunion. Something to consider when the 20 year mark rolls around.