A Festivus for the Rest of Us

To those of you who are familiar with Seinfeld, you know about Festivus.

This December 23^rd I attended a bar where Festivus was being held, complete with the traditional aluminum pole. One of the Festivus organizers, Cooper, had attempted to cut down a fence pole in his back yard,, but after failing, he sent his girlfriend to a hardware store. A woman buying a single aluminum pole on the night of December 23^rd is no doubt an unusual thing and the cashier asked why she was buying it. Her reply was "my friends are retarded." If loving Seinfeld enough to celebrate Festivus is retarded, then I'm profoundly retarded.

Since the bar was also a restaurant, it was supposed to be a family environment and therefore had no bouncers. This meant that the bar was unprepared for the drunken debauchery that we unleashed. Imagine this for a moment: you have no knowledge of Festivus, and you're having a nice evening out with the fam. Then, a man walks into the bar with a six foot pole, says nothing, and leans it against the wall, inspects his handiwork, then heads to the bar to get a drink. How loudly would your brain be screaming "What the fuck?!"?

Eventually the normal people escaped and we were able to celebrate Festivus undisturbed.  Every time that someone entered the bar we would all shout "Person is here! It's another Festivus Miracle!" And Person would grin at the rest of the bar and be assimilated into the drunken hivemind.

After airing grievances as loudly as we could, Cooper wandered the bar with the aluminum pole. One of the patrons, Ron, asked if the pole was aluminum or galvanized steel. In response to this, Cooper handed the aluminum pole off to someone and knelt down in a Tim Tebow pose. Cooper slowly made a fist and drew back his arm, then he unleashed a savage uppercut to Ron's testicles. Ron immediately grabbed his crotch and ever so slowly tipped over to one side and fell on the floor. The waitress calmly stepped over his corpse and wandered off to deliver some food. Later Ron's facebook status would read "I should not have questioned the validity of the aluminum pole."

A Day in the Life

7am.

At work already. The sky didn't want to work this morning either, so it stayed in bed knowing that the clouds would cover for it. I paced back in forth in front of my crew, a hypnotic pendulum that would likely send them back to sleep. The coffee was strong and black like something in a vaguely racist metaphor. We took to calling it 'a punch in the face,' because it wakes you up like one.

"Why the fuck are we here so early if the delivery truck isn't here yet?" said one of the crew. He was all the worst wigger stereotypes, Vanilla Ice himself would be embarrassed. The crooked hat completed the look.

"It's here now," gestured the second crewman, Sean, who was a friend of my boss.
I stopped pacing back and forth and looked up. The delivery truck took over as the pendulum, repeatedly backing up and pulling forward. I looked at the markings on the ground and realized the tires were driving precisely over the same tracks. I sighed, as my boss tried to direct the truck driver back. It was like a mind-boggling version of the broken telephone game, played with only two people. No matter how clearly my boss instructed the shit-chucking-ape-of-a-truck-driver, nothing got through. Meanwhile, the crew and I tried to guess how many points this turn had already. We settled on thirty.

I'm reminded of all the joy and laughter that Family Circus didn't bring me over the years.

After ten minutes of dicking about, he spontaneously recovered his knowledge of truck driving and put the damn thing in park. Even though we see them all the time, you never realize how big a 18 wheeler truck is until you have to unload one.

Well shit.

We set up to unload, the profoundly retarded truck driver and his assistant unloaded the cargo onto a set of rollers, at the end of which was a flight of stairs. I stood at the bottom of the stairs and passed the cargo up half a flight to Vanilla Ice who in turn would put it through the railing at the top of the stairs where Sean, my boss, and his father would put it away.

Oooooh, now I get it. Cargo is slang for cocaine, right?

Naturally, the most intense work is passing stuff up the stairs, because you have to lift a lot of weight straight up, while everyone else just jerks off or something. I set an impressive pace, knowing that the masturbators wouldn't tell me to slow down, knowing that I'm doing the harder work. They call me the Energizer Bunny.
  

Ladies.

Part woman's bathrobe, part lagomorph, all badass.

After about five minutes, Vanilla Ice acts like a jive ass bitch and switches with Sean. Now Sean and I are doing the hard work, while everyone else is chatting about fishing or something in order to distract themselves from the fact that they're secretly lonely.

"Fuck, I'm really out of shape, man" said a red-faced Sean fifteen minutes later.
He started begging to switch back with Vanilla Ice, who refused, citing my maniacal pace as the deal breaker. I expected Sean to walk up the stairs to get Vanilla Ice but instead he took a few steps down the stairs. I was confused, what was happening? Then it hit me.

 In the face.

"Sean, did you have an onion bagel for breakfast?"

Epilogue
-Sean was sent home for being "fucking useless."
-Sean returned and apologized and gave me "the most deserved case of beer in the history of mankind."
-Sean had chili for breakfast, which is a WTF in itself.
-No, I'm not exaggerating about the fifteen minutes thing.
-I have renamed the coffee "a puke in the face."